“Where shall the world be found, where will the world resound?

Not here, there is not enough silence.” (TS Eliot)

Our part of the world is blessed with lots of prayer and retreat houses, and part of my work routine is a 3-4 day retreat each summer. Nice work if you can get it, I hear you say.

This week, as with pretty much any other time on retreat, the world is pretty much the same place as it was 5 days ago. The oil price is still rising, the CofE is still on the brink of collapse, the England cricket squad is unchanged, and we still don’t have any spoilers for tonights Doctor Who. It doesn’t look like I missed much with being away. Which is odd, because that’s one thing I was anxious about before I left.

Beating a Hasty Retreat

It’s incredibly hard to withdraw. A 24/7 society no longer has natural space for slowing down and silence. One counsellor, dealing with inmates in a young offenders institute, discovered that many of the young people were coming to her worried by the voices they could hear in their heads. She realised that, disconnected for the first time from a constant world of noise, it was the first time they’d been able to hear their own thoughts.

Our local leisure complex has a section called ‘The Retreat’, which offers a typical consumerist solution. By parting with large amounts of cash, you can get a facial, a massage, or something unspeakable with candle wax and whalesong. An hour in another world. It’s not long enough, but it’s all we’ve got time for. The provocative Slow Leadership recommends time out, but recognises that for many of us half an hour a day is stretching it.

Blogging only makes things worse. On a web that never sleeps, it takes a matter of minutes for a new story to circle the globe. Report it tomorrow and you’re already too late. Its said that todays newspaper is tomorrows chip paper, blog posts start to whiff of deep fat whilst you’re off having your lunch.

Because You’re Worth It

A couple of years ago, the BBC ran a series called ‘The Monastery’, which featured a group of men living for a month with the monks of Worth Abbey. Though each of them struggled with the regime of prayer, silence and community, by the end of the month each man had changed. Worth Abbey were inundated with enquiries, and the Abbot even wrote a book in response to all the interest the series generated.

Getting off the hamster wheel is good for us. Space, silence, time to think and pray, all help us work out the pattern our life and habits are weaving. When we can’t see the wood for the trees, we have to get out of the wood and find another vantage point, somewhere where we can see everything.

It’s no coincidence that in many cultures, places of worship and prayer are built on top of hills. Not only is it closer to heaven, in primitive cosmology, but there’s a better view of life down below.

William Wilberforce had a vantage point:

“Blessed be God for the day of rest and religious occupations wherein earthly things assume their true size and ambition is stunted…. “

Sam Shaw comments “For Wilberforce, Sabbath was a kind of check and balance system, to help him keep his career in perspective. He was saying, without withdrawing every seven days, I would get all out of balance. I would begin to think only thing that mattered was winning political races, even if I am motivated with right reasons.”

Feel the Rhythm

Hard-wired into creation is a rhythm, a rhythm which introduces the whole of the Bible: ‘on the … day God made…. and it was good’. Every day God stops working and reflects on it, evaluates it. And at the end of the week he looks at everything, declares it ‘very good’, then has a day off. The rhythm of rest and reflection gives meaning and value to work and activity.

In a post-Christian society, we no longer have the rhythm of Sabbath available to us. If we want time and space, we have to carve it out. Unfortunately the more we need it, the less energy and motivation we’ll have to create it. The faster life becomes, and the more information and choices it throws at us, the more important it gets to press the pause button. Martin Luther once said “I have so much to do today that I cannot possibly manage without spending 3 hours in prayer.”

One Good Reason To Become a Vicar

Time out: to pray, to evaluate, to realise we’re not as important as we think and that the world (and the blogosphere) will keep turning without us, to stand back from what’s growing in our inner and outer lives and work out what to prune, and where the fruit is. Say what you like about the Church of England, one thing we’re encouraged to do as vicars is to value this kind of time, to go on retreat regularly, to make a habit of standing back and taking stock. And if it was good enough for Jesus…

One wife had such a busy husband that she took to booking herself into his diary to make sure they got some time together. If, as Socrates suggested, ‘the unreflected life is not worth living’, then retreat time is time well worth booking in. And if your boss won’t let you, you could always become a vicar and have retreats as part of your job description. There’s always a career helping Boris Johnson if it doesn’t work out. Or not.

David Keen blogs at St. Aidan to Abbey Manor, and has never worked for Boris Johnson.