Online Retreat Report

Covid 19 restrictions have meant that WCF’s normal retreat programme has had to be abandoned. Instead we have developed a format for online day and week retreats, which are proving to be very valuable. 

WCF’s first online retreat – and I loved it! 

I found the whole process of bringing the retreat out into my ‘market place’, into my living room, was really wonderful. And I enjoyed the experience of communicating in break-out rooms with my fellow retreatants. 

On retreat a few years ago an image burst into my awareness of myself surrounded by a horde of what I named ‘my scabby kids’. There were about a dozen of them, and they were most unpleasant. They were/are aged about nine or ten, and they are a mess of spots, snot, scabs and boils. They are mocking, leering, quarrelling. In my image we are standing in front of a gate. I want to go through it but I know I can only do so if I take them all with me. And they’re too horrible and they’re fighting themselves and me too much for us to get through that gate. I’ve lived with this image for several years now, never imagining I might resolve it. 

On this retreat, however, I was contemplating this image yet again, when suddenly a voice in my head suggested I tried simply walking through the gate if that was what I wanted. So I did, and – lo and behold! – the scabby kids followed me. They were sulking and they pushed and shoved a bit, but they managed to get through the gate after me. It was all relatively easy. So then we were through the gate, and we all went off into separate spots and just lay down quietly in the grass. The scabby kids were calm and silent. 

And I realised two things. The first was that the gate was simply a gate in the middle of nowhere – there was no fence on either side of it, just string laid across the grass. The second was that the field we had finally managed to burst into after so much anguish, and were now lying down in, was exactly the same as the field we had been stuck in for so long. It was just a field, an area of rough grass with the odd clump of thistles. 

There was/is no sense of disappointment in my mind, not even of surprise. All that comes into my mind is the question ‘So now what?’ or ‘So what now?’ The scabby kids also seem to be asking the same question: ‘OK, we’ve come through the gate. So now what?’ 

So it looks as if I have a new koan: So now what? Or, rather, it’s a koan I’ve had in my subconscious for a long time, if not all my adult life. It commands me to be alert, awake and questioning. It’s about being breast-on to the passing of time. In fact death seems to pose the same question: OK, I’m going to die sooner or later – so now what?