Updated on February 21, 2023
Lent Retreat in Daily Life : The Spiritual Exercises
21 February to 18 April 2023
Hey Friends –
You may be familiar with the Retreat in Daily Life concept. If not, the idea is that rather than going away for a length of time on retreat, you carve out time in the ordinary patterns of your daily life, making a little extra space for prayer over a certain number of weeks. You also generally meet once per week with a spiritual companion/spiritual director during the retreat, to discuss what is coming up in your prayer life and how it is shaping you.
You may or may not know that Contemplative at Home meditations were actually conceived of while I was leading a group of friends through a retreat in daily life with the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius Loyola, back in 2015. I wanted to help my friends imagine how slowly they might savour the text in their prayer spaces, so I started recording the readings into my phone at meditation pace. An idea was sparked, and a few months later, the very first Contemplative at Home meditations were online.
The Spiritual Exercises are a series of prayers and meditations written by Ignatius of Loyola in the 16th century, as he was founding the Jesuit order. Traditionally the retreat is made over 30 days of silence, but it can also be engaged with in ordinary time. The retreat invites you to grapple with who you are and who God is, what God’s work in the world is like and how you are invited to participate in that work. To pray through the Exercises is a deepening prayer experience.
I undertook the Spiritual Exercises a few years ago with my own spiritual director, with a wonderful translation of them written by an American Jesuit, Kevin O’Brien. Kevin O’Brien’s translation has also been condensed into a shorter 8-week retreat which sits beautifully in Lent and the week after Easter. This is the course I ran with my friends back in 2015.
This year I am inviting you to consider engaging in this course, this Retreat in Daily Life with me. The material is all freely available from the folks over at Loyola Press, and you are welcome to use it in your own time, in any way you wish.
If you’d like the camaraderie and accountability of a few fellow pilgrims, and the idea of praying with the Exercises through Lent appeals to you, you might consider joining me and a few others on this retreat. We will meet each Tuesday on Zoom to share the graces and challenges with one another, in small group spiritual direction.
If you’d like to join us, you’ll need to be prepared to set aside 30-40 minutes each day for prayer between 21 February and 18 April, and be ready to share and listen respectfully and with an open heart on our weekly Zoom calls.
If you do decide to join us, I can say with certainty that Lent 2023 will be one you always remember.
Do pray about whether this might be the right thing for you this year, and if you’d like to join in along with us, you can find more information over here about how to sign up and the fee I am asking for the group spiritual direction sessions.
If you have any questions please feel free to get in touch!
Looking forward to sharing this journey with you.
Warmly
Lissy