Retreat! It's a verb, it's a noun . . . I have just returned from 2+ days in silent retreat at Holy Cross Monastery in West Park (a gruelling ten-minute drive over back-country roads from my home). The monastery is perched above the Hudson River, with a clear view of one of the Vanderbilt mansions in Hyde Park, monument to commerce and greed, across the water -- an ironic sight. The sky all weekend was filled with winter sun and high clouds, the river clogged with crumbling ice. Languid deer browsed along the water's edge, clearly confident of safety in this place. As were we. The silence was delicious and nutritious; I stuffed myself and went back to fill my plate again and again.

The retreat was entitled "Good Psalm, Bad Psalm," and was led by the Rev. Barbara Cawthorne Crafton. Part of the thrust was to look at the bone-crunching, blood-drinking stuff in so many psalms and figure out why it's there and how it can inform us spiritually. Beyond that, we looked at the poetic conventions of the psalms, their historic context, and so on. I would have to use the hyperbole of the psalmists themselves to convey what a fantastic retreat this was. We had the opportunity to write our own psalms, and most of us did. At the moment, I have only my own to share with you, and there were many far better ones. (There is to be a publication, so I may be able to post more of the best ones anon.) My Bad Psalm was written for fun and came from between my ears. My Good Psalm was written this morning, after a largely sleepless night, and came from somewhere just south of my solar plexis.