Ronald A. Knox - Retreat for Beginners

Knox, Ronald Arbuthnott, 1888-1957

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EX LIBRIS

Retreat for Beginners

FOR

A.

by Ttynald Knox

SHEED AND WARD - NEW YORK

CENSOR LIBRORUM

ARCHBISHOP OF NEW YORK

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Contents

A small girl I know had her first experience, some time ago, of hearing a sermon. She had been to Mass before, and that seemed reasonable enough; but she had always been in domestic chapels where the priest kept his back turned to the congregation and got on with his job. And when, one Sunday, a priest came along who turned round and began preaching, it worried her; she asked, in a very loud voice, Mummy, whos he talking to? Well, of course she was quite right. A man who gets up and lets off a number of remarks in the air, with the room full of people who may or may not be listening, always looks, and quite often is, foolish. But if you are echoing the small girls question, and want to know who it is that I am talking to, I have my answer ready. I am talking to you. Not to you in the plural. I am talking to one particular soul, you in the singular.

So please dont think of me as if I were sitting at a microphone, broadcasting, and you couldnt find the right handle for turning the thing off. Think of me as if I had just got your number on the telephone, and were putting through a personal call to you; to you in the singular. You know how idiotic people sometimes start a telephone conversation with the remark, Hullo, is that you?as if it could possibly be anyone else. That question, commonly so idiotic, I want to ask now, because for our particular purposes it has a

Retreat for Beginners

meaning; is that you? I mean, are we really going to talk honestly to one another, you and I, or are you going to put up some sort of barrage all the time, because Im a priest, and you know the sort of things priests always say, and you dont want to listen to it?

What is the point of a retreat? I should put it like this that God means to do something in and to your soul. It may be something quite little; almost certainly it will seem quite little. But then, of course, that little may be the thin end of a wedge. He wants to do a sort of tidying-up, a sort of spring-cleaning in your life; perhaps he will open your eyes to some fault, perhaps he will begin to wean you away from some bad habit, some dangerous friendship, perhaps he will give you a glimpse of some way (you hadnt thought about it hitherto) in which, later on, he means you to serve him. It may be that something I say will be the signal, dont let us put it any higher than that, just the signal, for some new train of thought to start rumbling through your brain. Probably you wont be conscious that the thing is happening.

I think you will probably be disposed to agree with me when I say that there is nothing so uninteresting as other peoples conversation in railway trains. Occasionally such people will say something exquisitely funny without meaning it, which you treasure up to repeat to your friends afterwards, but for the most part it is so inane that you wonder they dont shut up altogether. I did, though, not very long ago, hear a story in that way which seemed to me a good story, and I treasured it up for use; particularly for use on occasions like this. It is a very simple storythere was a

Retreat for Beginners

porter going round hitting the wheels of the carriages with a hammer, as you see them doing now and again in the course of a long run, at Carlisle or at York or somewhere like that. And a passenger went up and said, How long have you been doing that for? And the porter said, Twenty years, Sir. And the passenger said, What do you do it for? And the porter said, Dunno, Sir. He was probably sick of being asked.