Regardless of what each of us want from retreat, we may well get something different, something more like what we need.

When I first came to Dayspring for a silent retreat, I was both hopeful and apprehensive. I felt challenged: inadequate and “not ready” for what seemed like a big spiritual step. To make it worse, I was very nearly late, as traffic out of Washington was more congested than usual. But I made it, just in time, for the Friday evening meal.

This meal together is a wonderful way to begin, not in silence but meeting other retreatants and the retreat directors over an inevitably delicious vegetarian dinner. After food and prayer (and clear explanations about logistics for the weekend), we were released into the Silence. Although I had been looking forward to it, and am not a big talker anyway, I felt a surprising resistance to “being told what I cannot do.” I recognize that feeling as greed for what is suddenly not available.

But, what a gift this silence is. Through the specific kind of fasting that is silent retreat, as we fast from talking and noise, we may better come to understand our addictions: the busy-ness and mind chatter, the striving and greed, the need for control. Instead we have an opportunity to learn again what is important and central. To me, it is important to learn how to choose love over fear, everyday.

Earth is our recovery room if we can learn to be willing to begin, to re-make, re-new, re-create. Growth and healing can be painful. In our tradition, we are taught: in all things be grateful. This pertains even to the pain, as it is different than suffering.

I am overwhelmed by the generosity at Dayspring and by the abundance. So much is available to each of us in the Divine. We are blessed with each other and I find myself grateful for every other person on retreat, in all their silence, pain, and joy. It is a gratitude I wish to practice and carry with me into the noisy everyday. I, like most of us, lose my way so easily. It is so difficult to remember who we are in this house-of-mirrors existence in the world. How have we come to be more comfortable in our shame than in forgiveness?

I enter as a Christian because that is the tradition in which I was raised, but I don’t believe that the essential oneness of the Divine necessarily respects our artificial boundaries and labels. We are in the Divine and the Divine is in us - but we do hide relentlessly, don’t we? We perceive ourselves to be separate. When I am in deep Silence, I can begin to understand that there is nothing truly in our way, nothing that need separate us from our true nature. When I have entered deeply into the Silence, I almost do not know the source of my fears, almost cannot remember what crisis or anxiety brought me to retreat. Such surrender is most precious.

I treasure Dayspring for the love that has soaked into the very soil there. Its caretakers have created a special sanctuary. When I turn onto the road toward Dayspring, it feels like coming home after an endless and exhausting journey.