In Pennsylvania, a Quick Shot of Peace, on a Budget

I am neither Catholic nor anything in particular, but I yearned for a snippet of the no-frills spiritual solitude. The Jesuits, I’d read, were the guys to go to concerning such matters. Indeed, to engage in periods of quiet contemplation with a full-stop break from everyday life was central to the philosophy of the Jesuit founder Ignatius of Loyola (1491-1556). It still is. Today, some 200 Jesuits are engaged full time in directing spiritual retreats at more than 20 centers in the United States.

But there were other reasons I’d opted for the Jesuit Center in Wernserville over, say, a spa vacation, yoga retreat or vision quest. For one thing, the center advertised an Arcadian setting and drivable proximity from my home in Brooklyn. For another, the cost was $560 for five days, including room, board and a daily hourlong conversation with a spiritual director, who would escort me through Scripture-based prayer and meditation.

Moreover, the more luxe-sounding excursions I’d considered often seemed to involve a time commitment of a week or more, along with New Age locution that somehow did not sit right. A solo quest during which animal “spirit guides” could conceivably rip out my pancreas after the sweat lodge? No.

But while I’d had the notion that it would be tough to keep quiet for five days, I realized, on arrival, that I had not developed a textured sense of what I was getting into. The facility itself, an English Renaissance-style building constructed in the late 1920s, was gigantic and dark — attributes intensified by the resident Jesuits’ ubiquitously posted wish to keep the light bills low. Fantasies of sequestered holy men tending to herb gardens and homemade beer stills were combusted by industrial platters of green beans and pigs-in-blankets provided by Sodexo, the integrated food and facilities management services behemoth.

But there was also an ineffable sphinxiness about the place. For example, I got there an hour and a half late the first night, and there was no one to tell me where to go or what I should be doing. The only signpost was a list of names and room numbers tacked to a corkboard, so I found mine and rollerbagged down the building’s spooky, caliginous hallways until I tracked down my assigned spot. I creaked open the lockless door and found a jumbo crucifix resting on the bed pillow. If Stanley Kubrick had found this place, he’d never have shot a movie anywhere else.

And there were crucifixes everywhere. It’s a Jesuit center. But as someone not only dimwitted enough not to have anticipated a lot of crucifixes at a Jesuit center, but one also whose main visual encounter with crucifixes was watching “The Exorcist,” I found it surprisingly tricky at first to suppress the feeling that blood was going to start gushing down the walls. This was not an apprehension my fellow retreatants appeared to share. Mostly women my mother’s age or older, and to my eye, clearly devout and knowledgeable, they were not talk spoilers. In fact virtually no one made eye contact.

But by the end of my five days, I’d come to see my room as my sanctum sanctorum. I would regard crucifixes as heralds of human suffering and spiritual light. And I’d come to feel a strange closeness with my silent companions. All this was chaperoned by my spiritual director, Sister Barbara Singer.

I met Sister Barbara at 1:15 p.m. my first full day in a tiny, sunlit office on the building’s third floor. An upbeat grandmotherly woman with a plumose crown of lovely white hair, Sister Barbara calmly invited me to sit down across from her and asked me to tell her what had brought me there.

I told her about my stress-related illnesses, which had hospitalized me twice earlier that year; about my sparkly-minded children; about watching my Lear-like father die in front of me; about my divorce, subsequent remarriage and unexpected conception of my son; about my dip into poverty; my husband’s unemployment; my darkest fears; of aloneness.

Sister Barbara listened closely and then said, “What I hear you saying, Susan, is that you feel forsaken.”

Not dealing with abandonment issues: forsaken. Sister Barbara did not then press me to process my relationship with, say, my mother or to consider that I should “own” my feelings.

View the original article here