Contemplative Retreats for Vestries

In a line I’ve always loved from the Gospel of Mark, Jesus invites his disciples, “Come away to a lonely place and rest awhile” (6:31b). They’d been teaching and healing on the road for days and were no doubt exhausted by the demands of the crowds. Jesus knows that what the disciples need, as a group, is to step away together. They need to “regroup” and refresh themselves once more with prayer.

There’s something incredibly powerful about this act of withdrawing from ordinary activities— even if they’re the ordinary activities of a monastic community, a vestry, or a parish—which can help to refocus us in a specific, intentional way. Our annual community retreat is so important to my Brothers in the Society of Saint John the Evangelist that our Rule prescribes it as a necessity of our shared life: “The community shall have one week of retreat together every year under the direction of a retreat leader. The experience of shared silence and prayer deepens our solidarity in the Spirit and unites us in a common response to the living word.” People are sometimes surprised that monks who live and pray together every day still need to step away for a further, intentional time of communal prayer. And yet we do. For as our Rule explains, “Whenever we enter retreat we seek to be more available to God so that we may enter more fully into the divine life.” This is essential for every community of faith.

When deciding to “come away” for a time of retreat together, a community is faced with two possible models, which can be complementary or competing depending on the circumstances. I suspect most vestries are well-versed in practical retreats, during which they focus on planning and processing the future. But what about contemplative retreats in which the vestry comes together to pray in silence? This latter model, the formational retreat, is in my view the more crucial of the two because in that experience we rediscover who we are and whose we are. If we forget who we are and whose we are, then a planning retreat—where we debate flow charts, budgets, and upcoming offerings—might only cause us to lose focus further, getting lost in the minutiae. It does us little good to answer, “What are we going to do?” if we don’t share a very clear, collective understanding of why we’re doing it. That deeper sense of purpose—who we are and whose we are—can only come through prayer.

We Brothers have welcomed a number of vestries to the monastery for corporate times of retreat. It is always moving to watch these groups ease together into the silence. We’ve also been honored to hear, after the fact, how meaningful these retreats have proved to be for them. One rector and friend of the community, the Rev. R. Casey Shobe, shared with us his reflections on his vestry’s experiences:

Taking contemplative retreats together was part of a broader process of transforming our vestry leadership away from crunching numbers, going over the budget, and micromanaging administrative details into becoming a body of deeply formed and faithful Christian leaders. We really turned the corner as a group when we began to view our collective formation, our spiritual growth, and our prayer as of equal importance to us, as a body, as the tasks we needed to accomplish. Over the course of six years—with yearly retreats to the SSJE monastery being the culmination of this time—our intentionality around cultivating a deeper spiritual life had a great effect on our conflict management: on the way that we spoke with and to one another and especially on our handling of disagreement. Our decision-making becomes more exciting and hopeful, less anxious. I perceived that the group became more able to hold things with the proper sense of perspective. People looked forward to our meetings and didn’t resent them taking several hours. Above all, our attentiveness to one another was much greater.

I have no doubt that this transformation grew out of our shared experiences of silence and prayer. It’s just as the Brothers and those who observe a quieter life say: we too often fill our day-to-day interactions with mindless talking. When we stop the chitchat and superficial conversation, when we’re with another person or a group of people in silence, we can pay more attention to them, rather than less. When we then come back together and talk, our words are more carefully chosen. The things we do choose to talk about have greater depth.

What began for our vestry as a sacrifice, a leap of faith away from the planning retreats we’d taken as a group before, ultimately proved to be no sacrifice at all, because it was so richly rewarding to us as individuals and a group.

Like the disciples, Jesus invites us, “Come away to a lonely place and rest awhile.” Jesus invites us into the silence, where we can really pay attention to one another and to God.

Originally posted at www.ecfvp.org/vestrypapers/reboot-your-vestry/come-away-and-rest-awhile