The Restory Retreat Centre

We arrange our lives as best we can, to keep your holiness at bay, with our pieties, our doctrines, our liturgies, our moralities, our secret ideologies, Safe, virtuous, settled. And then you – you and your dreams you and your visions, you and your purposes, you and your commands, you and our neighbors. We find your holiness not at bay, but probing, pervading, insisting, demanding. And we yield, sometimes gladly, sometimes resentfully, sometimes late …. or soon. We yield because you, beyond us, are our God. We are your creatures met by your holiness, by your holiness made our true selves. And we yield. Amen                                                       ...

More suffering comes into the world by people taking offense than by people intending to give offence.                                                                                                                        Ken Keyes We don’t want to willingly hurt anybody’s feelings. We don’t want to be insensitive. Offensive remarks, language, behaviour and prejudices are uncalled for, need to be avoided and discouraged. So, on a certain level we are supporters of political correctness. After all, it promotes our very objectives. However, to a large extent the term acquired negative connotations over time. It became too excessive in its vigour. The result being terms and vocabulary...

  Try this: Happy water! Spring water infused with  lemongrass  and  chilled with  iced berries “Perhaps if one really knew when one was happy, one would know the things that were necessary for one’s life.”                                     Joanna Field When Julie Andrews sang about her favourite things in the classic film, The Sound of Music, it sounded like she knew exactly what made her happy: Raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens Bright copper kettles and warm woolen mittens Brown paper packages tied up with strings These are a few of my favorite things ... Wild geese that fly with the moon on their wings... http://www.stlyrics.com/lyrics/thesoundofmusic/myfavoritethings.htm Lyrics that make you swoon by the sheer joy that the images induce. But we don’t often list things that make us happy together with life’s necessities. It’s as i...

The darkness is still with us, O Lord.  You are still hidden  and the world which you have made does not want to know   you or receive you... You are still the hidden child in a  world grown old... You are still obscured by the veils of this  world's history,  you are still destined not to be acknowledged  in the scandal of your death on the cross... But I, O hidden  Lord of all things, boldly affirm my faith in you.  In confessing you, I take my stand with you...  If I make this avowal of faith, it must pierce the depths of  my heart like a sword,  I must bend my knee  before you, saying,  I must alter my life. I have still to become a Christian. ~Karl Rahner,   Prayers for Meditation

There are places we need to return to every so often. It’s as if the storerooms inside of us where we store the energy of these places slowly get depleted, and then, on a good day, you know: I need to get to the mountains, the sea, the green of a forest, the wide open spaces of a desert. I need to stand under the full moon, or the dark sky with no other light in sight but the stars.      I’m quite sure that this need is different for everybody. For me personally, it’s mountains I hunger for, preferably decked in indigenous  rain forest with waterfalls and huge trees to feel small against. And to be by the sea.      With the memories of our visit to Prague still fresh, it felt almost unduly indulgent to pack for yet another glorious vacation. This time to spend a week at San Lameer, on the South coast of Kwa-Zulu Natal. Again, as in the case with Prague, this was not something we had planned or saved up for; I had won a week’s accommodation at Sa...

To look at anything, If you would know that  thing, You must look at it long: To look at this green and say “I have seen spring in these Lovely leaves on the dune trail at San Lameer Woods”, will not do – you must Be the thing you see: You must be the dark snakes of Stems and ferny plumes of leaves, You must enter in To the small silences between The leaves. You must take your time And touch the very peace They issue from.                           John Moffit

On a glorious spring morning I’m driving on the dirt road down to the creek. On my way to town, I’m in no hurry. All around me are signs of spring – the sprinklers irrigate the crops in a silver spray, tender leaves and shoots can be seen in the trees. It therefore almost seems appropriate, although somewhat strange for this time of day, that the hare appears from nowhere and runs a few metres ahead of me in the road. There isn’t much of a possibility that he can turn left or right from the road because of the fences on either side. It forms a sort of passageway for me and my guide running ahead. Down at the creek though, it opens up and the hare can go into the veldt in all directions. So on this beautiful morning I’m driving to town with a hare ahead of me – a convoy of creation in harmony. There are sheep in the pastures next to the road and down in the creek a herd of cattle is grazing leisurely. And as I am driving down to the creek, the hare a few metres in front of...