I wonder how you feel about the prospect of eight days with a group of other meditators in complete silence. Each day is structured around seven periods of meditation together. If you’ve been meditating regularly twice a day yourself, some years you already have begun to get a sense of what that might be like and maybe your reaction is, yeah, I’m ready for that.
That would feel like an almost logical next step to take.Â
Maybe your reaction is actually, no, I know I’m not ready for that. That’s just too deeper dive for me. Maybe some time, but not just yet, maybe you’re just not very sure. And I think I’d like to say a few things that might help you to to discern that to work that out for yourself.Â
First of all, I think I’d like to say that Bonnevaux is a great place to do a silent retreat. If you don’t know it already, it’s in a very beautiful spot.Â
I know that from my own church here where I live in Cornwall, a church built in 1434, and every time you enter it, you feel that special quality that it has that draws you quite naturally, really into prayer and to stillness, and is in itself beautiful.Â
Bonnevaux is one of those places.Â
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…and supports us through it in a really quite wonderful way.Â
And then the second thing perhaps to say is that if you come, you’re not on your own. You’ll be in solitude, but you will be in solitude, in silence, with everyone else. And that’s a sort of solitude and community, coming together of solitude and community, that’s really very difficult to put into words. But maybe you’re already beginning to sense that if you belong to a meditation group, that these two things are not opposite.Â
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You will also have someone, one of the retreat leaders, who will come alongside you each day for a short period, where you can share and get help for anything that you want help with as you go along. So they’ll be that very practical support. And then we’ll be hearing each day a little bit of the wisdom of our tradition.Â
I’ll be giving some talks each day. I’m going to focus on some Bible stories, they are really quite amazing because they can speak to us wherever we are, at whatever stage of life, and however long we’ve been journeying into the mystery of God. There are many layered stories. So I’m going to start with the story of Jonah and the whale and see what there is for us in that story.
Curious to know more about silent retreats?
