A group of twenty students and staff from different Christian denominations and three prayer guides gather together for the opening meeting of a university week of guided prayer.  We go round the group giving names, answering a daft ice-breaker – everyone loves that – and expressing a hope for this week of retreat that is about to start.  I always have the same hope that ‘God will show up’.  He chooses his own time but I’ve not been disappointed after sixty or so of these retreats.  On one occasion he seemed to take twelve months to show but the Babylonian exile lasted much longer so I’m not complaining.

Even though the students and staff who take part are busy, when they give themselves generously to the experience, God does show up.  Something happens.  There might be an encounter with the living God.  Maybe a decision is made or confirmed.  Simpler fruit might include a return to regular prayer offering hope of a deepening relationship with God.

The core of the retreat includes the individual’s half hour of prayer each day.  We don’t argue if there is more but half-an-hour of quality time seems to be enough for busy people.  Without this prayer time there is little to talk about in the direction or guiding session.  That daily meeting with the director is the other core element.  An experienced guide (thank God for the prayer guides up and down the land who offer their time without charge) listens to the retreatant as she talks about life and prayer.  What’s been happening?  What has God been up to?  Where has God shown up?  During the guiding session itself there is an attempt to cooperate with whatever God seems to be doing in life and prayer and also as suggestions for further prayer are made.  Again and again, guides experience God consoling his people as he promised he would through the prophet Isaiah (eg Is 49:13).

I cannot say why the risen Jesus did not and still does not make himself more known to the world at large but he does seem particularly interested in meeting people in a retreat context.  I suppose that is why Ignatius was so keen on the Spiritual Exercises and its adaptations such as a week of guided prayer.  God likes retreats.  And if that is one of the ways God is consoling God’s people and turning the desert into an Eden (Is 51:3) then there is sufficient cause to continue.  If that is one place that God is showing up I guess we can do the same.

The core of the week of retreat is the prayer and the daily one-to-one meeting.  There are other elements of the week and retreatants are encouraged to take part in these.

There are workshops on three of the evenings each lasting about 90 minutes.  Participants attend where they can and often benefit the more that they do.  On Monday night we look at different ways of praying, challenging the idea that there are only a few ways of raising the heart and mind to God.  We might use art as a way of praying with our bodies.  We always have a guided imaginative contemplation on a gospel passage.  My hope here is that each retreatant will encounter Jesus Christ.  This is so crucial to the Spiritual Exercises that without it the thirty days or 19^th Annotation (the Exercises in daily life)  make no sense at all.  The encounter with Christ is a dedicated goal of the week of guided prayer too.

Tuesday night introduces some of the teaching on discernment and decision making that is so vital to any Christian and particularly relevant to students with many life choices still to make.  The Jesus who came that we might have fullness of life (John10:10) is calling each person to a particular way of following Him that is challenging, fulfilling and fruitful for others.  Herbert Alfonso calls this a personal vocation in his gem of a book by the same name.

Wednesday’s session is on images of God.  It is often beneath the surface that Christians who claim to believe in a loving forgiving God are in fact struggling with an image of God which is accusing, judgemental and perhaps cruel.  Often that ‘god’ is an echo of a strict church background or overbearing parental expectations.  It might be a projection of my own superego.  Destructive images of God can be identified and challenged.  Psychological and spiritual space is made for the real God to break through.

The workshops, as well as opening and closing meetings which top and tail the week, support the retreat.  They offer food for each individual journey and also provide a chance for the individual retreatants to meet together and share faith.  The retreat has a personal and communal dimension which flow into each other in a way that helps make and celebrate Christian community.  Sometimes retreatants decide to belong more to a worshipping community after the retreat has finished.  Chaplaincies often report a closer unity between the denominations and all the Christian groups that took part.

The retreat has a global dimension too.  Students are inspired by Christ to offer their lives more in service than in pursuit of wealth.  Voluntary action is undertaken.  Those who already seek after justice are affirmed.  The magis ‘more’ of St Ignatius goes beyond an accumulation of good deeds and many a retreatant has been saved from the violence of over-commitment by the week two rules for discernment.  ‘Less’ has often been the ‘more’ to which a disciple of Christ is called, confirmed in the retreat process as a ‘drop of water enters a sponge gently, lightly, sweetly’ (Second week rules for discernment n335).

I do these weeks as part of the Loyola Hall outreach to young adults, an attempt to offer that demographic the kind of experience of Christ that can spark or support a life-long discipleship.  The work is heavily subsidised so that Chaplaincies can afford it.  Many of our guides have been trained at Loyola Hall and we are delighted to offer them this opportunity to accompany others.  So are they and their delight is a testament to the fruitfulness of this ministry.  This is privileged work.  God is at work, consoling his people, and we get to watch.

Of course there are always those days when the projector refuses to work or the first couple of retreatants don’t turn up or haven’t prayed and there’s very little to work with.  At other times I fail as guide and miss the action of God in a person’s life or prayer – the ‘movement’ – and only realise after they have gone.  ‘Why did I focus on that when they brought this with them?  How could I miss something so obvious?  The bad spirit loves all that and adds force to the psychological flagellation.  The Good Spirit is doing something else: reminding me that He is the true guide and giving me and the retreatants another chance to cooperate with Him the next day.

Mostly these retreats take place in the colder months of the year when the university chaplaincy has students to hand.  For me that is the British desert.  I have been to a real desert and worked on one of these retreats.  Wadi Rum in southern Jordan was no wilderness to this Lancashire lad not used to reliable sunshine and warmth.  The climate of that beautiful landscape did not test my faith as much as the climate of these grey, damp islands.  In this environment of gloom, whenever a person experiences God in some way and I get to witness it, perhaps even playing a small part in the process, a spring comes to dispel the dark.  Not so much running streams to the thirsting deer as sunshine to a wintry heart.  In those moments of encounter the weather can do what it likes.  God shows up and the desert blooms.