Marissa Papula serves in Campus Ministry at Boston College. A trained spiritual director, she spends her days discussing “the stuff of souls” with students while overseeing Kairos, the largest retreat program of its kind in the US, inviting undergraduates to explore their relationships with God, self, and others. A native of New York’s Hudson Valley, she earned her BA from The University of Scranton and her MA from Boston College. She has published and spoken nationally on spirituality. Beyond her work and studies, Marissa enjoys Mary Oliver poetry, teaching barre fitness classes, and TSA precheck.

In my work as a Campus Minister at Boston College overseeing one of the largest retreat programs in the country, I lack the opportunity to acquaint myself personally with each student who moves through my program. However, before each retreat departs, I set aside a few hours in my work week to handwrite the names of every retreatant on their materials, praying for them as I loop my cursive, hoping they move through their retreat with comfort and care.

I was calmed immediately, then, when I arrived at the St. Raphaela Center in Haverford, Pennsylvania, in mid-July for a six day silent retreat, and learned during our opening prayer service that Sister Michelle, the Center’s director, had prayed for each attendee by name that morning. I knew that no matter what awaited me in the days ahead, I’d enjoy the same care and comfort of my beloved students. My nerves were assuaged. After making the drive to Philly from Boston, mind whirring with what the week might hold, I felt at ease.

Despite the nature of my ministerial work, I had never made a silent retreat myself. A self-identified “raging extrovert,” the thought of days-long stretches of quiet and unstructured time stirred anxiety – borderline, dread – in me, especially emerging from the isolation and warped chronology wrought by the pandemic. And yet, this summer found me on the precipice of a dangerous burnout: I was exhausted from the frenetic pace of my work in the academic cycle, and my relationships were strained. The wilderness of my interiority had been eroded, the landscape changing dramatically in recent years. Everything in me was crying out for a sabbatical of some sort to sojourn into my soul and map anew my interior terrain. While I attend closely to my psychosocial wellness through therapy, exercise, and other modes of the now-commodified notion of “self care,” my spirit was writhing. It was time to enter the wilderness of myself, and trust that God would meet me there, awaiting graciously all that I was packing with me. 

Such a retreat called for a dramatic deviation from my standard way of proceeding. Stillness and solitude are not my natural modus operandi. When faced with a productivity impasse, I’ll pop into a coworker’s office to chat or recruit a student to join me on a coffee run. I thrive on a stacked schedule. I make phone calls from the car and recommend books to former students from my Instagram DMs. To disconnect and pause rather than sprint through my days, filling my hours with activity and conversation felt unnatural. And yet, I knew deep within me that such a rattling of my routine was the only way I could shake myself up and allow truth and beauty to emerge from the rubble of my overstimulated existence. Long had I been straining to hear the whisper of God over the cacophony of my daily milieu. Only silence would suffice.

I arrived in Pennsylvania on a golden Tuesday afternoon with the din of traffic ringing in my ears and a backpack full of reading material strapped to me. Within a few minutes of settling in, I located my two safe havens: the library and the pool. As the names of beloved authors practically winked at me from the library shelves – Henri Nouwen, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Julian of Norwich – and the early evening sunlight shimmered along the poolwater surface, the pall of nervousness I had enveloped around myself gave way to glimmers of hope for the days ahead. I felt myself slowing down, easing into that first night. I ached for rest.

A rhythm for my days took shape naturally beginning that first morning: a late sleeper, I’d often forgo breakfast in favor of a quick coffee before opening my day by meeting with my spiritual director. Our morning conversations offered fodder for prayer as I headed into my day, my inner consciousness cleared with a bit of verbal processing, speaking into existence what God had written onto my heart. I was struck by the attentiveness with which my spiritual director accompanied me: I mentioned briefly that a tabletop sculpture of The Woman at the Well from John’s Gospel had caught my attention on the first floor of the retreat house, which gave way to rich reflection on narratives of complex women to whom Jesus draws close and through whom he reveals himself. When our conversations meandered through the life of Mary Magdalene, I was offered the next morning a copy of Marie Howe’s Magdalene: The Seven Devils. And meeting at the intersection of serendipity and providence, so too did my director invite to join our conversation familiar voices from my chorus of spiritual support: Mary Oliver, Teilhard de Chardin. Padding away from our direction room at the end of the hallway, barefoot and clutching near-empty coffee cup, our conversations softened my heart each morning, and opened me more expansively to the movements of the Spirit that would nudge me through my wide open days. 

I’d spend the rest of the morning journaling, noticing what questions percolated to the surface of my consciousness, and would bring my journal with me to Daily Mass. Following Mass, I found myself quickly eating lunch and heading out to the pool for the afternoon, a book and my float in hand. Lounging in the sunlight, unbothered by observations of my fellow retreatants, I chuckled silently to myself as I read The Heart’s Invisible Furies. I sobbed softly when an exacting turn of phrase by Anne Lamott pressed on an emotional bruise. My companions on this retreat were not those around me, making our own ways through our quiet, restful days; rather, I journeyed into myself with authors and voices who contoured my retreat into something entirely my own. Indeed, I would encounter the warm smile of another participant, or silently whisper “Bless you,” upon hearing a sneeze, but what those in my company were praying over and bringing to God during this time remains entirely unknown to me. In the tender stillness of our silence, we offered one another the gift of finding holiness by our own ways. 

As my own reflections deepened over my days in Haverford, I continued to find myself accompanied by complicated women whose stories were graced with illuminating agency: Glennon Doyle, Krista Tippett, Cheryl Strayed. I floated and napped and prayed those summer afternoons away, bringing their words and my own before God, and I was thankful to have nothing to do but rest in the sacred stillness. I’d pause to journal when a thought stirred me. I’d linger to enjoy a snack after finishing yet another book. I’d pore over a poem with perusing deliberation. I didn’t need to worry about my next meal: all was provided for me, and all was abundant and delicious. I had nowhere to be but where I was. Disconnected from my phone and divested from all sense of urgency, I came to notice beauty and truth anew. Some of these revelations were painfully simple: upon emerging from my shower one evening to a bathroom thick with steam, the scent of my shampoo filled the humid air, and I was struck by its sweetness. Had I been home, I’d have lunged for my phone to order another bottle. Here, though, I simply paused, and wondered to myself: has this silly soap of mine always smelled this good? When setting sunlight streamed through the chapel windows during an evening Taize service and the shrubs outside sparkled with the staccato glow of fireflies, I merely paused, stared, and allowed recognitions of grace to flood my consciousness: this lush summer night, this golden dusk, they were simply mine to behold. Instead of finding the silence and stillness stifling, in this stretch of sacred days, I was free.

A few weeks have now passed since my retreat at St. Raphaela’s, and I’ve been thrust back into the bustling cadence of my beloved life: I’ve flown across the country to a wedding, spent a weekend in New York City with friends, geared up for the return of my Boston College students. My days are once again filled with phone calls and work out classes and Amazon Prime purchases and various other oft-overlooked trappings of my millennial life. I love it in all its complexity, and yet, I am also attuned anew to the forces that clamor for my attention and call me away from myself and from God. In the sweet chaos of my routine, I appreciate more deeply now the grace borne of distilling one’s days down to their essential. To spend time with the God who calls us each by name and who knows the desires of our hearts that exist too deep for words is perhaps more imperative than it’s ever been for me, as my life bursts with abundance. I tread water in the sacred seas of ambition and urgency; retreating into myself with God, I need only float.