retreat - spirituality and the environment

So I (who hate retreats, really) signed up for this: www.johnmainseminar2012.com/

The description is: The John Main Seminar is an annual event designed to broaden & deepen the teaching of Christian Meditation. It brings together meditators from around the world & those wishing to discover the practice.

It's being held in Brazil this year and will be very interesting, I suspect. I'm curious who will show up. They seem to be expecting an international attendance, at least in part, since the only shuttle bus is running to the international airport, not the closer smaller airport where I will fly in. (Which is a hub for regional services, so easy enough to get a cheap flight to if you live in Brazil.)

I am curious on several levels:

One is this guy Boff is very famous, apparently, as a founder of Liberation Theology and an influential mystic and thinker.

The guy Freeman intrigues me because he has as his mission the revitalization of contemplative practice in the Christian tradition, which I think is a needed and good thing.

The other is I'm curious how a Christian contemplative retreat will be structured in terms of the balance of ritual and meditation and talks and so on.

I'm also curious what sort of people will show up and what their backgrounds and interests will be.

I'll write up a report after.

Tell them to hurry up, because I'd love to become a priest, but don't feel comfortable doing so under current Christian dogma and practices.

You might prefer being a monk, not a priest. The priests are burdened with numerous adminstrative and managerial tasks of running a parish, besides their personal and public ritual obligations.

Many of the monastic orders keep the contemplative practices quite alive. Most of the good modern books on contemplative prayer are written by Benedictines, for example. Stinissen (my current favorite) is a Carmelite.

Hmm, MORE food for thought. I've been thinking of becoming a psychologist recently, but not quite sure if I have the requisite intuitive capacity to be an excellent one.

The whole monk thing is pretty spot on though, as long as I would have the opportunity to facilitate development in others as well.

Just found out it will be a silent retreat, and there was some very weirdly worded and badly translated instruction that seemed to imply that while we should avoid making any eye contact, we should also offer each other general politenesses - presumably meaning that we shouldn't utterly ignore each other, but hold doors, pass the salt and so forth, but without lots of eye contact and gesturing and nonverbal communication.

This will be entertaining. I'm largely entertained because I've always loathed the idea of silent retreats (in part, perhaps, because I work for myself, alone in my office, and meditate by myself largely and so the one thing I would LOVE is opportunities to socialize with other people who understand contemplative practices. And retreats are one of the places such people go. But then they aren't allowed to interact...

But in this case the three day retreat part is followed by a four day seminar, with teaching and discussion, and restrained socializing is permitted (we aren't supposed to leap around yelling and so on).

I'm finding this whole strange adventure entertaining, really. Where it goes, nobody knows...