Silence

We just got back from our silent retreat yesterday. It was amazing.

It was 3 full days of silence. I have never experienced anything like that in my life!

Our house, the two Phoenix houses and the San Diego house all went to the Redemptorist Renewal Center, which is actually a really cool place! It's 20 minutes north of our house in the desert, with beautiful views of cacti and mountains...ok we see that all the time, but it was still pretty! There was a pool and we each got our own room (which is great when you're not talking!) and the meals were provided (they even had Pad Thai one night!).

I think the weirdest part for me was not looking at people in the eyes. We were supposed to look away, and even though I felt like smiling and looking at people that I knew, I had to just look down and walk away. But besides that, it was great. I actually learned a lot about my spirituality these last few days.

As I told my casamates and my spiritual director (Fumi, an FJV): over the last few years I have felt disconnected with the Catholic church. There is a lot that I don't believe in and things that I wish were part of the church. I want women to be able to be priests, I think gay people should be able to get married, and I am pro-choice. I also have a difficult time believing and agreeing with a lot that is in the Bible. I guess this all started in college, but it's been getting on my nerves lately and because I felt so disconnected from the church, I was feeling disconnected with God. But, then the silent retreat started and that all changed.

Fumi asked me the first day what I desired from the retreat. I decided that I wanted to be reconnected with God and I was going to do that through new types of prayer. Mass just hasn't been my thing lately. (Especially mass at Santa Cruz...very conservative). So, Fumi gave me lots of different types of prayers over the three days, I tried centering prayer, memory prayer, imagination prayer, conversation with God, and an art examen. Outside of spiritual direction I also did the labyrinth, a peace vigil, journaling, the guided hand meditation, and a collage. I found that I really like the centering prayer and the meditation. When I had tried meditation before, (high school?) I was in a very different place in my life. Now I think I'm really ready to try centering prayer for 20 minutes a day! (Wikipedia link if you're wondering what centering prayer is!)

Another thing that really helped me during the silent retreat was reading a book called "Losing Your Religion, Finding Your Faith." It was all about how we tie our religion and faith together when we are younger, but when we start to question our religion, we also question our faith. It was really cool and helpful. It used the metaphor of a road trip saying we are all on our spiritual journeys and we don't have to have it all figured out right now!

I wrote down some quotes from it into my journal:

"We sometimes think that because we cannot pray as we used to, we have lost our faith. But this is not so. It is only that God is challenging us to grow to a new and different level of prayerful intimacy."

"It would be terrible if we woke up one day, realized that all religious truth is simply read in the Bible, and then decided that there was nothing more to learn in the realm of spirituality...God wants us to discover all the different colors, experiences, and nuances along the road of faith."

"When we do not set aside a regular time to be attuned to God's voice in our lives, it is all too easy to become permanently distracted, spiritually asleep."

I think I had been feeling spiritually asleep until this silent retreat. Now, however, I have decided that prayer is an important part of my life. I want to not only do the centering prayer every day, but I will also be trying some new forms of prayer in the next few weeks. It feels really good to be a little more spiritually awake after that retreat!