The lockdown which began six months ago has been a form of enforced retreat for many. The silencing of traffic noise and sound of birdsong has brought delight to some, and been lonely torment for others. But how is this year playing out in traditional retreat centres?

During lockdown in spring and early summer, retreat houses were closed to guests, but many staff helped out with local needs caused by the pandemic. At Ammerdown in Somerset, homeless people were given a place to stay, with some of their food provided by Downside School. At Marygate House on Holy Island, wardens helped run a community shop. The Royal Foundation of St Katharine in London’s Limehouse gave convalescent care to patients without Covid. Nuns at the Community of St Mary the Virgin in Wantage took material which they had bought for habits and sewed them into medical scrubs.

Some retreat centres quickly learnt the ropes of offering retreats online. But since the easing of lockdown, some have reopened for residential, face-to-face retreat work. At the Jesuit retreat house of St Beuno’s in North Wales (www.pathwaystogod.org) individually guided retreats are available on Zoom, and guests are being welcomed back to the main house for socially distanced residential Ignatian retreats. Director Roger Dawson SJ told me: “People are desperate to get back”. He had not seen an influx of exhausted medical staff and key workers, but rather of people who already had a deep love for the place and would have come anyway. “People are coming with the same questions, the same need for God”, he told me. “Those questions are bigger and deeper than the virus, because God is bigger and deeper than the virus.” He quoted the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, who lived and wrote at St Beuno’s: “It is about the ‘deep, down things’. We need liminal places like this, which are set up to help people meet God in beauty and silence.”