Witnesses of the Faith | September 2024

A Month in Silence
Testimony from Fr. Matthew Maxwell

Who would spend a month in silence? Who would not only spend a whole month in silence, but spend most of that month in interior prayer? Sounds sort of crazy, but the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius of Loyola are precisely that. The complete retreat of the Spiritual Exercises involves 4 to 5 hours of mental prayer a day for a whole month. No wonder it is considered to be such a powerful retreat and one of the privileged means that the Church has to forge souls in holiness.

You might be wondering why am I talking about the month-long Spiritual Exercises in our testimony section. The reason is that from July 10 to August 10, I had the grace to do the retreat myself. What an experience!

I traveled to a small town in the middle of Spain called Burgo de Osma where they have been offering the retreat for the past 3 years. Our residence was an enormous seminary from the 18^th century that has, in part, been turned into a retreat house. The landscape was composed of beautiful rolling hills, medieval castle ruins, and an extremely Catholic cathedral in the center of a historic town. The retreat was run by two priests: one is a Spanish diocesan priest from Getafe, and the other is part of an apostolic community in Toledo. One of the other retreatants—there were 24 altogether—was Fr. Caesar Bertolacci from our Miles Christi community in Michigan. It was great to see him, although I can’t really say we talked to each other much.

In Miles Christi we spend a good amount of time studying and preaching the Spiritual Exercises. We even have as a part of our Constitutions to do a week-long, personal Spiritual Exercises retreat every year. It isn’t until you go through the full month, though, that the power and the genius of this retreat is unleashed in all its potential. They say that St. Ignatius was inspired when he put together the Spiritual Exercises. He had to have been inspired to produce something so spiritually enriching and so capable of helping the soul to find God and inflame it with desires to love and serve Him.

The ”exercises” are the hour-long periods of mental prayer that you do throughout the day. It really is an exercise to apply your mind, will and heart to the topics of our faith with so much focus and intensity. By the end of the day, we would normally be quite exhausted. It made me think of a quote from the book “The Soul of the Apostolate” where the author says that there are three kinds of labor: physical, intellectual and spiritual. He says that, of these three, the spiritual work is the most arduous. The Spiritual Exercises are definitely a testimony to this. In the same way, though, that physical exercise makes the body strong and healthy, the same result is felt in our soul when we carry out spiritual exercises. I can definitely attest to this after coming off my retreat!

I am so thankful to God for the opportunity to go on the retreat, and for all the graces that He gave me during my month with Him. It was a perfect time to step back and make new, good determinations for going forward. It was a great opportunity to reinvigorate the holy desires that we need in order to seriously pursue holiness. It was a wonderful experience to be able to absorb better the spiritual legacy of St. Ignatius of Loyola in order to pass in on to others in the retreats that we ourselves preach. Deo gratias!

In this testimony section, you will see so many examples of how God has used a priest to bring about His work of sanctification. What is assumed, though, is that the priest is capable of being used as an instrument by our Lord. In other words, it assumes that we, first and foremost, take seriously our own, personal sanctification. In Miles Christi, the Spiritual Exercises are a big part of how we strive to do that. Thank you for your prayers for priests, many graces that God wants to give us to make us better priests certainly come because others have prayed for us. Please continue to pray for us, that we might be faithful to all that God asks of us as His ministers on earth!