Where Intention Meets Attention: The Psalms as Spiritual Retreat Guide

02. Reorient

“I was glad when they said to me, ‘Let us go to the house of the Lord!’ Our feet are standing within your gates, O Jerusalem.” (Psalm 122:1–2, NRSVUEScripture quotations marked (NRSVUE) are taken from the New Revised Standard Version Bible, Updated Edition copyright 2021, Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.)

For starters, rather than thinking of spiritual retreating and praying Psalms as a “spiritual discipline,” consider them in the frame of “story immersion practices.” While Richard J. Foster does a commendable job of rescuing the word “discipline” from strict asceticism, the notion of discipline, while a biblical one for sure, can easily play into our highly “functional” modus operandi. “Discipline,” for some, readily morphs into the prominent religious mode of pietistic performance or the dominant cultural mode of self-actualization. On the other hand, “story immersion practices” can richly connect us to our baptism, wherein we died to our own plot and rose up into the epic narrative of Jesus. With discipline, we can easily remain in control. With story immersion, we must follow the plot. The Psalms orient us inside of the story with invitation (“Let us go”) and relocation (“Our feet are standing within your gates, O Jerusalem”).
In this groove, spiritual formation subverts the deceptive detours of our self-actualizing tendencies and self-righteous performances and leads us on the lifetime pilgrimage to an actualized baptism (i.e., “I no longer live, but Christ lives in me” [Galatians 2:20, NIVScripture quotations marked (NIV) are taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version®, NIV®. Copyright ©1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide. www.zondervan.com The “NIV” and “New International Version” are trademarks registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office by Biblica, Inc.™.) Reorientation is crucial. The Psalms reach out to us in our disoriented state and reorient us with hope. Spiritual retreats are essential precisely because they create the time and space required for ongoing reorientation with the big story, giving us much needed perspective on the smaller picture of our own lives.

03. Surrender Agendas

“My soul thirsts for God, for the living God. When can I go and meet with God?”  (Psalm 42:2, NIV)

As noted earlier, we have many opportunities to retreat that are deeply spiritual, yet they fall short of the truest meaning of a spiritual retreat. As a weekend break is to Sabbath rest, so a vacation or a spa day can be to a spiritual retreat. As a working trip to an exotic destination is to an annual pilgrimage, so is a think week (study-writing-planning) to a spiritual retreat. We have much to do and many good things to accomplish. The thought of a free twenty-four hours conjures up images of a comfortable chair, a backpack full of long-awaited books and journals, my iPod playlist ready with favorite podcasts and fresh music, and unlimited drafts of Starbucks coffee at my fingertips. I would call friends, text acquaintances, blog a bit, and generally twitter the day away. In other words, I would go after my own premeditated agenda with a passion.

While there is nothing wrong with a day like this, a spiritual retreat calls us to trade in an agenda filled with good activities for a heart pregnant with singular intention. Resist the temptation to take any books at all; take only the Bible and perhaps a journal. Submit to the ironic austerity of sola scriptura. Lay aside the subtle agendas of how you imagine the time will be spent. Enter into the depths of the psalmist’s pleading prayer, “My soul thirsts for God, for the living God. When can I go and meet with God?” (Psalm 42:2) In preparing for retreat, remember Kierkegaard’s oft-cited dictum, “Purity of heart is to will one thing.”

It’s easier said than done. So often my prayer goes something like this: “Lord, I am willing to be made willing to will one thing, but I’m not at all sure how to get there.” My simple starting place for a spiritual retreat is this question: “When can I go and meet with God?” When agendas give way to agenda, we near the threshold of intention.

05. Embrace Wilderness

“They tested God in their heart by demanding the food they craved. They spoke against God, saying, ‘Can God spread a table in the wilderness?’” (Psalm 78:18–19, NRSVUE)

Spiritual retreats journey us into the seeming serene wilderness where we are surprisingly confronted with the world, the flesh, and the devil. These enemies come in the form of distraction, temptation, and even despair: the distraction of doing something else, the temptation to substitute our own self-constructed messages for the Spirit’s, or the despair of not hearing anything at all. Despite challenges, the wilderness gifts us with liminal space, taking us into a dimension of reality between where we were and where we are going. Annie Dillard gets at this in her book, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek:

The gaps are the thing. The gaps are the spirit’s one home, the altitudes and latitudes so dazzlingly spare and clean that the spirit can discover itself for the first time like a once-blind man unbound. The gaps are the clefts in the rock where you cower to see the back parts of God; they are the fissures between mountains and cells the wind lances through, the icy narrowing fjords splitting the cliffs of mystery. Go up into the gaps. If you can find them; they shift and vanish too. Stalk the gaps. Squeak into a gap in the soil, turn, and unlock—more than a maple—a universe. This is how you spend this afternoon, and tomorrow morning, and tomorrow afternoon. Spend the afternoon. You can’t take it with you.Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (New York: Harper & Row, 1970), 269.

Dillard’s words recall the Celtic notion of “thin places,” thresholds where the veil between heaven and earth seems to vanish. Thin places often appear in disorienting and desperate conditions. Frequently, they are discernible only in retrospect. In the midst of a wilderness lament over the wicked, the psalmist exhorts, “Trust in the Lord and do good; dwell in the land and enjoy safe pasture. Delight yourself in the Lord and he will give you the desires of your heart” (Psalm 37:3–4, NIV). When the wilderness exhausts our resources, we find ourselves standing in a wide-open space of divine presence, feasting at a table while dismayed enemies look on.

If I’m honest, I want to run from my enemies, not eat in their presence. I want retreat so I can escape. I’m looking for a mystical, nirvana-like experience of the presence of God, a spiritual high so I can return and face my enemies again. The liminality of wilderness eschews escapism and creates the conditions for deep story immersion. It looks like Narnia, not nirvana; intimacy, not ecstasy. A true retreat ushers us through the “wardrobe” and into a “gap,” a between place of beholding our Father’s world, where skies burst with speech, mountains bow before majesty, and the trees of the field clap their hands. In this world the sun breaks forth “like a bridegroom from his wedding chamber” (Psalm 19:5, NRSVUE). In this place “deep calls to deep in the roar of your waterfalls” (Psalm 42:7, NIV), lions lie down with lambs, and children sit on the thrones of leadership. In the liminal place of wilderness, the Word of God takes on the currency of gold and the taste of honey. We return not to the “real” world but the waiting one, infused with a mission to declare reality into the ruins. Over time, praying Psalms on spiritual retreats renovates our hearts and minds, making them a “place of springs” (Psalm 84:6), a habitation for holy imagination. In his book Bread in the Wilderness, Thomas Merton captures these ideas:

The spiritual understanding of the Psalter will therefore not introduce us to some esoteric technique of prayer, nor will it tempt us to induce within our minds some peculiar psychological state. It will, above all, tell us not merely what we ought to be but the unbelievable thing that we already are. It will tell us over and over again that we are Christ in this world, and that He lives in us, and that what was said of Him has been and is being fulfilled in us: and that the last, most perfect fulfillment of all is now, at this moment, by the theological virtue of hope, placed in our hands. Thus the liturgy of earth is necessarily one with the liturgy of heaven. We are at the same time in the desert and in the Promised Land. The Psalms are our Bread of Heaven in the wilderness of our Exodus.Thomas Merton, Bread in the Wilderness (New York: New Directions Publishing Corporation, ©Abbey of Gethsemani, 1953), 38.

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