What is an Individually Guided Retreat?
What happens on a retreat?
With the exception of the full Spiritual Exercises of St Ignatius, which we offer as a 30-day retreat, our individually guided retreats do not have a particular theme or follow a fixed programme of meditations. Instead your personal retreat guide seeks to help you locate the areas it could be most fruitful to pray with and ponder over. In this way you make your own personal retreat with its own focus and dynamic.
All retreats offer a Sunday Eucharist and most a Daily Eucharist. The Sacrament of Reconciliation is available on request. Though the liturgy is in the Roman Catholic tradition you are welcome to attend whatever your Christian denomination or if you have no religious affiliation.
Retreatants normally make space for three to five periods of personal prayer a day of a length chosen to be comfortable rather than strenuous: fifteen minutes to an hour might be usual. You may be given suggestions for your prayer taken from scripture, poetry, or some other reading, or you may be invited to meditate on your own life.
You will usually see your guide once a day for between half and three quarters of an hour. A second daily meeting is occasionally arranged for people who are new to retreats. The time between prayer periods is most profitably spent alone and in silence. The silence is not intended as a penance, but to release your creative potential and help you get in touch with what is deepest within yourself. Many of us spend so much time rushing about that we take our fundamental options in life for granted. It is within the focused space promoted by solitude and silence that God can be heard speaking and making Godself known.
What you get from a retreat depends upon the particular grace God wants to give you at this time. If you are open, you will be graced by God, though not always in the way you expect. It is good to start a retreat with a completely open mind, open to self, to God and to your guide. Don’t expect instant solutions and try to avoid entering a retreat determined to ‘sort something out’ once and for all. The best approach is to come with a simple desire to be with God and to listen to God’s voice: ‘Speak Lord, your servant is listening.’ The best stance is one of generous openness.
Many retreatants just enjoy spending a few days of quiet and relaxation. For some it is a time to try out new methods of prayer and find those which are helpful to them. Others are confirmed in the decisions they have already made. Some are given help in discerning the ways in which God is calling them. Others may manage to face a block within themselves, a block to loving, or to developing a deeper relationship with God and with others.
What do I talk about with my guide?
Your retreat guide is listening for the ways in which God is relating to you, both in and out of prayer. The guide will be more interested in how you are feeling, your desires, joys and sorrows, than in intellectual ideas or pious reflections. The guide will be interested in your general mood, in what brings you joy and consolation and in what brings you down, or makes you feel depressed or desolate. They might ask how your periods of prayer went, whether you found them pleasant, distracting, boring, moving etc. It is helpful to keep a diary and make brief entries after each prayer period, noting how the prayer and the whole day went, how you felt, what your distractions were, what you felt God was saying to you, etc. It is better to report your experience simply rather than judging it or evaluating it according to what you think God or your guide might want to hear. Often it is the things we hardly notice initially which prove to be the richest.
What you say to your retreat guide at Loyola Hall is held in confidence.