Catholic and Loving it!

When you have a six week old baby it's a bit difficult to dissapear for a week, mum tends to notice and I can't imagine she would be very happy about it. So when Fr Massie started hassling me to drop everything for a week long silent ignatian retreat in Hornsea I was pretty certain that I wouldn't be going. At the last minute he told me that it would be okay to go for a day, so I did. Mums notice days, but you can get away with it.

The retreat was based on the spiritual exercises of St Ignatius, these are a month long series of prayers, meditations and contemplative practices. The retreat was only a week long so Fr John Edwards who was running the retreat somehow condensed them down to only a week. I was there for a day... I wasn't sure if I would be trying to do the full week in a day or just a day, I wasn't sure if just a day would make sense, I wasn't sure of anything. I know very little about Ignatian retreats.

I drove to Hornsea last Friday under beautiful blue skies, listening to the local radio station discussing the "news about Michael Jackson", I wasn't entirely sure what the news was and they were not about to tell me and instead said things like "this morning we're discussing the news about Michael Jackson" and then they said things like "it all happened last night our time". I wondered if he had been arrested but the back to back Michael Jackson songs were a strong clue of what had really happened, but they were too polite to mention death on a Friday morning while people are driving to work.

I arrived in time for silent breakfast which was surreal - I wandered across the kitchen looking for the fridge only to discover it was at the other end of the room so I wandered all the way back to open the fridge door only to discover that there were jugs of milk on the table. Then Fr Massie gestured to my mug which I took as an offer of tea and gave him a thumbs up, but is communication of that kind allowed? I don't know the rules! A few minutes later Fr Massie gestured to my cup again - I thought he was offering a top-up so I gave a thumbs up but then went to take my mug away for washing and gave me a strong look of contempt when he realised I hadn't quite finished my tea. Can you give people "looks" on silent retreat?

It turned out that the plan was not for me to cram in a full month of ignatian spirituality in to a day but instead to join them for the days that they did while I was there. Each day Fr John Edwards gave a conference on the theme of the day and told us the grace we would be asking for, in the morning that I was there we were meditating on the passion and the grace we were praying for was "Sorrow, affliction, confusion. Because of my sins, Our Lord is going to his Passion; Anguish with Christ in anguish. Tears; intense pain for his great pain, Suffered for me.

Happy stuff - in the evening we moved on to the ressurection where we asked for the grace to share in Christs joy, so while I was there I meditated on the sorrows of the Passion followed by the joys of the Ressurection which worked quite well. It was a heavy day for me because I wanted to make the most of my one day, so where the programme had an hour and a half gap during which we were supposed to do half an hours meditation, I spent the rest of the time praying or reading my bible. Twelve hours of God-time is a lot in one go when you're not used to it. When I left, I was absolutely shattered.

As Fr John said, the purpose of the retreat is to set up "laboratory conditions" in which to pray and listen to God and I think it worked really well, I'm very glad I went. I don't know if I could cope with a week of what I did, but if I was there for a week I think I would have done things differently and spent more of the non-prayer time on, well, non-prayer. Richard Marsden spent some of his time going for walks and runs on the beach, perhaps I might have spent some time drawing.

All in all, a great thing to have done and someday I would like to do a longer version. My advice to anybody in a position to get along to something like this is to do it, especially if you're young with long holidays, because once you have a family it's very difficult to arrange.

Oh, and do read Richard's account of the retreat. He was there all week.