SPIRITUAL RETREAT : Fishy Thoughts : At the Immaculate Heart Center for Spiritual Renewal in Montecito, getting quiet can be tough.

“My life is like a stroll upon the beach.” --Henry David Thoreau

“My life is like an Osterizer on high.” --The Reluctant Novice

Thoreau had two years at Walden Pond to find spirituality and serenity.

You have two days at the Immaculate Heart Center for Spiritual Renewal in Montecito.

You choose the center only after careful consideration, dismissing your other options.

There is the Christian retreat for single parents, but then there is that husband you’d have to lie about--a singularly un-Christian act. A Jewish retreat with prayer workshops is a possibility, but your Hebrew vocabulary is limited to “shalom.” A Buddhist retreat with daylong meditation sessions might be your ticket to nirvana, but for the small requirement of three months of spiritual preparation.

The director of the Immaculate Heart Center tells you over the phone that people of all faiths are welcome there--including spiritual novices like yourself. The retreat is on 26 acres just outside Santa Barbara, she says, and is completely self-directed. Up to seven people at a time can come to the center to read, meditate, worship, hike or rest in private rooms. Silence is encouraged rather than required, and the only proviso is that visitors don’t leave the grounds during their two- to four-day stay.

“If you were going to go to the beach, you might as well just stay in a motel,” Ann Chamberlin said. “This is really a place for people to get away from all the hustle and noise that they deal with in their everyday life, so they can replenish their sanity.” The suggested donation is $40 a night, or $50 per couple.

You are convinced that this is the spot for you. Your spouse, however, isn’t so sure. “What will you do there for two whole days, all by yourself?” he asks. Translation: “But who’s going to take care of the house and kids while you’re gone?”

You fetch your suitcase.

Packing for a spiritual getaway is a new experience. In fear of being tossed, you set aside your copy of Cosmopolitan and anything by Danielle Steele. Ditto for your beeper. You pack a journal to record any spiritual insights, a book of poetry and a novel you haven’t found time to finish.

Driving up El Bosque Road in the early morning, passing beneath overhanging trees and into Montecito’s wooded foothills, you are struck by what seems to be a hundred shades of green. You pass an open orchard, oaks, sycamores, alders and a monkey puzzle tree, before the retreat comes into sight: a 1920s private estate house, its two-story sandstone walls covered with flowering acacias, honeysuckle and bougainvillea.

After several owners, the estate was purchased by the Immaculate Heart community in 1942 for its novitiate. In 1974, it was opened to the public as a retreat for married couples and individuals.

Chamberlin greets you at the door and then leads you on a tour of the house, which is furnished with antiques--including a Chippendale table that seats 16--donated by friends of the church. The library, to the right of the Spanish-tiled foyer, is filled with spiritual books and tapes. In the kitchen, Chamberlin says that guests may help themselves to breakfast and lunch. Dinner may be eaten alone, in silence, or in the dining room with other guests.

You are taken upstairs to your spacious bedroom overlooking an expanse of garden, the tops of eucalyptus trees and the ocean beyond. Chamberlin closes the door quietly. Suddenly, you are alone.

The silence takes time to sink in. The feeling of needing to be somewhere else, or do something you have forgotten, overwhelms you. You try picking up a nearby book. You flip through the pages and read: “In shallow men, the fish of little thoughts cause much commotion. In oceanic minds, the whales of inspiration make hardly a ripple.”

You sit up with a jolt. What if you left the iron on at home?

After a monastic lunch of sectioned tomato with cottage cheese, celery and carrot sticks, you take a walk behind the retreat, hearing only the sound of your own breathing. After a short distance, you sit, thinking about the meaning of spirituality. You’re not certain what it is, you decide, but you might know what it’s not.

It’s not just for people who wear crystals and odd sandals. And it’s probably not dependent on any particular religious faith. Thinking this, you close your eyes and feel the sun and a gentle breeze on your face.

At dinner, in the first conversation since your arrival, you ask a newly arrived guest why he has come to the retreat. His wife and children left to visit relatives, he explains, and it seemed like a good time to get quiet inside. To you, with your own boisterous family at home, this sounds a bit like closing the barn door after the horses have gone.

By mid-morning the next day, the man has thrown in the spiritual towel and gone home. “Some people come here and they just don’t know what to do with themselves,” Chamberlin says. “They’re so used to having things happening around them all the time, that they simply don’t know how to get quiet.”

You, on the other hand, have taken to the quiet like a dog to a meaty bone. By the time you return home, you are so relaxed and tranquil that the chaotic sight beyond the front door doesn’t rattle you.

Even Thoreau, you have learned, had to get away from Walden Pond on occasion.

He took his laundry to his mother’s house on weekends.

* THE PREMISE: There are plenty of things you have never tried. Fun things, dangerous things, character-building things. The Reluctant Novice tries them for you and reports the results. After all, the Novice gets paid to do them--and has no choice in the matter. If you want to tell the Novice where to go, please call us at 658-5547. If we use your idea, we’ll send you a present. This week’s Reluctant Novice is Aurora Mackey Armstrong.