Making a Christian retreat@home

I’m not sure if it came across as flattery to Mel and J. I shared with them that staying with them for three weeks was like making a Christian retreat. Oh, how I miss making retreats with a large community of people! Since marriage and now with a child, leaving home to make a prayer retreat is almost impossible.

When we make retreats with a big community, we sometimes lose focus. The original intent is to get away from our familiar workspace or family environment to come close to Jesus. However, we get distracted with the many people we need to interact with. The speaker who delivered a good speech, the facilitator who did a good job, the new acquaintances whom we find a niche with and the friends we went along with to the retreat.

Some years back, the mission group that I’m with held a “mission orientation program”. The daily schedule was intentionally left out so that the participants could experience for themselves that mission work is often “schedule less”. However, people were uneasy and uncomfortable with the lack of anticipation and control. In this retreat at my friends’ home, there is no program to follow. Only lots of self-imposed silence and the discipline to perform a few irregularities from our regular chores.

A home retreat would seem lack of the most important ingredient -the spiritual inputs that we receive from the speaker. We spend the entire day looking after the kids, doing household chores, “firefighting” and playing with the babies. However, in a home retreat, we can still experience spiritual inputs when we observe Jesus’ manifestation in the children, through the many happenings during the day. In this retreat, I continue to make time for prayer. Even if it were for five or ten minutes a day. Even if we sang the angelus and the kids ask why are we singing three hail marys and when’s it gonna end. Finally, i take baby steps to stop my cycle of negativity and re-commit myself towards choosing Joy in my life instead of sensationalized news.

If I am serious about this retreat (I still have a couple of weeks left), I should go further into silence. Not just with my words but also with my thoughts. I quote from Henri Nouwen, “The exchange of countless details about people’s lives can often create more distance than closeness. Words are important in order to come close, but too many words create distance. Not every event has to be told, not every idea has to be exchanged. Once an atmosphere of mutual trust is present, we can be silent together and let the Lord be the one who speaks gently and softly. Listening together to Jesus is a very powerful way to grow closer to each other and reach a level of intimacy that no interpersonal exchange of words can bring. A silence lived together in the presence of Jesus will also continue to bear many fruits in the future. It seems as if a caring silence can enter deeper into our memory than many caring words. But to create this silence requires much spiritual work.”

Wherever possible, it is good to make annual or more frequent retreats. But I guess we should get recharged from our retreats and look forward to returning to our regular communities. jeanne anne hsi