Browsing by Author "Nekesa, Mildrate"

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    A five-day retreat based on the theme: Introducing Postulants to Silence and Prayer
    (Tangaza University College, 2004-04) Nekesa, Mildrate
    The exercise of recollecting the divine word in our hearts, amid silence and interior peace, is a Christian tradition handed on to believers as a spiritual heritage. It dates back to Christ, and has continued from the early Church to the present. We do this after the example of Jesus who made forty days of prayer in the desert before the beginning of his public life. "Retreatants down the centuries have therefore imitated Christ, the retreatant par excellence". In our time we hear of people going on retreat: members of organizations, political parties, committees in the Church or in other organizations, having a day or two-day retreat, held in some unusual environment outside their normal places of operation. They pull away from their duties to be by themselves, which is necessary because it enables people to focus on what has been going on for some identified period of time. Christians need to have these moments to pay attention to their lives in general. All of us need some quiet place to realize this. Our spiritual journey is initiated by God, and at his initiative, he invites us to a deeper knowledge and intimate relationship with him. Going on a retreat is a way of responding to God's invitation that we experience through the desire to know him. Christians go on retreat because of the need to deepen a personal relationship with God. If one wishes to discern the various movements of the spirit experienced at deeper level of one's being, a period of retreat would serve for this. As James Neafsey has written,Such an understanding of withdrawal from daily activities and the noisy environment of our daily life remains an important motivation for retreats. We have possibilities of making thirty days, eight days or six days of either a preached or a guided retreat. The focus of this essay however is a five-day preached retreat for the postulants of the Benedictine Sisters of Divine Providence, whose main purpose is to deepen the prayer life of the young women, so as to bring them to greater conversion drawing them closer to the Lord. These retreat conferences are aimed at introducing the participants to silence and prayer. The purpose of the selected themes is to foster greater listening to God in Scripture and a deepening of the postulants' relationship with him and with one another, giving value to the Word contained in Scripture.