DavidScottWritings.com
• Home
• Books
• Essays & Reviews
• Reporting
• Occasional Writings
• Scripture & Spirituality
• Current Projects
• About David Scott
• Links
Encounter With Silence:
A Retreat for Saints
 |
The Sermon on the Mount is the manifesto of the Christian life. Nowhere in the Gospel can we see the truly revolutionary character of Christianity and how completely it is opposed to the mind and practice of the world. Here is the pattern of human life as designed by the Creator himself. He wants us to live not human lives, but divine lives. This is what it means to be children of God, elevated to a share in the divine nature. |
The Venerable Dorothy Day, founder of the Catholic Worker movement, called it “the famous retreat.”
The week-long retreat, based on the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius of Loyola and the spirituality of St. John of the Cross, requires complete silence on the part of participants. During the retreat, retreatants are permitted to read only a Bible and their own retreat notes. Each day the Eucharist is celebrated and three spiritual conferences are delivered by the retreat master.
For Dorothy Day and hundreds of others, the retreats led by Father John Hugo presented the full meaning of the Gospel and the implications of its radical and uncompromising spirituality. As Day said: "This is what I was looking for in the way of an explanation of the Christian life. I saw things as a whole for the first time with a delight, a joy, an excitement which is hard to describe. This is what I expected when I became a Catholic."
Father John Hugo finished giving his final retreat just two days before his untimely death in an automobile accident, on October 1, 1985.
Below are links to audio files of this historic retreat. Each mp3 file is 45-50 minutes long (about 50 mb each). New conferences will be added regularly until the complete retreat is available, nearly 30 hours in all. Please know that these conferences were recorded by a non-professional retreatant on equipment that is primitive by today's standards. There are inconsistencies in sound quality and occasional small gaps in the final recording.
Encounter With Silence
A Retreat by Father John Hugo
September 22–29, 1985
For more on Father Hugo and the retreat, see "The Catholic Worker Retreat of Father Hugo Changed My Life"
For the only collection of Father Hugo's collection of spiritual writings, see Weapons of the Spirit.
The retreat continues today by spiritual heirs to Father Hugo. For information, see Encounter With Silence page.