From October 14 through 20, a small group of practitioners with lived experience of incarceration will gather at Anawim Bethany Retreat Center, in the wooded hills of central Pennsylvania, for a seven-day silent retreat that includes roughly three hours of Centering Prayer daily. The retreat is co-sponsored with COPOST, the small but mighty team of volunteers who organize Contemplative Outreach's prison outreach. Jennie K. Curtis, Rita Weick, and Patricia Hutchinson will be serving as retreat staff. 

Retreat allows for a rare stepping outside of one’s daily routine. It’s not simply a week away, but rather an opportunity for a “deep dive” into the practice, a time to prioritize one’s spiritual journey. It is also the first sustained experience of real quiet many of our participants have had in years, sometimes decades. After living in environments shaped by noise, vigilance, control, and constant interruption, the silence can be remarkably restorative.

Again and again, we have watched what happens when people are given enough safety, stillness, beauty, and unstructured time to begin listening inwardly. Something softens. Prayer deepens. Exhaustion rises to the surface. Grief, clarity, tenderness, joy — all of it has room to emerge. And alongside that inner unfolding, community begins to form in a different way, through shared presence.



These retreats are important because hunger for contemplative practice does not stop once a person comes home from prison. In many ways, the transition home can be when the practice is needed most.

To learn more about the 2026 retreat, click here.
To view the photo gallery from the 2025 retreat, click here.

We asked Rita recently what she pays attention to when we plan one of these weeks. She talked first about the location itself:

"Is it quiet — because the people on the retreat have had years of not a quiet environment? Is the food accommodating? Are there places to walk, so you have a sense of freedom and also beauty?"

And then she talked about agency, which we believe is a crucial part of the deeper architecture of the Centering Prayer Intensive retreats offered by PCF/Praestolari and COPOST. Each day, retreatants have choices: the yoga or bodywork session, or a long walk in the trees; a half-hour conversation with one of the staff, or another stretch of silence. The prayer sits are held in common, each person’s presence a key ingredient in the sacred container. One day is held as a hermit day with no videos and no scheduled talks at all. The schedule for the sits remains, but with the added invitation to do some of them on one’s own if so moved – “a retreat from the retreat.”

"Because that amount of freedom is offered," Rita said, "most of the people show up for everything. They really open up at a deep level because of the amount of silence, the agency they have, the amount of quiet they're experiencing. They can really dig deep and open up."

On the last morning, there is a final circle. Sometimes the person who has seemed most closed all week — "a closed book," as Rita put it — is the one whose sharing blows her socks off. "The prayer in silence under that circumstance forms community. And it is a total mystery, because nobody is talking."

Hear from Rita about the retreat experience here.

In this short video, participants from the 2025 Centering Prayer Retreat hosted by PCF/Praestolari and COPOST, reflect on what the experience meant to them. They speak about silence, belonging, friendship, and the rare opportunity to spend time in person with other contemplatives who understand the challenges of incarceration and reentry. Through shared practice and community, many found renewed hope, deeper connection, and a sense of being part of something larger than themselves.

Carla came home from prison in January of 2021, already a longtime meditator. Yoga and her own quiet practices had traveled with her into the dorm and back out again. What she hadn't yet found was Centering Prayer.

She came to it shortly after release, through a Quaker meeting in Lincoln, Nebraska, where people gather to sit together in silence for an hour at a time, week after week. The Quakers' silence felt familiar to her. Centering Prayer asked for something different. Her first response was that it was uncomfortable... and, she kept showing up anyway.

In this conversation, Carla shares what brought her to the practice and what has kept her there, including the slow work of learning to sit with whatever surfaces. She is part of Outside the Walls, the community of formerly incarcerated practitioners who gather weekly on Zoom to sit in the silence together.

Watch our conversation with Carla here.



If something in Carla's story, or in Rita's, or in the voices on the compilation is stirring for you, here are some ways you can help:

If the retreat is calling to you, or if you know someone who has been incarcerated, has an established practice, and may be ready for a week like this, please reach out.

Applications are open, and we would love to hear from you. Initial interest can be registered by filling out this form, after which one of the retreat staff will be in touch.

  

If you'd like to help send someone to the retreat, every gift this month goes directly toward the cost of getting our friends to Anawim. 

And prayer support of all forms is most welcome – for retreatants and support staff, both as we prepare and during the retreat – this form of accompaniment reaches further than we can measure.

Rita shared an image she traces back to Thomas Keating… that the Divine picks us up like a pencil when there is some work to do, writes for a while with us, and then sets us down again. A retreat like this one is, in some ways, a whole community of pencils being picked up at once. The people coming. The people praying for and with those who come. The people who have already come — Carla and so many others among them. The community sitting in silence together. The people giving, so that the week can happen at all.



Gratitude for sharing the journey with you – may we all be willing pencils, part of the restoration and healing that Love seeks always to write in new and creative ways, with our consent,

Centering Inside Newsletter

Centering Inside is our twice-yearly newsletter written for and sent directly to people living in locked facilities across the United States, offering reflections, teachings, and connection across the walls.

Locked Up and Free

Locked Up and Free is a pamphlet intended to be a hand of hope reaching out to those struggling under the weight of incarceration. It’s created by people who have “done time” themselves as well as by the friends and family of those incarcerated.

If you would like copies of Locked Up and Free to take inside one or more facilities, please fill out this form.