Ignatian Silent Retreat

Every year, the Center for Ignatian Spirituality sponsors a weekend Ignatian Silent Retreat for Boston College faculty and staff. The program starts on a Thursday evening and ends after dinner on a Sunday, with silence observed throughout each day. Each participant has a spiritual director. The retreat is preached, with two input sessions each day. The program has socials and introductory remarks at the beginning and at the end. Mass is offered on Saturday night.

1. Give participants a break from their routines.
2. Deepen participants’ experience of Ignatian Spirituality through this classic way of searching for God.
3. Participants experience and better understand the consolation and desolation of solitude in community.

Colleagues are often wary of spending a weekend in silence. As with the 19th Annotation, administrators and staff often overcome their fears more easily than professors (and, numerically, there are more administrators and staff than faculty as participants). This retreat has been designed to be flexible for some faculty colleagues. Some can opt for an independent retreat track, allowing them to enlarge capacity for silence and more fully engage in the future.

Program staff have realized that they need to offer a series of “days of silence” to help professors taste the value of silence before they plunge into longer retreats. Once they see that this is something beneficial, they often want more of it. The pipeline of trust has grown stronger each year and staff have more and more faculty colleagues who imagine themselves making a silent retreat.