Thirty Days: On Retreat With the Exercises of St. Ignatius

From the day Paul Mariani arrives at Eastern Point Retreat House to take part in the five-hundred-year-old Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius, he realizes that his expectations and assumptions about who he is, what he knows, and what he believes are about to change radically. In this profound memoir Mariani blends a brief life of St. Ignatius and meditations on the life of Jesus with the day-to-day unfolding of thirty days of silence at the retreat house. His journey of introspection, self-revelation, and spiritual renewal leads him to a new understanding of his relationship with God and of what it truly means to put others before oneself.

Paul Mariani, an award-winning poet, biographer of William Carlos Williams and Robert Lowell, and critic, holds a Chair in English at Boston College. A former professor of English at the University of Massachusetts, he has lectured widely across the country and lives in Montague, Massachusetts.