‘The Vision’
“God is realized most directly in seclusion and quiet [….] Looking back upon the old days it seems, indeed, strange to many of us now that we should have come to rely so exclusively as we did upon organisations, clubs, missions, – upon everything in short that is not quiet – for the deepening and extending of our Christian faith and life. ”
The Association for Promoting Retreats (APR) was formed in 1919 to develop retreat opportunities for laypeople. The organisation understood its work as responding to a decline of institutional religion and as representing a departure from the typical methods employed by the Church of England. In early numbers of the APR’s house journal The Vision, Canon Alan H. Simpson, the founding editor, opposed the APR to the established bureaucratic competence of the church or the ‘old ways’ of ‘organisations, clubs, missions’. Religious crisis was to be addressed not by imitating the administrative state’s bureaucratic procedures, but rather through the power of ‘quiet’ in and through which retreatants could be reformed and remade. In line with aspects of Underhill and personalism, here the mystical aspects of religion – reflection on or time alone with God – are placed at the centre of institutional religion rather than representing an alternative outside it. The shift in turn has repercussions for the way the church organises itself. Simpson sees the rise of retreat as signalling the end of the ‘old ways’. Orthodoxy, by this measure, has itself become mystical.
Image: The Chapel, The House of Mercy, Horbury, Yorkshire. reproduced from The Vision, 72 (October 1937), p. 8. Digital image courtesy of the author.
