RETREATS ARE BIBLICAL
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Tents aren't for mountains
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TRANSCRIPT
As Lent comes to its close, many Catholics have made some form of a retreat. This week, Holy Week, Church Militant is holding its annual retreat outside Dallas, Texas. The practice of retreats stretches back millennia for Catholics looking to be spiritually fed and recharged.
Church Militant's Hunter Bradford is on the ground in Dallas for our 2022 Retreat on Land and has this analysis of retreats from a scriptural standpoint.
Going on retreats is as old as Catholicism. Our Lord Himself took "retreats," if you will. Right after getting baptized by St. John the Baptist, Our Blessed Lord was "led up by the Spirit into the wilderness" (Matthew 4:1).
Saint Luke tells us in chapter 5, verse 15, of his Gospel that, after cleansing a leper, the Good Lord "withdrew to the wilderness and prayed."
The Second Person of the Trinity also took some of His Apostles out on what could be thought of today as "retreats," like the Transfiguration, for example.
But the passage in Scripture that best serves as a foundation for the faithful going on retreats is Mark 6:31: "And He said to them, 'Come away by yourselves to a lonely place and rest a while.'"
Therein lies the very purpose of retreats — to be with Christ, to rest with Him. The point isn't just to go out and withdraw from the world. The goal of retreating is to be more able to unite with Our Lord in prayer, to draw nearer to God — something many saints understood.
In his Treatise on the Love of God, St. Francis de Sales claims St. Ignatius of Loyola played a crucial role in restoring the idea of going on retreat. In fact, the Society of Jesus was the first active religious order in which the practice of the retreat became obligatory by rule.
Going back to Our Lord's Transfiguration, just like any retreat, there's an end to it. You have to go down the mountain and back into the real world because, like 2,000 years ago, you can't build tents and stay on the mountain. The mountain experience is there to help you live in the valley.
Saint Ignatius prescribed the exercise of 30 days of retreat as a necessary experience before any of his religious were admitted to vows.
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