Retreat!

I'm just back from a week at St Cuthman's retreat house in Sussex. No tv (hooray!), no radio (but I sneaked in my portable DAB), no wifi, so no emails (hooray!) and no updates to the blog. But I doubt anyone's reading it anyway...

St Cuthman's is a beautiful, comfortable and peculiar place. Beautiful house & setting. Comfortable bedrooms and lounges. A peculiar mix of people, not quite knowing whether or how much to say to one another, in case the other is on a silent retreat.

As I suspected it didn't take long to strike gold in Packer's 'Knowing God'. In the introduction, he outlines two unhelpful modern trends in Christians. I'll just give you the first, which seems particularly apt: 'Christian minds have been conformed to the modern spirit: the spirit, that is, that spawns great thoughts of man and leaves room only for small thoughts of God... No-one can wholly blame them, for churchmen [i.e. church leaders] who look at God, so to speak, through the wrong end of the telescope, so reducing him to pigmy [sic] proportions, cannot help to end up as more than pigmy Christians...'
So I'll do my best not to be a 'pigmy' Christian, and use this sabbatical to enlarge my vision of the majestic Trinity.

Talking of the Trinity, in Jesus' prayer recorded in John 17, we're reminded that the church should reflect the union and love of the Three-in-One. I was thinking about this as I sat in the silent dining room, reading as I ate my supper, along with seven others doing the same. For me, the attraction of a silent meal was the avoidance of the polite small-talk of the non-silent dining room. But that was selfish. I was shutting myself off from other members of the body of Christ – refusing to love them by showing an interest in them. So I changed my dining habits!