Retreat Narratives

About the Book

In late 1995, with the advice of a friend, I arranged for a retreat with Sr. Cornelia Gust, a Benedictine Sister in Crookston MN. That first retreat came in January of 1996, a partial week set up to test the model. In response, I created a narrative tracing my way through the retreat, adding a selection of verse centered on the surroundings. I decided to repeat the experiment in the Summer of 1996, again in the Spring and then the Fall of 1997. In each case, I gathered the experience in what I called a Narrative along with a series of poems that responded to the overall experience. Together, I found them satisfying and worthwhile. About 30 years later, I reviewed those narratives and the poems and decided to put them together into this review. It happened that I moved in 1998 and tried another retreat in another venue and discovered the experience not nearly as helpful. I offer these four narratives and the associated verse as a testimony to what proved to be a very helpful integration of the spiritual life that I had been experiencing into a more recognized presence of mind and heart. I hope that the sum of those four retreats so long ago allows my readers to enter the dialogue inherent in the retreat experience. Sr. Cornelia and most of the sisters with whom I spent those weeks have died long since; these narratives give witness to the wealth they provided me.

About the Author

I am a retired minister, having served in the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ). I now live in retirement in central Illinois. In the course of my ministry, I became involved in the practices of the Spiritual Life, being led by steps along the way ... what I came to consider as the spiritual life getting serious with me and leading me along into the involvement of life with the presence of God as that engaged me. At one point, I was encouraged to find a spiritual director and given some guidance toward one in particular. In the mid 1990s, I engaged that guidance through a retreat, become a series of retreats in Crookston MN, at Mount St. Benedict Monastery. Those four periods of intense concentration proved to be helpful as an outgrowth of my prior indulgence and a stepping stone into what would prove to be my future in the care of the Spirit. As with so many of my projects over time, these attest to the experience of growth in the life I have found buoying me along through the years. I live now with my wife of 58 years and two dogs and five cats, my companions along the way.