The Messenger - August 2008 - Editorial August 08
By John Looby, SJ - 01 August 2008
Reality Check: For a few years, I spent the summer months directing retreats in Manresa, the Jesuit Spirituality Centre in Dublin. I can only describe it as a deeply moving experience. An older form of retreat, today called the directed retreat, has become more common.
Over a period of three or eight days, the person making the retreat prays in silence and each day talks with their director about their prayer. The anam cara idea may best describe the relationship as the person making the retreat comes to understand what is happening when they pray and come to be more at ease in prayer, and to speak with the Lord as ‘a friend might talk with a close friend’, to quote St. Ignatius.
I remember one retreat on a lovely, warm evening. I was talking about what they might pray about. I was probably speaking animatedly about the incarnation, about God becoming man in Jesus Christ. The windows were open and a soft breeze made the curtains billow. Well into my talk, I became aware of three teenage boys on the lawn outside the window; they seemed fascinated by what they saw in our room. When next I looked in their direction two of them seemed to be fighting. Then as I watched, one drew a knife and stabbed his opponent. I got to my feet and tried to find the nearest way out to where the boys were. It took a minute or two, but when I reached them they seemed not to have moved. The boy with the knife saw me and ran away, followed by the third boy who had been a spectator to what had happened. As I got close to the victim lying on the ground, he shot up and also ran away.
I was relieved when I realized we had been the victims of an elaborate hoax carried out with considerable dramatic effect. I wonder what the boys made of us sitting there so quiet and serious? But I quickly became aware of what their little play-acting had meant to us. It is easy when speaking of religion to enter a special world of the spiritual, a different world to our daily world of danger and killings. I wonder if God did not arrange that little diversion to wake us up to the reality of the world that Jesus Christ was born into. It was a world of danger, from his early days when Herod attempted to kill him to his final days when the Chief Priests did have him killed. Our faith is lived out in this real world, the same world as Jesus knew. Our prayer became more real, more meaningful that evening.
John Looby, SJ - Editor