a school of the heart: more real.

Moonrise kingdom: view from my room, Sacred Heart Novitiate & Retreat Center.

Welcome back. Thanks for tuning in.

So... back amongst the talking. And the question regarding the past thirty days of the Spiritual Exercises coming from friends/family as well as within my own head/heart is...

So what was it like?

I'll feebly attempt to share a little bit with you in this way - using a phrase my spiritual director heard practically every day of the retreat - it's like this:

[London Calling] begins with one of the best opening songs of any record ever, the title track. The song starts cold. Two guitar chords ring on the downbeats, locked in step with the drums, marching forward with no dynamic variation. A second guitar introduces difference, coming toward us like an ambulance Dopplering into range. The bass guitar, sounding like someone’s voice, heralds everybody over the hill and into the song. If you can listen to it without getting a chilly burst of immortality, there is a layer between you and the world.
- Sasha Frere-Jones, “1979: The Year Punk Died, and was Reborn,” from The New Yorker (November 1, 2004)

Balete tree. Massive.

Great description, huh? And some nice similes/metaphors to try to describe what the song is like. But here's the rub: if you've never heard the tune, never experienced it, these words fall kinda flat, right? It's like trying to describe what salt tastes like: "Well, salt tastes... salty." Or endeavoring to describe what the color midnight blue looks like to someone who has never seen such color. Or to attempt describe one's own experience of the Eucharist.

And - the experience of a song, or of a color, the Eucharist, can be something incredibly unique, intimate even, to the individual, that trying to describe it becomes futile. I happen to find the song "London Calling" kinda transcendent, the way Frere-Jones details - you may not, or it might be quite a different experience. Not more or less valid. Different.

God bless the mystics, the poets, the artists, the musicians who boldly trod out with pen or guitar or paintbrush in hand & manage to capture a fleeting glance of such transcendence. I can't. No matter.

That being said, this is what is was like.

It starts with the longing - our hearts are restless indeed, Augustine. The longing to recognize & experience more fully, more deeply, Christ particular to one's own life. Not in some lofty, head-in-the-clouds way, but in the midst of the day-to-day... the regular joys & amusements & headaches & heartaches. Using one of my favorite words from the Johannine writings (as well as The Dude), to abide.

A few months back as I departed Washington DC, a wise & dear friend presented me with what would turn out to be an incredibly potent gift - a notecard, simple as that:

A quote taken from the Tertianship Spiritual Exercises journal of Alfred Delp, SJ, written 75 years prior to the precise time we would be making our own Tertianship Spiritual Exercises. Delp simply & eloquently sums it all up: the Exercises are all about entering & abiding more deeply, more uniquely, in what is more real: God, Christ, his life & ways, and yes, his demands. The demands to live more fully, to abide more deeply in who each of us uniquely is in & for Christ. To live outta that, brothers & sisters. Pretty powerful. Pretty practical, too.

To allow Christ to become more uniquely real in my own life, which ultimately comes down to allowing myself to become more real, more fully who I uniquely have been created to live & be.

So that's kinda what it's all about. Again, something we should be longing for each & every day. Yet for those easily distracted (I look at that guy every day in the mirror), sometimes it becomes desirable to step away from everything & devote the one-on-one time to moving more deeply toward this end.

Still Life with Tiger's Cap, 2013.

And that's what the Spiritual Exercises are all about. And that's the stuff of which the privileged thirty-odd days at Sacred Heart Novitiate & Retreat Center consisted.

Thirty-odd days. One-on-one time with Christ.

In silence.

And beauty.

And baletes and big bats (the ones that fly at you at dusk). Bayawak too.