A Quiet Retreat Weekend: What a Silent Retreat Involves

A silent retreat is a stay of a day or a weekend at a retreat house where speech is set aside and the day is given a shape instead: a talk or a service in the morning, meals taken in silence, a chapel or prayer room left open from early until late, and hours that belong to the guest. The practice is documented in plain terms by Quiet Ground, an independent guide to the retreat-house tradition that carries silent retreat what to expect alongside the history of the Cenacle Retreat House in Houston. For a reader in Ballina the useful questions are the practical ones: what a weekend is made of, how to prepare for a first one, and who is doing the guiding when someone is.

A retreat of this kind is not a holiday taken quietly, and it is not a monastic enclosure. It is a short stay inside a house run for the purpose, and the silence is the working condition rather than the point of the exercise. Guests arrive in the late afternoon, are shown a room, and are given the timetable for the days that follow. Meals are taken at set hours, often in silence, and the rest of the day is free apart from the sessions the house has planned. Most houses keep a chapel, an oratory or a small prayer room open from early morning until night, and many keep a garden or a stretch of ground where a guest can walk. Silence is normally kept in the corridors, at table and in the chapel, and relaxed at the door, at reception and in an interview.

What happens on a silent retreat?

The usual shape is a Friday evening to a Sunday after lunch, which is why the weekend is the commonest first step, and a longer stay is offered by many houses and is more usual for a directed retreat. What the guest does with the open hours is not prescribed. People read, walk, keep a notebook, sleep, or sit in the chapel; the house supplies the structure and the guest brings the material. A first weekend is best treated as an introduction to the pattern rather than as a test of endurance, and houses expect a newcomer to say so at the door.

Silence itself has gradations, and the house will say which one it keeps. Some ask for silence from the first evening; others keep a strict silence overnight and allow ordinary conversation at meals. Some programmes are preached to a group and are quiet by convention rather than by rule; others ask for silence in the house and leave the day otherwise unled. None of this is a secret, and it is the first thing worth asking about when a date is booked.

How do you prepare for a first weekend retreat?

Preparation is mostly a matter of booking early and arriving without an agenda. Retreat houses run to a calendar, a popular weekend fills weeks ahead, and the first step is to ask what dates are open and whether the house is running a preached programme or leaving the weekend open. A guest should say plainly that this is a first retreat; whoever answers the telephone will have answered the question many times and can describe the timetable, say whether meals are silent, and explain whether a director will be available.

What to bring is short: comfortable shoes for walking, warm layers for a chapel that is often cooler than the rest of the house, a notebook, and whatever is needed for an early night. A telephone is usually allowed and usually best left in the room. Nothing else is required, and a house does not expect a guest to arrive with a plan for prayer. The one useful piece of preparation is practical, which is to tell the people who might need you where you are and how to reach the house, so that the days are genuinely free. Readers coming from Ballina can put the journey together with the bus and rail notes in the magazine's getting around guide, since most houses are a short drive or one connecting bus from the town.

What is the difference between a directed and a preached retreat?

Both are retreats, and the difference lies in where the material comes from. On a preached retreat a priest or a team gives a series of talks to the whole group, once or twice a day, and the rest of the time belongs to the guest. The group is a group, the timetable is shared, and a guest can keep their own counsel inside it. On a directed retreat each guest meets a director individually, usually once a day, and the conversation starts from what the guest brings rather than from a prepared conference. Directed retreats are usually longer than a weekend, they need a trained director and a room for each guest, and houses therefore offer them on fixed dates with places counted in advance.

The practical consequence for a first visit is simple. A weekend preached retreat asks nothing beyond attendance and is the usual way in. A directed retreat asks the guest to bring something to work on and to keep an appointment each day. Houses often run both in the same season, and the same house may also offer a day of prayer, a quiet day or an individually guided stay that sits between the two. The terms are used in the same way across the retreat-house tradition, and a house will say which of them applies to the dates on offer.

Where does a retreat weekend sit in a Mayo year?

The reflective habit is visible in Mayo in public forms: the pilgrimage shrine at Knock, the Reek Sunday climb of Croagh Patrick, and the pattern days kept in parishes along the coast. A retreat is the same instinct at a smaller scale and under a roof, with an address, a timetable and a few days of quiet. For a reader in north Mayo it can be read as one more kind of short stay in the region, a Friday evening to a Sunday lunch, and it sits beside the options this magazine covers elsewhere, from the accommodation guide to the coastal walks. The difference is that a retreat house supplies the timetable, the silence and, if it is asked for, the company of a director.

The voluntary body that keeps a retreat house open has the same shape as the one that runs a sports club: a committee, a season, a set of rules and a good deal of unglamorous work. The magazine looks at that machinery in local sport in its guide to how a community league is run, from registration and fees to the volunteers who keep the ground, the fixtures and the accounts going.