This year’s Chaplaincy Retreat was a weekend spent with the Brothers of the Commnunity of the Resurrection in Mirfield, near Leeds. The title of the weekend was “Windows onto God”, and was ably led by Father Mike Kavanagh, who himself trained for the ministry at the adjoining college, and is an ex-York student to boot!

The aim of it all was to help us to discover new ways of experiencing God, mainly through — silence and contemplation. Indeed the crux of the whole weekend was the observation of the house silence, from the Friday evening until the Sunday morning. This time was given over mainly to personal prayer and exploration of one’s relationship with God, both through one s own individual activities (praying, reading, writing poems, meditating on scripture or just good old fashioned thinking) and through a series of small talks led by Mike. These talks were designed to help us explore new ways of meeting with God. Firstly we learned about the features of monastic worship, to help us get accustomed to the goings on around us, followed by a talk on the nature of retreat — just what should we expect from a weekend of this nature? What’s the point? Will it have any lasting effect on our lives or our walk with God? And so on.

It would be, I think, rather pointless for me to explain what I personally got out of this weekend set aside to be spent in the presence of God. Everyone reacts to such an experience in a different way, and I dare say that if I went on another retreat next weekend I would come away from it with something completely different to reflect upon.

Suffice it for me to say that when one deliberately sets aside such a large portion of their time to just blot out the distractions and frustrations of day to day life and concentrate on God, one allows him the chance to make changes sometimes subtle and sometimes dramatic — a chance I found he took with relish!

Of course, the time at the monastery was very emotional, and it is very easy to come away hoping almosttoo hard that things will have changed — that the fruits of the Spirit will have suddenly blossomed out all over your life. It can be frustrating, then, to realise that, after a weekend free of them, all the old worries and doubts have come back so soon afterwards, and you find yourself making the same old mistakes over again. But, as Mike pointed out during the weekend, this is to be expected. You don’t get changed completely into the Image of Christ just because you spent a weekend with some monks, however nice it all was! Perhaps there will never be any obvious changes in my life as a result of the retreat, and it will just have been a good chance to spend some time thinking about where my relationship with God is going. Perhaps something which affected me deeply will only become apparent many years from now. I don’t know. All I can know is that my experiences at Mirfield were ones which I shall cherish for a long time to come; but my hope is that they don’t just end up as cherished memories, but the catalyst for a (long needed) lasting change.

Susan Key