Our June blog takes a look at what we’ve learnt from this last year...

Making retreat widely available and accessible because it’s good for people and fundamental to how we live is a founding principle of Retreat House Chester. This last year (or year and a half...) has seen this develop in remarkable unexpected ways: making retreat available and accessible by moving online; a global encounter with Big Questions and with our humanity in all its greatness and vulnerability; and an awakening of ‘spirituality’. Something has been shifting this year.

That shift makes Retreat House Chester all the more necessary. People need Peace; we need ‘easy’ ways to engage with big questions and spirituality. In setting up six years ago, global pandemic was not a context we envisaged. But now it feels like we were ahead of the curve, and the time for making retreat widely available and accessible has certainly come.

In the first lockdown of March 2020, like many charities, we found ourselves working out how we might survive such a change to our work and such uncertainty ahead. From swiftly adapting to online resources and then to online events as the crisis lengthened, and with the essential support of grant funding and donations, Retreat House Chester both negotiated a way through the year and also discovered and developed ways which will be worth carrying with us into the future.

We believe that Retreat House Chester addresses a fundamental human need. Spiritual experiences relate to a fundamental dimension of human existence – whether someone is ‘religious’ or not - and are frequently reported across all cultures. Indeed, retreat itself is common across cultures and through history, as a fundamental and valued part of living; we like to say it is ‘as old as the hills’.

Responding to this fundamental need, RHC has always been an imaginative contemporary response, enabling folk to take a little time quite easily and find ways to engage with their spiritual life. Now, pandemic circumstances have awoken many to a sense of ‘something more’, and it’s worth paying attention to. But retreat is not just personal. There are social benefits to retreat, too. It’s the kind of thing we see when reports show how personal wellbeing improves the wellbeing of society in general. It kind of goes without saying – but it’s important to say because the perception is often that retreat is somehow self-indulgent, when in fact one person’s retreat can help us all.

There may be an echo here with one of the values in our Vision and Values: ‘being small in a big picture’. My own small retreat affects a bigger picture. In other ways, this value speaks of the value of ‘local’ at a time when people can and do access online events anywhere in the world. Although we do have folk joining from locations further afield – which is wonderful - we have been told repeatedly by many people that they join us online because we are local, or at least regional, giving a sense of local connection and relationship at a time when we have all needed such things. We have all learnt this year how we are part of the big world, but also how we need our local world too. It’s like the micro-cultures in a healthy eco-system. Our grassroots matter.

our community mosaic, made by folk coming along to RHC, is inspired by the ripple effects of retreat, and how we are each part of the whole

So what have folk told us this year? “I think that what happens in this hour and a half is rather extraordinary.” This comment sent in after one of our events echoes much of what we are told by those who come along to activities with Retreat House Chester – that what we are doing is special and also that it is hard to find elsewhere. We are glad that we have been able to find ways to continue to offer our ‘ways to retreat for all people as a part of living’, throughout a year which may be described as ‘extraordinary’ in itself. Here are just some things folk have said about our retreat-house-online this year:

Just to say thank you so much for this retreat. It was a really fruitful time... thought-full, thought inspiring, sensitively crafted. Also, in a practical way I thought the format totally worked...

Thank you so much for organising the event. I cannot explain how much I enjoyed it and I think/hope received so much...

I really enjoyed it at the time and have benefitted from it deeply since...

Thank you for such a beautifully led retreat this morning. I have taken a lot from it and it will carry me through the rest of Lent and beyond...

I am finding the resources on the Living Differently pages so useful and stimulating and enriching...

the sessions I have joined so far have been wonderful...

the session was informative, participative and most of all enjoyable...

Thank you for another very enjoyable and very useful session. They just get better and better and I am going to miss them when they finish...

The series and today have been extraordinarily rich, overflowing with possibilities at every point - such a profound experience....

authentic listening and connection...

comforting... calming... relaxing... productive... helpful... challenging... embracing... enriching... nurtured... encouraged...

the graceful space that is Retreat House Chester...

Let’s have more of these please..

“Thank you for the wonderful opportunity you are giving us.” Time and again, folk have sent in their thanks. We, in turn, say a big ‘thank you’ to all those who have been a part of Retreat House Chester this year, in whatever way that means.

The crisis of this pandemic has thrown into relief the human need and capacity for the things that we call ‘retreat’. As it always has done for folk, retreat will have a much-needed part to play in what emerges from these times, both immediately and into the future – for ourselves and for us all.

This month’s blog draws on our Annual Report for 2020-21, which also contains much more. It will be published soon and available on our website.