Off on Retreat

Going to Wernersville, the Jesuit retreat house, for three days next week. I was looking forward to it last week, now I'm feeling a bit of unease. Very normal emotion--each retreat is a journey, after all. ("Journey" with all its material, spiritual, and psychobabbly overtones.) I'm not a great traveler to begin with, and anything can happen on a retreat. The physical journeying itself so often jolts the soul's inertia. One can imagine what a medieval pilgrim felt the night before shipping out to Jerusalem.

But I like Wernersville. I felt such a sense of relief when I drove through those gates last year. It's an old novitiate house, a huge one, with plenty of room for retreatants to rattle around in. And plenty of outdoor space, too, for walking. Good art and a good library. A dedicated, engaging staff. And a giant stone of a chapel that resists modernizing.

"Resists modernizing"--Catholic antennae going up! OK, in the interests of full disclosure, my sensibilities are pretty conservative. But Wernersville's is not, so...if you're liberal Catholic, you can go jauntily, and if you're conservative Catholic: don't cheat yourself, it's very welcoming and not at all over the top. I'll just say I've very rarely gone there when somebody at some point hasn't whipped out a rosary. Non-Catholics are welcome, too, and, if they are also wondering what Catholics are fussing about, try A People Adrift by Peter Steinfels, which I thought was pretty even-handed, accurate, and, frankly, quite dispiriting.