When the Words End

The Summons That Remains After the Retreat

“Today, if you hear His voice, harden not your hearts.”

Psalm 95:7–8

As the Lenten retreat series comes to its close, I want to express my gratitude to all who walked this path together. Many of you listened with patience, wrestled with the words, shared your questions, and endured the discomfort that the Gospel often brings when it is allowed to speak plainly.

Thank you for your seriousness of heart.

Thank you for your willingness to remain when the teaching pressed against the illusions we often build around ourselves.

Thank you for allowing the words of the fathers and the modern elders to disturb the comfortable places within us.

But a retreat does not exist to leave us with words.

If it has served its purpose at all, it has done something far more unsettling.

It has taken away some of the places where we hide.

Throughout these reflections we spoke about the collapse of the religious self, the dismantling of the ego, the poverty of the heart, the wound through which grace enters, and the quiet birth of the inner monastery. None of these things are ideas. They are events that occur in a life that is actually given to Christ.

The desert fathers were very sober about this.

A man may listen to spiritual teaching for years and remain unchanged. He may admire the desert and never enter it. He may speak beautifully about humility while guarding the last fortress of the self.

The retreat therefore leaves us with a question that cannot be avoided.

Will we remain as we are?

Or will we allow Christ to dismantle what we have built?

The summons of this retreat is simple and severe.

To stop protecting the self we have constructed.

To stop seeking a Christianity that preserves our comfort, reputation, and control.

To allow the Gospel to lead us into the poverty where Christ Himself is found.

This does not happen in dramatic gestures.

It happens quietly.

In the hidden labor of prayer.

In watchfulness over the thoughts.

In repentance that does not justify itself.

In patience when God strips away the things we leaned upon.

In love that seeks nothing in return.

The fathers would say that this is where the real work begins.

Not in the retreat.

But after it.

When the words fall silent and a man stands alone before God with his life.

May Christ grant all of us the courage not to flee this work.

And may the hidden fire of His grace continue to burn in the depths of the heart until, little by little, the false man falls away and the true man in Christ is born.

Thank you again to each of you who walked this Lenten path together.

Pray for me as I pray for you.