A retreat is really a vacation with God. We all know that vacations are great with our spouses, our family, or our friends because when we're away from our daily responsibilities, we're free to concentrate on each other, enjoy each other, play with each other, have more intimate conversations with each other. The same is true of a retreat with God: we're away from our daily responsibilities, so we're free to concentrate on God, play with God, enjoy God, have intimate conversations with God. After all, because our hearts are made for God alone, only He can fill them.
If you've never been on a retreat, I urge you to do so, even if it's only for a few hours. Do this even if you may be having mental, emotional, or spiritual "issues" with God: the talks, the quiet, will free you to listen to God and to yourself in deep, healing ways. If you can't afford to get away, schedule a few hours for yourself to be alone to do spiritual reading, to pray, to take walks in your backyard or at a park with God. Give Him time, give Him space, to be with you alone.
There is nothing to fear about silence or walking in solitude unless to face the fear we have of finding ourselves and/or finding God. Why fear ourselves? There is more beauty, more harmony, more spiritual power to do good and be good in ourselves than we can possibly imagine, because our souls are united with Divine Immensity and Love. There is nothing to fear from God except that God is the Divine Lover Who wants to possess our hearts, the Divine Lover Who is faithful to us even in our darkest, bleakest moments. When we are alone with God and we allow ourselves to be quiet and vulnerable, it's as if we suddenly discover the sun, the moon, and the stars illuminating us in the depths of ourselves, and we fall into undiscovered horizons of joy.
Even if, when we're alone in solitude, we weep, God is there to wipe our tears and take us deeper into our grief until we walk out on the other side a stronger person.
So, do not be afraid to be alone in silence with God. Go on retreat one day. Take a vacation with God. You'll come home refreshed, re-energized, and in a deeper relationship with the One Who made you, Who loves you, and Who wants time alone with you. Because you are God's Beloved, and He wants to be yours.
Here are some lovely quotes on silence. I'll be with you again next week.
There is nothing so much like God in all the universe as silence. Meister Eckhart
We need silence to be alone with God, to speak to him, to listen to him, to ponder his words deep in our hearts. We need to be alone with God in silence to be renewed and transformed. Silence gives us a new outlook on life. In it we are filled with the energy of God himself that makes us do all things with joy. Mother Teresa
True silence is the rest of the mind; it is to the spirit what sleep is to the body, nourishment and refreshment. William Penn
Silence of the heart is necessary so you can hear God everywhere--in the closing of a door, in the person who needs you, in the birds that sing, in the flowers, in the animals. Mother Teresa
To live a spiritual life we must first find the courage to enter the desert of our loneliness and to change it by gentle and persistent efforts into a garden of solitude. Henri Nouwen
Settle yourself in solitude, and you will come upon Him in yourself. Saint Theresa
To go into solitude, a man needs to retire as much from his chamber as from society. I am not solitary whilst I read and write, though nobody is with me. But if a man would be alone, let him look at the stars....One might think the atmosphere was made transparent...to give man, in the heavenly bodies, the perpetual presence of the sublime. Ralph Waldo Emerson