Vow Day is growing in my consciousness, with less than three weeks to go. Taking first vows was the hoped-for conclusion when I began the novitiate; indeed we arrived the day before vows which is intended to make the connection explicit. However, the first vows I witnessed in the novitiate largely passed by without much… Continue reading Reflections on approaching vows
My apologies for the double blog a couple of weeks ago – the expression “It never rains but it pours” comes to mind, especially since there was no post the week before. We have been reminded of the saying literally considering that a few months ago there was a lot of talk about drought which… Continue reading It never rains but it pours
It is difficult to write about my pilgrimage experience after two and a half weeks, with another three and a half weeks to go, because my perception of it changes frequently, often depending on what has just happened and what my mood is. On Friday when I led us down the wrong road for about three… Continue reading Looking back over the journey so far
We are out on the road – in my case it should be literal, a small road about halfway between Birmingham and Walsingham. Ignatius recalls in his autobiography that he made his journey to Paris “alone and on foot”. We, Joel and I, are making a pilgrimage to the Marian shrine in Norfolk (http://www.walsingham.org.uk/) and… Continue reading On the road
Since our tour throughout the Irish province that we completed at the beginning of last week, the novices have been at home and following the normal timetable most of the time. On Thursday evening the Birmingham Jesuit Volunteer Community (http://www.jvcbritain.org/Jesuit_Volunteer_Community,_Britain/Home.html) joined us for Mass and dinner. Then we took a walk together in a nearby… Continue reading Home again
This past weekend I had a positive experience of being a Jesuit with other Jesuits. Three of us novices went to Loyola Hall retreat centre (http://loyolahall.co.uk) to help the vocations promoter of the British Province, Matthew Power (http://www.jesuitvocations.org.uk/news-from-the-vocations-director), with the organisation and implementation of the bi-annual meeting of European vocation promoters. We drove up on Wednesday… Continue reading European vocations promoters meeting
I apologise if anyone came to read our blog last week and did not find anything new. We were away on our Holy Week experiments which, although short are usually intense which means little time to write. This year some of us had slightly longer experiments and also didn’t have easy Internet access. Two novices… Continue reading Northern Cross walk
The novices who were on experiment in England have returned – the Irish contingent is due to return on Saturday while three of us set out on the Northern Cross pilgrimage (http://www.northerncross.co.uk/). I have really welcomed the opportunity to have a few days at a slower pace. We have started reflecting on the experiments and… Continue reading Reflecting on the experiments
In his semi-autobiographical novel “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man”, James Joyce (a former student at Clongowes Wood College where I am spending a six week experiment as a first year novice) describes how the story’s protagonist develops a fever after being pushed into an open cesspool by a bullying classmate. He… Continue reading A Jesuit Boarding School Experiment
One of the challenges of the last week has been to keep my mind on the present and not to start living for the return to Birmingham. It certainly isn’t because of a lack of things to keep me busy. In fact, a challenge is to take enough time to relax and not to use… Continue reading Not finishing before the end
Manresa Amigos 