“Silent” Retreat Goes “Contemplative”

By: Fr. Alan Yost, S.J.

Comparisons can be odious, especially when comparing with valued colleagues. But most of us on the University Ministry team (affectionately called UMin) consider the Montserrat Retreat to be the deepest of our various retreat programs. The name comes from a town and a Benedictine monastery in Catalonia, Spain, one hour from Barcelona. It’s important to us Jesuits because St. Ignatius, our founder, spent a few days there early in his own conversion process. He lived there briefly as a hermit, confessed his sins, and almost definitely received a copy of a book on which he was later to base his famous retreat, “The Spiritual Exercises.”

It’s a worthy name for a GU retreat that seeks to help students explore their own spirituality on the deepest levels possible. Traditionally the Montserrat Retreat has been marketed more towards upper-division students. But since I’ve taken over the retreat, a number of first-years and sophomores have attended and have easily held their own among their older peers.

The retreat takes place within a context of silence, an extraordinarily rare commodity in our world, and even more so in the life of a college student. Silence is so rare that we eventually discovered that even calling it the “silent” retreat was intimidating some people, since they were worried that they couldn’t handle 40 hours of silence. Ironically, at the end of the weekend, most retreatants say they wish they had another day of it, but you can’t convince people of that until they’ve experienced it themselves. So we’ve made the simple change of calling it the “Montserrat Contemplative Retreat.” (Semantics perhaps, but words do matter, especially insofar as they can either inspire or frighten.)

Some of the post-retreat feedback we’ve received bears this out:

• “Having plenty of time for prayer and self-reflection. Was very much out of my comfort zone but was also very much needed.”
• “The quiet and inspiring atmosphere of the retreat center, the calm tranquility of being silent, and the opportunities to talk to God when I could not talk to any person on the retreat – very meaningful.”

Besides, while the retreatants themselves are largely silent, the team is not: we offer several talks that we hope will provide inspiration for prayer and tools for the future exploration of their own spiritual life. Each retreatant also meets twice with a private spiritual director, an experience that most are having for their very first time. More feedback:

• “My Spiritual Director was awesome and really helped me get the most out of the retreat.”
• “I really liked all of the talks and the reconciliation service; each thing gave me a lot to pray about and reflect on, and after each talk, the materials provided and what I had heard really helped me to examine my faith and myself more deeply.”

And of course, as with all that we offer at UMin, the ultimate goal is that our students grow in becoming “women and men for others.” The Montserrat Retreat serves this goal best by embodying the words of Oregon Province Jesuit Fr. Joe Conwell:

Agite, igitur: Get moving! Follow wherever the Spirit leads you. The Spirit leads where no human being has ever gone; the Spirit leads into darkness; the Spirit leads into light; the Spirit leads into the unknown; the Spirit leads wherever the children of God are in deeper need. (Impelling Spirit, 1997)

If we can give even a few of our retreatants the chance to find and follow the Spirit for a moment or two, we give thanks to God for the privilege.