Retreat Centers Serve as Oases from Stressful Times Residents of the Heartland Have Many Options When Looking to Decompress

Stress — including that caused by our nation’s current political turmoil — is such a common experience that people have devised many ways to describe it, including the simple exclamation “I’m stressed out.”

There’s also the phrase you’re likely to hear only in parts of New England: “I’m right out straight.” Sometimes people under age 40 or so put it this way: “I’m out of bandwidth.” And among residents of the South, it’s more common to say “I’m fit to be tied” or “I’m about to have a come-apart.”

However stress is named — and whether the cause is the new administration in Washington or something else — Americans trying to manage the pressure often turn to retreat centers.

The good news?

There are many such centers here in the Heartland. Quite a few are created by — or connected to — faith communities, but often you need not be a member of that spiritual tradition to find the relief, calm, and reboot the centers offer.

Teresa Pryor of Warrensburg, Missouri, for instance, has used the Hermitage Spiritual Retreat Center on Lake Pomme de Terre in Pittsburg, Missouri, for reasons other than calming herself down from the current national turmoil.

But part of her reason for going on retreat is “just knowing that the state of the nation is — and has been — in turmoil, and I’ve been seeking God and imploring him to help our nation and our leaders to get back to him, to the basics. We need to live as a family and coexist with our divisions.”

Pryor, a retired medical transcriptionist, first went to the Hermitage center several years ago to recover from grief over her husband’s death, stress over family estrangement, and other family issues. But she returns because she loves the simplicity there, especially “an 1890s-style little log cabin with no electricity but with an inside potty. Just the primitiveness of it was what I needed — just to be still, to be silent.”

Neoma Youma, a licensed massage therapist in Columbia, Missouri, discovered the same retreat center last year and uses it to recharge. On her first visit, she spent three days in silence and found it “a really cool experience.”

The center has several Kansas City connections and draws retreatants from here. It welcomes people of any faith tradition and none, though its two leaders and most of its board members (of which I used to be one) are some variety of Christian.

Youma, who returned to the center for several days earlier this year, says, “With the business and stress of life, it’s important to be able to take a step back and find some stillness within myself and quiet my mind.”

A few examples of other retreat centers scattered throughout the Heartland:

• Precious Blood Renewal Center in Liberty, Missouri. It’s a ministry of a Catholic religious order.
• Jerusalem Farm, a Catholic intentional community that I wrote about here, located in Kansas City’s northeast neighborhood.
• Savior Pastoral Center (connected to the Catholic Archdiocese of Kansas City in Kansas) in Kansas City, Kansas.
• The Hollis Center, an Evangelical Lutheran Church in America establishment also located in Kansas City, Kansas.
• The Heartland Retreat Center, a Presbyterian Church (USA) facility in Parkville, Missouri.
• Timber Creek Retreat House in Drexel, Missouri.
• The Rime Buddhist Center on Kansas City’s East Side.
• Unity Village, a Unity religious community facility just east of Kansas City.
• Mount St. Scholastica’s Sophia Spirituality Center, a ministry of the Benedictine sisters in Atchison, Kansas.
• Three Trails Camp and Retreat Center, a Salvation Army facility at the edge of Independence and Kansas City.

Three Trails is evidence that such centers aren’t new. Last year, it celebrated its centennial anniversary.

Executive Director Michael Dixon says the need for such facilities is shown by the fact that — for a variety of reasons — “this last year we did the most in outside rental that we’ve had since pre-Covid.”

In the midst of that pandemic, Three Trails mostly had to shut down, but still found a way to be useful by “creating an isolation center here for homeless people for about three and a half months,” Dixon says. Today it even ministers to children with disabilities.

And the facility is large enough to handle several groups at once. Located on 40 acres, it has 17 buildings and six full-time staff members.

People who operate these centers are full of stories about retreatants who have used them to help steer them back to a good, healthful path.

For instance, Lucia Ferrara, the Precious Blood Center’s director of hospitality, describes “an older woman who had moved here from Kansas and was wanting a place where she could serve in some capacity and find spiritual direction.”

The woman got engaged at the center, and eventually “she completely embraced our community and our mission. She found peace, hope and renewal each time she visited and did not hesitate to remind us of how much she loved our space. To her, it was a sacred and safe space for her to find herself and Jesus in her last days with us.”

Ferrara also describes a young married woman with children who was looking for a place to rest after being diagnosed with cancer. “I feel like she was able to find her true, authentic self here at the center,” Ferrara says. “She said she was able to focus and calm herself while being here.”

Precious Blood, like several other centers, distributes periodic newsletters that highlight offerings, including both individual and directed retreats.

No matter what’s happening in national politics or a gyrating culture, some area residents find that periodic retreats keep them centered and in touch with what, to them, is most important in life.

An example is my own wife, Marcia, a Benedictine oblate. Her group of oblates does an annual multi-day retreat at the Sophia Spirituality Center.

And for Neoma Youma, a retreat center allows her temporarily to relieve what she calls the “accumulating levels of stress” happening now in the nation. Finding a place to be silent and pay attention to the small miracles around her in nature, she says, “keeps me functional and healthy.”

Bill Tammeus, an award-winning columnist formerly with The Kansas City Star, writes the “Faith Matters” blog for The Star’s website, book reviews for The National Catholic Reporter and The Presbyterian Outlook. His latest book is Love, Loss and Endurance: A 9/11 Story of Resilience and Hope in an Age of Anxiety. Email him at wtammeus@gmail.com.