ALLELUIA TIME for Jesuit novices 72 years ago. Christ is risen . . .

Deo Gratias at breakfast, manual labor, correcting your neighbor, looking ahead . . .

We finished the third week and had our third break day—walking in the morning, playing “passball” in the afternoon (touch football without touching), returning to retreat mode with 4:30 “flexoria,” afternoon meditation—and entered the Fourth Week, about the risen life of Christ. 

If you never thought four days of meditating could be fun, then you never did it after three-plus weeks raking over the coals in your soul including a long, hard look at suffering and death on a near-cosmic scale. 

Done now was the crucifixion. It was full speed ahead to the resurrection. Again we imagined and looked, applying our senses. “Contemplated” was the term. Now it was of Jesus risen, gospel accounts of appearances, including at a lakeside fish fry, on the walk to Emmaus, in the upper room, his followers amazed and heartened. Now the novice master found room for jokes. 

He gave us a look at the lighter side of the spiritual life. “This is the day that the Lord has made, let us be glad and rejoice therein!” was the governing quote. We were looking at the side of religion that consoled and encouraged, having looked while trying not to blink at the hard side that challenged and (ideally) inspired.

This week also had its Ignatian specials. The best was the “contemplation to attain divine love,” or in Latin contemplatio ad amorem. On this contemplation we spent the 30th day, which served as a sort of decompression chamber. We walked outside and looked at the birds in the trees, the sky above, the sun and clouds and rain spattering on pavement. We felt the autumn breezes—it was late October in the Ohio Valley—watched leaves falling, kicked them away. I swear, the novitiate experience was as much nature appreciation as anything else. 

Ensconced in a far suburb on ninety-nine acres, we took long walks down country roads and through woods, often to our working farm and its villa a few miles away. Most of us were city boys. The novitiate years, and for two more years the juniorate, were nature immersion. We got our running start at seeing God in nature from this Ignatian “contemplatio,” which was typically systematic and detailed. 

Two points Ignatius made right away: one, that love showed itself in deeds not words, and two, it’s to be mutual. Them that has, gives. You share with the other. Not having to say you’re sorry and hundreds of other definitions aside, the love Ignatius had in mind was doing and giving. We were to do more than talk a good game.

END GAME We finished. Prayer the next morning was a distracted thing. By now we were trying to recapture the retreat’s best moments, times of “consolation,” as we called it. Its opposite, “desolation,” both standard terms, was the devil trying to sidetrack us and/or God testing us. So in prayer you tried to stay on track with a dollop or so of consolation. The whole thing was a concentrated exercise in mind and emotion control. Stay calm, stay cool, pray hard, and you had it made — for the moment anyhow.

After meditation, mass, then 15 minutes remaining in the chapel for “thanksgiving.” Then at 7:15 the breakfast bell, filing out of chapel across hall, past napkin boxes to the long tables festively arranged. Then grace, sitting down, getting settled. The reader began in the pulpit, kitchen doors banged open on either side of it. Then the rector’s “Tu autem, Domine” and our “Deo Gratias,” and out we burst with our first relatively uninhibited conversation, our first not with fellow retreatants and our first at any meal for 30 days. 

Chatter, chatter, eat, eat. At a suitable time, maybe 45 minutes, the rector again: “Satis.” Enough. Talking stopped. Finish breakfast on your own, get across the hall for a short chapel visit. Back to one’s dormitory and desk. And there a pile of letters, the first in 30 days! Yahoo! Dinner, at mid-day then, was talk time too. Come 2 pm or so, we had a “fusion” recreation, novices and juniors. 

Teams competed. There was a lot of standing around and meeting or getting to know people. At this fusion we met the juniors from the other side of the house, standing on the grassy novitiate playing field with a novices vs. juniors — classics sudents in third or fourth year — softball game in progress, meeting and greeting. Most of us had gone to Jesuit high schools, which served as feeder institutions, though all but four in our year had a year or more of college. Chief among these were Loyola-Chicago, Xavier-Cincinnati, Notre Dame, and John Carroll-Cleveland.

DIGGING IN When the bell rang at 4 pm or so, we headed into the routine, for novices beginning with 4:30 meditation — flexoria — and picking up next day with “manualia” (as in manual work). This was our sweeping and mopping, helping with laundry, waiting table, washing dishes, working on the grounds, and other chores at least an hour a day. Novices to an extent kept the place running.

We also worked at the nearby laymen’s retreat house, waiting table, making beds, cleaning up. This was a tidy white cinder-block building on one corner of our ninety-nine acres on the Little Miami River, to which the so-called Men of Milford came for spiritual refreshment from Cincinnati and its environs.

“It’s a long time between drinks,” ruefully commented Charley O., a novice who later left because of headaches after setting a standard for sheer intensity of piety and demeanor. Charley, 25 or so, two years of law school behind him, was a Marine veteran from the South Pacific and China at the close of WW2. He’d been part of a Marine contingent stationed in a major Chinese city when Mao’s army was on the move and at one point stood with his buddies as a last bastion against the advancing horde, which would have swallowed them up in a quick gulp, but didn’t. Charley had a dramatic flair, and his account of Marines under pressure stayed with me, 18 and with no military experience. 

As a novice I drew him once as my “admonition partner,” who once a week or so had the chance, nay, duty, to keep me posted on my peccadillos, as I had the duty to keep him posted. This sort of novitiate practice tried men’s souls. Your goal had been to ignore what bothered you about a buddy or acquaintance. Now it was to call him on it.

We were a bad match. Charley with his gravitas was one to give me advice, you could argue. But I him? Where was I to come up with something to help Charley become a better novice? His remembered advice for me, in any case, was to go easy on scratching myself. Like any man wearing underwear, I had an itch now and then, but relieved it too obviously, Charley said. You see these guys standing around scratching, he reminded me, with crooked grin. You don’t want to look like that. I sure did not, and learned to be more careful.

Next: More checking up on each other, plus self-accusation and questionable practices . . .