Retreat — March 2011 — No. 7: Results

Note: My previous posts on this topic can be easily accessed by clicking on the label "retreat" at the bottom of this post.


The "health scare" I mentioned in my previous post about the retreat interrupted the daily routine I had established. So there was no smooth carryover into my home life. Clearly, I would have had to adapt things because I'd need to shop, prepare meals, and engage in all the other things that are part of my everyday life, while making room for more time in prayer. But in reality, in the weeks immediately after my return from the retreat, there was no perceptible difference from how I had been doing before I went on the retreat. Gradually, however, there have been changes.

One thing that was very important, I think, was to create a prayer room in the tiny sewing room upstairs. This was made possible when my nephew took the futon which he had used on visits before the front bedroom became available. I brought in prayer books, a Bible, and some other books for spiritual reading. With that, I have begun to do some Bible reading after I finish my morning prayer. I am reading the book of Isaiah. When I do my evening prayer at a reasonable hour, I follow it with some spiritual reading. Right now I'm slowly going through Henri Nouwen's Can You Drink the Cup? I'd like to do more — read Pope Benedict's two volume Jesus of Nazareth, spend more time reflecting prayerfully on the things I'm already reading, follow the formats from retreat for "behold" and "Bringing Feelings to Prayer." But wile there is still progress to be made, I know that I have made progress, and I hope to continue to do so.

The other area that both my retreat director and my regular spiritual director have encouraged me to work on is what might be called my social life. If these seems a bit unrelated to spirituality, love of others, which is one of the basic commandments, normally is practiced through contact with them. Here again, there has perhaps been less progress then one could have dreamed of, but there has been progress. There have been my night at the opera, pleasant day, and pleasant evening with Zack. When he had to come to this area for his friend's memorial service, I had the nerve to invite him to stay overnight with me, which I might not have quite dared to — "What will the neighbors think?" — without the encouragement I had received. There is also a reconnection with my college classmates, which began with a lunch with one of them and will continue on Friday with dinner with him and another and their wives. I've taken a couple of little steps toward developing a friendship with a member of the yacht club Race Committee who seems to like my company. And finally, I've reconnected with a priest who used to be in my parish. We really hit it off when he was here, and we'd go to dinner every month for a couple of years after he was assigned to another parish. Eventually the dinners petered out, but I called last week, and we'll be getting together in December. I'll try to remember to ask if he likes opera. I've started going to the theater broadcasts of the Metropolitan opera since we were in regular contact, and they could furnish a good occasion for getting together (except he's not always free on Saturday afternoons or Wednesday evenings). At this point I'm not out to any of these guys except Zack, but I'd like to be out to at least the priest and the classmates. OTOH, I'm not ready just to draw a deep breathe and say, "Guess what? I'm homosexual." It's more a matter of trying to steer the conversation to a point where it becomes the question they ask or the logical next thing for me to say.

So, unlike my first retreat, which ultimately didn't seem to have any permanent effect, the one last March seems to have set me in a good direction both for prayer and for developing personal relationships.