Retreat for Beginners by Ronald A. Knox

Author:Ronald A. Knox
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Meditations, Retreats, Christian Ministry, Religion
Publisher: Sheed and Ward
Published: 1960-03-15T06:00:00+00:00

I 2. The Mass

There was a boy who was given a holiday one day, I don’t quite know why. It was a bright spring day, about this time of year, and, as there was a lake near where he lived, he thought he would go out in his father’s boat, if his father would let him. His mother said he would drown himself; but his father said nonsense, he was quite old enough to be trusted with the boat just for one day. His mother said anyhow he would lose himself and not be home in time for supper; that kind of thing had happened before. He said, “That’s all right, Mother, I swear I’ll be home in time.” In the end they compromised; he must take some food with him in case he got lost and felt hungry. His mother put half a dozen rolls into his satchel; he wanted fewer, because they were rather heavy to carry, but she insisted on that.

Well, he had a great time on the lake. He trawled a bit with some contraption of his own—only a home-made affair, but he was in luck that day; he managed to catch three quarter-pounders, and only just lost another. By that time—he hadn’t got a watch, of course, he wasn’t that kind of boy—he spotted from the position of the sun that it was getting well on into the afternoon; and he was also beginning to feel a little hungry. So he thought it would be a good idea if he put in to land—he was at the far side of the

lake now, away from home—and tried to cook his fish for luncheon. There was a fishing-boat near where he landed, drawn up to the shore, with nobody in it, and he wondered idly what it was doing there, because that part of the country was miles away from anywhere, and you wouldn’t expect to find people about. He cooked the fish as best he could, and that wasn’t very well; but he had to pretend it was all right, because he’d cooked them himself. He ate one with a roll, and it wasn’t too bad; the other two he put back in his satchel. Then he thought he would go and explore. He would look for the people the other boat belonged to; perhaps they would be smugglers or something exciting like that. There was a rough path which went up the cliff, so it looked as if they would probably have taken that.

However, he was in for a surprise. He hadn’t gone far when he found, not just the boat’s crew, but a whole crowd of people collected; hundreds and hundreds of them, or so he thought, all collected in a sort of hollow a little way from the shore. As far as he could make out, somebody was making a speech to them. It looked as if it might be a political meeting; rather an unusual thing just then, although he knew from his father’s talk that it had been common enough a few years before he was born.

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