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Day Fifteen: Your Voice Will Find You

Today’s Prompt: Think about an event you’ve attended and loved. Your hometown’s annual fair. That life-changing music festival. A conference that shifted your worldview. Imagine you’re told it will be cancelled forever or taken over by an evil corporate force. How does that make you feel?

Today’s twist: While writing this post, focus again on your own voice. Pay attention to your word choice, tone, and rhythm. Read each sentence aloud multiple times, making edits as you read through. Before you hit “Publish,” read your entire piece out loud to ensure it sounds like you.

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Retreating from the Faith

Our Lady 1

Our Lady of the Mountain Retreat House

I don’t even have to try to conjure how I’d feel in this situation because I’ve actually lived it.

As I’ve mentioned before in other blog posts, when I was head of Women’s Ministries at our old church, one thing I was in charge of was a Fall Women’s Retreat. For twelve years I worked with a group of gals to hone the retreat, to find the right combination of learning, activities, fellowship, and personal time with God that would best meet the needs of the woman who attended. The drive behind what I, with the help of those four women did was to provide a place where the ladies could come and let the world fall away. A place to rest, to not have to think about their life outside the retreat house for just this little space of three days, to bond with each other, to have time to themselves . . . just a place to breathe and heal.

Holding down two jobs and playing taxi service to a junior high and a high schooler (who didn’t have his own car) pretty much kept me worn to a frazzle in those days. I needed that retreat as much as anyone. But the business of getting a facilitator lined up for the study, helping arrange an English tea for Saturday afternoon, and a hands-on group activity for Saturday night was a balm to me. It never felt like work. It felt like a privilege.

I was busy, to be sure, but I reaped a great sense of fulfillment from using a gift I think God had given me. In those days I often thought of what Jesus said about his yoke. “Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.” (Matthew 11:29-30) And that’s exactly what I found as I fulfilled my role in that ministry.

But it wasn’t all work. On Saturday evening after we’d finished our group activity, sung some praise songs, and prayed, the ladies would be released for Compline — a time when we all took a vow of silence. There was always a short written assignment for them to do, often something to share during worship the next day. But after that they were free to spend the rest of the evening as they wished — as long as they didn’t talk to one another.

As soon as they went about their business, the five of us would decorate the small chapel for the morning service. We’d light candles all over the retreat house and turn out the lights. We’d put cd players in the commons room and the chapel to play quiet, meditative music. Then we were done for the evening, too.

That’s when MY retreat really started. I often found myself sitting companionably in the commons room with a few other ladies not saying a word, but mostly I would sit in the candlelight in the back of that little chapel and soak up the thousands and thousands of prayers of hope, gratitude, and heartache that had been whispered there over the life of that retreat house. It felt holy to me, as if I needed to take my shoes off before entering.

And it was during those evening hours that I absorbed that rarefied energy that filled my spirit up. It was there I felt the veil between this world and the next was the thinnest between me and God. The Celts believe there are places like that all over the world. They call them “thin places.” And for me, this was one of them. It was where I got my batteries recharged for another year of trying to remember we’re not human beings having a spiritual experience here; we’re spiritual beings having a human experience. Spiritual in the sense that life is eternal no matter what brand of faith you do or don’t practice. That is my heart-felt belief. That retreat house, that chapel was my holy place, my mountain top.

And then the Catholic diocese decided the retreat house was no longer profitable. They closed it down. I felt as if a part of my heart and soul had been violently ripped out of me. I fell into panic mode not knowing where I’d ever again find a thin place that would foster the kind of connection with the divine I’d felt in that little chapel. It may sound overly dramatic to say, but I believe I somehow lost God when that happened.

To say the closure of the retreat house affected my life would be an understatement. It has thrown me into a faith crisis that I’m still, thirteen years later, trying to deal with. It left a wound on my heart that I fear will never heal. I once likened it to Frodo’s wound by a Morgul blade in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. Not only would the wound itself never fully heal, but on the anniversary of his wounding, it always made itself known to Frodo in a painful way. I’ve asked myself the same thing Frodo asked:

“How do you pick up the threads of an old life? How do you go on when in your heart you begin to understand there is no going back? There are some things that time cannot mend, some hurts that go too deep that have taken hold.” (Return of the King, J.R.R. Tolkien)

Every Autumn I suffer from that wound again. And every Autumn I wonder what in the world God is trying to teach me by NOT healing that painful and lonely break in my heart, by allowing this spiritual crisis to continue in my life.

Recently a special friend of mine has given me a word I think I need to ponder in answer to that question. The word is “both.” Maybe it will help get me headed in the right direction again…if I can get my butt up on my camel, that is…