Fr. Victor R. Baltazar, SJ
February 27, 2020
Giving retreats and recollections has been part of my Jesuit ministry ever since I was a second year novice. A friend from a Jesuit social institute was seriously thinking of joining the Jesuits and asked if I could accompany him through a weekend discernment retreat. My novice master gave me permission so that retreat became my initiation into a most grace-filled ministry of guiding individuals and groups in Ignatian retreats.
My present work at the Ateneo de Davao St. Ignatius Spirituality Center (SISC) gives me a chance not only to guide others through prayer, but also to train and form people who want to become retreat directors and guides. The most fulfilling experience for me is to spend some days giving a retreat conference or two in a semi-directed with junior retreat guides forming a team with me and sharing in the work of accompanying retreatants either in a one-on-one or a small group spiritual direction setting. Not only does this strategy intensify the retreat process by adding accompaniment, accountability and spiritual direction to the efficacy of an ordinary preached retreat, but this also becomes a good opportunity for me to mentor and transfer competency to retreat guides in formation.
Two questions that some junior guides have asked me lately were where do I get material for the conferences that I prepare quite fast and give in our retreats, and what constitutes a retreat guide’s “backpack”? These are the main questions I will explore in this article.
My Idea of a Retreat. What I keep in my “Retreat Guide’s Backpack” of course depends on the notion I have of a good retreat. And for this my most important guide is really St. Ignatius of Loyola himself. St. Ignatius has left with us the Spiritual Exercises, a manual or a guide book for prayer that codifies many of the themes and processes that he himself went through, and that early on, he wanted to share with others who desire growth in the spiritual life or some others who wish to direct or guide other souls.
For Ignatius a good retreat is a time for a grace-filled encounter with God, with the “Creator dealing directly with the creature and the creature with his Creator and Lord [cf. S.E. n. 15],” in order for the retreatant to “rid himself or herself of all disordered affections so that s/he might seek and find the divine will in regard to the disposition of his/her life for the salvation of the soul” [cf. S.E. n.1]. The Spiritual Exercises prayer dynamic is therefore aimed at helping the retreatant receive a double freedom: a “freedom from” attachments and sinful and disordered affections and more importantly, a “freedom for” commitment to God and to God’s desires for my person and life.
Ignatius suggests a suitable prayer process to support the retreatant’s prayerful formation into this double freedom. Briefly put, the process brings a person to consider God as one’s foundational religious experience. The retreatant is invited in prayer to come home to God as Merciful and Unconditional Love who receives her, forgives and heals her and then invites her to make a fundamental commitment with Jesus, to share and collaborate with him in completing God’s redemptive project.
If retreatants are prepared and disposed to proceed into more advanced spiritual and apostolic response, the prayer process proceeds to elaborate such fundamental commitment into a more specific discernment and election of a personal vocation or conversion path which expresses the person’s intimate relationship with our Lord and articulates her participation in Jesus Christ’s mission of building the Father’s Kingdom.
Furthermore, retreatants are made to pray over the mystery of Jesus’ suffering, death and resurrection as way of sealing and confirming their following of Christ. The retreatant as it were is asked to unite her self-offering in mission to Christ’s self-offering on the cross and in his rising to new life. In this way the retreatant seeks to enter into a mystical communion of wills with God and a mystical communion of service with others to whom God sends her and whom God sends to her.
The progressive and dynamic maturing of freedom in prayer, in the retreatant’s imitation of and identification with Christ and of communion in service of God and neighbor can serve as a core dynamic that any retreat director or guide can look out for and discern carefully in a prayer process which we may properly call “Ignatian.” Once such core dynamic is perceived and distinguished, a retreat guide or director may design many different adaptations of the Ignatian retreat elaborating on one or other theme which is more responsive to particular retreat groups. For instance a group of widows or widowers may want to pray over the experience of grieving after having lost a loved one. A group of Church leaders may want to explore the inner movements of growing in discipleship and ministry. Young priests in the first five years of priestly ministry may want to explore their journey as “boy priests”, praying over how Jesus has journeyed with them through their honeymoon years in early priestly life and pastoral ministry. Still a group of teachers who are only in the brink of or just a few more years away from retirement may wish to pray over their experience preparing for life in retirement. Young professionals who are in serious life direction discernment for both permanent careers or permanent life states may want to pray over crossroads they have seen themselves making thus far and notice how their configuration of personal values and preferences give shape to their desired permanent life directions.
The Ignatian prayer process is an initiation into a spiritual journey with Jesus through conversion, spiritual maturing, passion, death and rising to new life and these processes find echoes or resonances with particular life themes which people who are into different sectoral, ministerial or developmental concerns are currently faced with or engaged in. The process furthermore may be used to articulate the prayer dynamics pertinent to the liturgical season, eg. Advent-Christmas cycle, or the Lenten-Easter cycle.
Hence a budding retreat guide will definitely be helped by constant prayer and spiritual direction, supervised self-study, readings, actual apprenticeship, and ongoing supervision. In addition, the apprentice guide may want to initially explore materials that relate with the more general dynamic of the Ignatian prayer process, and then informed by their personal religious experiences or their own spiritual maturing, the guide may want to focus her study and practice particularly on guiding retreatants praying on one or other theme.
Sources for My Guide’s Backpack. I have been giving short directed, semi-directed or preached retreats since 1987. I have begun directing 8-day or 30-day directed retreats since the year 2000, training and mentoring retreat guides and spiritual directors since 1997, after my presbyteral ordinations. Through the years of retreat-giving and spiritual direction practice and my work in the formation of guides, what have I found myself accumulating in my guide’s backpack?
First, some prenotes. For one, I noticed that a big part of the things in my backpack come from my own prayer experiences whether in the day-to-day morning meditations and journal writing or especially in my annual retreats as a Jesuit in formation or as an ordained Jesuit priest in ministry. I have by this time made two 30-day retreats and both remain a rich wellspring of religious experience from which to draw some patterns and insights and guidance in giving prayer points to my own retreatants.
I also draw from the spiritual guidance I have received from the older Jesuits who gave us retreats in the past, as well as one diocesan priest who has been the only non-Jesuit invited to give our batch an annual retreat—the now Cardinal Archbishop Luis Antonio Tagle, DD. From this wealth of experience come different perspectives in guiding prayer, in interpreting Scripture, in structuring the Exercises or in managing the overall climate in a Sacred Space. From these I have also learned ways of drawing inspiration from the biblical text, Church teaching, poetry or our Institute’s documents. I have also learned practical applications of the rules for discernment of spirits especially as they are articulated in the practice of Jesuits as they guided me at one or other point in my spiritual journey.
Finally, as I gradually matured in the process, I had received much help from more personal reading, scholarly research, and my giving of occasional conferences on the Exercises and other related fields like fundamental, moral and sacramental theology, studies and readings on the life of Ignatius, studies on our Jesuit constitutions and other spiritual documents, narrative studies, psychology of religious experience, symbols, biographies of saints, especially of Doctors of the Church or early Church fathers and mothers, Social Teachings of the Church, Spiritual direction, and other related knowledge bases especially relevant to a specific theme which is a chosen focus for a theme retreat, eg. Grief and Loss, Midlife Transitions, Life Direction discernment, Journalling, etc.
What Do I Find in My Guide’s Backpack Nowadays and How Do I Make My Backpack “Grow.” Through the years, I have found myself keeping a good file of five types of documents which I easily mix and match as I find them relevant to the spiritual movements I sense in an individual retreatant or group of retreatants: a) prayers, b) guidelines for prayer, c) scripture texts with some brief interpretation guidelines, d) journal prayer exercises and e) sets of points for reflection and prayer clustered according to theme or grace. My own guide to choosing which things to mix and match are the spiritual movements I “hear” from the individual retreatant or the group and what I perceive to be the Id quod volo graces the retreatant(s) ought to be pursuing as they appropriate the dynamic of the Exercises prayer process at a particular point of the retreat.
I have kept these five kinds of documents as classified according to the graces proposed by Ignatius for the first, second, third and fourth weeks.
For semi-directed and preached retreats, I have been helped much by published biblical or spiritual books and prayer programs by known scriptural scholars or retreat practitioners like Robert Alter, William Barry, Peter van Breemen, Beatrice Bruteau, Luke Timothy Johnson, Carlo Maria Martini, Anthony de Mello, Joyce Rupp, Janet Ruffing, Margaret Silf, Monty Williams, David Stanley, Joseph Tetlow, and John Veltri, etc.
A big help in preparing powerpoint presentations which I use in semi-directed or preached retreats are repositories of audio-visual materials which help prime individuals and groups for deeper prayer. I have maintained a good database of MP3 and MP4 files of instrumental meditation music, Jesuit or non-Jesuit liturgical or pop religious songs, popular ballads or love songs which may be used for meditation on spiritual experiences, eg. Karen Carpenter’s “I Won’t Last a Day Without You” or “Simon and Garfunkel’s “Sound of Silence” or “Bridge over Troubled Waters,” Josh Groban’s “You Raise Me Up” or “You are Loved” or even Brian McKnight’s “Coming Home.” From my own prayer, songs like Ray Valera’s “Maging Sino Ka Man” or Wency Cornejo’s “Habang May Buhay” or even Willy Cruz’s “Sana’y Wala Nang Wakas as performed by Sharon Cuneta.”
When I choose to play an MP3 file of a song, or play a music-video of a religious song, I often also flash a copy of the lyrics, so retreatants can more easily meditate on words or phrases as they contemplate images that have moved them or helped them articulate an inner spiritual movement or desire. Hence aside from MP3 or MP4 files, I also keep files of song lyrics.
I also keep files of clipart, photos or images related to spiritual movements or concerns, and of particular scriptural verses or themes. Google searches are always helpful in locating such clipart or photos. I simply type “parable of the talents” and countless scripture clipart or photos appear in the search results. Or I type “Grieving” or “Spiritual Formation” and many photos of those specified themes come out. I simply copy these into my drive and make a mental note where they are stored in my hard drives so I can easily retrieve them once I find them useful in a power point presentation.
Finally I also keep copies of prayers, poetry or stories which help deepen retreatant’s consideration or meditation of a theme. Poets like Kahlil Gibran, Rabindranath Tagore, Rainier Maria Rilke, Gerald Manley Hopkins, EE Cummings, Robert Frost are but some authors whose poetry I have found most fruitful in prayer whether my own prayers or those of retreatants. I often write translations of these poem-prayers or find Filipino versions of these and present them side-by-side with the English versions and retreatants have found these fruitful.
Tracing the Footprints of our Ever-Ancient-Ever-New God. Designing and Giving Retreats are pretty much like engaging our ever-ancient-ever-new God in our retreatants. Much of the religious experience shared find resonance with those of others who had also encountered God. This principle is in fact what makes our use of Scriptures fruitful as well. In a sense, Sacred Scriptures are a codification of the religious experience of the people of God and as such they can fruitfully mirror to us our own religious experience at the present time. And so I find it most helpful to keep a good backpack of resources that may prove helpful in guiding another retreatant to encounter his or her God. I do not expect to keep using the same text or prayer point or poem for all my retreatants, but one or two hand-outs from the backpack, with a little tweak here and there, I may still find useful or relevant for another retreatant who is sent to me for accompaniment.
Fr. Victor Baltazar, SJ was formerly Executive Director of Center for Ignatian Spirituality-Philippines. He is currently the Director of Ateneo de Davao University’s St. Ignatius Spirituality Center.