In
today's Gospel the disciples come home exulting in their first missionary
experience. Jesus invites them to make a retreat, "You must come
away to some lonely place all by yourselves and rest for a while."
In our own times people continue to go apart to make retreats. In
recent years the trends in retreats have been changing.
The
first of the trends, basic to most of the others, is that the emphasis
has moved from morality to spirituality. In the days prior to Vatican
II, most retreats assumed and emphasized that things weren't going
all that well in the lives of people who came. At the top of the agenda,
you would find awareness of sin and the need for wiping the slate
clean before returning to a sinful world. But in the wake of Vatican
II, interest in this kind of retreat died out, and the retreat movement
might have gone with it.
But
from the ashes rose retreats with a new emphasis - spirituality. The
focus became spirituality and prayer experience rather than the heavy
morality of the past.
The
interest today is in a more holistic spirituality. That is, people
are not as preoccupied with the vertical link between God and the
soul, but are concerned with all aspects of the human and their connection
with the divine. In other words, this spirituality concentrates on
the whole person, on all of the person's life.
Because holistic spirituality also includes the body, often seen in
the past as the enemy of the spiritual life, several retreat directors
now include exercise programs in their retreats. Some would bring
in a nutritionist or a doctor to speak during retreats, while still
others have artists and musicians participating in retreats in an
effort to help achieve integration.
However,
the most remarkable trend in today's retreats is the bursting interest
in contemplative prayer. No doubt many traditional prayers - such
as the rosary and rote prayers featuring lots of words, memorized
or read from a book - are still in evidence during retreats. But the
trend now is very much toward the contemplative word-less thought-less
style of prayer, a form of prayer associated in the past with religious
communities and the East, but now gaining popularity among lay people
in western or westernized countries.
While
interest in prayer and silence and solitude remains very high, an
increasing number of people are coming to retreats because they are
suffering in some way and are looking for help. They are hurting and
looking for healing. They can often be helped to healing through an
individually directed retreat or through a peer co-counseling type
of group retreat.
But
there is another sense in which the spirituality one finds on retreats
has a holistic character. It not only emphasizes the individual as
a whole, but creation as a whole, and, human beings as part of that
creation. Further, this emphasis says creation reveals the Creator,
and, indeed, is the first source of revelation and where God can be
experienced.
One
reason the retreat directors may be turning toward creation spirituality
is that its strong this-world dimension forms a basis for a social
justice focus, an area in which efforts have been inconsistent up
to now.
Not
surprisingly, the traditional retreat of the past whose content tended
to be the same, also had a format that was considered more or less
standard. There are many new formats today in which participants don't
just listen passively, but participate actively and interact with
each other. Often this approach is called process. It emphasizes helping
people make discoveries usually about realities already present in
their own lives, rather than sharing new information. What's more,
in their dialogue participants go beyond discussing ideas to a deeper
level of sharing their personal feelings, experiences and faith. This
process is particularly powerful in retreats focusing on participants
with a common hurt - such as the divorced or widowed dealing with
their loss.
