Thirty Days
On Retreat with the Exercises of St. Ignatius
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- $17.99
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- $17.99
Publisher Description
From the day Paul Mariani arrives at Eastern Point Retreat House to take part in the five-hundred-year-old Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius, he realizes that his expectations and assumptions about who he is, what he knows, and what he believes are about to change radically. In this profound memoir Mariani blends a brief life of St. Ignatius and meditations on the life of Jesus with the day-to-day unfolding of thirty days of silence at the retreat house. His journey of introspection, self-revelation, and spiritual renewal leads him to a new understanding of his relationship with God and of what it truly means to put others before oneself.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In laying open his journal from a 30-day retreat based on the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius, Mariani, a writer and English professor at Boston College, allows the world to look in on a highly personal time in his life. His gracious and courageous invitation is not for everyone, however. Those considering the "Long Retreat" with Ignatius's Exercises may benefit from an intensive look at one man's encounter with this time-honored method for contemplation and reflection, but reading his book will require something of the endurance needed to undertake the retreat itself. Mariani has tried to provide a sense of what daily life is like at a retreat center by including observations about the food, the weather and his personal habits along with the progress he is making in his reflections on the Scriptures. But by the second week of his accounts, this pattern becomes tiresome and repetitious, even though the menus change. The cycle of eating, sleeping, walking, meditating and meeting with Mariani's spiritual director communicate the routine of the retreat but sometimes get in the way of his more substantive message about its spiritual content. Readers who persevere, however, will be rewarded with some wonderfully tender moments from Mariani's 30 days, particularly those concerning his once-fractured relationship with his wife, Eileen.
