So My Weekend was Pretty Quiet: A Post about JVC Silent Retreat

I'll admit it: I've been way too scattered recently to hammer out a decent blog post. Not that I haven't tried. A look in my Blogger drafts folder will reveal my airy-fairy reflection on the power of names, my idealist blueprints for a Wal-mart style social service center (one stop shop!), a blubbery love drunk post dedicated to Sister Helen Prejean, and a few one sentence blogs that stand more to be tweets than actual posts.

So going into silent retreat this past weekend, I didn't feel equipped to handle three days of any sort of reflection. What, between planning for my future, changes and hectic days at work, average community/family/friend obligations, and just standard life things happening all at once, I felt some genuine anxiety for silence. And I'm naturally an introvert, so really I should have been psyched for this. Introversion Spring Break 2014! Woo.

But up until the day of, I remained nervous. 

And, contrary to my introverted nature, when I get nervous, I talk. A lot. About stupid things. Rapidly. 

Like, for example, the second time I went to get my ears pierced, I was feeling kind of anxious. So I chatted to my friends, talked to my mom, and cracked jokes with the guy who was holding the piercing gun to my ear lobes, until I was eventually told to stop talking because the piercing guy was laughing and was worried he might give me crooked piercing. Yeah, that really helped calm my nerves. 

Pre-silent retreat wasn't much different. On the walk to the bus with my community, I just babbled. Figured I get it all out of the way then before we'd have to just sit and stare at each other for a few days. I'm pretty socially awkward, but when I want to talk to people, I want to talk. The thought of having that not be an option was causing way more anxiety than it should have. 

That, and the fact that the silence was supposed to be filled with prayer. I've said it many, many times by now, but in case you're just tuning into FishBreadHouseBird, I am bad at praying. No, shush, you can so be bad at praying. I know, because I am. None of that hippy, Jesuity nonsense about prayer being what you make it and therefore, is not a gradable skill. I have as much anxiety about praying as I do about silence, which I think is the opposite of what I'm supposed to feel about prayer. 

My plan of attack for this retreat, therefore, was that I would keep myself busy enough that I wouldn't notice the silence. To achieve this, I packed an entire extra bag of things meant to starve off boredom--four books, my crocheting, colored pencils, sketch pads, my running shoes, and enough pens and paper to supply a fledgling newspaper. 

I don't handle impending boredom well.This is exactly what I shouldn't have done, but I panicked. So sue me. 

Getting to the retreat center was, erm, a tinsy bit complicated, but trying to get nine JV's anywhere isn't going to be smooth sailing. All that matters is we got to the Bellarmine Jesuit Retreat House in one piece and:

Take this view and multiply it by 80 acres and holy crap, this place was beautiful. 

Plus interiors like this:

And guest rooms that looked like this:

And I was at least comforted that I was going have a stellar view while I struggled silently. 

We began our silence with a prayer during which we all named things we hoped would occur during the retreat. Unsure of what I wanted, I threw out my new favorite Jesuit buzzword: "Discernment."

And then everyone dispersed.

Not knowing what else to do, I decided I would go for a run. What I didn't take into account was that at 8:30 p.m. in MiddleoNowhere, Illinois, it gets really dark outside. I'm used to my city lights. Even on moonless, cloudy nights in the city, I can feel reasonably certain that I won't walk into walls or trees should I go outside. The grounds of Bellarmine gave me no such guarantee. After the eighth or ninth time I mistook a mailbox for a serial killer, I began to think that I probably could have planned this better.

Insecurity and doubt was definitely the theme of that run, as I found myself using my miles to wonder how I was going to take something away from the weekend. I was bad at praying, bad at staying focused and already off to a rough start with my spastic nighttime jog. As I pondered how ill equipped I was to be on this retreat, I thought I saw something moving in the woods just ahead of me.

I figured it was just another mailbox.

That's when two deer came charging out of the trees right in front of me, completely cutting me off and giving me a small heart attack.

My first thought was "If I die out here, no one's going to know what happened to me because we're on a stupid silent retreat and I didn't tell anyone where I was going and no one is going to be able to ask where I am."

My next thought was, "That could mean something."

Not in regards to the dying bit. The fear of dying was real. Instead, I was struck that I was expecting one thing, but then was pleasantly surprised when something else came hurtling my way.

I was expecting to leave silent retreat no closer to anything, be that a life trajectory or an understanding of God or a stronger sense of spirituality or...anything. I was expecting to feel inadequate in my ability to work with the silence. I was expecting that my own underdeveloped sense of the spiritual would, once again, leave me feeling as though I had missed a few classes way back when and I wasn't going to be able to catch up with the other JVs  students. I expected that my own worries about everything else going on in my life would be too distracting to get anything meaningful accomplished at all. 

I wasn't expecting deer. Or heart attacks. Yet I had just had both.

Thus was born the promise that I would stop expecting things that weekend. The only obligation I had this retreat was to be there. Everything else from mass to meals was optional. I was going to do whatever I wanted when I wanted to and whatever happens in the process would happen.

Hokey and overly sentimental? Maybe. But I had just had a near death experience. I was allowed a moment of grand and cliche promises.

So I took walks. Crocheted a little bit. Put a dent in James Martin SJ's The Jesuit Guide to (Almost) Everything. Went on more runs (in the daylight), got a little sunburned, drew some dumb pictures, ate a lot of salad because apparently "vegetarian retreat" is a very loosely defined term. I even went to mass. Twice.

And I tried praying. And something just clicked this time.

I'll spare you my own revelations and adventures into the spiritual. I gave my spiritual director an earful of all of that and I'm pretty sure he was glad he only had to deal with me for a weekend. It's almost embarrassing to say, but it took getting rid of all the pressure to get the value of spirituality right for me to, finally, in some weird way, get it right.

James Martin writes in The Guide that one of the most important insights of Ignatius was that God speaks to people in personal ways. The trick is not to discount those experiences as a strictly emotional or imagined, but to accept that God uses those very experiences in which you feel something as a means of communication. As an English major, I know the danger of trying to find meaning where there isn't any, but if I find meaning when I'm not looking for it, am I going to fail for calling it real?

In silent non-expectation, it's a lot easier to believe that, sometimes, God is trying to find you. Yeah, finding God in all things and whatever, but looking at everything is exhausting. Sometimes, God finds you when you are absolutely are not expecting it.

I didn't find God, so I can't tell anyone where they should be looking. I wasn't saved, and I'm not joining a convent. I still need to force myself to go to mass and promise I will never ever ever memorize scripture with the intention of using it for anything.  

But I feel like silent retreat left me with an appreciation for the JVC value I was neglecting. And it's something I felt like sharing. Yes, it was dumb of me to be nervous, and yeah, I'm discovering a lot of things only now that have been obvious to other people for like, ever, but it's new and neat for me.

Things with God are less awkward, that's for sure.

And to any JVs reading this who haven't gone on Silent Retreat yet, enjoy it. It's kind of fabulous.

Thanks for reading. You rock. Peace.