Restorative Day

I need to make a regular habit of taking some retreat time!

 

I've had a lovely day ~ a long walk, a good read of a big chunk of David Brooks' book on character, some housework and errands, listening (twice) to Krista Tippet's interview with John O'Donohue, an episode of Doc Martin, some music and some coloring and some journaling, and a visit with a good friend.

 

The Little Stray Cat now has a straw bed, I have some lovely new stuff in my head for my church and myself, and I am feeling quite mellow.  I really did need to break the cycle of roiling, obsessive thoughts that had nearly taken over my life these last few months.   I am hopeful tonight about the restoration of my contemplative life, and what I hope will be its salutary effect on everyone I live and work with.

 

 

 

Retreat

One day.  Tomorrow.

 

I had some plans to get away to Chautauqua for a day (John Carroll, where I teach, is on a long week-end, so no class), but I've abandoned those. And I don't think the weather is going to cooperate as hoped for per the image above, so . . . an indoor retreat at home. 

 

I am unraveling here. Yesterday I had a flat tire way over on the other side of Cleveland.  This morning the tire store came up with ideas for $1,200 of repairs beyond the free tire replacement.  (Which were ultimately deemed  unnecessary, but not before I had completely flipped out.)  This after $$$ of repairs during the last couple of months, and at the same time that the furnace guy was at my house installing a new panel, whatever that is ~ also not inexpensive. 

 

At church, the day care director's anxiety over the Presbytery's indecision about its continued tenancy is spilling outward.  There was correspondence about the closing to which to attend, and food gone bad to throw out, and two Bible studies to lead.  I wrote most of my sermon at 7:00 am because I was up, so why not? . . . after having been wide awake at midnight when I realized that I had left the thing that covers the spare tire in the trunk behind at the gas station where someone had kindly changed my tire.  (Got that?)

 

And then there is this stray cat I have been feeding for more than two weeks.  I was freezing last night in our furnace-free house, so I was also awake worrying about her. Hoping that she makes it until her date with the shelter, and hoping that then she can be found.

 

Just too much. 

 

I did tell my assistant today that as I was getting out of my car at church, I was thinking that I should get back in and start driving.  I could call her from wherever I was at about 6:00 p.m. ~ Wisconsin, maybe?

 

But I didn't do it. 

 

So: A day.  Tomorrow.

 

On Retreat Back in April

For the past several years, I've made a silent retreat of several days, usually at the rural Jesuit Center in Wernersville PA.  Last summer, still pastoring at Tiny Rural Church, I decided that I'd like to make my next retreat in a somewhat more populated locale.  I started thinking about whom I knew, in person or by reputation, in places like New York and Boston, and then remembered that Spiritual Director Emeritus is at Georgetown!  Although my plans for a winter retreat were derailed by the broken ankle episode, I did get there in April.  For whatever reason, I've been thinking about that week today, and so here is my usual pictorial replay:

 I stayed at the Jesuit Residence (the JesRes) on campus, an elegant building in which an incredibly hospitable and kind community of rather amazing men resides.  I stayed mostly to myself, and they all honored my retreat time, but it was a lot of fun to look around at meals and recognize faces from book jacket photographs.  (I think I was probably the only Presbyterian in the building all week, and one of very few women.  Some weeks my life is more unusual than others.) 

 

My car, sadly, spent several days and a lot of money on its own retreat a local service station.  It had started to sputter as I approached the campus, and the next day was utterly silent and still.  Some kind of transmission line thing.

The first couple of days it was really warm, so I stayed outside as much as possible.

 

Early morning prayer view:

 

 

 I spent a lot of time curled up with my foot elevated and wrapped in my ice pack, probably because I persisted in exploring the campus at least a little bit.

 

History ~

 

 

Trinity Chapel Courtyard ~

 

 

My story ~

 

 

Crypt chapel ~

 

 

Dahlgren Chapel ~

 

 

Iggy, of course ~

 

Michelle and her husband came down from Bryn Mawr for a production in which their son was involved and stopped by for a late night visit:

 

And a certain spiritual director refused to cooperate for a Serious and Spiritual Selfie.

 

It's difficult to articulate the results of a week of intensive and silent prayer ~ in this case, relaxed and only relatively silent.  I have a sense, though, that the results of that retreat are starting  to seep into my daily ministry and to sort themselves into a slight and much needed alteration of perspective.

 

I first became acquainted with a Christ Pantocrator icon at Mount Angel Abbey in Oregon.   It probably means something that I ran into another one on the other side of the country during a week that might turn out to have been somewhat significant.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ten Years?

Yep, I've been blogging for ten years.

And I think I've about exhausted what I have to say, at least for the time being.

During those ten years, one of my three children finished high school, they all finished college, one died, and two earned graduate degrees.

I've been to Iona and Paris, the Pacific Northwest (multiple times, thanks to a college student), canoeing in Canada, lobbying in Columbus and Washington, D.C., and up and down the Atlantic seaboard.

I was diagnosed with breast cancer and broke my ankle.

I completed seminary and a certificate in spiritual direction, was ordained to ministry, taught some college classes, and have served two churches as pastor.

I'm, just back from a much needed week of silence and spiritual direction at Georgetown University, where I stayed in the Jesuit Community's residence, did a disappointingly small bit of exploration (that ankle!), dealt with a car breakdown, and read a lot of Brian Doyle.  (How have I not read all of his books before ???)

Mostly I stretched luxuriously into prayer as my cat stretches across the bed, sinking into a fleece blanket, retracting her claws, and closing her eyes.

 

At least twice on my retreat, deep into the contemplation of passages of scripture, I related to my spiritual director what seemed to me to be striking insights, and he told me to look into what the early church fathers had to say about them when I got home.

 

I have nothing original whatever to offer! ~ be it on the church, bereavement, ministry, parenting, suicide, prayer, or any of the other topics which have absorbed me this past decade.

 

I have concluded that I am in need of much more silence in my life, much more time for listening and reading and absorbing. 

 

So . . .  if you've been reading, thank you.  If you've been commenting, thank you even more.  I might return, someday ~ but for now, I think that my online presence will be a small and quiet one.

AMDG.





Image: Holy Trinity Church near the Georgetown University Campus.

Moving Into Retreat Mode

"To go on retreat" can mean just about anything.

 

Corporate retreats, leadership retreats, new vision retreats, team-building retreats . . .

In much of my church life, it has meant to take a week-end's detour to a somewhat remote location for a couple of days of group worship, conversation, music, and dining, with occasional long walks tossed in.

A group from my home church made a fairly silent retreat years ago under the leadership of two women from Church of the Savior in D.C.   We did learn a lot about the inward/outward approach to the spiritual life, but my favorite parts were silently listing on the group white board the spring migrant birds I was watching, taking a solo canoe trip around and around a small pond, and walking the labyrinth under a full moon sometime past midnight.

 

Some years ago, making a retreat came to mean making the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius, which I did in the daily life form over the course of a year.  As the year progressed, the silence became something I sought greedily more and more.  On week-ends that spring, I would disappear for hours, walking the cemetery and the Little Lakes, immersed in my newfound contemplative life. 

 

Since then, I've made several solitary silent retreats at various Jesuit centers, places where I could be assured of thoughtful daily spiritual direction and surrounded by people who "get" the need for pervasive silence.  Three of those retreats stand out.  The first, my very first silent retreat, at the Jesuit center in Guelph, Ontario. A bit of an incongruous week, as I was out in late summer nature all day, every day, soaked in Ignatian prayer and preparing for seminary to start week later, and yet engaged in a bit of a struggle with a spiritual director who could not get her mind around an Ignatian Presbyterian person.  I never did figure out what bothered her so much. 

 

The second, at Wernersville in eastern Pennsylvania, two-plus years after Josh died.  Again, a week almost entirely out-of-doors, that time as the leaves were changing, and a week of grappling with grief in ways that made it possible to inch forward over the next months.

 

And the third, in between: the retreat that wasn't. The retreat in Michigan at which I got the call that Josh had died.

 

This year, after three or four consecutive years at Wernersville, I decided to try something different.  Feeling so isolated out in Small Rural Church, I started to wonder who I knew, or knew of, who might direct me in a retreat in a city. I started thinking my way up and down both coasts ~ and then realized that Spiritual Director Emeritus, my guide through the Exercises, is at Georgetown.  We have continued to correspond, and he knows a lot about what you might call the spirituality of leadership, which is a huge issue for me these days.  And at Georgetown there will be lots of people! And so we worked out a retreat week for the beginning of February.  Which obviously did not happen, to my most miserable disappointment.

 

But five weeks from today, barring further disaster, it will.  The timing could not, actually, be better.  After the isolation of the last two months, I can hardly wait for the liveliness of a university community.  I plan on a lot of silence, but there will be concerts, I'm sure, and some lectures, and lots of people out and about.  I don't have to talk to anyone, but I will be surrounded by a microcosm of The World.  And given the struggles of my new small church,  everyone stands to benefit from a pastor's week of prayer and perhaps (who knows?) even direct attentiveness to leadership matters.

 

I have to laugh when I think of my Guelph director: How can you possibly combine Ignatian spirituality and Presbyterian theology?  I'm going to spend a week at the Jesuit residence at Georgetown on precisely that continuing adventure.  In April.  Here's hoping for a more-rather-than-less healed ankle and for the beginnings of Spring!

 

Out and About ~ Oops!

The first time I ever made an eight-day silent retreat, I started to get restless around the fourth day. 

 

"Isn't it about time for a movie night?" I asked my director.  "Couldn't we all get together for some popcorn and a film and some conversation?"

 

She was a humorless woman, and she gave me a horrified look as she said, "No!"

 

"Just kidding," I said.

 

This morning I forgot all about my internet sabbatical, and posted a few things on FB.  I've noticed many posts, on FB and in blogs, on which I've wanted to comment, but I've restrained myself.  Such a habit, though!  Open laptop and start talking!

 

Going back to my bunker now.

Into the Silent Land Revisted

Martin Laird, O.S.A., journeyed to Wernersville last week-end to lead a two-day contemplative prayer retreat ~ for me, the retreat within a retreat.  Ninety people, probably all of them familiar with his books, Into the Silent Land and A Sunlit Absence, showed up to listen to his presentations and to spend time in silence with one another.

 

(Michelle and I spent some months awhile ago blogging back and forth about Into the Silent Land; those posts remain linked in my bar above.  I've read A Sunlit Absence as well and, to tell the truth, I couldn't make head nor tail of it.  I will probably give it another try soon.)

 

I thought I'd offer just a very few vignettes from the presentations, and explore them in more detail later, as I sort through my own prayer and reactions. I'm using quotation marks even though these are not verbatim quotations; they're close enough, and I want to indicate that the source is Martin Laird rather than myself.

 

*****

 

"Inner silence constitutes inner spaciousness."

 

"In our spiritual lives, we are like someone fishing for minnows from the back of a whale ~ sitting on the greatest catch of all, and yet satisfied with something puny."

 

"You will know that you are in the countryside of prayer when you experience joy and reverence at the same time." (That one comes from Evagrius rather than from Marty Laird.)

 

"The purpose of the Christian life is to open the eye of the heart, where God may be known." (That was one of Augustine's contributions.)

 

"In the practice of contemplative prayer, we move away from the chatter of discursive prayer in our heads in which, no matter how dreadful the narrative, we always have the starring role."  (A Laird riff on Evagrius, which I found hilarious, and oh-so-true!)

 

*****

 

As you might be able to tell, the presentations were divided roughly into material on the history of Christian contemplation and reflections on its actual practice.  Marty Laird is the master of metaphor, and listening to his measured, unhurried  observations is itself an exercise in contemplative prayer.

 

I've studied a lot of the material he presented and I'm somewhat familiar with the development of contemplative prayer in the Christian tradition.  (And even in my Presbyterian seminary, we were offered a tinge of an introduction to the desert fathers and mothers in the context of our church history sequence ~ a linear and factual introduction, not an invitation into the spirituality of the desert by someone who had himself delved deeply into its pathways.)  But to hear a master of the tradition, someone who has spent his life exploring its nooks and crannies, bring it to life is to be yourself immersed, however briefly, into that sea of prayer.

 

*****

 

We do, in reality, mostly relax in our beach chairs on top of the whale.

Retreat Lunch

Dramatis personae:  Bill, S.J. - Jesuit of fifty-plus years who has journeyed with me for the past three, and Me - Presbyterian pastor of less than two years, on a road and traveling, traveling, traveling, looking for something; what can it be?  (Yes, Joni Mitchell.)

 

Setting: Dining room, last day.

 

 

 

Bill, munching on salad:

Aren't you Protestants the ones who are supposed to be all about grace?

This One's For Karen EAST (No Sense of Direction!)

A day at Wernersville:

 

 

 

 

Retreat Pondering

While I was on retreat, the following poem by Veronica A. Shoffstall popped up on People for Others.  I commented that it might well be re-titled "Retreat at Wernersville.

 

 

 

After a while you learn the subtle difference between
holding a hand and chaining a soul,
And you learn that love doesn't mean learning and
company doesn't mean security,
And you begin to learn that kisses aren't contracts
and presents aren't promises,
And you begin to accept your  defeat with your head
up and your eyes open, with the grace of an adult,
not the grief of a child,
And you learn to build all your roads on today
because tomorrow's ground is too uncertain for
plans.
After a while you learn that even sunshine burns if
you get too much.
So you plant your own garden and decorate your own
soul, instead of waiting for someone else to bring you
flowers.
And you learn that you really can endure...
That you really are strong,
And you really do have worth.

 

 

 

I would say that there's a Part II in this for me, which I'll post in a couple of days.

Retreat: Calm Before Storm

No desk at which I have ever worked looks anything like this five minutes after I've gotten started.   I took this photograph of my desk at Wernersville after I had cleaned up one evening ~  as false evidence of a clear and thoughtfully engaged mind.

 

Journal collage page on the right: I spent a lot of time over the first few days on Matthew 14:22-33.  You might like to try that sometime.


 

Spa Week at Wernersville . . . Not!

So here's what I did on retreat:

I walked 3-4 miles every day.  Unfortunately, the retreat center sits atop a hill, so every walk, no matter the route, proceeds down and then returns up.   

I sat in the Adirondack chairs in the sun as much as possible.

I cut out pictures and made collages, and colored in lots of Celtic patterns ~ a methodically and rhythmically prayerful way of spending time.  (I have been so very, very sick of words of late, and so I took a huge bag of art supplies with me.)

I went to daily mass. Since I was there during a "nonofficial" retreat time, there were only a few people at the liturgy each morning. Once I looked around and thought, Hmm, six Jesuits and me.  Interesting crowd.  (And then a few staff members showed up.)

I got to meet George Aschenbrenner, S.J.  "You're the guy who taught us all to pray the examen!" I exclaimed, when I stopped him in the hallway to introduce myself.  "Well, the Holy Spirit had something to do with that," he responded.  I told him that I am a Presbyterian pastor and an Ignatian spiritual director.  "There seem to be more and more of those," he reflected.

I met with my spiritual director every day, and pondered and wondered and prayed with the observations he made.  Those are the times when it becomes most apparent that a silent retreat is not for the faint-of-heart, or for those dreaming of a relaxing spa day.  (In the summertime, I often sit in the Adirondack chairs in the afternoon sun and paint my toenails, but even then: tough stuff going on.)

I did follow the Boston Marathon case to some extent.  More than I should have ( iPhones represent a terrible temptation), but far, far less than I would have had I been home.

I was struck, as our small group gathered for mass the day after the marathon, by the awesome faithfulness of quiet Christian witness: a few people who considered that the most important thing they could do in the face of mind-bending violence and horror would be to spend half an hour celebrating a liturgy.

More on the week-end retreat-within-a-retreat later.


 

Just Ahead

Tomorrow morning:

The Monthly Pancake Breakfast at my church.  A lot of people from the surrounding area come.   It will be busy and crowded and noisy.

Tomorrow evening:

The Tenth Anniversary Celebration of the Ignatian Spirituality Institute, where I did my spiritual direction training.  In a moment of weakness some months ago, I agreed to host the speech-ifying part.  Since someone from each of the ten classes will be saying something, I'm going to talk about Ignatian repetition in prayer.  I also have one joke, because I was instructed to be funny.  Jokes are not my thing; usually I cannot remember them for more than about a second.  But this one made me laugh.  Let's hope I can remember it for another twenty-four hours.

Sunday:

A complete and total day off.  With some laundry and packing.  Because . . .

Monday morning:

A drive to Pittsburgh for the seminary Taize' service and visits and lunch with professors and

Monday afternoon:

Keep driving until I reach Wernersville for dinner, a meeting with the lovely man who's been my director there for now the fourth time, and

Silence begins.

In my head, I am already there!



Image: Wernersville Jesuit Center, October 2010

Kicking Back (Friday Five)

Pat is way out west in one of my favorite places, the Tetons, asking about our plans for Easter Sabbaths.  Only ten more days! . . .  and I am off to the Wernersville Jesuit Center west of Philly for a week-plus silent retreat.  This will be a bit different than the past few times I've been there; I'll be between regularly scheduled retreats, so there won't be the usual forty or so people eating in silence and wandering around in solitude together.  I have no idea who will be there, but people do pop in and out for a day or a few days at a time.  Given this year's cold, I don't suppose that the grounds will have burst into bloom yet (I took the photo last April), but it will still be wonderful to settle into my small room in a massive building in which silence is the first language.

 

Another difference: I'll be making a retreat within a retreat, as Marty Laird, O.S.A, will be presenting a retreat over the week-end.  Here's the description:

 

INTO A SILENT LAND: A Contemplative Prayer Intensive
April 19-21, 2013
Martin Laird, O.S.A.

 

This silent retreat will feature sitting in silent prayer together as a way to affirm and deepen the life of contemplative prayer which most of us practice alone in the course of our daily lives.   Apart from times dedicated to sitting in silence together, Martin Laird will focus his conferences on some of the noble failures and encouraging defeats that we all face, like all the saints and sages, as we release into the God who is already shining out our eyes.  While praying and eating together in silence will keynote this retreat, there will also be time for solitary prayer and walks in nature.

 

Martin Laird, O.S.A., Ph.D., has studied Early Church thought and spirituality in Rome, London, and Oxford.  Since 1998 he has taught at Villanova University.  He is the translator or author of numerous books and articles, including two highly acclaimed books on the practice of contemplation:  Into the Silent Land and A Sunlit Absence: Silence, Awareness and Contemplation (each from Oxford University Press). For many years he has lectured and led retreats throughout the United States, Ireland, and Great Britain.

 

*****

 

Michelle and I spent some time awhile ago writing back and forth about Into the Silent Land (the posts are linked in the bar above).  I am SO excited for this opportunity to sink into even deeper silence and to learn and pray with a group of similarly-inclined folks.

 

*****

 

Now, if everything at church remains on an even keel for the next ten days . . .       . 

 

 

 

 

 

Pictures, Misc.

This past week-end it was my delight and privilege to lead a women's Lenten retreat in Dearborn MI, put together by the pastors of (left to right, me in black) Baptist, Lutheran, and Episcopal congregations for their members.  They all did such a beautiful job of pulling everything together and leading us in worship; I'm hoping the retreat was worthwhile for the

women who showed up. 

Looking at some other old photos I've recently put on CDs.  Josh graduated from Chicago in March of 2007 and he and I made a little celebratory trip to the Virginia shore, replaying a family vacation of many, many years previous.  I had always hoped that we would all return together and, as I look at this photo, I think of that quote that periodically makes the rounds: The problem is, you always think that you have time.  Thank God we made time for this ~ even if it was cold and windy all week, we spent a wonderful week together riding bikes through the wildlife refuge and walking the beach and eating seafood and

talking things over.

 

*****

 

Life mostly unbloggable these days.  Guess there will be photos instead. 

Busy Person's Retreat

I'm at The College of Wooster this morning, where I'll spend a few hours for each of the next four days helping to direct a Busy Person's Retreat.  (That's last year's FB page, but you'll get the idea.)  We had our orientation last night, so at the moment I'm curled under my blankets at the lovely Black Squirrel Inn  ~ it's 12 degrees out there!

 

What a Busy Person's Retreat?  These opportunities got started about a decade ago, developed by  the Young Adult Ministries Council of the Cleveland Catholic Diocese and focused on a different theme each year.  They have expanded to include faculty and staff at the several colleges at which they're offered.  Although the orientation is a group event involving introductions and explanations and a delicious meal, the retreat itself is an individual affair.

 

Each retreatant is provided with a packet of material containing a number of prayer resources, including a sheet filled with quotes, questions, Scripture passages, and other suggestions for each day of the week.  And . . . here's where we come in: each retreatant also has an hour or so a day to meet one-on-one with a spiritual director, a time in which to explore and process the day's journey, undertaken in the midst of each person's busy life.

 

I've been able to do this a couple of times before, once for a Busy Student's Retreat on Discernment at Case Western Reserve, and once for a Busy Person's Lenten Retreat which a friend and I designed for our home church.  This week the topic is Stress, and I have three retreatants, a college senior and two college administration staffers.

 

Back at my church (about thirty minutes away), a usual week is underway, and lots of Lenten preparation lies ahead ~ but I am very much looking forward to these hours each day of helping others to savor their lives of prayer.

A This 'n That Kind of Week

Yesterday ~ Monday ~ I had a lovely brunch with a seminary friend, a chaplain at a Presbyterian Retirement Center.  Lots of talk about aging and spirituality, about trying to help our older folks, and their adult children as well.

I planned Sunday's worship ~ an entire service filled with Taize' music, which we've been learning for the past month ~ and spent a lot of time reading and staring into space, as this week's sermon is going nowhere fast.

And I worked on two retreats, one for my own church, set for a month from now, and one for an ecumenical group of women in Dearborn the next week-end, thanks to an invitation from RevGal Terri.

 

Today ~ lunch with a large group of women from my own church, and home visits to three older ladies. I learned a bit more about the terrors of being almost 93 and having just suffered a fourth heart attack from a delightful woman who just wants to leave her son's house and go home. I also got to know yet another woman in the church who has lost a son ~ that makes at least three of us ~ in this case, a 23-year-old in a work accident 35 years ago.  That particular lady told me that she is delighting in the anticipation of the birth of a great-great grandchild this spring!  She has five surviving children, eleven grandchildren, and eleven great-grandchildren.  She also told me some of the consequences of her son's death as far as her friendships of the past 35 years are concerned.  Ay-yep.

 

Tonight ~ Bible study at church, which presents challenges untold. Some weeks ago I finally figured out the foundational one: For many of my congregants, the Bible is the Big Book of Answers.  For me, it's the Big Book of Questions.  They're always hoping for definitive answers to life's dilemmas; I'm always seeing yet another question lurking in the corner.  Makes for an intriguing dialectic.

 

Tomorrow ~ lunch with one of the Methodist pastors here.  This seems to be the Week of Lunches.   And a visit to a new mother.  OK, I admit it; I have an ulterior motive.  A year and a half, and I have yet to baptize a baby.  Maybe this baby would like to join me at the font?

 

That's my week so far. How's yours?

Walt Farrell, S.J.

Two or three weeks ago, I learned via email that Father Walt Farrell, S.J. had moved to hospice care, and tonight I've learned, via the blog of Joe Koczera, S.J., that he died last night.  Father Farrell was my director during the retreat that wasn't, the retreat that I was making when Josh died.

I had met Walt once or twice before; he had come to Cleveland to make presentations to those of us working on our certificates in spiritual direction.  When I learned that he was to be my director for my week in Michigan, I was elated: seventy-plus years of Jesuit experience and wisdom at my disposal! You can read more about what that entailed in the biography at Joe's place.  My story is about my two personal experiences with Walt.

My first retreat day that year was an intense one.  I had spent the summer doing my CPE (clinical pastoral education, i.e. chaplaincy education) at The Cleveland Clinic, and when I went to meet with Walt for the second time, he wondered aloud why every movement in my prayer brought me back to that experience.

"Because I have been completely traumatized by my summer," I said in surprise, beginning to see my days in the MICU differently than had been possible when I was in the midst of them.  All that illness; all those deaths.  Walt told me to take it easy for the next twenty-four hours.  Get some rest.  Don't feel that you have to focus on prayer.  Enjoy the grounds.

If only.  

I got the message about Josh late that afternoon.  I went back to the main building and told someone that it was urgent that they find Father Farrell immediately. After I told him what had happened, I said in a vague sort of way that I needed a computer, and he graciously turned his office over to me so that I could begin the terrible, terrible process of notifying people while I waited for friends to make the long drive to get me.  I spent a long hour or two on the computer and phone, engaged in one complicated interaction after another, and then Walt and I stood in the hallway for another hour and talked about an astonishing array of topics and people. Shock produces some of the world's most bizarre conversations.

My friends came, I went home, and I think that I wrote him a thank-you email at some point, and that he responded. I didn't expect to encounter him again; I knew that I would never be able to return to the Manresa retreat house.

Two Christmases later I ran into Walt at a mass at the Carmelite monastery in Cleveland.  I was back in seminary; I was, in fact, doing my field education in a big downtown church, which meant that I had acquired some responsibilities in public leadership.  But I was still hiding out at the Carmelites' on a regular basis.  

It took him a minute to place me ~ "You were with me when my son died," I said ~ and then he said, "Of course."  And then, without missing a beat, "How's seminary?"

When I wrote to him a couple of weeks ago, I recalled that conversation and how wonderfully affirming it was for me.  Serving in the church, I must have looked pretty functional on the outside, but  it was still a struggle to get up ~ every single morning.  And there wasn't an hour that passed that I didn't wonder whether I had lost my mind, in the most literal sense of the phrase, to imagine that I would ever be either a pastor or a spiritual director.  Every day I expected someone else to see reason, and to tell me that no one was going to be interested in a minister whose child had died of suicide.

But the 93-year-old Father Walt Farrell didn't ask me whether I had gone back, or speak in a pitying tone of voice, or otherwise imply anything other than an expectation that I would have found my way back.  He simply asked how school was going.

Such a little thing, but it meant a great deal to me.

I see from his biography that, as I knew, he was a man of wide-ranging experience and great accomplishment.  But I do believe that it's in the smallest of encounters that you can really take the measure of a person.  I have no major Walt Farrell speeches on which to report, no honors or recognitions to recall.  Only a couple of days of encounter that helped to shape my own story ~ which is what, in the end, makes a great director of the Spiritual Exercises.

(I've stolen Joe's photograph. I think it's a beautiful one, so I hope he doesn't mind.)