Well, I survived the retreat, and all retreatants survived me. Ha! We all have a long way to go to Christ likeness. The good thing, the really happy-happy joy-joy thing is there will be no more giant retreats. YEA!

A retreat to me is not something where things are scheduled, at least not a retreat at Gethsemani. There, a retreat is hours of unbroken silence, and an hour or so of talk, and not the other way around. Also, sitting and listening to someone talk in a room with 70 people isn't a retreat either, that's like work. Even if the speakers are people you love and care about, it's still a lecture series and not a retreat. Retreat leaders often want to keep an iron grip on things, and that is just plain old irritating.

However I loved the wine, cheese, and bourbon party on Sunday night, when the lightweights among us (you know who you are) hehehehehe, had already gone home. Then again, those who attended were spending the night, and I only had to drive to Bardstown. But that was when the real "fellowship" began. Food and wine brings out the family feeling far more easily than just saying "we're all a big family."

There are levels of love, and levels of family, and levels of solidarity. My local once a month group is my best love, best family, and best solidarity. The rest of the people, sure, they are part of my spiritual family, and Lay Cistercian family, but I have no real connection to them. They are faces I recognize; names on a list or a name card; that, and nothing more. I pray for all Lay Cistercians of Gethsemani, and all Lay Cistercians in the entire world, but I have about the same connection with most of the LCG as I do with the people who live in the Grange of St. Bernard, in France.

In the end I have to agree with Michael Brown. If today the Abbot General should say, "No more lay anything, I dissolve you." That would not change my relationship to the Abbey one stitch, or my relationship to those in my group. The love of Christ impels us, or it does not. It's just that simple.