Retreats are work. Last month I completed my annual eight-day silent retreat at Conception Abbey, a Benedictine Monastery outside Kansas City, Missouri. It is a lovely place, and there’s plenty of time to rest, but a retreat is work in the end. St. Benedict, who the Church commemorates today, set off to found a monastic community that changed the face of Western Christianity forever. He did not go just to have some quiet and sit by the poolside in an idyllic Italian landscape for the rest of his life. St. Benedict went into silence to wrestle with God. He went to overcome the world’s distractions to get closer to God.
Jacob wrestles with an angel in today’s First Reading. Like St. Benedict, he picked up everything he had and went on the move, and then suddenly, this divine figure appeared, and they both fought until sunrise. He emerges from the fight a new person marked by his new name: Israel. When encountering the divine in the silence of prayer, we change as Jacob and Benedict did. The move into the silence is to go and meet God, transforming a person. In these battles with God, we bring our doubts, needs, desires, and insecurities before God. Or perhaps God brings them before us. Silence is uncomfortable for many of us because we have to face the truth, whatever that might be for us. Prayer is not a vacation but a vocation (a call) to be totally free and totally alive. The good news is that we do not have to join a monastery, cross a river to fight some angel, or even go on an eight-day silent retreat to find God and grow spiritually. It is arduous work to grow spiritually, but St. Benedict and Israel show us that it’s worth the fight.