Greetings

Greetings God, we have received your mercy in the midst of your temple

Peace be with you. On behalf of Abbot James and the monks of this monastery welcome to your retreat at St. Benedict’s Abbey. This booklet will give you a brief orientation to the day to day life of the monastery which we invite you to participate in, as you desire, during your retreat. But first we may ask, what does it mean to “go on retreat”? Jesus himself would “often slip away to the wilderness and pray” (Luke 5:16). Why? Certainly not to flee what was before him, but to love it more, by staying with the Father who gave it to Him. So we can say that to retreat, in the Christian sense, is not to escape but to enter more deeply into the truth of things, like taking a step back from a painting in order to see more clearly the whole of its beauty, in which shines the harmony of each part. We are also invited into this relationship: “Remain in me, as I remain in you. Just as a branch cannot bear fruit on its own unless it remains on the vine, so neither can you unless you remain in me” (John 15:4). It is only in and through the reality the Father is giving to us hic et nunc (here and now) that we can take up the Jesus’ command to remain in his presence, to stay awake and keep watch, await, and meet the source of our lives, who is our happiness, that is, our destiny.

This “meeting” moved our Holy Father St. Benedict, almost 1500 years ago, to dedicate his life and the lives of his followers to meeting and plumbing the depths of this Mystery in every aspect and detail of life. Or, as it has been put: Quaerere Deum. To seek God. St. Benedict saw that everything is given to aid us on our search for God. This is what allows us to cry out with the Psalmist: God, we have received your mercy in the midst of your temple (Ps 47:10). The temple is the place where we are found by God’s mercy and moved to journey deeper with him into the mystery of his love. For us monks that place is particularly here, St. Benedict’s Abbey. Preferring this encounter with God in this place is the reason at the origin of many of the distinctive gestures and practices of Benedictine monasteries: defining the day by regular hours of prayer, observing silence, praying with the scriptures (Lectio Divina), working and studying together, and keeping the cloister (enclosure) of the monastery. This is the experience we invite you to enter into during your retreat with us. The simplest way to do this is to follow, as you desire and are able, our monastic Horarium (Latin for “the hours”). The following pages will outline our hours of prayer, silence, work, and meals, and give a few introductory and practical notes on each subject. It is our prayer for you that this time of your retreat will be filled with an awareness of God’s mercy in every moment and detail given to you in his temple, in which we are all guests.