Retreat Houses, Religious and Lay

Extract

In England there is great need for more houses where retreats can be made and quite as urgently for different types of retreat house. There is room for considerable variety, for a network of smaller and larger houses, in towns and out of them, religious and lay. There is a very clear need for a liturgical retreat house, more for women than for men, to whom the existing monasteries are open. There is need for a retreat house sufficiently contemplative and monastic for a genuine spirit of silence to rule; but there is also need for a home for a very free type of retreat where the Christian minority who love the Lord in a neo-pagan age can meet, and such retreats might be the beginning of many genuine friendships and much work for God.

In a retreat we break from our routine life and plunge for a time into another life, so as to turn right way up—if we were previously upside-down—but above all so as to plunge from a more superficial to a deeper and more fully lived Christian life. But if the plunge is not into another and more fully lived life, but into a vacuum with devotional frills, an appendage to a religious life going on behind closed doors, it is apt to lend an air of unreality to the whole, so that the effects fade before the “realities” of everyday life. The grace of God apart, everything then depends on the strength of prayer of the individual and the preacher’s sterling worth.