Lost in the Woods

This is just a funny story.


Holy Week is, as you would expect, the busiest time of year for a priest. There are penance services, Chrism Masses, and lots of planning leading up to the Triduum. I knew this going in, so (inspired by my spiritual director) I scheduled some time off/away with a priest friend for the three days after Easter.


We spent part of our vacation/retreat at St. Thomas More House of Prayer, a fantastic retreat center in Pennsylvania. If you're looking for a quiet place to spend some time in prayer, I highly recommend it. The place is wonderfully secluded.


On our second day there, we decided to take a walk in the woods after Mass. We found a path behind the house and headed off into the trees. It was a well-marked path and we had no problem following it for about 25 minutes.


As we were discussing whether we wanted to head back or walk a little more, we spotted a tree stand (for hunting) off in the woods and decided we should check it out. How can you pass up on what is basically a treehouse in the middle of a forest? We got there, climbed up, and hung out for a while, hoping a deer or some other animal would pass by us. Nothing came.


After about 10 minutes we were getting cold and climbed down to go back to the path. I thought I knew the right direction out of the woods, so we headed off that way. How we got turned around or veered off in a different direction, we still don't know, but after a while we found ourselves in a clearing that we did not cross on the way in - we were lost.


Now, I can't say that it wasn't a little scary - but it was a good kind of scary, a kind of exhilaration at having to rely on yourself to get back to where you need to be.


We tried to talk through our route and figure out what went wrong, but we could not find anything that would point us in the right direction and nothing in the area looked familiar.


This next part is kind of embarrassing. I was a Boy Scout (I dropped out, but I was still in it) and I like hiking and being in the woods. For the past two summers, I've gone backpacking with my former bishop, some priests and seminarians. I'm not some sort of expert woodsman, but I'm not totally clueless.


So, it is with shame that I say that we used our iPhones to find our way back to the retreat house.


I couldn't think of anything else to do and I had strangely strong service, so I googled the retreat house, plugged the address into Google Maps, and then used the GPS function on the phone to find the right direction. It wasn't all easy - the address for the place wasn't actually where the house was, so we used a satellite view to find the place visually. It was then that we realized we were maybe 100 yards away from the path we came in on.


In the end, it was one of the highlights of our trip for me. We had spent a lot of time discussing how we could spend those three days - it was challenging to think of something relaxing but not boring. As it turned out, adventure found us.