Ignatian retreats offer participants a way to grow closer to God

By Bill Doyle | CFP Correspondent

WORCESTER – If you’re looking to grow closer to God, the Ignatian Retreat In Daily Life program may be for you.

A Jesuit-trained team will offer the 30-week prayer experience held in the tradition of St. Ignatius of Loyola in the St. Peter Church lower hall from 7-8:30 p.m. on Tuesdays from Sept. 30 through May 5.

St. Ignatius was a Basque Spaniard Catholic priest and theologian who helped found the Jesuits in 1539. He wrote the Spiritual Exercises, a series of meditations, contemplations and prayers which serve as the manual of the Worcester retreat. St. Ignatius designed exercises to take place over 30 days and later 30 weeks.

Worcester retreat administrator Dick Kirk, 74, said retreatants are looking for more in their faith.

“Ignatius and a lot of other good spiritual teachers tell us,” he said, “that these desires for increased sense of the holy, of the sacred, in our lives is a desire that God plants within us. Noticing that desire, that hunger, that thirst drives people to experience a little bit more than what they normally get by going to church on Sunday.”

Mr. Kirk pointed out that in addition to the Ignatian retreat, the Light of the World retreat, prayer groups and Bible studies are further proof that the hunger exists.

“The important part of the [Ignatian] retreat takes place at home,” Mr. Kirk said.

Retreatants are expected to spend 30-45 minutes at home to pray through the daily spiritual exercises in the textbook, The Ignatian Adventure by Father Kevin O’Brien, S.J.

At the Tuesday meetings, each retreatant meets for half an hour with his or her prayer companion who guides them through the exercises by listening and providing advice when needed.

Then all the retreatants meet as a group for 20 minutes to share their experiences with the exercises.

“We find that that can inspire other people or deepen their own understanding or help a light bulb turn on,” Mr. Kirk said. “People say that group sharing is really powerful. It’s powerful for us to hear it, too.”

Listening to retreatants share their spiritual experiences reminds the retreat leaders of their own similar circumstances.

“I think we’ve stopped feeling guilty that we get so much personally out of this work,” Mr. Kirk said.

Finally, there’s a 20-30-minute presentation by a team member looking forward to the following week’s exercises. One week, Mr. Kirk told the retreatants about the time he shared with his spiritual director the anger he felt toward his father’s alcoholism. The director told him that he needed to be more compassionate. He hopes his story prompted retreatants to be more understanding.

“You can be brought up in a church,” Mr. Kirk said, “and go through all the training, but there is a movement towards deeper intimacy and deeper union with God and Christ that can come through these exercises.”

“We know it works,” said Deacon Mike Corby, another retreat leader, “because after three or four weeks the people come back and say, ‘My co-workers, my family say there’s something different about me.’”

The Ignatian retreat will begin its 10th year locally in September.

“It’s gone far beyond what I think we thought it might,” Mr. Kirk said.

Over the first nine years, 154 people have taken part, an average of 17 per year. Most retreatants are 60 or older, but two people in their 30s participated last year. The bulk of the retreatants are from the Worcester area, but some have come from Leominster, Sturbridge and Danielson, Conn.

The program asks for evaluations from retreatants each year.

“The people who respond say this has been life-changing,” Mr. Kirk said.

Mr. Kirk and his wife, Debbie, live in Spencer and belong to Mary, Queen of the Rosary Parish. Since 1980, they have gone on retreat with Deacon Michael and Linda Corby, and Paul and Sheila Bosse at the Eastern Point Retreat House in Gloucester. All are in their 70s. The Bosses and Corbys used to belong to Mary, Queen of the Rosary, but the Bosses now live in Worcester and attend St. Mary Parish in Jefferson. The Corbys live in Leicester and attend St. Joseph-St. Pius X Parish where Deacon Corby serves as a deacon.

The Jesuit-run retreat in Gloucester spoke to the three couples, but they wanted more than what the weekend retreat offered. They couldn’t commit the time required to attend the 30-day Ignatian Spiritual Exercises. The 30-week retreat in which participants meet weekly suited them better.

The Worcester area didn’t have a 30-week program so they reached out to Holy Cross to seek a Jesuit priest to help them start one. Father Bill Campbell S.J. was willing, but he was about to move out of the area so he recommended that they contact Sister Clare Walsh and Father Ron Mercier, S.J., who had opened an office of Ignatian spirituality in the Boston area.
In 2008, Sister Walsh and Father Mercier acted as spiritual directors for a 30-week retreat for the three couples. Then, over the next three years, the couples held eight-week retreats for others.

Father Tom McMurray and Father John Savard, Jesuit priests from Holy Cross, helped them expand their retreat to 30 weeks. To promote the retreat, they held two Ignatian evening prayer experience sessions in 2016 at St. Mary Parish in Jefferson.

That fall, they launched a 30-week program for eight retreatants.

Father McMurray doesn’t attend as many meetings as he once did because of health problems, but he’s still a vital part of the program.

“Father Tom has been, I would say, the integral Ignatian Jesuit presence in our team,” Mr. Kirk said. “He would minimize his own importance, but without him we wouldn’t be doing this.”

In 2017, 19 people took part in the retreat. In 2018, 35 people applied and some had to be turned away. So Father McMurray, Mr. Bosse and Mrs. Kirk created a four-year training program for prayer companions with help from a group in Wells, Maine.

“It requires diligence and a lot of reading,” Mr. Kirk said.

Mrs. Corby said she gets “goosebumps” talking about how retreatants change as the program progresses.

“They become calmer,” she said. “You can see the freedom on their faces. Sometimes they come in with baggage, [heavy] baggage, and you see that lift as the time goes on. It is a very transformative thing and it’s wonderful to watch. But if people don’t put the effort into it, you don’t see that because the change doesn’t happen. You get what you put into it.”

Deacon Corby said the retreat teaches people to expand their prayer life.

“It’s not on-your-knees prayer,” he said, “it’s not a rote prayer, which are all good things, but this is different. We teach people to be more cognizant of how God is touching them in very usual ways that they might have overlooked and to be able to appreciate it more.”

All the retreat leaders volunteer their time.

Mr. Kirk, Mr. Bosse and Kathy OhEigeartaigh have completed a two-year program at Fairfield University to become spiritual directors. Marie Dio will complete the program in December.
About 30 prayer companions have been trained over the years and 17 are still active. They can accommodate about 25 retreatants. So Mr. Kirk is confident the Ignatian program will continue once he and the other founders are no longer involved.

“It’s not just us that want to see it grow,” Mrs. Corby said. “I think everybody who has experienced what we’ve experienced wants it to grow. If everybody could do this, the world would be such a better place.”

The cost is $150 for the 30 weeks, but no one will be turned away if they cannot afford it. Register by Sept. 8 at ignatianspiritualexercisesworcester.com.