Archive for the ‘Retreat Centers’ Category

Jesuit Father Paul Michael Sullivan serves as spiritual director at the Eastern Point Retreat House in Gloucester, Mass.

“Everybody has a vocation,” he said. “God is no further from ourselves than we are.”

Here, Fr. Sullivan’s mission is to help spiritual seekers grow in their relationship with God and in willing service to their neighbor. He compared a relationship with God to a human friendship.

“They have the same dynamics,” he said. “If you want to be friends with someone, spend time with him — listen to him.”

His calling to the priesthood came gradually, a gentle nudge throughout his high school and college years.

“I don’t think it was any one moment of time,” he said.

When he inquired about the possibility of a vocation, he was advised to go to college first.

Sullivan attended the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Mass., one of the nation’s leading liberal arts institutions that embraces a Catholic/Jesuit identity. There, he majored in history.

“Eventually I thought about the Jesuits to be both a priest and teacher,” he said. “I got to know quite a number of Jesuits, many of them in their late 30s and 40s, who seemed interesting and happy.”

When Sullivan graduated in 1973, he was at a crossroads.

“I did apply to do graduate work in history or American studies and got accepted in a couple of places, or I could join the Jesuits,” he said.

Sullivan has spent time teaching high school in Maine and Massachusetts and also as a parish priest.

“I was open to another couple of years of parish work. I enjoyed being pastor,” he said. “But as things evolved, I ended up at Eastern Point Retreat House in Gloucester.

Noted for the spectacular beauty of its rocks, ocean and woods, the retreat house provides an idyllic environment for contemplation and prayer.

This is Sullivan’s third year as a member of the staff, which includes four Jesuits and a Sister of St. Joseph.

Based on the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius, the retreats are open to people of diverse backgrounds and traditions who are seeking God in their lives.

“How do you see where God may be calling you? Sullivan said. “It is where your deepest desires intersect with the community’s deepest needs.”

You can read more about Fr. Sullivan’s experiences and about the Eastern Point Retreat House at SouthCoastToday.com.

Jesuit Father John Murray says that when people ask him what it’s like to be a spiritual director, his answer is always the same. “Spiritual director is to be more a companion on the journey, than a person who has the answers to another’s concerns,” he writes in a reflection.

Fr. Murray writes that his life at Eastern Point Retreat House in Gloucester, Mass., where he is director, is a “wild mixture of listening, companioning and managing a good size inn!”

“With our staff of Jesuits and guest directors, we listen and focus and shine some light into darkened hearts,” writes Murray.

He finds managing a retreat house is both a great challenge and a great joy.

“As I reflect on my years as a Jesuit; high school work, then principal, then socius and now as a retreat director, I marvel at how Jesus has become my true love and friend,” he writes.

Read more of Murray’s reflections.

Going on a retreat is a way people can experience the presence of God, according to Jesuit Father Charles Moutenot, director of spiritual programs at Loyola Jesuit House of Retreats in Morristown, N.J.

“I see people come through those doors very, very tired. There’s a lot of noise in our world. They work very hard. They’re busy…I see them leave on Sunday rested,” Fr. Moutenot said. “Not simply rested as if they went to a spa and slept for a weekend. But really rested in the Lord.

“The second thing I see in people is that they are rejuvenated. They feel ready to go back to their jobs, their families, their churches and their ministries with a renewed vigor,” he said.

In the video below, Moutenot joins retreatants in explaining how a weekend retreat is an excellent way to come home to God.

Going on a retreat is a way people can experience the presence of God, according to Jesuit Father Charles Moutenot, director of spiritual programs at Loyola Jesuit House of Retreats in Morristown, N.J.

“I see people come through those doors very, very tired. There’s a lot of noise in our world. They work very hard. They’re busy…I see them leave on Sunday rested,” Fr. Moutenot said. “Not simply rested as if they went to a spa and slept for a weekend. But really rested in the Lord.

“The second thing I see in people is that they are rejuvenated. They feel ready to go back to their jobs, their families, their churches and their ministries with a renewed vigor,” he said.

In the video below, Moutenot joins retreatants in explaining how a weekend retreat is an excellent way to come home to God.

Jesuit Father Joseph Tetlow is the director of Montserrat Jesuit Retreat House in Lake Dallas, Texas where he gives retreats, workshops and writes. Before his came to Montserrat, Fr. Tetlow spent several years in Rome as head of the Jesuit General’s Secretariat for Ignatian Spirituality, guiding the efforts of 250 Jesuit retreat houses. Widely considered one of the Jesuits’ leading authorities on spiritual direction, Tetlow shares with National Jesuit News some of his thoughts on what being a spiritual director means to him in this piece:

Who is a spiritual director? “Someone people go to for spiritual direction.”

And how do you know who’s a good spiritual director? “Someone people keep going to.”

There’s a lot of truth in that old saying. But it leaves a lot out. I’ve been giving spiritual direction one way or another for fifty years: to scholastics, tertians, retreatants, priests and religious, lay men and women. I still find it mysterious that people come to me, and I to another (only a fool gives it without getting it).  But I see three things that help people to come: charism, position and being a listener.

People come because you have a charism. Many have gifts that draw people to them for companioning or guidance. They can be helped with some formation. Jesuits have put a lot of energy into that and now our lay colleagues have taken it up. Certainly we need a lot more spiritual helpers; at Montserrat, we cannot help all who ask.

The second clear reason why people come: a position you are in. A number of years ago, a priest came to tell me that he was thinking of taking a leave to decide his future. He came to me as spiritual director of clergy. We worked and prayed together for a long while and he remains a good pastor.

People need to know that telling you something is like dropping a stone in a well. It goes nowhere.  I don’t even tell who sees me. They also need to feel that you can handle whatever they have to tell you. What that might be differs vastly. In the past few months, I’ve helped a man split from his business partner, a priest choose holiness, a woman deepen her prayer and a person contemplating suicide choose life.

A Jesuit at Montserrat, as at any Jesuit retreat house, is placed to help a lot of people.

A third reason people come is that you’re known as a listener. “Listen first and then listen again” begins the seminar on ignatian direction that I run at Perkins School of Theology at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. This listening isn’t a skill or habit the director has – it isn’t about the director at all. It’s about the people who come: they have to leave you consoled that they have been listened to and heard. It’s the first way you help people know God: you let them know they are heard.

Charism, position and listening are basic to all spiritual direction. But in my experience, Ignatian direction has to be ready to go beyond them. It is distinctive in several ways that suit it to our time. Here are four big ones.

First, the Ignatian spiritual director wants passionately to help people know Jesus Christ. It is not first of all about choosing a vocation or reforming life or making spiritual progress.  It’s not about “who I am.” It’s about who Jesus is in my life. That’s what you can give them – if you have it to give. Nemo dat quod non habet. So know Jesus better, love Him more, and let the disciple “grow like the Master” (Luke 6:40).

Second, the God we seek is an active God. I recently sent a woman another director’s phone number because her prayer of quiet sought the God of quiet. Ignatian spirituality seeks the busy God, active in all things, creating us momently. This realizes the third point of the Contemplation: intimate knowledge of God always acting in His gifts. We bring people to Jesus of Nazareth who said that He could do “only what He sees the Father doing.” (John 5:20).  The Father doing.

Then, third, we offer “discernment.” We don’t own the word. In the Catechism, obeying conscience requires discernment. But we mean a specific discernment: the movement of spirits.  We talk about it a lot, not always entirely accurately. Some discern to find out what they authentically feel and desire, expecting that to be God’s will. Some work out how consolation or desolation connect with serving God. But in my experience, not many get as far as genuine discernment of spirits in everyday life.

It’s a cultural thing. Secular Americans cannot comprehend the idea of a spirit different from mine within my self, working busily for its own aims and purposes.  It took me decades to really grasp the discernment of spirits and I still work at it. Many directors I know, if they do grasp it, are not so zealous to apply it.

A final, fourth, mark of Ignatian spiritual direction: you actually direct people. You don’t do it all the time with everyone. Most of the time, you are accompanying or guiding. But at times, you direct. You tell a desolate woman to change her prayer as it’s mainly self-absorption. You instruct a young Jesuit not to change his current way of praying. You challenge a married woman, telling her that she would be wise to break off a relationship that is disturbing her marriage. You do none of this easily or without reflecting, and never harshly or judgmentally.  But you do it.

Truly directing goes against American expressive individualism. We yearn to know and have “what I authentically want,” so no one can tell us much of anything. Sr. Marian Cowan, C.S.J., a justly renowned director, prefers to talk about “spiritual companioning.” That’s how most of the Episcopalian and Methodist theologians I teach think. It is fruitful and probably what any of us do most of the time.

And it’s very Jesuit, the reason the first Jesuits were the First Companions. But look what happened when they made the Spiritual Exercises. Master Ignatius directed them, surely at a balance to let the Spirit work directly. Each elected a way of life and kept it secret. Then one day on Montmartre, they all told what they had chosen individually: a life of apostolic poverty, Jerusalem, Rome.  The same choice.  It might have been a miracle, but probably not. Before and outside the retreat, Ignatius directed them.

So I go back to where I started. It’s a mystery why a person so incomplete and imperfect – who is more correct than most when he says at Mass, “I have sinned through my own fault” – it’s a mystery why people should come to such a person. It’s humiliating. It’s profoundly gratifying. And it’s a very insistent way to die to self.

You can listen to an interview with Fr. Tetlow from the 2009 Spiritual Directors International Conference in this video.