Discernment
How to Make a Retreat
Discernment · 8 steps
Preparing for, making and returning from a retreat: choosing the kind, setting an intention, arriving and going silent, following the rhythm of Mass and prayer, meeting the director, confession, resolutions, and a gentle return home.
8 steps · About 30 minutes
A retreat is time deliberately taken away from ordinary life to be alone with God: a day, a weekend, a week, or the full thirty days of the Spiritual Exercises. Jesus himself went apart to a deserted place to pray, and the Church has always sent her people after him. Priests and religious are bound by canon law to make one regularly; the laity are simply, warmly, invited. Saint John Paul II in Novo Millennio Ineunte asked that our parishes and communities become 'genuine schools of prayer', and the Catechism describes the three great expressions of prayer — vocal, meditative, contemplative — that a retreat gives room to. A retreat is not a course to pass; it is a place where God can speak because, for once, you are listening.
What you need
- A retreat booked: at a retreat house, a monastery, or a parish program
- A Bible, a notebook and a rosary
- Simple clothes, and whatever the house asks you to bring
- Arrangements at home and work so that you can actually be absent
- A question or intention to bring, or simply the desire to be with God
When to pray it
Once a year if you can, as many religious communities require of their members; Advent and Lent are natural seasons, and a retreat is the traditional way to prepare for a big decision, a sacrament, or a consecration.
Steps
Step 1: Choose the kind of retreat
Decide what you need and what you can give. A preached retreat has talks and a shared timetable; a directed retreat (in the Ignatian tradition) is silent, with a daily meeting with a director who gives you Scripture to pray; a private retreat at a monastery follows the monks' Hours with no program; parish weekends and movements such as Cursillo are more communal. Beginners are usually best served by a preached or directed retreat of two to five days. Ask your parish or diocese for retreat houses; most monasteries also receive guests.
Tips
- Silence is the main event. Everything else on the retreat exists to let it happen.
- Do not measure the retreat by feelings; dryness in prayer, the Catechism says, is often where the real work is done.
- Sleep. Most people arrive exhausted, and God is not offended by rest.
- Take away one or two resolutions, not ten; the ones you keep are the ones the retreat was for.