Yesterday I flew to the UK and began a week long Retreat in Daily Life or Week of Guided Prayer with a bunch of university students. This retreat is offered by our Jesuit colleagues up and down the UK and is very popular. By now I am used enough to making a retreat from daily life for a couple of days at a time but, this invitation is to make a retreat within daily life! This is promised to be a retreat experience that wraps itself around the contours and commitments of people’s everyday lives. I like the prospect of that, but what exactly will it consist of and what am I hoping for?

Well, the outline I got from our Jesuit companions reads ‘This is an opportunity to discover or find again the value of prayer, to encounter the God who loves you and calls you, and maybe get help with a decision you need to make’.

Last evening about thirty of us, most aged in the mid twenties or younger gathered at the university chaplaincy to begin.  It was exciting to meet the other participants share expectations and in the process clarify them for ourselves! We enjoyed some simple lectio divina prayer and got paired up with our prayer guides for the week.

From Monday morning and for the next five days we will commit to half an hour of personal prayer in our respective homes and places of work or study. I guess we’ll be encouraged to pray in whatever way has meaning for us. Praying with Scripture will also be an important part of it. Later each day we will each meet individually with a trained spiritual guide who’ll help us reflect on and discuss that day’s experience of prayer.

There will be two or three optional workshops a few evenings during the week. They will be on the topics of ‘Ways of praying’, ‘Images of God’, and ‘Spiritual discernment’. We will be encouraged to go only to the extent that we feel a particular workshop can help us where we are at right now. The workshops are intended to be a support to the week rather than a core part.

The week will end with a final gathering and final liturgy together.

Last night, sitting about on cushions in the chaplaincy, it was encouraging to hear the simple range of hopes people had for the week long retreat. .. ‘I want to find peace in prayer’, ‘I want to re-connect’, ‘I hope to learn how to pray’, ‘I am looking for help to make a decision’, ‘I am hoping for the grace to be a more generous person’, ‘I hope to learn how to wait’, ‘I want to better feel and hear God active in my life’. There are no end of possible hopes, and no end of possible outcomes!

We prayed very simply with a piece of Scripture, read aloud and slowly a couple of times. We each settled on a word or phrase that seemed to have particular meaning for us, and let the rest of the text fade into the background. We each made a simple silent prayer of our word or phrase.

Though all of us are setting out on this same journey within a journey, all of us will experience it differently! We were encouraged to have a think about how we will organise our week to give appropriate time to prayer, work, exercise and rest. Also to begin each prayer time with a pause and by letting God know what it is you desire from that period of prayer. If prayer is sometimes ‘dry’ we are told this is fine as ‘dryness’ increases thirst! We will end our prayer by speaking with Jesus/God as one friend speaks to another. We are also encouraged to make a few notes about what happened during each period of prayer to discuss with our guide.

We then had to choose the guide we would like to be paired with. I decided to trust providence and went for a lucky dip! I closed my eyes and swooped – coming away with the name of the only Irish prayer guide in the group!

So what am I most looking forward to personally?

For a start I am looking forward to it being a lighter week on the commitments front. Not just because I will be away in the UK and out of reach for many usual commitments but,  because all participants are asked to clear the dairy as much as possible of all non essential things and to enter this retreat with a generosity of time and spirit. Steve our guide says God has a particular love for deserts, mountains and retreats. Special things happen there, so we are to be expectant and be generous!

I am looking forward to having to re-order, re-prioritise and slow down a bit for this week. I want an experience of slow patient engagement with this, not one where I’m shovelling prayer in dutifully in between multiple engagements or two spoonfuls of cornflakes.

I’ve always found retreats to be important pit stops or wellsprings at which we can fill up and re-energise for the road ahead. Generally I’ll make sure to pencil in at least one three day retreat in a year.  They can be wonderfully relaxing and reflective spaces. It can be tricky to keep momentum with trying to work the fruits or insights from the retreat into daily living though. When it is over, you rejoin the motorway of life and it is hard to find the space to live the change you want to effect. I am hoping from that perspective as well the retreat in daily life should be a useful sort of pit stop! I’ll experience a different rhythm for a week, one that incorporates all usual and essential commitments but, doesn’t get swallowed by them.

I am really looking forward to comparing my ‘before’ and ‘after’ sense of this retreat and experiencing a growing bond with other participants as we get together for the different workshops.  Perhaps there’ll be a coffee, pizza or pint of English beer to be had afterward. My prayer guide lives across the town, about thirty minutes walk away. I am already looking forward to that daily meander, journeying toward, journeying deeper.

Earlier, thumbing through an English Jesuit publication I found a quote by Fr. Adolfo Nicolas, the Fr. Superior of the Jesuits that sums up what I am excited about for this retreat. ‘Faith is like having a musical sense. When God sings we hear it. When the spirit murmurs in our ears, we hear it. It’s a music that sings with the harmony of our hearts’.  I am excited at the prospect of being more deeply alone with and deepening sensitivity to God.

A Retreat in Daily Life for 18-35 year olds modelled on this UK experience will be offered by the Jesuit Young Adult Ministry in Ireland from the 27^th November to 3^rd December 2011. Applications are available for download on www.magisireland.com together with an outline of the retreat. Places are very limited, please book early.

A lot going on nothing happening