What might you do with thirty days (or two million minutes?)

An amaryllis planted
as I began.

 Maybe the real question is what would God do with 30 days?  My friend Fran posted a link to this article about a British politician who, after making what was presumably the Spiritual Exericises of St. Iganiatius (a 30-day Jesuit retreat), decided not to stand for re-election.

My room when I first walked in.

Sunday it will be five years since I began the Spiritual Exercises, but today marks the fifth anniversary of the day I got in the car on what I remember being an unseasonably warm January afternoon and drove to Boston, where I spent the night before driving out to Gloucester.  The Boy wrote me regularly while I was in the silence, toward the end reminding how many more breaths I would take before I would be back home.

As I type this, it's been roughly two and half million minutes — some two hundred thousand breaths — since the silence broke on the retreat, on a bright and cold February morning.  And while I didn't go home having discerned a seismic shift in my life, God has done a great deal of breathing in me since.

Reflecting on reflecting with Ignatius: writing on teaching

My harvest of limes in Kamikatsu, Japan

Last year at this time I was in Japan with a group of students from the college's 360^o program. Today, an essay I wrote reflecting on the experience we had reflecting with our students about the structure of the course appeared — framed loosely around Ignatian repetition and his notion of the Examen.

You can find the essay here.  (Click on the photo to see the full text.)

Circling Time: Ignatian Repetition

One of my Augustinian friends calls them three-finger days, when you need three fingers to keep track of your page in the Psalter, the Proper for the day and a Common while praying the Hours. I'm in next of extra fingers these days. The Advent volume of my breviary is double-marked - one set of ribbons marking where we are now, the first week of Advent and a bookmark set where we will be in a few weeks -- on the cusp of Christmas.

The Advent reflections I've been writing for the Standard & Times need to be sent off to the editor a week or 10 days before they appear. We're not quite at the 2nd Sunday of Advent and I'm in the throes of writing the last reflection - which will be in the paper just before the 4th Sunday of Advent.

More so than in most seasons, this Advent my prayer tastes of Ignatian repetition. I am embarking on my personal Advent contemplations having already spent the better part of 4 weeks soaking in the Advent readings in the Lectionary and the Hours. And I am finding them to be sharper versions of the contemplations that resulted in the published reflections — very much repetitions of the contemplations in the Ignatian sense. When Ignatius instructed those making the Exercises to repeat a contemplation, the idea was not a step by step review, but a sharpening of the lens, a revisiting of the places that seemed to bear the most fruit. The point was not to dig out something new, but to deepen what had been there from the start.

I'm looking forward to being wholly in Advent for a bit. Soon and very soon...

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The photo was taken during my 30-day retreat, the view is from my room, of a pine tree behind Eastern Point retreat house, just after a blizzard.