On Retreat in Canada

Retreat After Devastation

A typical Ignatian-style retreat is made in silence, and includes a daily conversation with a spiritual director who listens to what you have to say, makes a few comments or asks a few questions designed to help you deepen your experience of prayer during the week, and then suggests some material for you to pray with over the course of the next 24 hours.

Your director might suggest just about anything ~ art, music, poetry, other reading, pretty much any kind of prayer or contemplation at all ~ but the hallmark Ignatian form of prayer involves imaginative interaction with Scripture.

Last year I met with my director late in the morning and we agreed to meet again before supper, since we were just getting started and only had five days. He suggested a few passages of Scripture for me, passages which I'm sure he uses all the time to help someone start a retreat.

When I returned late that afternoon and described my day, he asked, "Why do you think it is that no matter what text you encounter, everything that emerges is about Famous Giant Hospital (where I had just completed the summer chaplaincy program)?"

I looked at him and said, surprised by my discovery, "Because I have been completely traumatized by my summer there."

We talked a bit more and he suggested some more readings, but told me to lay off until the next day. "This has been a little intense," he said "Take a complete break tonight."

Our son died during the night, and I found out the next afternoon and went home that evening.

Words like trauma and intense hardly describe the subsequent eleven months.

And so day after tomorrow I am off for another weeklong retreat. Not to last year's place ~ I can't imagine ever returning there ~ but to Guelph, where I went two years ago.

"What do you desire from this week?" Always one of the first questions.

I have no idea.

Happiness in Any Circumstance

Like many of you, I receive a daily reading from Inward/Outward, a ministry of the amazing Church of the Saviour in Washington, D.C. When I saw today's caption, I groaned ~ please not, on my birthday, someone trying to tell me to make the best of things.

And then I saw the name of the writer and knew how wrong I was. Alfred Delp was a Jesuit priest imprisoned and executed for his resistance to the Nazis ~ one of those people who has the right to speak to any situation.

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It does happen, even under these circumstances, that every now and then my whole being is flooded with pulsating life and my heart can scarcely contain the delirious joy there is in it. Suddenly, without any cause that I can perceive, without knowing why or by what right, my spirits soar again and there is not a doubt in my mind that all the promises hold good.... Outwardly nothing is changed. The hopelessness of the situation remains only too obvious; yet one can face it undismayed. One is content to leave everything in God's hands. And that is the whole point. Happiness in this life is inextricably mixed with God. Fellow creatures can be the means of giving us much pleasure and of creating conditions which are comfortable and delightful, but the success of this depends upon the extent to which the recipient is capable of recognizing the good and accepting it. And even this capacity is dependent on our relationship with God.

~ Father Alfred Delp, S.J.

How Not To Do Your Job

This morning I had to make a telephone call about a bureaucratic matter relating to our son's death. There was no mystery about who I was or why I was calling: I am the mother and estate administrator of a son who is dead, and this matter needs to be addressed on his behalf.

The young lady on the other end said she had the matter in her tickler file for follow-up at the end of the week.

I asked whether she might follow up today, the end of the week being five days away and meaning, no doubt, at least another week's delay.

She repeated that her follow-up is scheduled for the the of the week.

I suggested rather more strongly that a two-sentence email this morning would be in order.

"I have other things to do," she said.

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I couldn't count how many times in the past year I have thought that we should perhaps engage in every business encounter as if it were a pastoral matter. I have been the beneficiary of a ridiculous number of mishandled, carelessly handled, or not handled matters. And of course, unlike this morning's exchange, the person who has made the mistake or created the delay or forgotten the task altogether seldom knows that he or she is working with someone trying to accomplish something under the most stressful and painful circumstances possible. But maybe we should always assume that the person we are attempting to serve is, in fact, in some distress, and that anything we could do to help might, completely unbeknownst to us, ease a difficult situation.

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And , oh yeah, I left a message with the young lady's supervisor. I did not swear and I did not raise my voice, and she did not return the call.

Needless to say, I have not been studying for my Hebrew final.

Today's Find: Dual Thinking

I am in the local college library studying for my Hebrew final and reading and playing online when I need a break. I need many breaks.

From Zorba the Greek, found in Love is Stronger than Death by Peter Kreeft:

Zorba: Why do the young die? Why does anybody die, tell me?

Scholar: I don't know.

Zorba: What's the use of all your damn books? If they don't tell you that, what the hell do they tell you?

Scholar: They tell me about the agony of [those] who can't answer questions like yours.

France: Noelle!

I started a little series some posts back on our son's great gift of France to us via his 11th grade year spent there. If I can get some help from The Lovely Daughter later, I'll try to scan in some photos. In the meantime:

Of course, the rest of us went to France for Christmas. We spent the first few days in Rennes, where our son lived with his wonderful family: Marithe, his French mother, her friend, and her two sons, one a couple of years older and one a couple of years younger than Chicago Son. Marithe is a nursing home administrator and had to work on Christmas Day, but she welcomed us on Christmas Eve with an extraordinary meal that went on for hours. It was such a joyful and festive evening: reunited with our son after three months, meeting his family and enjoying an evening of food and wine and gifts Francais-style, all of us so delighted to meet one another and laughing over our limited communication capacities. Geoff, his mother's companion, and Thomas, the oldest son, were both excellent English speakers, and Chicago Son could manage quite well in French by that time, so all was not lost.

After a few days in Rennes, which gave us a chance to get to know Chicago Son's family and city a bit and visit the coast of Normandy, we headed for Paris. Three highlights of that trip:

Chartres, of course. Although we had rented a car to travel in Brittany, we took the train to Paris and then, still uncertain about our movements, took a day long bus tour to Chartres. Anyone who has read much of my other blog knows that I fell in love with the city as soon as we began to ride through its narrow streets and with the cathedral as soon as it loomed before us. I had a moment of apprehension ~ it was absolutely freezing in France that holiday season, with temperatures seldom out of the teens, and it suddenly occurred to me, sitting in the toasty coach-style tourist bus, that an 800-year-old building was unlikely to feature central heat. Sure enough ~ we spent a very cold few hours there, but they were enough to lure us back a few years later (in the summer!).

New Year's Eve on the Champs Elysees. I don't much care for crowds and you couldn't get me to Times Square on New Year's Eve for anything. I would have been happy with a tiny cafe in a deserted neighborhood. But everyone else wanted to go outwhere the action was that night and I figured, What are the chances of ever again celebrating New Year's in Paris? What incredible fun we had! I don't know how many hundreds of thousands (literally!) of people from all over the world crowd the Champs Elysees on New Year's Eve, many of them carrying freely-flowing champagne, but it was really, really, wonderful! (And very, very cold!) A bank of clouds settled in around the top of the Eiffel Tower at about 11:55, so we couldn't see the fireworks at midnight, but it didn't matter. It was completely exhilarating to be out partying with all those people who had found their way to such an extraordinary spot.

And a small memory, one of many. We stayed here, which has become our favorite Paris hotel. A couple of doors down is a creperie, and it took us about five seconds to discover its chocolate crepes, which became standard fare for us as we were left or returned from our various jaunts through Paris. When my husband and I were back two summers ago, we smiled immediately at the thought of our three teenaged children dashing out the door to the creperie window in the mornings.

We were so incredibly fortunate to have those ten days all together in France.

Chipping Sparrow

I did TWO thee-mile walks today. Hebrew makes me restless and so, after my three hour class and one and one-half hour tutoring session, I went for a walk and got rained on and then, before dinner, unable to sit still and study, I grabbed my notes and retraced my steps.

I was alternating between trying to grasp the text (carrying a xeroxed copy covered with a plethora of tiny handwritten notes) and pondering the questions that plague me these days. Hebrew must be memorized, but one cannot lose a child to suicide in the middle of seminary and not have one's concept and dreams of ministry utterly changed. The constant dualism of my train of what passes for thought.

And then I saw this little bird in someone's yard and turned my attention to it. The words "chipping sparrow" slowly emerged from the very dim recesses of my very much fogged and disabled mind. A mile or so later and another one appeared at the reservoir around which I walk. Chipping sparrows. Birds that in another lifetime I would have noted or checked off on a spring migration list.

Who was that woman? It seems so odd to me, that there are still chipping sparrows and that I still notice.