January 7 – 14 – Our community retreat

Every year, the monastery takes a week for its own private retreat. There may be an assumption on the part of people who come here for retreat that because the monks live in a monastery, they are more or less on retreat all the time. While this is partially true – we are dedicated to worship, prayer, and spiritual reflection all year long – at the same time, life can be quite busy here, especially over our Christmas season when we ship our fudge and fruitcake to those who support us all over the world. So it is very healthy to have some time to simply be here, without the need for work responsibilities for a week every year. We use the time for reading, for rest, for walks in our lovely woods, and so on. And we attend conferences twice a day given by an invited speaker.

This year we were very fortunate to have Fr. John Corbett, O.P. as our retreat master. He opened his conferences by saying that he didn’t want to talk about monastic life, since we probably knew more about it than he did, and then went on to discuss elements of the Gospel of John, which nonetheless related very well to our life here at Gethsemani.

Fr. John was ordained a Dominican priest in 1980 and has talked, taught, and given retreats all over the world. He is currently living at St. Gertrude Priory in Cincinnati, Ohio. not far from his home in Columbus. When he left us, he headed to Rome where he is due to teach a month-long course.

We appreciated the time he spent with us, and we appreciated the opportunity to explore even more fully the meaning of our vocation as monks at the Abbey of Gethsemani.