What a retreat it was

We left on Wednesday morning to drive up to Holy Cross Monastery. The weather promised to be a good indicator of how good the retreat was going to be.The weather, the company, the location, the food, the time to be spiritually recharged–all was just as we had wanted it to be.

One of the reasons I go on retreat is that I am not sure what will happen, how God will reveal things to me, but the chance to slow down, open up to whatever mystery is waiting, and then as so often happens to me, if I don’t fight it, will help me to get somewhere I didn’t even know I needed to go.

My first “trip” was into my novel. It came about because I met a woman who sat with me one evening and we just talked. It could have been one of those chatty New Yorker to New Yorker talks but wasn’t. She was in pain and thus more open and forthcoming.

Part of what she talked about was love and what it meant to her. As she spoke of it, I realized how significant it has been to me that Scags is as much of a blank slate as she is when it comes to relationships.

As the novel begins, Scags has no idea what the world is like nor what it can do to a person. She has of course had her own struggles but on a stage so small that while she felt pain, and it was definitely painful to see how her Pops had been sidelined by his mental illness, the pain didn’t throw her off course. Nothing therefore has happened to Scags to cause her to question what her life means. Certainly she has not yet experienced the kind of ruptures that lead to the spiritual problems that had brought the young woman I met at the monastery to be in the amount of pain she is now in.

I thought a good deal about what Scags is going through in the new novel and what she is looking for. Even when a character is looking for some of the most seemingly normal things in life–a person to spend our life with, the path to a good career, the friends we want to be surrounded by, etc.– this search can take us into a world of danger and despair.

For some of us, luck helps us to make the choices we need to make to create a good life. For others, it is not a matter of bad luck necessarily, but of lack of foresight and instincts, that leads us down paths that are not just dead ends but paralyze us forever.

As a novelist what I want for Scags is to use the many choices before her to help her learn how to become more aware of the world in which she lives.

While I sat with this woman whose life was full of lots of painful attempts to retrieve what is permanently lost, it struck me just how my plans for Scags are of course much different. For one thing, I can choose what to have her tempted by. As humans, that is not a real choice for us. We confront life and as best we can we try to figure out how to handle what presents itself.

Another reason why going on retreat can be of such great benefit, I am able to see where I have been going and whether the way forward is possible for me to sustain. So far, I can report, it looks good. I will definitely keep you posted if there are any other indications.