Retreat — March 2011 —No. 5: Praying and Other Activity

     The material which the retreat house provides suggests that retreatants should have several sessions of prayer each day, each one lasting up to 45 minutes. There should also be time for relaxation, in addition to meals.

     Early on, I told my director that in my experience, after about 10 minutes my mind would begin to wander. He indicated that I should not try to force myself to do more than I realistically could. But reflecting prayerfully on the scripture passages he had suggested and using the format he had supplied for "bringing feelings to prayer," I actually found myself in prayer for up to 40 minutes at a time without major distractions.

     For relaxation, I had brought a book of sudoku puzzles and one of ken-ken. I'd spend maybe a half-hour on those several times a day. I also had a couple of more serious books, unPlanned, by Abby Johnson (which I finished while I was there), and The Cost of Discipleship, by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, which at first I thought might be too discouraging. But after finishing the other book, I decided to give it a try. I had already begun it. Even so, I was surprised to find that it was actually encouraging, not in the sense of suggesting that everything was fine with me, but in saying that what I was trying to do was worth the effort.

     The weather was fairly chilly, so I didn't take a lot of walks, but I did a few. It felt good to get back indoors. One day I took a walk through the surrounding neighborhood. It is an area with large houses on large lots. Many of the houses look like the sort of thing that was built before World War II, and the area is reminiscent of the area where I grew up. When I was walking in this neighborhood in December 2009, on my first retreat, I was suddenly filled with a feeling of horror, or dread, as if it were an evil place. But this year, no such feeling came to me as I walked down the same street. I'm still at a loss to explain the earlier reaction. The only thought I have is that when I was a boy, I felt somehow excluded or unwelcome in much of my neighborhood. Of course, when you don't know the people who live in a house, it's only natural not to feel invited in, but maybe that had particular overtones in my childish mind.

     I usually spent an hour or so in the Fireplace Room in the evening. By the time I got there, the fire was usually going well, and as it died down, people would drift away. I enjoyed moving the logs around to make it flame up again. I'd usuall be able to revive it two or three times before it was reduced to glowing embers, and I was always the last to leave, I think. sometime around 10:00 p.m.

     As the end of the retreat approached, I felt that it had been quite worthwhile, and I expected to be able to apply my newfound aptitude to prayer to my everyday life.