Call off the search parties

The retreat at the Carmelite Monastery was nice. Here’s some pictures, the first of those “long-remembered”:/if_i_dont_make_it_back.php tall stone walls and the rest of the beautiful chapel:

It was a silent retreat–for us at least. There were three talks about “Teresa of Avila”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teresa_of_Avila given by Father Tim Byerley, who also works with the “Collegium Center”:http://www.collegiumcenter.org/about.php, a kind of religious education outreach project for young adult Catholics in South Jersey (I mentioned it “a few months ago”:https://www.quakerranter.org/teaching_quakerism_again.php as a model of young adult youth outreach that Friends might want to consider). Much of what Teresa has to say about prayer is universal and very applicable to Friends, though I have to admit I started spacing out by around the fourth mansion of the “Interior Castle”:http://www.ccel.org/ccel/teresa/castle2.toc.html (I’ve never been good with numbered religious steps!).
I’m in no danger of following my wife Julie’s journey from Friends to Catholicism, though as always I very much enjoyed being in the midst of a gathered group committed to a spirituality. The idea of religious life as self-abnegation is an important one for all Christians in an age where “me-ism”:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ScWdek6_Ids&eurl has become the “secular state religion”:http://www.walmart.com/ and I hope to return to it in the near future.