In Genesis 28:16, Jacob falls asleep by the side of a desert road and dreams what is now a very famous dream. Waking up, he says what are now very famous words: “Surely the Lord is in this place, and I did not know it.”
In an instant, his entire way of seeing is transformed. Suddenly, his perception of what this life actually is appears to be radically different.
Many have followed in Jacob’s footsteps. “I once was blind but now I see” is how John Newton notably named the experience. For Thomas Merton, it led him to write “life is this simple: we are living in a world that is absolutely transparent and the divine is shining through it all the time.” Mary Oliver came to see these moments as a framework for everything: “Instructions for living a life: Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.”
Our tradition is full of these kinds of stories – stories of waking up. While they vary enormously in their finer details, the formula is relatively similar: first, a direct encounter of the sacred, generally through an experience of awe, wonder or love. Second, a suddenly expanded sense of what it is to be alive. Third, an entirely new way of seeing everything.
For me, it happened in the small town of Wanaka on New Zealand’s South Island. I was navigating early adulthood with all of its typical anxiety and loneliness on a holiday in 2017, when, far away from the usual concerns and busyness of my day-to-day life, I went for an afternoon walk by myself along the lake.
I can’t say for sure when precisely it happened, but at some point during the fading of the day’s light, it was as if I was now experiencing the depth and beauty of life in a new way. Quite suddenly, I was overcome with the sense of being held, being loved, being caught up in something indescribably good.
The world around me did not change in any instant, dramatic way to suddenly become worthy of this kind of reverence. It was largely the same as it had been five minutes beforehand. The change had been entirely on my end.
This moment proved, unsurprisingly, to be the ignition of my own faith life. Afterwards, all of the stories of our tradition now felt so much more real, all the characters so much more alive, all the wonder so much more present.
I had, at last, moved from the place of intellectual agreement (or disagreement) with the stories of the Christian faith into a more mystical awareness of that transcendent love that the stories had been trying to name.
A few years later, when I started working as a Lay Chaplain in an Anglican School on the Gold Coast, it was this moment in Wanaka that served as the inspiration for an idea: opt-in Faith & Spirituality Retreats.
The concept was relatively simple. Instead of simply telling stories about moments of sacred encounter and spiritual awakening in the wilderness, what if we took some of our most soulful students on a pilgrimage to discover it for themselves?
Our first attempt was the 2023 Desert Retreat, where sixteen students across years eleven and twelve joined me and a couple of other supervising adults on a journey to Alice Springs and Uluru.
After dropping our luggage off at the retreat centre, we embarked on the short drive to Simpsons Gap for our first sunset in the desert.
When we arrived, I asked the group to find their own place to sit for twenty minutes in silence, inviting them to take in their surrounds and be present to the moment.
We gathered in a circle shortly afterwards, where I asked them to share what they were feeling.
One of our Year Twelve girls was the first to speak. “I feel small, but in the best way”, she said with a smile. In that moment, I knew that we were in the midst of something special.
The following days were spent with daily reflections around the campfire, hikes through stunning scenery, long drives with endless rounds of road trip games, conversations much deeper than the usual rhythm of school life allows, and a sense of a common life far richer than any of the group had known before.
These experiences were all captured in personalised journals we had provided the students with for the retreat, encouraging them to note down their reflections, insights and memories throughout.
Inspired by the Celtic tradition’s belief that our job is to awaken the spirit of God from within rather than trying to impose it from outside, the journals have become a central part of the experience. They are our attempt to provide students with the space and empowerment they need to listen to their own lives, pay attention to the sacred thread running through their own experiences, and develop a deep sense of their own faith.
Seeing our students encounter their own Genesis 28:16 moments on the first Desert Retreat was an extraordinary gift. For some, it has proven to be life-changing, with one of the group now even working in the Lay Chaplaincy space herself.
When the suggestion was made to run another retreat the following year, we were faced with the dilemma of having interested students who had already experienced the Desert Retreat.
Looking for another location, my mind wandered back to the moment in Wanaka. In a full circle moment, our second experiment was born shortly afterwards: the 2024 Alpine Retreat.
We set off to New Zealand with nineteen year twelve students in the middle of the winter holidays, with the snowy peaks around Queenstown proving every bit as awe-inspiring and soul-deepening as the red dirt of the desert.
Our first full day of the trip included a visit to Milford Sound, which happened to fall on one of Milford’s famous rainy days with waterfalls cascading off every surrounding cliff.
Seeing the faces of the students in the rearview mirror as we drove through Fiordland National Park is something that will stay with me for life. Jaws dropped almost unanimously in the back seats, with a spellbound silence coming over the car.
Later that night (after drying off), I asked the students to reflect on the opening words of our worship liturgy, which invite us each week to remember that “this life is a gift, this world is full of wonder, and at the very centre of everything is a love that will never let us go.”
When I asked them if life felt like a gift today, they all nodded.
When I asked if this world felt full of wonder right now, they nodded again.
When I asked them if they felt there might be a love at the very centre of everything that will never let them go, they nodded a third time. From the back, one of them chimed in: “Obviously”.
It was around this point of the trip that I mentioned to a colleague that we seemed to be playing the role of ‘Roadies for God’. It felt like the most accurate breakdown of the team structure on the retreats – we drive the vans; God does the rest.
This is not to diminish the care taken by our leaders in crafting meaningful reflections, which are always a significant highlight of the experience. It is simply an acknowledgment that the wonder of the landscapes and the power of sacred encounter does much more of the transformative work than any content ever could.
My Principal, Patrick, likes to refer to the Parable of the Sower when talking about our mission. Our job, he says, is merely to turn over the soil as best we can in the hope that it will be ready to receive the seed when it falls.
This is the primary work we do in the lead-up to the retreats and throughout the experience, all with the aim of encouraging an openness and attentiveness that ensures the eyes of the looker are as open as they can be when the possibility of a sacred awakening arrives.
In this spirit, one of my favourite parts of each retreat is seeing the impact our groups have on tourists in the places we stop for moments of silence and reverence.
Often, we can hear groups of tourists wandering towards us loudly in conversation, only for them to arrive at the lookout and find twenty-odd high schoolers sitting silently together encountering the view.
More often than not, this leads the tourists into a quieter state themselves. While this usually begins somewhat awkwardly as the tourists try to make sense of our group, it rarely takes long before we find ourselves alongside ten or twenty others standing in bewildered silence in extraordinary places.
We have run both the Desert & Alpine Retreats once more since these first trips, with enough interest now to make the Desert Retreat an annual Easter holidays trip for Year Eleven students, while also running the Alpine Retreat each year in the winter holidays for Year Twelve students.
The neuroscientist and philosopher Dr Iain McGilchrist argues that humans need three things to be fully alive: a relationship with a common life, a relationship with nature and a relationship with the sacred.
Assessing modern culture, he argues that many humans in the West are currently 0/3.
The gift of the Faith & Spirituality Retreats might be best summarised as an immersive, awe-driven experience focused on deepening all three of those relationships.
“Surely the Lord is in this place, and I did not know it,” Jacob said all those years ago.
Thankfully, it seems the Lord might just be in this place too.
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