KEEP THE SILENCE FR JOHN JOLLIFFE, SM
A “silent directed retreat” is our response to Christ’s many invitations to accept his companionship: “Then he said to them, ‘You must come away to some lonely place all by yourselves and rest for a while’” (Mark 6:31), and ‘“Come to me, all you who labour and are overburdened, and I will give you rest” (Matthew 11:28). It is an act of hope and trust in him about whom the prophet says, “He will bring us back to life ... that he will come is as certain as the dawn” (Hosea 6:2-3).
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he fundamental reality is that our capacity to exist at all is only because God first loved us into life and loves us still. So to live within that love is our basic existence, our true identity, our inner peace. The old catechism taught that God made us “to know him, to love him, and to serve him in this world, and to be happy with him forever in heaven.” St Augustine experienced the reality that “our hearts are restless until they rest in God.” A basic truth is that God is love, and so God acts in love, and therefore God loves us into life and loves us still, whether we accept it or not. Our inner peace grows when we re-centre our lives to be led by that core reality. Our dis-ease comes when we live contrary to it and to who we really are as people continually loved by God. A retreat provides freedom of space and time for us to humbly ponder that amazing mystery of God’s love, to appreciate its life-giving truth, to regain our confidence both in God’s care for us and in our ability to directly respond to him, and to choose to refocus the direction of our lives to live more freely and happily in God’s love. In a retreat we bring ourselves to our loving God just as we are. We come with our griefs and sorrows, hopes and anxieties, joys and worries. We may be seeking to regain confidence in ways of prayer. We may be seeking to work through some grief or turmoil, a struggle or sorrow. We may be wishing to deal with an area of sinfulness or to rediscover hope and our basic goodness. Our personal needs, and our active desire to ask God’s help, are starting points of our retreat journey closer to God. The retreat will
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PHOTOS: TYBURN MONASTERY, NGAKURU BY TAILA BURTON-GOLLOP
