It's the middle of July 2011 and within a couple weeks, Humble Blogger will be heading off to the Jesuit Retreat House on Demontreville Trail in Lake Elmo,MN. This will be my 39th annual retreat at the place often referred to in one word as "Demontreville". It has a nice website with details of the retreat weekend and includes a music slide show. All photos below are selected from a group I took on my last retreat in July 2010.
Demontreville entrance sign on the side of Demontreville Trail road. I gave the sign a face-lift using photo editing software
Gated entrance to Demontreville.
This silent retreat begins on a Thursday evening and ends on Sunday evening. Fifty to 65 men are present to share meals, attend daily Mass in the chapel, listen to spiritual presentations based on the (much shortened) 30 day "Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius", pray, reflect, read and sleep in a private room in one of several houses on the property. The idea is to get away from ordinary life for a few days to try and discern what is really important in (my) life. Every man makes his own retreat. CD Music or "table readings" are played during meals to assist in keeping the silence.
Above is Keegan Hall at Demontreville named after Fr. Donald Keegan, S.J, the first Director from 1948-1965. This building contains the Chapel, Library, Dining Room, Lounge and basement recreation area where men can go for a 1 hour period after supper. Talking is allowed during recreation and some men (Humble Blogger included) choose not to participate so they can maintain silence during the entire retreat.
Men sleep in one of six houses and usually keep the same room and house on succeeding years on the same weekend each year. My house Campion is shown in the photo above. The house is named after Saint Edmund Campion who was born in 1540 and was the most famous of the 25 Jesuit martyrs of England and Wales. There are four houses with similar name histories: Loyola, Regis, Bellarmine and Xavier. The last house Manresa is named after a Spanish town near Barcelona where Saint Ignatius Loyola conceived the idea of "The Spiritual Exercises" and over the course of 10 months filled notebooks with writings which would become The Retreat Manual.
Often during afternoon rest time after lunch, I'll take a stroll through one of the many beautiful paths on the property. One year (July 1981) , I was wearing sandals and was stung on the foot by a Honeybee which usually doesn't sting unless stepped on or roughly handled. I wrote a Tanka poem (5,7,5,7,7 syllables) to mark the occasion:
An unfortunate
Honeybee flew between his
sandal and bare toes.
It stung by instinct, causing
him to share its pangs of death!
__________
I mention my retreats at Demontreville in other places in this Blog:
Journals, Journals Everywhere and
