Friends,
I spent this last weekend at Mission San Antonio in the Santa Lucia mountains with a group of 18 MPC folk. It was wonderful—the last in a series of four seasonal retreats in a place I have loved since childhood, that has haunted my dreams for a couple of decades now.
I’ve been wanting to do a series of seasonal retreats at Mission San Antonio for at least 25 years. I floated the idea at my church in San José and didn’t get any takers, so I put the retreats on my back burner. Then, as COVID was winding down I started casting about for ideas to help reinvigorate our community after the pandemic. I pulled the seasonal retreat idea out of the dusty attic that is my brain, I pitched the retreats to the MPC family, and several people came on board. Several folks stepped up to organize the retreats and to make them happen, and it has been a wonderful and satisfying experience. The retreats certainly have helped strengthen me spiritually for the next chapter in the story of MPC’s life, and I suspect the 25 people (or so) who participated in the retreats would say the same.
Mission San Antonio is a sacred place—holy to the Xolón Salinan people and to later day Roman Catholic and Protestant Christians—and it has had a profound impact on me for a long time. I first visited the mission when I was about eight years old and was on my way to Disneyland with my father. Later, when I was in college and driving between Santa Barbara and Mendocino, I sometimes took a detour to visit the mission on my way to and from school. When we lived in Monterey County, Anne and I sang in a choir that performed in the mission, and I used to spend time at the mission on personal retreats, back when it was still an active monastery.
Every trip I’ve made to Mission San Antonio has been important to me, but these last four visits have been particularly profound. It was wonderful to be in that special place with members of the MPC family. Our spiritual work together, our conversations, our walks, our shared observations, our interactions with creation (including a rattlesnake!), and even getting in trouble with the military police together (ask me about that sometime) have all been deeply moving, even life changing experiences for me. I am so grateful to everyone who made the retreats possible.
On a final note: during our retreats, each participant was invited to find a special place on the mission grounds and to revisit that place several times during each retreat, to see how the places changed during the day and over the course of four seasons. My place was an old cottonwood tree. I developed quite a relationship with this tree; I took lots of photos of it and wrote poetry about it. Seasonal photos are below.
I expect there will be more opportunities to go back to Mission San Antonio. When we do, I hope you can join us.
God’s Peace,
Ben
