RETREAT AT PALLOTTI COLLEGE     2008

The Retreat began on the evening of Friday 18th April and concluded after lunch on Sunday 20th April.

For more information on Pallotti and retreats at Templestowe Uniting Church call 9846 1285.

Below is a description of last year's retreat to give an idea of the atmosphere of the retreats at what has become a "special place" to many in their spiritual development. Pallotti is a retreat centre at Milgrove near Warburton, nestled in the foothills at the base of Mt. Donna Buang. It is a delightful place to reflect and re-energize. Pallotti welcomes groups, couples and singles.

Retreat 2007 - This was a great weekend, a time of learning about other faiths, exploring other cultures, sharing our faith and continuing our faith journey. All who attended agreed it was a special time. Comments by Andrew Boyle are below.

About 22 members attended the retreat at Palloti College at Millgrove near Warburton for the weekend of the 16th to 18th March. We came away with what seemed to be a truly exhilarated sense of what the life of faith is about. Our Saturday was lead by the Rev. Dr Ruwan Palapathwala, part-time priest at St Albans Anglican church in North Melbourne and part-time academic and teacher at Trinity Theological College in Parkville. Ruwan specialises in the exploration of the intersections between the scriptures of the world’s great faiths. After I read something by Ruwan about inter-faith dialogue last year I found a clearer sense of what my own faith journey has been about.

Ruwan generously agreed to lead us and so he spent Saturday gently coaxing us through some of our Jewish and Christian scriptures and then into the scriptures of other faiths to explore the intersections between these. His starting point is that at their mature level all the faiths lead us on a similar path enabling us to attend to and come to peace with the “human condition”.

In a world which we are told is more and more driven by religious extremism is it possible that the great world faiths might actually lead us to peace than to mutual condemnation and annihilation? Over the weekend we found that the path to religious maturity, whatever the faith system, is a similar path to inner peace and so also to comprehending and accepting our common humanity. If we hold to an understanding of faith that it is about being on the right side then we will inevitably go down the path to religious extremism. If we seek the path to faith-maturity, and so are willing to confront our own inner demons, then we will be lead to a sense of unity with God and all people. This is the way of Christ.

The weekend built further on the openness which many of us have found through thinking about our faith in Living the Questions. We came away with a sense that we were on the edge of something exciting, what that might be I don’t think any of us were quite sure but there was a sense that the spirit was at work in our midst. Please pray for our church as we explore these things further.

Andrew