by: Matt Cardases

I once read about a man who was plagued with constant fatigue. He was always tired but unable to sleep, irritable, and generally unsatisfied with everything. Frustrated and confused, he went to see his doctor. The doctor, having discovered that his patient was in decent overall health, asked him where his happiest childhood memory took place. The man answered, “At the beach”.  So the doctor told him to take a day off work, get up early, and take a drive to the beach, not to watch any TV, read the newspaper, or listen to any music in the morning, and not to listen to anything during the drive. The doctor told him to pack a lunch, but not to take any reading material. He then wrote something on three small pieces of paper, folded them, and told his patient to read them the next day, in order, at 9 a.m., 12 p.m., and 3 p.m. They said the following:

Look back. The man looked back, bringing back old memories, happy ones and not so happy ones, replaying them in his head like movies. He felt warmed and soothed.

Listen carefully. As he sat in the sand, the man listened carefully to the roaring waves, the wind blowing in the long grass. He realized that for a brief moment in between each breaker, there is complete and utter silence.  The more he listened for the moment of silence, the longer and longer it seemed to him, and he was overwhelmed with peace.

Rethink your priorities. The man went through what he knew was most important to him and saw how he had neglected those things. He understood how he needed to rework his schedule to focus on what really mattered to him. He felt refreshed and determined to make changes in his life.

The man later wrote that this single day of retreat from his everyday surroundings was one of the most therapeutic, revitalizing experiences he had ever had. Thenceforth, whenever he began to feel unusually tired, overloaded, and listless, he would take a day off and drive to the beach, following the same steps.

It has become rather cliché to say that as students in current urban society we are always busy with papers or extracurricular activities and we are constantly bombarded with media messages. Loathe as I do to reiterate that, I think that as intellectually aware of this reality as we may be, on a practical level I really do not feel that we attempt to counteract it. We go insane with overdue homework, field educations, etc. Our social circles don’t change. As much as we can head to the Activity Centre to play pool, watch a movie, play cards, or just hang out, we can never really get away; we just ignore things for a while. Just like Hotel California, it seems that mentally, we can check out any time we like, but we can never leave.

It was with realities like this in mind that Sean O’Leary worked an overnight spiritual retreat on November 14 and 15 at Crieff Hills Retreat Centre into his Spiritual Formation class. The idea was for the class to relocate to new surroundings with fewer distractions; to devote ourselves to worship and communion. Sean led us in several worship sessions, we took communion, we shared personal experiences and life stories, shared food together, and had political debates that eventually deteriorated into determining that Jack Layton should be prime minister based exclusively on his moustache. We took a walk alone through the trails for prayer and reflection.

At Crieff Hills, I found the austere silence and the sublime tranquility refreshing. I realized that the necessity for spiritual retreat is often spoken about but rarely acted on. At the end of Luke 4, Jesus goes out to a “solitary place,” and in chapter 5, it says that “crowds of people came to hear him and to be healed of their sicknesses, but Jesus often withdrew to lonely places and prayed”. We get caught up in our academic and ministerial responsibilities and it becomes easy to think that other people need us more than we need God. That’s not true. We must take time away to be with God. I realize this is extremely difficult at EBC, but there are always ways to escape. Even a long walk or a trip home on the weekend can work. There’s more solitude in the immediate vicinity of EBC than you’d think; go explore, you’ll find it. Even better: take Spiritual Formation with Sean next semester.