When Laura Senft’s 3-year-old nephew died last summer, the Northbrook mother of five couldn’t stop grieving. Nothing worked.
Finally, Rev. Richard Valker, assistant pastor at St. Norbert Catholic Church in Northbrook, suggested that she call St. Benedict’s Abbey near Antioch to inquire about attending a weekend religious retreat.
“It was simple, very meditative and just what I needed,” said Senft, who attended an August retreat with a neighbor and their two 12-year-old daughters. “I had a new strength. That’s the only way to put it. I went there empty and came back full.”
She is one of a growing number of Lake County residents, Catholic and Protestant, finding solace in attending religious retreats in Chicago-area retreat houses.
On a typical retreat, participants arrive on Friday evening and leave on Sunday afternoon. There are talks by a retreat director, time for prayer, mediation, meeting with the retreat director, reading and meal times. Retreats usually but not necessarily are silent. A three-day weekend costs about $130. The price is the same for three-day retreats during the week.
“Structure is at a minimum so that retreatants have time to reflect and interact with others in the group,” said Rev. Leo Ryska, the Benedictine superior of St. Benedict’s.
“They’re kind of what Sunday was like a long time ago,” added Rev. James Scorgie, pastor of United Methodist Church of Libertyville. He attended a retreat at the Franciscan-run Marytown Retreat House in Libertyville as the finale to a parish Bible study group.
“Friday night you’re just kind of there,” said Carolyn Bagdon of Lake Bluff, who has attended retreats at Bellarmine Hall in Barrington and Marytown. “Saturdays, you work. By Sunday, you’ve broken through the barriers.”
More than a million people nationwide attend retreats annually, according to Anne Luther, executive director of Retreats International, a retreat assistance organization at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana. She gets more than a dozen calls weekly from people asking for retreat house referrals.
At Bellarmine Hall, Rev. Donald Hayes, the director, said annual attendance at that Jesuit-run facility has increased to 4,200 people from 2,600 in 10 years. And at St. Benedict’s, “we’re practically all booked up for every weekend the entire year and have only some space available on weekdays,” Ryska reported. Interest among members at Scorgie’s Libertyville church “is up about 100 percent, maybe more than that, in the last five years,” he said.
In fact, interest in retreats has been so great that Marytown Retreat House opened a $2.5 million, three-story addition to house 70 people in September 1997. Bellarmine Hall plans to announce a $6.5 million capital campaign to expand its facilities.
Many people expressing interest haven’t been on a retreat in years, reported Tom Pfeiffer of Lake Forest. “The last five men I’ve talked to haven’t been on a retreat for 30 years,” said Pfeiffer, a coordinator of the annual men’s retreat for the Church of St. Mary in Lake Forest.
Lake County participants list a number of factors prompting this resurgence. Simplicity of the program, ample time to evaluate their lives and solitude are key attractions.
“I enjoy my job,” said Diana Jurista, director of religious education at Our Lady of Humility Catholic Church in Beach Park. “But it gets crazy. I wanted some time to be with God and get away. I like the solitude. Everything is done for you. All you have to do is think.”
“Something was missing from my life,” says Todd Benzschawel, a 33-year-old Abbott Laboratories Inc. financial manager from Lake Villa. “People my age are looking for something more. You can find that by looking for quiet time. Retreats help me refocus on how I can be a better Christian and a father. It helps me recharge my batteries.”
Local retreat house directors and Luther cited other factors.
“Since the Vatican II Council, people have gone through all kinds of gimmicks and various kinds of programs,” said Ryska, the St. Benedict’s abbot. “There’s a new appreciation for the silent, quiet, contemplative retreat. There is also an awareness, when you get to middle age, that there aren’t many years ahead. There’s a new seriousness for things that you might want to be doing.”
“People tell me, whatever you do, don’t do away with the silence,” said Hayes of Bellarmine Hall. “If prayer is a conversation with God, you need the atmosphere of quiet to listen. If there isn’t some quiet in our lives, we can become trivial.”
“There’s no one else to talk to,” added Bagdon of Lake Bluff. “You think you can’t get through it. But you almost don’t want to go home because the silence is so wonderful. It brings you back to God, and you learn some things about yourself.”
Scorgie, the Libertyville Methodist pastor, cited the impact of increased anonymity in society.
“We live in a society that, despite its connection to the Internet, is pretty anonymous,” he said. “People are going to work and working long hours. People don’t connect much or know their neighbors. They’ve gotten estranged from each other. There is a quest to reestablish a sense of belonging of family and of spiritual purpose.”
“Our institutional religious places are not meeting the real needs of people,” added Luther, the Indiana retreat association director. “The response is to meet those needs in different ways. Retreats are one of those ways.”
Another reason for the renewed interest may be increased variety in types of retreats and the way retreats are conducted today.
In March, Marytown will sponsor a “Celtic Spirituality” retreat to coincide with St. Patrick’s Day, said Marcia Tomaszewski, retreat director. Many of the retreats have even greater personal urgency. About 50 percent of St. Benedict’s programs are based on 12-step programs for recovery from addictions.
“This is a long way from the way it was when we opened in 1945,” Ryska said. “In those days, it was for men only. Retreatants simply lived with the monks and prayed with them for a weekend. Now we’re trying to offer what people need. They can come here and have a directed retreat in which they work with a spiritual director. Or they can come with a group and talk to other people. It’s whatever works for them.
“We have a lot of people who come to scout us out before they come,” he continued. “People are much more in touch with what they want, what they need and where they’re going to invest their energies. They are less prone to buy an assembly-line product. People are looking at retreat houses to satisfy those needs.”
During the visit by Senft, the Northbrook woman, to St. Benedict’s, monks used a taize service for evening prayers. Ryska explained that taize is a candlelight prayer service that uses icons, music and simple repetitive prayer.
“It was wonderful,” Senft said. “It was very soothing, meditative and beautiful with the flute music and the friars praying.”
A highlight for Jurista, the Beach Park religious education coordinator, was praying and eating with the friars at St. Benedict’s. “You pray with them, you eat with them in their kitchen, you can go into the cupboards the way that they do, you become part of their family,” she said. “It’s an experience you don’t get in the everyday world.”
When the Marytown addition opened, retreat organizers anticipated that the average age of retreatants would be middle-aged, Tomaszewski said. “Over the last year and a half, we’ve seen many more people in their 40s, 30s and 20s,” she says.
They also didn’t anticipate the interest of non-Catholics, she added. Recently, Marytown has hosted retreats for parishioners from Grace Lutheran Church, the United Methodist Church and First Presbyterian Church, all of Libertyville.
Even though retreats are short in duration, their impact can be profound, according to participants. Retreats helped Benzschwabel, the Abbott financial manager, “find a better way to balance my work, family and church lives,” he said.
He also started a new council of Knights of Columbus, a Catholic men’s religious association, in Prince of Peace parish in Lake Villa. “If you had told me I would be a Grand Knight,” he said, “I would have told you that you were crazy.”
Senft, the Northbrook retreat participant, reorganized her days to include time for yoga classes and 20 minutes of quiet time for prayer.
“Life gets so busy and jumbled where my head is spinning,” explained Senft, whose children range in age from 1 to 12. “I needed a retreat to get away from it, pull myself out of where I was and go into a spot that was simple and quiet. I loved the simplicity of the retreat.
“There’s a new sense of knowing that I can be centered, calm and still,” she said. “The calmness of our home depends on how calm I am. If I’m calmed and centered, then the people in my house will be. That’s what the retreat did.”
Continued interest in local retreats should continue, retreat directors and participants said.
At Bellarmine Hall, 75 to 80 percent of retreatants are repeat customers, and St. Benedict’s has a 5 percent annual increase in attendance.
Many local retreat houses also are expanding days of recollection, or mini-retreats, that last one day. They feature religious talks and meditation time. Marytown has also offered Spanish-speaking days of recollection.
A good retreat lasts throughout the year, Pfeiffer concluded. “If you make a plan there and stick with it, it’s great. Even if you don’t, it’s still a good three-day way to recharge the batteries. All you need is your listening and your recollections. You just cool out. I can get some of the best sleeps of the year there.”
