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- Herausgeber: IVP Formatio
- Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
- Serie: Transforming Resources
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018
Academy of Parish Clergy Top Ten List "Come away and rest awhile." Jesus invites us to be with him, offering our full and undivided attention to him. When we choose retreat, we make a generous investment in our friendship with Christ. We are not always generous with ourselves where God is concerned. Many of us have tried to incorporate regular times of solitude and silence into the rhythm of our ordinary lives, which may mean that we give God twenty minutes here and half an hour there. And there's no question we are better for it! But we need more. Indeed, we long for more. In these pages Transforming Center founder and seasoned spiritual director Ruth Haley Barton gently leads us into retreat as a key practice that opens us to God. Based on her own practice and her experience leading hundreds of retreats for others, she will guide you in a very personal exploration of seven specific invitations contained within the general invitation to retreat. You will discover how to say yes to God's winsome invitation to greater freedom and surrender. There has never been a time when the invitation to retreat is so radical and so relevant, so needed and so welcome. It is not a luxury, but a necessity of the spiritual life.
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To Fr. Eric Jensen, SJ
The right spiritual director at the right time.
Thanks be to God!
And to my mom,
JoAnn Neburka Haley
(July 17, 1934–December 24, 2017),
who entered into her final rest
just as I was finishing the book.
You are now fully experiencing what
I can only babble about.
Oh God of peace,
who has taught us that in returning and rest
we shall be saved,
in quietness and trust shall be our strength;
By the power of your Holy Spirit
quiet our hearts we pray,
that we may be still and know that you are God,
through Jesus Christ our Lord.
Amen.
Contents
INVITATIONto RETREAT
If you don’t come apart for a while,
you will come apart after a while.
I T IS A WONDERFUL THING TO BE INVITED—especially when the invitation is particularly well-suited to our needs, our desires, our delights. A gifted communicator receives a significant invitation to speak on a topic that is important to them. An artist is commissioned to create banners for the Easter processional or design a memorial that will forever commemorate a historic event. A pastor gets called to serve a church that they feel drawn to. Your family gets invited to another family’s home for Thanksgiving or Christmas dinner. A man invites a woman to marry him—or vice versa!
When it’s the right invitation, we feel honored, we feel warmed, we feel drawn. Everything in us leaps to say yes!
TIRED OF BEING TOLD WHAT TO DO
One of the reasons I love a good invitation is that I get tired of being told what to do. As the very responsible oldest daughter of a pastor and someone who entered vocational ministry at a young age, my life has been shaped by a strong sense of what I had to do, what I needed to do, and what I ought to do, according to a lot of other people’s expectations. And there is nothing wrong with that, as far as it goes. But these days I find a good invitation to be much more compelling than responsibility. To be invited into something that is right for me and to have the chance to choose freely, well, that is an entirely different experience! With a true invitation, there is no coercion, no forcing, no guilting, no manipulation—just a winsome opportunity, an openhearted welcome and the freedom to say yes or no.
An invitation means that I really do have a choice, and I just love that!
The other thing that is simply wonderful about a good invitation is that it means I am wanted. For some of us the desire to be wanted is closer to the surface than it is for others, but no matter how buried it might be, the desire to know we are appreciated, accepted, and desired is a fairly universal human longing. Our awareness of this longing and our experiences with how this desire was met (or not) go way back and may shape us even now. We all have early memories of knowing something special was going on—a bunch of girls having a sleepover, a birthday party for one of the cool kids, a group of guys playing baseball or street hockey—and experiencing the sting of realizing we were not invited. We might remember the grade school excitement of being invited to someone’s house after school and looking forward to it all day or the sting of not being invited when others have been.
As we grew into adolescence, we may have felt the security of being included in a group of good friends or the emptiness of being on the outside. We might have waited breathlessly for an invitation to an upcoming dance, or we may have been the one doing the asking and waiting breathlessly for that person’s response. Perhaps we yearned to be part of the cast for a major production, to be on the football team, or even invited to be a special helper to a teacher we liked. Whatever our experiences have been, we know instinctively that to be invited means we are wanted and, in the very best scenario, wanted by someone we find interesting, intriguing, or just plain cool.
And that is exactly what makes the invitation to retreat so compelling. It is a winsome call from this intriguing person we call God—the One who loves us, the One who is inexplicably drawn to us, the One who knows so intimately what we need in order to be well. It is an invitation straight from the heart of Jesus to us—his enthusiastic disciples who routinely wear ourselves out with good things and with lesser things, and we don’t even know we’re doing it half the time! Taking on too much at work without prioritizing, thinking I can be the savior of all who are convinced they need time with me, making commitments I cannot possibly keep without running myself into the ground, reacting and responding to every need as though it were mine to fix, trying to be perfect and never disappoint—all of these compulsive behaviors ensure I will never come away and rest awhile.
Imagine the disciples’ surprise in Mark 6:30-31 when, in the midst of their excitement about “all they had done and taught” in Jesus’ name, he invited them to retreat. Literally! His words, “Come away to a deserted place . . . and rest a while,” shut down the conversation the disciples wanted to have and redirected it to the conversation Jesus wanted to have—about retreat! I can see them ceasing their breathless chatter, cocking their heads a bit in disbelief and thinking, Well, that’s different! What a wonder it is, as Jesus’ disciples, to be invited by him to conversation and communion, self-care and replenishment.
RECLAIMING RETREAT AS A SPIRITUAL PRACTICE
The problem with trying to talk about retreat these days is that the word itself has been severely compromised, both in the secular culture and in the religious subculture. In business circles, a retreat is often a long meeting from which you cannot go home. It usually involves extended days spent off-site in which the event organizers not only have control over your daytime working hours but also your evening and early morning hours. Typically, we work harder on “retreat” than in our normal working days, and of course we come home exhausted.
The same is true in church culture. A retreat might involve an extended time away for the elders or pastoral staff to do strategic planning or problem solving. Usually time is built in for fellowship and community building, which means that the days are long and the evenings even longer!
We also might be accustomed to youth retreats and men’s, women’s, or couple’s retreats that include multiple teaching sessions with many other carefully orchestrated programming elements—loud music, icebreakers, games, elective workshops, activities, skits, and entertainment. Participants typically share rooms, which means they stay up later than usual and don’t rest as well because of the snoring person in the other bed! While such events are wonderful opportunities for building community and creating space for focused teaching and interaction with others, they can also be stimulating to the extent that no one leaves rested or in touch with their own souls—at least not in the way Jesus encouraged his disciples to “come away with me and rest a while.”
So what are we really talking about when we reference retreat as a spiritual practice?
A GENEROUS COMMITMENT TO OUR FRIENDSHIP WITH GOD
Retreat in the context of the spiritual life is an extended time apart for the purpose of being with God and giving God our full and undivided attention; it is, as Emilie Griffin puts it, “a generous commitment to our friendship with God.” The emphasis is on the words extended and generous. Truth is, we are not always generous with ourselves where God is concerned. Many of us have done well to incorporate regular times of solitude and silence into the rhythm of our ordinary lives, which means we’ve gotten pretty good at giving God twenty minutes here and half an hour there. And there’s no question we are better for it!
There has never been a time when the invitation to retreat is so radical and so relevant, so needed and so welcome.
But many of us are longing for more—and we have a sense that there is more if we could create more space for quiet to give attention to God at the center of our beings. We sense that a kind of fullness and satisfaction is discovered more in the silence than in the words, more in solitude than in socializing, more in spaciousness than in busyness. “Times come,” Emilie Griffin goes on to say, “when we yearn for more of God than our schedules will allow. We are tired, we are crushed, we are crowded by friends and acquaintances, commitments and obligations. The life of grace is abounding, but we are too busy for it. Even good obligations begin to hem us in.”
Ron Roheiser points out three images for retreat used in Scripture that meet us in our yearning; all of them apply in different ways at different times.
There is the lonely place to which Jesus invited his disciples when he said, “Come away to a deserted place . . . and rest a while” (Mark 6:30). With this invitation he was calling them out of their busyness to a place of rest beyond the demands of their life in ministry, as we referenced earlier.
There is the desert/wilderness that the Spirit drove Jesus to after his baptism (Luke 4). Here he did battle with Satan and faced his demons, as we all must. But there’s more! Old Testament references hint at the fact that the wilderness (spiritually speaking) is also a place of intimacy where God tenderly speaks those things he has been wanting to say to our souls: “Therefore I will now allure her, / and bring her into the wilderness / and speak tenderly to her. . . . / There she shall respond as in the days of her youth” (Hosea 2:14-15). “When Israel was a child, I loved him, / and out of Egypt I called my son [to a journey through the wilderness to the Promised Land]. / The more I called them, / the more they went from me” (Hosea 11:1-2). Clearly something special happens between God and his people in the wilderness!
And there is the Sabbath, the first retreat of all retreats, in which God introduces rhythms of work and rest to the way we order our time. When time had no shape at all, God—by his example and by his instruction—established optimal rhythms for his creation that included working six days and resting on the seventh. This was not a lifestyle suggestion; it was a commandment as significant as not murdering, not committing adultery, and not lying.
These metaphors form the biblical/spiritual context for reclaiming retreat as spiritual practice for our time. In fact, there has never been a time when the invitation to retreat is so radical and so relevant, so needed and so welcome.
A COUNTERCULTURAL PRACTICE
The yearning for retreat: Can you feel it? That yearning is your invitation. It is the Spirit of God stirring up your deepest longings and questions in order to draw you deeper into the intimacy with the God you were created for. Will you trust it? Are you brave enough to let it carry you into the more?
To fully reclaim retreat as a practice that will open us to God, we will explore some of the concrete invitations contained within the more general one. We will consider the meaning of a military retreat (otherwise known as “strategic withdrawal”) for our own lives—putting distance between ourselves and the battle line, wherever that line is drawn in our lives right now. We will hear God’s invitation to rest and learn what we must relinquish in order to do that. We will experience rhythms that replenish us—body, mind, and soul. We will practice recognizing and responding to the presence of God through discernment, and recalibrate based on what God is saying to our souls. We will feel ourselves drawn to reengage our lives in the company of others from a more rested place and establish regular patterns of returning and resting in God.
You can use this book to prepare for a variety of types of retreats. For example, it will help you to be ready for a group retreat in which you are provided with a schedule and content for your time. But it will also be company for you if you are making a solitary venture into retreat. Likewise, you can read this book ahead of your retreat, using the ideas at the end of each chapter under the heading “Preparing for Retreat,” or you can take it with you and read it when you get there, using the ideas under the heading “While on Retreat.” Whatever you do, don’t let this book itself become a burden or type of homework that actually keeps you from entering in. God will always be willing to meet you if you show up with an open heart.
My guess is that the invitation to retreat feels as different and countercultural to most of us as it felt to the disciples, but it was—and is!—the right invitation, offered by One who knows his children so well. The beauty of it is that we are not pushed, coerced, manipulated, or told we have to. Rather, we are invited to enter into something so good for us—body, mind, and soul—that once we recognize it as the winsome opportunity it really is, everything in us will leap to say yes. We may even wonder why it took us so long!
STRATEGICWITHDRAWAL
I have lived too long where I am reachable.
B RAD IS A PASTOR WHOSE CHURCH IS GOING WELL. Attendance at weekend services is growing steadily, and they have just completed a building project that is enabling them to grow and provide a variety of ministries to meet needs within their growing congregation and the community surrounding them. People respond well to his preaching, and his church is known around town as being a church that cares. Brad is growing in stature and reputation among local leaders—even becoming a respected voice regarding important issues facing the community—which means he is in demand and attends many meetings. He is increasingly aware that it takes a full-time schedule and more to keep all the plates spinning. His two young children could use much more attention than he able to give them, and his wife is exhausted from picking up the slack from his busy schedule. When he looks in her eyes he sees a hollowness that mirrors the emptiness he feels in his own soul, but the demands of being a young pastor whose star is rising, the husband and father of growing family, and a soul that is longing for more seem mutually exclusive.
Jen is a stay-at-home mom with four kids. She loves being a mom and sees this as her highest priority, yet over the years she has had a niggling sense that there is something more she is supposed to do with herself and her gifts. Her husband travels regularly for work, which means the lion’s share of care for home and family falls to her; she has little time to devote to getting in touch with her spiritual desires and her sense of calling. Most of the time she is able to put aside her questions and desires in order to make sure everyone else’s needs are cared for, but lately they have been pressing in on her. She finds herself close to tears a lot, questioning her worth, questioning her motives, and wondering if she is doing enough for all the people who need her. She feels her sense of self slipping away and is alarmed by feelings of anger, unsettledness, and even depression.
Jeremy is a gifted entrepreneur who is just starting to achieve recognition for the work his creative company is offering. The phone is ringing with offers of more work than their company can handle, and they have even received a few awards for their work. At the same time, there are internal problems in the company—dissension in the ranks, stress fractures in the leadership, and temptations when he travels. Given the external accolades, he cannot understand why things feel so broken on the inside. He realizes that if he does not get some time away to reflect on what’s really going on, to listen to God, and to get a handle on his motivations and behaviors, he may ruin everything he’s worked so hard for due to bad decision making—decision making that is disconnected from discerning God’s presence and activity in his life.
PULLING BACK FROM DANGER
When we hear the word retreat many of us think of the military use of the word, which refers to the tactic troops use when they are losing too much ground, when they are tired and ineffective, and when there have been too many casualties or the current strategy is not working. When any of these scenarios are in play, the commander might instruct the troops to pull back and put some distance between themselves and the battle line. We often see this as a negative thing; however, military retreat can also be a wise tactic—an opportunity to rest the troops and tend to their wounds, to stop the enemy’s momentum, or to step back to get a panoramic view of what’s going and set new strategies. In fact, the military is now using a more positive term—strategic withdrawal—to describe retreat, and I like it!
Strategic withdrawal captures the more positive connotations of the word retreat, namely, that there are times when the better part of wisdom in combat is to withdraw for good reasons—which can apply to us as well. There are times when we too need to pull back from the battle line in own lives rather than continuing to fight the same battles in the same old ways. We need to pull back from our busyness, from life in our culture, from other people’s expectations and our own compulsions, from whatever is not working in our lives.
The other thing that is true for those of us who have been walking with God for a long time is that all of us have either sustained real wounds in the battle of life or we’re just plain tired. Many of us just soldier on, hoping time will heal all things. But experience tells us that while time does stop the bleeding and heals our wounds, scar tissue often remains. While on the surface it might seem like all is well, a hardening has taken place; ironically, those tight, hurting places are tender and can flare with pain when touched in the wrong way by some unsuspecting soul. And there might be numb places where we cannot feel anything at all.
At some point in our Christian life, many of us realize no one ever told us how to deal with our wounds that are still there—buried deeper than ever—but still there. Father Ronald Rolheiser aptly describes this dawning awareness:
Once the sheer impulse of life begins to be tempered by the weight of our commitments and the grind of the years, more of our sensitivities begin to break through, and we sense more and more how we have been wounded and how life has not been fair to us. New demons then emerge: bitterness, anger, jealousy, and a sense of how we have been cheated. Disappointment cools the fiery energies of our youth, and our enthusiasm begins to be tempered by bitterness and anger . . . where once we struggled to properly control our energies, we now struggle to access them.
No matter how far along we are in the spiritual life, there is no time when retreat —or strategic withdrawal—ceases to be an essential practice.
The point is that the evil one is never done stirring up trouble up and instigating new skirmishes. No matter how far along we are in the spiritual life, there is no time when retreat—or strategic withdrawal—ceases to be an essential practice. The battle lines might be drawn in different places at different stages of our lives, but retreat is always a practice we can engage when we too are tired or wounded, lacking in wisdom, or seeking more effective approaches to engaging the fight. Retreat is a time when we are strengthened for battle, putting on the whole armor of God that Paul describes so specifically (Ephesians 6:10-17).
While it might seem strange to begin our reflections on such a gentle topic with such a harsh metaphor, the truth is there are times when the invitation to strategic withdrawal is exactly what we most need!
ON THE FRONT LINES OF A SPIRITUAL BATTLE
So much about the military tactic of retreat is applicable to Christians. If we are following Jesus—especially if we are trying to serve meaningfully in Christ’s kingdom or exercising any kind of spiritual leadership—there is no question we are on the front lines of a spiritual battle. Ephesians 6:12, in particular, reminds us that we are engaged in a spiritual conflict with the evil one: “Our struggle is not against enemies of blood and flesh,” Paul says, “but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.”
Paul describes the Christian life in rather dramatic terms as a battle in which the evil one attacks us with flaming arrows. Paul’s counsel in the face of this reality is that we must stand firm and confront these deadly forces by putting on the whole armor of God—which he then describes in detail.
While I am not one to see a demon behind every bush or spiritual warfare in every difficulty, the fact is that we are regularly engaged in the struggle against good and evil—whether we know it or not. And as we mature in our faith, the battles become more subtle and hard to detect: the good is often the enemy of the best and it is hard to know the difference. Of necessity, the weapons of our warfare must become more precise as well.
A point may come on the spiritual journey when persons who deeply love God must be aware of, understand, and reject certain attractions to good and holy things that, if undertaken, would distract them from the different good and holy things to which God is genuinely calling them. . . . They will need to discern between spiritual consolation that is authentically of the good spirit and deceptive spiritual consolation that is not of the good spirit, and that will lead, if followed, to spiritual harm.
I will say more about discernment later on, but for now it is enough to note that the military definition of retreat as “strategic withdrawal” fits this reality of the spiritual life quite well. There comes a time when the Christian who is awake and aware notices that the battle is different than it used to be, and the battle lines are drawn in different places. Satan’s tactics are even more devious and hard to recognize than they were earlier in our life, and the weapons of our warfare must be wielded differently. Such times can actually be quite confusing, and wisdom whispers deep in our souls that we must pull back in order to gain perspective and set new strategies.
WHERE AM I IN DANGER?
The first invitation contained in the more general invitation to retreat is to notice where our lives might be in danger—to identify where the spiritual battle is raging—and to pull back so we can rest, heal, and set new strategies before reengaging. When in the middle of a battle, retreating can feel like a radical and counterintuitive choice—like we are actually ensuring our own defeat.
Some of us are reticent to walk away from a battle that is still in progress, accustomed as we are to stand our ground, swinging, whether it’s doing any good or not! At such moments we may be convinced that the battle will be won or lost on the basis of our ability to keep fighting, when in truth, “the battle is the Lord’s” as the Scriptures tell us. Retreat is an opportunity to act like we really believe this!
Others of us are more accustomed to avoiding the battle by pretending there isn’t one! Perhaps we believe that if we don’t acknowledge it or engage it, maybe it will simply go away. If this is our tendency, retreat is an opportunity to act like we believe the truth of Ephesians 6—that there really is a battle, that it is a serious one, and that none of us can fight 24/7. There comes a time when soldiers who have been involved in a real battle need to take a break—to rest, to allow God to tend our wounds, to get a perspective, and to review the battle from that perspective, inviting God to give us the wisdom we need.
Neither of those approaches—relying on ourselves to fight the good fight 24/7 or pretending there is no battle and avoiding it altogether—is an effective way to approach the rigors of the spiritual life. If we accept the military definition of retreat as an appropriate one for us as Christians, it might lead us to wonder, Where am I in danger in my life right now? Not only does this question orient us toward our need for retreat, it can also help us shape our retreat time in ways that correspond to the dangers we are experiencing currently. This question is always relevant, since the battle line is always shifting, and there are so many different ways we can be in danger—even in the relative safety in which most of us live.
ON THE BRINK OF DISASTER
In a recent article titled (disturbingly) “I Used to Be a Human Being,” Andrew Sullivan offers an insightful description of how he arrived at an extended retreat after finding himself in danger due to his constant engagement with technology. “A year before,” he says,
