I just returned from a two-day silent retreat. Our church sponsors two such retreats a year, and I think it’s a rare gift we can give ourselves of slowing down, meeting God and listening that we greatly need in our society. Nevertheless, it was a rough retreat for me.
When I go into silence, I long to experience epiphanies or even small revelations. I imagine finding the harmonic chord the universe hums and casting my voice into it. I at least want a butterfly to float up and land on my cheek. Right? This is what I paid for.
But none of that happened for me at this retreat. As I sat on a bench along a trail deep in the woods of our retreat site and stared across a canyon, I wept. And I sobbed and I whimpered and I used my flannel shirt tail to sop up my excesses. It wasn’t pretty. And no butterfly in its right mind wanted anything to do with me.
It was the start of a silence filled with anger and pain and sorrow. If I had been home, I would have made cookies, knitted a Christmas tree, laid sod. Something, anything to still all those emotions I work so hard to keep locked away. But I had none of those recourses at the retreat.
At the end of the retreat evaluation forms were passed to participants, and the retreat leader later asked me why we did this. “How can you evaluate or rate where and how God has met you in silence?” she asked. “It may have been a hard, unpleasant meeting but one that leads to more wholeness.”
She’s right. We cannot order up a holy high like we do a Big Mac and fries. Nor is seeking to be in God’s presence like watching a sitcom, where plot development and resolution transpires in a prescribed period of time and ends happily with a flashing LAUGH sign to the audience.
Some people do experience an epiphany and some a wee revelation. Sometimes butterflies or redbirds do appear at the exact instant you have asked God for a sign of her presence. And sometimes, a shower of falling leaves is just dead leaves turning into compost. And sometimes, you go to a silent retreat and you just cry.
When I reread Mary’s poignant song, what we call the Magnificat, I remember that this young girl, above all, trusted. She surely had no true idea of what she had just said “Yes!” to, and yet she said yes nonetheless. She could not have known what laid ahead or how this moment of yielding would lead to the events it did. But she said yes nonetheless.
In epiphanies or pity parties, in dancing butterflies or deepest grief, God meets us. It is never in the way we expect, and the only real question is, “Can we open ourselves enough to receive God with our own ‘Yes!'”
Simply Yours 