The Retreat

So… I took the train and made a three mile hike carrying my eight days worth of clothes etc down to the center. I had recently purchased a new bag so that I could fit one of my full sized swords in it. I thought training might be appropriate and having not had a chance yet to talk to my director I took the sword in case. It turned out that he encouraged my sword training and this was a form of meditation that provided a couple of insights useful to the retreat.

The center (http://www.campioncenter.org/index.htm) is a rather large building and is currently used primarily as a residence for aging or hospitalized Jesuits. When it was originally built it was a school for training novices to become Jesuit priests. It has a nice big chapel with a dome and a half dome in the middle front of the building. The grounds are quite large and are used by retreatants for meditative nature walks.

When I arrived the director’s secretary, a woman I had talked with trying to get set up with this retreat, took me up to my room. It was one of the old dorm rooms of the Jesuit school. Eventually I met my director Fr. Mattaliano and he scheduled to meet with me each morning at 10 am. Our morning meetings consisted of him asking how my meditations and prayers of the previous day went and me telling him as I felt it appropriate or useful to do so. We would then discuss the potential meanings and importance of the things I observed in my own thoughts and feelings. Then he would sort of assign me passages of scripture to read and a direction for meditating on them. He would also direct me to pray for what he called a grace, which in Mormonism we might call a spiritual gift. An example of the type of grace he would suggest praying for might be a deeper understanding of some aspect of God’s love in a certain context. He would of specify the aspect and context. Then I would try to do it and we would talk about it again.

I found this interesting and useful for a couple of reasons. First, we discussed things in my spiritual experience that I very seldom have talked about with other people. It was sort of like having someone else there to listen to my thoughts and reflect them back at me in ways that helped me to see what was going on with a bit more clarity than I could have accomplished on my own. In the Zen temple this is not something we got much chance to do as discussing things experienced in meditation was pretty discouraged. Why this is the case has something to do with sacredness but, I think there is more to it than I understand. I have experienced some difficulties in having discussions like this with people who are LDS too, I think particularly of my mission but at other times as well. Part of this I think has to do with a strange sort of cultural corruption of our faith where people are afraid to believe in taking instruction from the Holy Ghost. It’s sort of like a denial that we as common random individuals, “non-prophets,” might have interesting and important revelations. The other part of our difficulty may lie in not having much in the way of training or teaching on how to have these conversations. Not knowing some appropriate method, we may feel inordinate fear or hesitation to having these sorts of dialogues.

The second major benefit I found from having spiritual direction, as it is called, was to be directed. The way I know the scriptures is different from the way that he knows them. Of course he’s trained to do this stuff and has been through a formal and rigorous theological education but that’s not really what I’m referring to. The scriptures that have the most interest to me, that I know well, and the sorts of interpretations I’ve put on them are different than those of my director. So, when he hears about my meditations and assigns me passages, he is doing it from his background and experience. Because it is different from mine it offers me a new perspective on the issues at hand, or his suggested prayers and meditation offer me a new perspective on old scriptures. I found this to be valuable as well.

Now, some may wonder about the Jesuit aspect of this whole experience. Now because of my knowledge of St. Ignatius, the Exercises, the way that it seems Jesuits seem to have a certain thing for schools, education, and the sciences, as well as an evangelical function I have felt a certain kinship or relationship with them. To some degree I wondered if this trip might not further tempt me with the idea that I had played with a little of joining their order. Somewhat to my surprise it did exactly the opposite. Being surrounded by these men, who had so dedicated their lives to the service of God as they understood it, I realized that I could never do it. On the grounds there is a cemetery for Jesuit fathers that they suggest walking through as a sort of meditation where one can contemplate the number of people who have served as witnesses of Christ. However, this is not at all how it felt for me. The identical grave markers in perfect rows gave me a sense of extreme loneliness. These were all men whose lines had ended. They were not with their ancestors, they had no descendants. It was quite sad. As I saw them around the center and overheard them talking in the dining hall I had much the same impression: theirs was in many ways a life of loneliness, grandfathers with no grandchildren.

Now as for the content of my meditations… let us say that I feel the experience was a good one. I learned new things and sort of relearned things I’d forgotten. It has also been interesting spending these last few days in the wake of the retreat because I see with greater clarity the meanings of the things I derived from my meditations and by and large what I have to do about them. I found a lot of my vulnerability exposed to myself and certain of my strengths, things I depend on daily but don’t give much thought to. A greater appreciation of these things and a desire to grow in strengths by allowing myself to experience vulnerability may be a fruit of this experience.