Bring Retreat Rhythms into Daily Rhythms
Last summer I celebrated 15 years of pastoral ministry at my parish. Looking back on things that have sustained and strengthened me through those years, I notice that retreats have been both instrumental and vital, both for my own spiritual life and my spiritual leadership within a parish. I’ve attended silent retreats with others on a numerous occasions, but most of the retreats I take these days happen in complete solitude.
There’s one reason I prefer total solitude: rhythm. When my daily life has taken on arrhythmia, I need a restored rhythm for my soul.
Thus, I have adopted two cardinal rules for solitude retreats:
- Don’t bring an agenda
- Find a rhythm for prayer
When I begin a solitude retreat I’m seeking a spiritual rhythm that will attune my mind and heart to the voice of God. For me, praying the four services of the Daily Office establishes that rhythm I need to slow my mind and anchor my thoughts in Christ.
I don’t follow a schedule for the Daily Office set by hours and minutes of the day. I simply follow the order—Morning, Midday, Evening, Compline—receiving the day as the Lord gives it.
Desperate for Silence
In between the hours of prayer, I pursue two treasures on retreat that I want to embrace more often in regular, daily life: silence and creation. Yet over the years, I noticed not only how much I needed silence and the beauty of creation, I noticed a dis-ease within. I was arriving at solitude retreats desperate for silence. To be desperate for silence means there was a deprivation within—I had forfeited the gift of silence on a routine basis. I chose other things to rest and renew my mind and body. It is an unobserved decision I make too often: choosing sounds and images over silence. If I’m desperate for silence, to hear the voice of God, that means there has been far too little silence in ordinary days.
As blood needs iron, the soul needs silence for health. Madeleine Delbrel, who devoted her life to serve the poor on the outskirts of Paris, shared these meditations on silence in her collection of essays We, the Ordinary People of the Streets:
We do not need to find silence; we already have it. The day we lack silence is the day we have not learned how to keep it.1
Silence is indispensable, even among those with a radical call to serve the world’s poor, heroic servants such as Madeleine Delbrel and Mother Teresa. Mother Teresa was alarmed in her time that priests were abandoning the life of prayer to immerse themselves in social work. She noted how our Lord Jesus ‘sacrificed even charity for prayer…to teach us that, without God, we are too poor to help the poor!’2
Putting Pressures on Time Away
When one reclaims the treasures of silence and the beauty of creation on retreat, there’s an instinct to store up every moment of solitude because regular life will bring demands upon returning home.
It’s not discussed nearly enough, but one can actually feel pressure when taking a retreat. One feels pressure to make the most of the time away, to get the most rest, to write as much as possible in a journal, to sit in silence for hours after months of constant activity. When one has been formed by an efficiency mindset by the world, that doesn’t disappear once you check into a peaceful mountain cabin.
A scarcity mindset can also set in during a retreat, especially for those serving in vocational ministry. We know the inbox will be full upon returning to daily rhythms, appointments will fill the calendar, obligations will fill to-do lists. The gift of uninterrupted time presents the temptation to sort out all of one’s interior issues in a weekend. And this is when the first cardinal rule of retreats must be guarded: don’t bring an agenda.
Instead of bringing a spiritual agenda, seek a spiritual rhythm on retreat instead. It took several years before I noticed the necessity of rhythm while on retreat. But I noticed that a different order of time was a reason I was seeking retreat at all. I want to embrace time as grace and gift (kairos time) and not feel constantly defeated by chronological time. Retreats are occasions to redeem the time.
Retreats and the Reordering of Ordinary Days
I have realized that I do not take retreats because my Myers-Briggs temperament is introverted. I take retreats because God put eternity in my heart. Metropolitan Anthony Bloom believed that there are spiritual moments of ‘depth, light, serenity…when we feel that we are on the frontier of eternity.’3Retreats bring us to the frontier of eternity, a foretaste, however brief, of living outside the pressures and demands of chronological time.
These experiences of time ordered by grace aren’t meant to happen only on occasional getaways, brief reprieves so that one can survive one season to the next. Finding rhythm on a retreat is not just a psychological necessity; it is not onlya way of restoring equilibrium and sanity. Retreats are meant to change us. However, it is not grand, illuminating epiphanies that one ought to seek for interior change. In fact, the desert fathers say that one who seeks grand spiritual experiences is filled with ambition, not the love of Christ. Instead of seeking an experience, retreats ought to change our ordering of time back home, as well.
Retreats help me not only to recover from, but to re-examine the arrhythmia of my daily life. A retreat is a catalyst and a prompt to re-examine my schedule and daily rhythms. Instead of deferring long spaces for silence to retreats, I want retreat rhythms to gain ground in my daily rhythms back home. I want to have more pauses in my weekly rhythms to savor the beauty of creation. Deep renewal in Christ doesn’t require a 1-2 hour drive to a scenic location. Retreats teach me that silence in the presence of God will restore my soul. The silence of God is available to me each day at home, especially in the early morning hours before the world awakens. I can choose silence or I can choose something else, but make no mistake, we have freedom of choice in the matter.
Yes, there is a different rhythm to our daily lives than retreat rhythms. Work, errands, family, friends, and church require our time and energy. Even still, the hours at the beginning and end of the day, even certain transition moments in the day, present opportunities to bring spiritual practices from a retreat into daily life. Prayer, silence, enjoying Christ in creation, taking an easy stroll (not walking for exercise!), spiritual reading—these are choices we have in our daily lives. These are the practices that I want to be normative in my daily rhythms. These rhythms help push back against the hurried pace and the disordering of time in our world. Retreats aren’t the only time and place when we can experience the frontiers of eternity. That experience awaits each day and each evening—at home.
