Last week my schedule looked something like this:
5:00 AM Wake up
5:30 AM Vigils & Lauds with the monks
6:15 AM Exercise
7:00 AM Shower
7:30 AM Mass with the monks
8:15 AM Breakfast
9:00 AM Meet with a personal retreat director
10:00 AM Personal reflection time
12:00 PM Midday prayer with the monks
12:15 PM Lunch
1:00 PM Personal reflection time
5:00 PM Vespers with the monks
5:30 PM Dinner
6:00 PM Personal reflection time
7:00 PM Night prayer with the monks
7:30 PM Personal reflection time
8:30 PM Bedtime
Let me tell you: it was glorious.
The rhythm of the monks regularly meeting for prayer provided the perfect background to step away from the everyday busyness of life and truly reflect. The hardest thing was facing moments of silence and quiet and feeling the impulse to do something. But when I just sat with some of the discomfort and turned to reading or journaling or meditating, I found I could actually hear myself think. It was exactly what I had been needing.
The need for retreat
My oldest is twelve years old, so I’m guessing it’s been at least that long since I’ve been on a retreat. I honestly can’t remember. There was a time in my life where I went on retreats all the time. When I was a seminarian studying to be a priest1, I’d go on at least two or three retreats per year. Even after getting married, Emily and I managed to get away to a couple retreats. Then Sophia was born. I didn’t really notice, but somehow I wasn’t able to find the time to take a retreat since having kids.
A retreat is different from vacation and also different from travel. While both vacation and travel can help you get out of yourself and return to life refreshed and energized, a retreat has a different purpose. When you go on a retreat, you’re there to listen.
This begs the question, “Why, Ben, did you feel the need to listen?” You ever have moments in your life where you feel so busy you can barely keep up with everything going on; your work and home life start to blur together and neither allow a real escape from the other; and you secretly wish it would all just end—or at least pause—so you can breathe and maybe even think? Do those moments ever string together and last months at a time? That was me. Or at least, that feeling was the catalyst that got me to talk myself into going on a retreat.
Interestingly, you would think that with me not working, my life wouldn’t feel all that busy. Oh wow, let me just say I had know idea how much energy it takes to just be present to my children and be more active around the house. It feels impossible not to be busy.
The other reason I felt the need to listen is quite plainly a desire to reflect on my purpose and calling in life. It feels a bit weird spending time doing that in my late thirties—shouldn’t I have this figured out by now?—but it’s also exactly the right time.
Choosing a place to retreat
I first learned about the St. Meinrad Archabbey when I led a small group of teens from my church on a youth retreat there in the summer of 2007. I could barely remember what the place looked like. All I could really remember is how the monks prayed together—particularly the style of chant they used2—and how the monks had a rhythm to their day, constantly going back and forth between prayer and work3.
My main goals in finding a place to retreat were:
Quiet
The opportunity to meat with a retreat director privately
A regular rhythm of liturgical prayer
Bonus: the liturgical prayer is beautiful
There are all kinds of retreats—themed retreats, evangelical retreats, retreats that focus on the Ignatian spiritual exercises, to name a few—but I really wasn’t looking for any structure other than the rhythm of prayer and quiet. For that, a Benedictine monastery is perfect.
The thing about Benedictine monks is that they literally come together to pray at the ringing of a bell4. The schedule of prayer provides the rhythm to the day. Everything else fits in around that structure.
St. Meinrad Archabbey isn’t the closest monastery to me. In fact, there’s a monastery in Conyers, Georgia which is only about forty-five minutes away from my home. Nothing against the Trappists in Conyers, but I find the liturgical prayer of the monks at St. Meinrad to be really beautiful. It’s a bonus that’s worth the six-and-a-half hour drive.
How will I fill the time?
One of the things the modern world asks of us—constantly—is our time, and with that our attention. There is always something on our phones, our computers, and our televisions to accompany us throughout our day from the moment we wake up until the moment we finally let the screen turn off on our nightstand. And on the other side of these screens are really important things: work to be done, emails to be answered, shows to be watched (to help us recover from the things demanding our time on the other screens). To turn everything off is really quite a shock to the system.
The schedule of prayer was the perfect shock absorber. After I checked into my room and got my things put away, I started feeling antsy. What do I do? Pretty soon it was five o’clock. Ah yes, let’s go to prayer with the monks. The monks don’t pray because they feel like it. They pray because it’s time.
When I got back to my room after dinner, I had a similar feeling as before. How do I fill this time? There’s a feeling of wanting to work, to be productive. I’ll read the book that I brought. Pretty soon it was time for Night prayer, again with the monks. After that, I read for a bit and then went to bed. You pretty much have to when the next day starts so early.
I would wake at 5 AM to be ready for Vigils and Lauds with the monks at 5:30 AM. Going to prayer first thing in the morning was amazing for my brain. One morning I woke up after a weird dream. I didn’t feel right. I didn’t even want to go to prayer. I went anyway. Five minutes later, I had forgotten about what didn’t feel right.
Meeting with a spiritual director was a bit of a wild card in my plans. Who was I going to get? Would they be any good? I met with an eighty-one year old priest who was a former retreat director and who had once been rector of the seminary5. He was also a biblical theologian, so it wasn’t surprising when he suggested I spend time reading Matthew 5-7—i.e. the sermon on the mount—as a focus of my retreat.
When the monks aren’t praying, they’re working. I was on retreat, so when I wasn’t praying with the monks, my work was to be on retreat. After meeting with the priest, I spent time in the chapel reading the Gospel of Matthew6. I spent so much time slowly reading those chapters that it almost felt wasteful. Shouldn’t I be doing something else? No, this is why I am here. This is my work right now.
The meals also helped break up the “work” of the retreat. I could have chosen to have a completely silent retreat, but I chose instead to talk to some of the other retreatants who were there and learn their stories. I also visited a lot of different places on campus so I wasn’t always holed up in my room. I spent time between the guest house chapel, the Archabbey chapel, my room, and a coffee shop run by the seminarians. I’d take my books and journal with me and continue the “work” of my retreat wherever I ended up.
Speaking of journaling, it had been a while since I had journaled with actual pen and paper. I’ve been trying to get into the habit of digital journaling—typing or writing with a stylus—but it hasn’t stuck. It was refreshing to just pull out pen and paper in a notebook and just start going. That ended up being one of the main ways I processed the work of my retreat.
Throughout my time on the retreat, there was a steady pull to leave, to be productive, to get “real” work done. But I’d keep returning to the rhythm of prayer and the work of the retreat. This is why I’m here. Instead of my phone, I’d pull out a book. Instead of a computer I’d pull out my journal. I can’t really imagine it happening anywhere else but a retreat.
Finding purpose
I’m not sure I want to go into all of the depth of the “takeaways” of my retreat, but I’ll just say it had a profound effect on me and the lens through which I view the world. There were quite a few takeaways from Matthew 5-7 itself, but the one that stands out to me the most is this:
Don’t be anxious.
Going into the retreat, I had the feeling of: “Can I really afford to do this? Shouldn’t I be looking for a job? Or at least taking a vacation?” Coming out of the treat, I had the feeling of: “This is exactly what I needed to be doing.”
Since coming back, I’ve tried to carry forward some of the habits I picked up on retreat. I put my phone in a charging closet outside of my bedroom before going to bed. I’ve tried introducing a “rhythm of prayer” with my family at home (I’m surprised it’s off to a decent start). I’m journaling more.
Choosing to go on a retreat
When I write these kinds of posts that are firmly in the “Etc.” portion of the “Customers, Etc.” newsletter, I often have people reach out to say that my writing impacted them in a meaningful way. I always find that profoundly humbling. It’s also why I keep writing these kinds of posts.
If that’s you after reading this post:
Keep it up. Please reach out to me. I love hearing from people and feel humbled to be a part of your story.
Prioritize your own retreat. We both can count a billion reasons not to go, but if you’re feeling it on your heart that you should go on a retreat, put it on the calendar and do it7.
Fr. Eugene, my retreat director, gave me some advice the last day we met: do this every six months and don’t think of it as a luxury. It’s something you actually need. You need to step away every so often.
A retreat is not a luxury, though it can feel like one if you’ve never been on one or it’s been a while. We all need moments to step back from the busyness of life and really listen.
I wrote briefly about my decision to study to be a priest in my post about going to business school.
Chant has been around quite literally for thousands of years, so it’s odd to think of innovations in chant, but that’s what happened at St. Meinrad Archabbey under the leadership of the late Fr. Columba Kelly, OSB starting in the 1960s in the wake of the Second Vatican Council. One particular innovation he introduced was by providing eight psalm tones that could accommodate verses of between two and six lines.
Here’s a video of Fr. Columba Kelly shortly before he passed briefly describing his background and the innovation of what he introduced from a liturgical perspective (i.e. pertaining to worship during the mass). It’s hard to emphasize how innovative his work is. If you were to hang out in Catholic circles, you would find political factions related to music that go one of two ways: either you’re a strict traditionalist that believes all chant should be Gregorian and in Latin, or you’re a modern progressive that believes chant is dead and all singing should be in the vernacular (and perhaps backed by a twelve-string guitar). To do something new in chant that follows the history of the eight original Gregorian modes while being accessible in the vernacular is really a narrow needle to thread, but Fr. Kelly did it well and the results are quite beautiful.
Okay, one more thing. I was looking at St. Meinrad’s YouTube channel and they recorded all the liturgies while I was there! If you want to get a feeling for their style of chant, check out this recording of Vespers from February 2nd. See if you can find yours truly.
Ora et labora, the traditional motto of the Benedictines, means prayer and work.
There was a copy of the Rule of St. Benedict in my room, so I read it while I was on retreat. Written in 516, it’s surprising the rhythm of prayer that St. Benedict wrote about is still alive in monasteries today.
Fun fact: this retreat director, Fr. Eugene Hansell, OSB, was the rector of the St. Meinrad Seminary while two important people in my life studied to become priests: Fr. Tim Hepburn, who was the chaplain at Emory University when I was a freshman at Georgia Tech—he was a really big help in my discernment to become a seminarian; and (now) Bishop David Talley, who at the time was pastor at our parish in Lilburn, GA and who celebrated our wedding. There weren’t that many priests from Atlanta who went to St. Meinrad and there haven’t been that many rectors, so it was a neat connection to stumble upon.
This style of biblical reading, lectio divina, has a long tradition in Benedictine spirituality.
Reach out if you want help finding a retreat that’s a good match for you. The monastery I went to is run by monks who are Roman Catholic Christians, but they frequently have non-Catholics visit for a retreat. Most of their scheduled prayer is based on the psalms, readings from scripture, and readings from ancient church fathers from before the reformation.