Sonal Castelino, Director of Campus Ministry, writes:
This Lenten season, Campus Ministry organized a retreat for students to find inner peace through an intentional and personal friendship with Jesus. This was an opportunity, an avenue – amidst the busyness of the academic term, the stress or the newness around the return to on campus learning, the helplessness in front of the war in Ukraine—to stop a moment and connect to that which is essential: finding grounding and depth in the spiritual life and thus hope and strength to persevere and continue.
The format of the retreat included committing to daily prayer for 30-40 minutes and a time for spiritual conversation weekly to unpack the prayer experience as a group and listen to each other over five weeks.
The retreat is inspired by the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius of Loyola and the format we used was proposed by Michael Hansen, an Australian Jesuit who created a community through the First Spiritual Exercises.
To ensure accessibility, we offered this retreat both in person and online with facilitators to guide and move the retreat along with the participants. The experience has been a very fruitful one.
Here is the experience of Paul Kye, a doctoral student at St. Michael’s Faculty of Theology:
Sitting in solitude, I found myself interacting with Jesus one day, who had been waiting for my friendship and wholesome acceptance. I was introduced to this retreat couple of days later, and I have been participating it on my own every day. This journey has been life-changing, both in interior and external levels of my life–how I see this world and how I see myself. I emerge in prayer and meet Jesus, who appears to me at levels appropriate for my own level of spirituality, I feel so much love and attention, consolation and encouragement that I have needed. Sometimes I see him as a teacher, as the Creator or a friend who takes my own yoke in exchange of his light one, instills an enlightening understanding and newly nurtured love for my own cross to bear, and most of all, breathes in lifegiving joy and excitement in my heart to face the daily life. This exercise has transformed me, as I dedicate a specific set of time to it every day, it allowed to me to see my life not according to my own will or those of others, but according to God’s will.
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