Paul Mariani is a 59-year-old award-winning poet, critic, essayist, and biographer of William Carlos Williams, Hart Crane, John Berryman, and Robert Lowell. He holds a chair in English at Boston College. In this devotional work, Mariani, a Catholic layperson who had made six eight-day Jesuit retreats over the past 30 years, recounts the experiences of his first thirty-day retreat. He is attracted to the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius, especially "their sacramental sense of time and place, of God operating in our everyday world."
Mariani gets lost on his way to the Eastern Point Retreat House on the Atlantic Ocean near Gloucester, Massachusetts. The structure of his spiritual adventure is two days of prep followed by thirty days of silence, with two half days off for socializing, and concluding with two days of debriefing. The author's intention is coming to an "understanding of my own radical disorder, and then trying to align my will with God's." To accomplish this goal, he reads scripture, talks with a priest, studies the life and ministry of St. Ignatius, and engages in plenty of soul searching. Mariani confronts his lust and notes: "I have not asked that passion be taken away — for passion is what keeps life fresh, what gives me the spring to place my two feet over the edge of the bed each morning and get up — but rather that my passions might be channeled."
On this thirty-day retreat, the author finds new ways to kindle his soul, deepen his relationship with God, and come to a more intense realization of the passion and death of Jesus Christ. For Mariani, silence opens him up to the grace that is always available from a loving God.
