Retreat notes
Posted by Terry Nelson on May 9th, 2007
“So how can you be on retreat if you don’t go away someplace?” People always ask me that. I simply answer, “I can.”
When religious communities are on retreat, they don’t leave their monasteries and go off to a retreat house. The Hawthorne Dominicans remain in their Homes during retreat, continuing to care for their patients. One doesn’t have to go off to a monastery for retreat.
My house is my hermitage, my yard it’s enclosure…the Church with the Blessed Sacrament is just a few blocks away. I have a good library, the scriptures, my rosary…my solitude - what else does one need?
God is present.
“The whole illusion of a separate holy existence is a dream.” Fr. Louis Merton
May 9th, 2007 at 6:40 am
Good attitude!
May 9th, 2007 at 8:08 am
Quite so. The popular notion (and I’m guilty of this still) is that monks & nuns live in some esoteric existence; dwelling in a super-terrestrial twilight, when in reality it’s a ho-hum existence filled with pots & pans, cleaning toilets, dressing wounds in the infirmary, maintaining the boiler, doing the laundry … that’s just as much prayer as formal liturgy. The question remains: where’s your heart?