Mousetrap

Next week, I am supposed to be going on another silent retreat. I am so nervous about it that I might chicken out. It’s for 6 whole weeks. No TV. No email. No texting. No chatting. No going to the pub with my mates. Wind my life back just over 2 years, to the end of 2009, and I would never have dreamt that I would even be thinking about such a thing. How on earth did I get here?
Do you remember that game, Mousetrap? I still have my old boxed set sitting in the sideboard. If you landed on the right square, a whole sequence of events was triggered. There was a ball that rolled down a slope and a man that dived into a pool of water and a seasaw and eventually, a little cage fell down on top of the poor unsuspecting mouse. It was like cascading dominoes – one event led to another, which set the next event off until the mouse was trapped.

My path to the six week silent retreat has been like that. Someone on Songs of Praise fell sick, so I took over briefly and finished his programmes off. I was working on a team with a lovely woman called J, whom I’d hardly ever spoken to, despite years of working in the same office. We got on brilliantly though (why on earth didn’t I speak to her before?) and became close friends. One day, J told me that she wrote to someone on Death Row and how rewarding it was, so I decided to do the same and I started writing to Jim (not his real name). You can read more about that here: Help100

Then I heard that Sister Helen Prejean was coming to the UK to give a talk. In case you don’t know, she’s the real life nun behind the story of the film Dead Man Walking. She befriended a guy on Death Row right up until his death. I went to hear her talk at a conference in Durham. Father Christopher Jamison was also giving a talk so I ended up hearing that as well. At the time, he was the Abbot of Worth Abbey in Sussex. There was something about his talk that captivated me and I was intrigued to hear that normal people like me could go and stay at the Abbey and experience something of the monastic life. That was to be my first retreat.

Less than a year later, there was a programme about silence on the BBC. It was presented by Christopher Jamison so I watched it. It featured a group of people going off to another retreat, this time at St Beuno’s Spirituality Centre in North Wales. It was a life-changing experience for them so I went off and tried a ten day silent retreat.

If I pluck up courage and go to St Beuno’s next week, it will be my third and longest retreat there. What amazes me, looking back, is the way that one event has led to another event. A member of the Songs of Praise team got sick, I met J, she mentioned Death Row, I started writing to Jim and then went to hear Sister Helen, heard Father Christopher too and booked on my first retreat.

So many blogs and self-help books claim to tell us how to change our lives. In fact, I probably spend quite a bit of my life engaged in conscious efforts to change my life. But going on retreat has changed my life and my outlook on life and I never even intended to go. It was just a chain of events that I followed. I simply took the next step, never thinking where I was going.

Just as landing on the right square can lead to the poor little mouse being trap and the game of Mousetrap being won, someone in Songs of Praise going off sick has led me to a six week silent retreat. I can’t help wondering where life will take me after that.