A retreat journal

(trích trong cuốn A VACATION WITH THE LORD của Thomas Green S.J)

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An important tool of a good retreat is a journal. Journal workshops and keeping a journal of our prayer are fairly common today. I myself find it a very valuable tool for discernment. The idea is just to sit down for a few minutes, perhaps after each period of prayer, and to jot down in the journal what has happened in prayer. I find it most helpful to write talking to the Lord, because if I write talking to the book or to myself, my writing tends to be very "heady" -- focused on ideas and insights; whereas, as we shall stress, it is our feelings that we discern. I find when I write talking to the Lord, for example: "Lord, this hour was very difficult. I found myself distracted and restless, unable to center on you. But I tried to persevere, and in the last moment or two I felt your peace and your reassurance that the time was not wasted" - as I say, when I write talking to the Lord, the journal very naturally focuses on my feelings. He knows all my ideas and insights already. It is what I felt and experienced that is uniquely me and that comes into focus for me when I write to him.

I see three values of a good journal in a retreat. First of all, we all tend to be introspective, to be looking over our shoulder at ourselves when we are praying. We tend to ask, "Am I really praying?" or "Is this really God?" In other words, we turn away from the actual prayer experience in order to look at ourselves praying, and that is not good. The journal, I believe, can be a great help in avoiding that introspection during our time of prayer. When I am tempted to ask whether I am praying, whether this is really God, I can say: "No. There will be a time for that question after the prayer, when I sit down with the journal. It is better just to go ahead and pray as best I can and not be analyzing my prayer now."

The second value of the journal is this: if I have a director, or if I myself am attempting to see the unity of the whole retreat experience as I go along, the journal can help me not to lose sight of the forest because of the trees. A good retreat is like the weather; it changes suddenly and unpredictably, and when we have dark days we tend to forget that the sun ever shone. As St. John of the Cross says, referring especially to the dark night, "When there is consolation we feel it will last forever; and when there is desolation we believe God is gone forever." The journal can help us to see these individual ups and downs as parts of a total experience. For that reason also, I always suggest to retreatants that the last prayer period in each day be a repetition of the whole day, asking for the grace of unity. I suggest they not use some new scriptural passage but, rather, reread their journal for the whole day or for the whole time of the retreat up to that moment, asking always to see the unity of the total experience. I believe that in a good retreat the Lord has just one "message" for us. It is an exciting adventure to discover gradually, with the help of the journal and the daily repetition, what that message is.

The journal's third value is realized when we come to speak to the director, to share what has been happening in our prayer. Usually it is not good, I think, to show the journal to the director. If we do, we will be writing it for the director, whereas it should be between the retreatant and the Lord. We should not be writing with a view to impressing someone else. But it can be very helpful before meeting the director to read over the journal to see what we wish to share.