By The Reverend Stephen H. Wade
One summer some years ago, I traveled to Gloucester, Massachusetts on Cape Anne for a 30-day silent retreat with the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius Loyola. Friends who had done this retreat in the past were divided in their counsel: one said it would be a really long haul, and I had better choose my spiritual director carefully; another said it would be the best summer of my life; a photographer friend told me to bring along some cameras and lots of film, for the light on Cape Anne is world-famously beautiful.
I was apprehensive. Thirty days of silent prayer in an old stone retreat house on the Atlantic Ocean with about 30 other people whom I had never met before was daunting. True, I had a car and my cameras, so if I needed a retreat from my retreat, I could manage it. But still…
Cheering me on, coincidentally, was my daughter Susannah, who was doing an internship that summer with one of her professors at Wellesley College, just down the way in Boston. She was intrigued by what I was doing and pledged to come for a visit from time to time to see what I was up to.
I was “launched.”
On Susannah’s first visit, after I had been at it for a week or ten days, I offered a tour of the retreat house and grounds. I explained that the rules of the road were for silence to be kept at all times in the house — except at the daily evening liturgy — and that she and I could talk about it all once we were back outside. I showed her my accommodations in a small apartment upstairs in an old barn that was joined to the main house. I showed her the dining room, the kitchen, the several chapels, and the common room and entry way that became the main chapel for our evening liturgies. And of course, I showed her the breathtaking views of the Atlantic at the perimeter of the grounds with only a majestic stand of New England granite to protect us from it.
Once back outside, Susannah fairly gushed, “Dad, there’s a lot more going on in there than just silence. It is like the whole place is charged with some kind of energy. I could really feel it!”
“Just so,” I replied. The night before, in his homily, one of the Jesuits referred to this charged atmosphere as “a force field of energy,” stirred up in us and around us by all of our being in continuing silent prayer. Think of it maybe as a cleansing, purifying energy that makes us more permeable to the presence of God.
And then he told a story about his encounter with a workman there on the grounds who was cleaning up after a recent and memorable hurricane. The workman stopped him, “Excuse me, sir, is this some kind of monastery or holy place?”
The Jesuit replied, “Why yes, it is a house of prayer. Why do you ask?”
“Because,” said the workman, ‘it is like these tree trunks and boulders are moving themselves, with almost no effort from me. I am kind of spooked, and I don’t know whether I want to get as far away from this place as I possibly can or spend the rest of my life here.”
Indeed, “a force field of energy.”
In the broader context of the retreat, what this cleansing force field seems to do, in addition to making us more permeable to God, is beginning the retreat’s work of transformation in us, working the beginning of a shift in the horizons of our desires. By the end of the third week, when I had been with Jesus in the Gospels and this deepening force field, every day, when I had been guided through three weeks of the Ignatian contemplations and meditations, I found that I wanted only more of that. Nothing else. Like the workman moving the tree trunks and boulders outside, I wanted to spend the rest of my life right here—right here with Jesus, my loving brother, and the light and the compass for my way forward. The horizon of my desires had shifted.
Later that summer when I returned to my parish, it turned out there had been some visible transformation for me on this retreat as well. My parishioners asked things like “Where have you been?” and “What have you been doing?” They said things like “You’re different. You look different. Your preaching and speaking are different. Your behavior is different. What have you been doing?!” The retreat had changed my life.
And so, one good reason for doing an Ignatian directed retreat is that it can change your life. It can change what you desire and want in life. It can give you a closer and more intimate walk with your Lord and your God. And it can make you a happier, freer person because of it all.
The question then, is not why you should do an Ignatian directed retreat. The question is: What have you got to lose?
Probably just a few misdirected desires that you are tired of anyway.
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Learn more about the following Silent Directed Retreats at Bon Secours: