Thirty Days: On Retreat with the Exercises of St. Ignatius (Compass)

Go be quiet and pray for 30 days and you might come to know yourself--and your God, too. That's what Paul Mariani found out when he went on retreat with the Exercises of St. Ignatius, as he explains in Thirty Days. Mariani, a poet and literary critic, spent the month of January one year at a retreat center on the rocky Atlantic coast near Gloucester, Massachusetts. During that time he confronted his past experiences as a father, husband, teacher, and Christian and arrived at some surprising conclusions about his place in God's world. Thirty Days--a work of probing self-examination, including much reflection on the lives of St. Ignatius and Jesus--is the journal that he kept during that period. Readers of this fine, honest, intelligent book will be quietly assured by something Mariani himself learned from Ignatius's Exercises. "How consoling to know that, no matter how small we may think we are against the backdrop of eternity, we do count in the cosmic scheme of things." --Michael Joseph Gross