By Katie Burke, Director of Content and Community for the Cloisters Ignatian Prayer App
Retreats at the Cloisters are life-changing. As a busy mom of four, my body craves the silence, that uninterrupted time with the Lord and a weekend of someone feeding me for once, physically and spiritually. But a year is a long time, and the further I get from my weekend, the more difficult it is to hand my heart, will, and worries to God in that quiet, peaceful openness.
Maybe you have felt this way before.
While on retreat, there is no one I would rather talk to than Jesus, prayer becomes second nature, and the Scriptures are at hand and frequently reached for. When I return home, the desire to be close to Him remains, but life makes it more challenging to create a quiet moment, to raise my heart and mind to Christ, to keep an ear to the Spirit’s promptings.
This gap is one of the reasons we created the Cloisters Ignatian Prayer app. Our desire is to help reconnect you with those retreat moments, between your annual retreats, while you are on standby for an up-coming weekend, or if there ever comes a time that circumstances are such that you can’t get away on retreat.
In the Cloisters Ignatian Prayer app, you will find the full Ignatian experience, whether you want to revisit the retreat from start to finish, watching all eleven lessons, or if you prefer to let the Lord lead you to individual topics He wants you to hear. The retreat and content library are full of resources to guide you in the Spiritual Exercises when an in-person retreat is not available. The app’s content is provided by some of the Cloisters’ favorite Jesuits, including Fr. Robert Kroll, Fr. Joe Laramie, Fr. Aaron Pidel, and Fr. Michael Rossman, plus local leaders, like Fr. Andrew Roza and Alice Nahas. Beyond retreat talks and videos, our resource library also includes remastered episodes of Fulton Sheen’s classic TV show, an immersive reflection on the Stations of the Cross filmed on site in Gretna, and a guided daily Examen to help you keep Ignatian practices in place every day.
St. Ignatius encourages us to make our Examen daily as a tool for discernment and detecting God’s presence in our lives. In the Cloisters app, the Examen is intended for the end of your day, and it gives you space to write and reflect, allowing you to memorialize the work the Lord is doing and look back on it at a later date.
While Cloisters Ignatian Prayer can put St. Ignatius’ tools in your hand, ready and available, we unfortunately cannot make silence for you at home. In order to help the Ignatian method fit into your life as seamlessly as possible, we did include an easy pause feature, and you can always start and stop to come back to the silence when you have a moment.
Full access to Cloisters Ignatian Prayer is subscription based – $8 per month or $60 per year ($5 per month), and all of the proceeds support on-going operations at The Cloisters on the Platte. We invite you to give it a try the next time you’re wishing your retreat date was here.
Overview:
- App version 2.0.1
- Required OS: iOS 15.1 or later, Android 7.0 and up
- Also available at cloistersignatianprayer.org
- First lesson is free when you sign up
- $8/month or $60/year
- Full access subscription includes
- Full Ignatian retreat
- Resource library with additional talks
- Fulton Sheen episodes
- Stations of the Cross meditation
- Daily Examen
- Cancel any time
- Proceeds benefit The Cloisters on the Platte