The Recycling Retreat is one of the most intense and important moments of personal and community training. It is a voluntary, positive and joyful retreat consisting of daily activities to meet God face to face, so that He can reorient and revive the members of the Community of Life and Covenant. For Covenant members, the 10-day retreat amounts to more than 50% of their yearly training.
“Each member takes part in a 10-day annual Recycling offered by the Community” (ECCS, 28)
The first Recycling Retreat took place in 1993 and was inspired by the founder, Moysés Azevedo, to bring the members of the Community, on an annual retreat of 10 days, to ask God for the grace of renewal of professional, ecclesial, doctrinal and fraternal life. The Community was starting to grow faster and the apostolic commitments made the time for spiritual, intellectual and community formation insufficient.
Recycling every day of the retreat
We have mornings of silence, meditation, and prayer, always reviewing and updating aspects of the vocational life; the afternoons are for the study of the Church’s documents and theological, doctrinal and vocational formation; and the nights are dedicated to the experience and strengthening of the fraternity.
How is a theme chosen?
The Shalom Community Formation Assistance Committee is responsible for the content and preaching of the Retreat, and each year the three fundamental aspects of vocation as prayer, apostolate, and fraternity are deepened in view of the growth of the profound experience of the Charism. Self-knowledge, evangelical radicalism, evangelization, missionary and other states of life, Spousal Love and The New Work have been some of the themes already dealt with during the Recycling.