How to Take a Personal Prayer Retreat
A personal prayer retreat is a choice to cut yourself off from the world for a time in order to be with God. I recommend every Christian, including laity, take a two-night prayer retreat at least once a year. This is not always feasible and, if you are unaccustomed to praying for more than an hour at a time, it is inadvisable. You should not consider a retreat if your ordinary habits of prayer are erratic or dilapidated. Even so, a retreat is something you should strive to make an annual practice. The best case for retreats is that the One who teaches us how to pray (Luke 11:1) took them.
Jesus in the Desolate Places
After returning from his temptation in the wilderness, Mark tells us that Jesus began his public ministry in Capernaum, a fishing village on the northwestern shore of the Sea of Galilee, forty miles from Nazareth. Located on the Via Maris (“the Way of the Sea”), a major trade route connecting Egypt to Syria, the village was strategic for travel and the spread of news. Jesus found his first disciples there and began to teach, heal, and exorcise demons. Though his activity was locally restricted, his fame spread “throughout all the surrounding region of Galilee” (Mark 1:28).
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In light of these developments, he rose “very early in the morning, while it was still dark” and “went out to a desolate place, and there he prayed” (Mark 1:35). When his disciples woke and found him missing, they formed a search party. They must have searched for hours, long enough to explore the village and expand into the “desolate places.”
Eventually, an exasperated Peter discovers Jesus, who ignores complaints about his disappearing act and announces the next stage of their mission: “Let us go on to the next towns, that I may preach there also,” adding, “for that is why I came out [to this desolate place]” (Mark 1:37). The choice of Capernaum as the gospel’s ground zero indicates Jesus had always intended to expand his ministry, and now was the moment of decision. Jesus was on the move.
The pattern repeats throughout Jesus’s earthly ministry. Luke attests that Jesus would often “withdraw to desolate places and pray” (Luke 5:16). He favored mountaintops, gardens, and pockets of wilderness. Even when he took others with him, he prioritized solitude by praying apart at some distance (see Luke 9:18; 9:28–29; 11:1).
If Jesus, who was sinless and lived every moment in perfect communion with the Father, took personal prayer retreats, how much more should we?
Retreat as Abnegation
A personal prayer retreat is an exercise in self-denial. The older word is abnegation. Abnegation is not mere moral discipline or a grim renunciation of pleasure, as it is occasionally characterized, but a movement of love through which the soul is purified and redirected toward its true object, God. Abnegation is the act of “taking up our crosses” (Matt. 16:24) in the same manner as Christ, namely, to the Father, through prayer (Luke 22:24; cf. Matt. 26:39; 6:10).
Ordinary Christian life already observes patterns of abnegation, small turnings away from everyday concerns toward our Lord. When we worship together, we leave the world and enter a sanctuary. When we observe Morning Prayer, we flee to a quiet corner in the house. In this sense, a personal prayer retreat is nothing radical. It inflects something you already do in smaller measures. A prayer retreat pursues a fuller abnegation than we can manage in everyday life, and there is something irreplaceable and Christ-like about drawing a deep, hard line between yourself and the world, at least for a time.
Where to Go and for How Long
There is no substitute for retreating for two nights. You will experience a level of disorientation after you’ve arrived and unpacked. You will have set aside your daily rituals and the structures imposed by the demands of your job, family, and community, and you may not know what to do with yourself at first. Indeed, you might feel frustrated, restless, apathetic, bored, or even depressed. These feelings are normal. Your body may be on retreat, but your mind is still back home, and this incongruity is the source of these feelings. The body relocates faster than the mind. It needs time to catch up. A full twenty-four hours is what it takes to extricate yourself mentally, settle, and then transition into a new pattern constructed around prayer.
A retreat has a certain physicality, so location is the most critical consideration. Find someplace quiet where you aren’t to be disturbed: a hotel, an Airbnb, a campsite, or a guest house at a monastery or retreat center. If two nights sounds intimidating or unfeasible, start with something shorter. Take a half-day (four hours), then build up to a work-day (eight hours).
Short retreats like these can be taken multiple times a year, and they greatly expand your list of venue options: a park, a forest reserve, a public library, or even a coffee shop may suffice. Recently, I took the train downtown and spent the day in the medieval wing of the Art Institute of Chicago. It was quiet, and I could sit on a bench in front of a twelfth-century crucifix and mutter to Jesus, and no one cared. Many an art student was doing something stranger that moment.
Why Should You Go on a Personal Prayer Retreat?
Jesus seems to have taken different prayer retreats for different reasons. Sometimes, he would do so before making an important decision, as seen in Capernaum, and again when he spent the night on a mountain before deciding which of his mass of followers would be his apostles (Luke 6:12). Another time, he appears to have retreated in order to prepare himself for some great undertaking. The most significant example is his withdrawal into the garden of Gethsemane to pray before his arrest and crucifixion (Mark 14:32–42; Matt. 26:36–46; John 17). At other times, Jesus would retreat after performing a great work of ministry, as when he climbed to the top of a mountain to pray alone after feeding the five thousand (Mark 6:46; Matt. 14:23; John 6:15), presumably to rest and give thanks.
Discernment, preparation, rest—all of these were motivations for Jesus to withdraw, but any reason you can think of to pray can be a reason to take a retreat. We can suppose that at times Jesus had no motive other than the joy of praying to his Father.
Here are some common reasons to take a personal prayer retreat:
1. A major life change
Are you moving? Having or adopting a child? Getting married? Changing careers? Launching a new ministry program? Such occasions come with an array of anxieties. A prayer retreat can help you commit all things to God and make the transition with courage and gratitude.
2. A difficult choice
The operative word here is discernment. Perhaps you have been accepted by multiple colleges or seminaries, and all appeal to you, so now you are having difficulty choosing. Perhaps you want to have or adopt a child, but you aren’t sure it is the right time. A prayer retreat can provide the space you need to work through your options and seek God’s pleasure.
3. Spiritual rest
For rest, a two-night stay is critical. Perhaps you are coming to the end of a difficult season. Perhaps you have wrapped up a church program, completed a degree, ended your time in couples therapy, left home, or have just found yourself uncommonly busy and stressed. A spiritual retreat is a salutary way to renew your prayer life while sealing the difficult season with thanks and praise.
4. Comfort
Are you worn down by a particular burden? Do you long for marriage, but can’t seem to find a partner? Are you stuck in a disappointing job? Do you hope for children, but struggle with infertility? Have you recently experienced loss or a discouraging diagnosis? Do you feel alone, betrayed, or lost? Go to the one who is meek and lowly (Matt. 11:29), and you will “find rest for your souls” (Jer. 6:16).
5. Repentance
If you harbor secret or habitual sins, sins you struggle to confess or renounce or mortify, bring them before your Father, who shows grace to the humble but resists the proud (see Jas. 4:6).
6. God’s face
You do not need life circumstances to motivate you to go on a prayer retreat. Prayer, as such, moves us to acknowledge we have only One True Need. You can withdraw, seeking nothing more than God’s face, leaving the agenda to him. These retreats are open-ended and, in my experience, tend to be the most fruitful.
What to Bring
For your first prayer retreat, do not be austere. The experience will be new and uncomfortable enough by itself. I wouldn’t recommend fasting, for example. In fact, bring a tasty snack. Your first prayer retreat is an experiment, so don’t make too many demands of yourself upfront. Like an athlete, see what you can carry first before adding weight. That said, fasting is the sweetest companion to prayer, so you should incorporate this into your retreats eventually.
What to Do
Your first priority after you’ve arrived is to settle into the place. Take a walk, explore the grounds. A spiritual director told me her first order of business is to nap. Give your mind opportunity to catch up to where your body is. Before you can enter a new pattern of living organized around prayer, you must be all there.
1. Pray
You may do other things on a retreat, but only one thing is necessary. How you begin does not matter; only begin. Start praying in the way that is most familiar or natural to you. I find retreats are opportune times to experiment with other prayer practices, such as the Daily Office, lectio divina, the Book of Hours, or the Jesus Prayer. Praying for several hours might sound impossible, but you only feel this way from the outside, I find. Once you are inside the retreat, the hours speed by and it’s already 1 p.m. and, oh my, I’ve barely prayed at all.
2. Listen
Friends of mine like to bring music and headphones, and not just to play relaxing music: Sometimes listening through an album, such as a recording of Handel’s Messiah (1741) or Josh Garrels’s Love and War and the Sea in Between (2011), can be a spiritual practice.
3. Read
I am bookish, so I always bring a short spiritual work to read through. Others I know bring novels. Whatever your selection, make sure it is spiritually nourishing and enriches your prayer.
4. Move around
God did not create us as pure souls, but as composites of dust and breath (Gen. 2:7). The body is the soul’s helpmeet in life, and the two will share eternity together after the Final Resurrection. The body should be subject to the spirit precisely because everything the soul does is done with the body. If you have trouble with maintaining inward reverence, lead the soul into reverence with the body by assuming a posture of reverence. Bow, genuflect, kneel, prostrate, lift up your hands, walk and leap in praise (Acts 3:8), maybe even dance (2 Sam. 6:14). Inward worship is what’s essential, but the body can “lead” the soul to worship as it ought.
5. Create
We pray with our hands as well as our tongues. Draw yourself into a contemplative mode by drawing. Paint something. Knit a sweater. In the past, I even learned how to tie chotki knots to make prayer ropes.
Image: photo Ahmet Enes Tek from Pexels, courtesy of Canva. Digitally edited by Jacob Davis.
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