The emphasizes the importance for every baptized person to develop a living relationship with God. is a great way to do this, through the supportive setting of prayer or teachings. Spiritual retreats are getting more and more popular today. So why go on a retreat? Needs, desires, and motivations can be very different from one person to another. In this article by Hozana, let's take a look at the most common motivations for enrolling in retreats. At the end of this reading, we invite you to discover other great .
Learning (or teaching) is a way for many Christians to live out one of the five.
Some people will therefore decide to take a retreat for reasons related to learning and teaching. For example, such as those who want to deepen their understanding of a biblical topic, or one from the Magisterium, or on Christian life (such as holiness, forgiveness, etc.).
This can also be linked to the desire to discover a new spirituality: for example, Carmelite spirituality with the , spirituality, , etc.
Some participants enroll in a retreat to discern: that could mean discerning their vocation such as marriage or priesthood, whether or not to engage with a certain person, to continue to work in one's professional field or reorient oneself, etc.
In short, discernment is generally about a specific question that the retreat member hopes to have more elements at the end to answer.
Some people will enroll in a retreat to experience a personal encounter with God. Often, this decision comes from inside, but in other cases, it is simply because they have been invited to participate in a retreat.
For people far from the Church, spiritual retreat can be a way to have a new experience. For others, participating in a retreat is also motivated by renewing the experience of God's love and rekindling the fire.
At a retreat, you usually don’t have to cook. Your daily obligations are reduced. And one of the motivations of some participants is simply to rest.
A motivation for making a retreat can be to take a break, to do a review or a rereading of one's life. This motivation is different from discernment. It’s a matter of re-reading one's life, listening to God and the Holy Spirit, without necessarily discerning on a specific question. It can be, for example, to see the moments when the Lord was particularly present in our lives and to give thanks.
Another motivation for making a retreat can be to rekindle the fire in oneself to be zealous again. To the extent that every Christian is called to be a missionary disciple, it is important to be animated by the fire of the Spirit to evangelize. When our fire is out, and we have less ardor, a spiritual retreat is a very good way to revive this fire. Teachings and prayer are ways for the retreat to rekindle this fire: “I have come to bring fire on the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled!” (Luke 12:49).
Hozana offers retreats online. For example:
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· Or perhaps you’d prefer a shorter one to