By Amy Peterson | Echo
St. Meinrad Archabbey sits on the line between Eastern and Central time. As we hurried from the fifteen-passenger vans to the bathrooms, my phone flipped back and forth. It's 3:45. It's 4:45. It's 3:45 again. We had landed somewhere outside of time, and that seemed perfectly fitting.
I visited St. Meinrad for the first time last month with a group of Taylor students taking an overnight silent retreat. We drove four hours through heavy traffic around Indianapolis and through miles and miles of dry yellow cornfields, flat farmland giving way to rolling hills as we neared the Kentucky border. The thick green forest, splatter-painted red, bent over us as the road wound toward the abbey, encasing us for a moment in a hushed tunnel of leaves.
As we settled into our guest rooms and scattered across the extensive abbey grounds-to the prayer chapel, the bench by the lake, the sunshine in the graveyard, the well-tended garden-I thought about why we were there. On a weekend crowded with social events and many responsibilities, from wing events and pick-a-dates to research papers and exam preparation, why had we asked these students to leave it all behind for silence? Why had we asked them to leave their duties and relationships, spending two days accomplishing . . . nothing?
We brought them to St. Meinrad because there's a danger in being high-achieving students at the best liberal arts college in the Midwest. There's a danger in wanting to change the world for God. There's a danger in the multiplicity of good leadership opportunities available to Taylor students. There's a danger in the (legitimate and important) call to be good stewards of the many gifts they've been given.
The danger is that they may forget they are dust. They may begin to believe their spiritual worth is somehow dependent on their success, accomplishments and leadership capabilities. When they can't keep all their juggling balls in the air, they may lose faith in their value to the kingdom of God.
Or they may succeed, and begin to believe that the kingdom of God depends on their successes, their unceasing labor. But God calls us to silence and to Sabbath rest as reminders that we are not gods, that the fate of the world does not depend on us and that our value is not related to our work. We can cease our striving and be still, for our inherent worth comes from being created in the image of God and being loved by God.
A silent retreat reinforces the essential lessons of the Sabbath. We brought students to St. Meinrad to help them remember that they matter despite what they do or don't accomplish. That they are loved regardless of what they achieve. That they need to listen as much as they need to speak. That they need to be still as much as they need to act. That they can succeed or fail, and God's kingdom will still prevail. That they are dust, but they are deeply loved by God.
We brought them to St. Meinrad for silence, for a chance to slow down and listen to their lives instead of being ruled by the frantic pace of college life that always asks for more, that demands that they prove themselves over and over again. We brought them to St. Meinrad's to remind them that they were created for kairos, time outside of time. Regardless of what they do with their lives, their vocation is simple: to be made new. To live full and flourishing human lives. To be.
The chronos we live in, temporal time, is fading away, but we are all being made new. A weekend spent accomplishing "nothing" but being with God might be the perfect way to remember we are loved apart from our accomplishments.
