Peter and I had dinner Friday evening with someone who used to work with my older brother, Phil. Our dinner host said Phil had told him I was going on a week-long silent retreat. Then, like a perfect older brother, Phil added, "Dave talks all the time. I can't imagine how he could stay silent for a week."

Because a couple of you this past week have told me you were looking forward to hearing about my retreat, I decided to preach about it. While Catholics have been going on individual silent retreats for years, most Protestants are not familiar with the concept.

My spiritual director Sheila, a motorcycle-riding former nun, says a retreat should be taken literally: re-treat. Giving yourself a treat again. The assumption being your life feels out-of-balance because you've had too much of some things and not enough of others to live your life well.

So I spent six days and nights re-treating at Mt. Angel Abby. It sits on a hill between Portland and Salem, Oregon. Through the windows of the dining room you can see Mt. Hood, Mt. Jefferson, Mt. St. Helen's, and Mt. Rainier. Out the windows of my little room in the retreat center, I look out over hops fields in the Willamette Valley. These are not hard views to behold. Last week was the third time I've been on retreat at Mt. Angel.

For me, the gift of a retreat is that you can do what you feel like doing without that really irritating voice that says, "Don't you think you should really be doing _________________ instead?" So I slept a lot. I played guitar on the roof of the retreat center while the sun was setting. I did what is called "sacred" reading, which means spending a lot of time with a small portion of the Bible or another reading, to try to listen for the layers of meaning it contains. I started the next novel for the book group Peter and I are in. I took walks. I did talk with people during meals – so my older brother could be relieved of his fear that as I held in all those words I'd normally be speaking I'd explode with pressure-cooker intensity. I attended lots of worship services. I did a little drawing. And I wrote. Writing is the main way I listen to God. And the main way I pray and find clarity. I wrote a couple letters to friends. And because I want to keep up with my Spanish, 90% of my journal entries were in Spanish. Which forced me to slow down and focus on what I was really hearing and feeling. And forced me to express that in the simplest and most jargon-free way I could.

The 45 monks of Mt. Angel Abbey belong to the Order of St. Benedict. Benedict lived 1500 years ago. In a world where monks always lived off in the desert totally alone, Benedict had the radical idea that we need to live in community if we hope to hear God's voice and practice following Jesus. So he formed the first monasteries where monks live, work, pray, study, and welcome the stranger together. Monks promise to stay together their whole lives. And Benedictine monks promise to live their lives according to the Bible, according to the guide for life St. Benedict wrote, according to the wisdom of the community leaders, and according to God's voice stirring within them.

The bells in the tower ring six times a day. To call the community to prayer. We gathered for worship at 5:30am, 6:30am, 8am, noon, 5pm, and 7:30pm. In all of these services, the monks sing psalms. In simple chanting, the monks sing the prayers of our Jewish ancestors. St. Benedict believed the monks should sing the psalms because he knew how easy it is to forget what we most need. Benedict knew we need a spirituality that "fills time with an awareness of the presence of God" (Joan Chittister, Wisdom Distilled from the Daily: The Rule of St. Benedict Today, San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1990, p. 30). And unless we keep praying, we forget God is with us.

Six periods of community prayer each day is a lot of praying. It can get kind of monotonous. There are things everyone would rather do than pray . . . again . . . after we've just been in the sanctuary. But Benedict knew prayer
"is not a matter of mood. To pray only when we feel like it is more to seek
[comfort] than to risk [letting God change us]. To pray only when it suits us is to want God on our terms. To pray only when it is convenient is to make the God-life a very low priority in a list of better opportunities. To pray only when it feels good is to court total emptiness when we most need to be filled. The hard fact, Benedict knew, is that nobody finds time for prayer. The time must be taken. There will always be something more pressing to do, something more important to be about than the apparently fruitless, empty act of prayer. But when that attitude takes over, we have begun the last trip down a very short road because, without prayer, the energy for the rest of life runs down. The fuel runs out. We become our own worst enemies: we call ourselves too tired and too busy to pray when, in reality, we are too tired and too busy not to pray. . . [So we just get] tired[er] and the vision [for life lived well] just gets dimmer and dimmer" (Chittister, pp. 31-32).

Most of the prayers in these services are sung psalms. The monks sing so many psalms each service, that they go through all 150 of them every two weeks. Which means these prayers of God's people get into their bones. They learn them by heart. They become the prayers of the monks. Of course there are times when a monk thinks, "Oh no, not Psalm 119 again! That sucker's endless." But the psalms - these honest, unembarrassed prayers of our Jewish ancestors - need to get into our bones. Because they talk about life and faith, about pettiness and the desire for revenge, about being lost and being found, about dying and healing. In the midst of feeling God's total absence, the psalms call us to remember. Remember how God has been faithful in the past. They sing the assurance that God has not forgotten us. But God will come. God is present. Listen, be aware, make room to notice. God is here. Which is at the heart of all our prayers: the desire for God to come to us (idea from Frederick Buechner inWishful Thinking).

It's why the hymns we're singing today, and some of the prayers we're praying, all come from the Psalms. It's a way to call us outside of our own small worlds, to embrace the worlds of our ancestors in the faith. And perhaps start to get some of these sung psalms into our bones. So we live them, sleep them, breathe them, love them, believe them. And practice hearing some of the ways God speaks. So we might be better able to hear God speak here and now. In our daily lives. To us.

Sheila the motorcycle-riding ex-nun gave me an assignment for this retreat. I always need an assignment before I go on a retreat. I can't just enter this open-ended, so-different-from-my-day-to-day-life kind of time without some focus. It's like a river needing banks to flow through. I need some kind of boundary, some kind of holder, some filter through which to pray and read and write and listen.

Her assignment was that I pray that God will help me see the fears that keep me from being able to know what brings me joy.

It might sound weird, but for most of my life it's like my feelings spoke a foreign language. I couldn't understand what they were telling me. Most of my life I didn't know what I was feeling. Somewhere along the line I learned that I wasn't lovable just for being a person and being alive. I learned that I had to earn love. And the way I earned love was to do what other people wanted me to do. When people admired and respected me, I felt loved. So I did things that I thought would earn me their respect and admiration. Not because I really wanted to do them. Not because they gave me great joy. Not even because I felt like that was what God's dream for me was. I needed love. And if love came from doing what others wanted me to do, then that's what I did.

Which meant listening to my feelings was kind of dangerous. Because if I started paying attention to what I wanted, then I might start doing things important people in my life wouldn't respect. Listening to what God was saying through my feelings, I might do things that people wouldn't respect me for. And that felt like death for me. Without the love I felt from the respect and admiration of others, I thought I'd die. I couldn't really believe love could come to me just because I was me. Or just because I was living with the integrity of following my call, and the not the call others wanted me to follow.

Only recently have I come to understand how important the respect and admiration of others has been for me. Often, my feelings still speak a foreign language. I need long periods of silence - like I had on this retreat - in order to re-learn the dialect my feelings speak in. I need long periods of silence to hear what they are saying to me. Before this past week, I hadn't been on a silent retreat for three years. It is no coincidence that after that retreat three years ago, I heard God inviting me out of my ministry at University Congregational United Church of Christ.

That's why such retreats can be dangerous. As a wise Christian writer has said, "None of us is very good at silence because it speaks too much" (Frederick Buechner). In silence, we can hear things that stay safely unheard, unnoticed, uncomprehended. Which short-term can be a relief. But long-term, not listening to God's whisper that comes through what brings us joy means we may never connect with that deep joy. We may never discover that love is a gift. Not something we earn by doing what makes people admire and respect us. Love isn't something we earn by doing what other people want us to. Or by achieving great things. Or by manipulating people, impressing people, or fawning over them. Love comes to us as a gift. As a gift. We are loved. A passive verb, this. Meaning it is something we receive. Open-handed, open-hearted. In that hard-to-be place of receiving, not doing. Not working. Not earning. Not performing. Not anything but receiving.

By the end of my six days at Mt. Angel, I felt that tiredness that comes from really stopping. That tiredness that comes from hard listening. I came to a deeper understanding of my desire to impress people, my hunger for the admiration and respect of others. And how that is a trap for me. I had moments of tasting joy. Moments of imagining deeper joy. Moments to paint a picture of what I need in my life for God's joy to come alive in me. And for me to taste the promise of Jesus, who said, "I have come that you may have life, and have it abundantly" (John 10.10).

Last Wednesday afternoon at the end of my retreat, Father Vincent drove me back to the train station in Salem. He's been a monk at Mt. Angel for 47 years. Somehow the topic of Father's Day came up. He said Father's Day is always a hard day for him. Because 26 years ago, on Father's Day, his father, mother, sister, and nephew were all killed in a car accident. He said, "My faith and this community in the abbey is what got me through this horrific loss. I kept singing the words of the psalms that are in my bones. And the other monks kept showing up and standing by my side. Just as Christ kept showing up. And standing by my side."

Singing all those psalms at Mt. Angel Abbey last week, I remembered the first time I sang psalms. It was at Yale Divinity School. The first time I heard one particular sung psalm, I almost cried. Because it spoke my truth. It spoke my longing. It spoke my life. It spoke love. The love of a God who too often felt like some being I talked about, but didn't talk to. Some being at an intellectual level I knew loved me, but who I wouldn't have staked my life on as really loving me. We sang this psalm a lot at divinity school. And it got into my bones. I learned it by heart. And I sing it whenever I need to hear God speak these words to me. Whenever I need to speak these words to God.

This first psalm that made a home for itself in my bones is Psalm 143. The Psalm Michele read. The psalm that, as a sung psalm, is in your bulletin. As we sing it together, I invite you to open yourself to receiving the love of God you sing. And to be washed over by God's love this and every morning.

Lord, my hope is in you: bring me news of your love ev'ry morning.
Hear my prayer, O Lord, hear me, for you are faithful and just. Bring me news of your love ev'ry morning.
I remember former times, and think of all you have done. Bring me news of your love ev'ry morning.
I stretch out my hands toward you, I am like dry, waterless ground. Bring me news of your love ev'ry morning.
Show me the way to walk, for I lift up my life to you. Bring me news of your love ev'ry morning.
Glory to our Great God: Creator, Christ, and Holy Spirit.
Lord, my hope is in you. Bring me news of your love ev'ry morning
(arrangement by Elizabeth Frohrip, 1980)

Amen.