Reflection on a Lenten Wilderness Retreat in a Georgia "desert"

Louis Vitale — Thu, 30 Mar 2006 18:12:50 -0600

March 2006
"LIGHTNING EAST TO WEST"

As Lent 2006 began to dawn on my Crisp County hermitage cell I felt a call to a deeper Lenten Experience. I had received a letter from Jim Douglass offering his phone number for a collect call. Early Ash Wednesday morning I placed a call to him asking for some spiritual additional food for Lent. (Jerry Zawada and I shared a Lenten retreat last year with the Douglasses' community in Birmingham, Alabama, on the theme of the wildernesses of life where--as Jesus and John the Baptist--we discover God.) I recalled to him how during a three month "retreat" at the Camaldolese Hermitage in Big Sur California I had a great spiritual theophany while reading his book Lightning East to West. Two days later I had the book as well as the finally published Peace in the Post-Christian Era by Thomas Merton. I was ready for the 1st Sunday of Lent.