April 22, 2007
Sunday
The facility that is now called the Jesuit Center at Wernersville was built in 1929 at a cost of $2 million, all of it underwritten by Nicholas and Genevieve Brady, a couple so wealthy and so generous that they employed an almoner to handle their philanthropic concerns. Great friends and benefactors of the Jesuits, they took on as a personal project the design and construction of a new center for the training of novices, young men undergoing their advanced education and spiritual formation as priests.
There was a time when a class of novices could number in the hundreds (and this was not the only novitiate the Jesuits operated). Changes in the church and society and the decline in vocations beginning in the 1960s meant that by the 1970s such a large facility was not needed, and was becoming a burden for the Jesuit community to maintain. There was talk of selling it, but creative people turned it instead into a center for programs aimed at the needs of lay people and clergy for spiritual growth and formation. There were still novices here when I started coming up the hill to get my soul free, a dozen instead of a hundred, but there haven’t been any since 1991. Program attendees and retreatants rarely interacted with these young men, but their energy was here, and I miss it.
The enormous building sits on a hill at the top of just under 300 acres of rolling land in Berks County, Pennsylvania. Picture a 500-room hotel with a church in the middle of it. The Jesuit property adjoins the large St. John’s (Hain’s) United Church of Christ and its vast 250-year-old cemetery. The Phoebe-Berks retirement community (built in the 1980s on land that had once been part of the Jesuit holdings) and the little borough of Wernersville are so far below the House (as the building is called) that they are little more than roofs and lights obscured by trees.
The House is usually quiet even when several groups are here. This weekend there were about sixty people in my group, keeping silence at meals and at other times when we were not in a session (and those sessions were not participatory but were conventional lectures where you listened and learned). Another thirty or so women were in a program with interactive components and lively mealtimes. (They used a separate dining room and separate serving times.) And there are the thirty or so resident retired Jesuits and staff who regularly live here. But even with more than a hundred people moving about the halls and meeting rooms and residence areas, it was pretty quiet.
Tonight there are fewer than twenty people in the House. The retreat and program guests had left by 2:00, about the time I went out to do some errands and visit some of my favorite places such as the Wertz Mill (where a train accident that figures in my novel took place). When I got back to the House I noticed that it really was more quiet than usual. When I went down for dinner at 5:45 I saw that there was no one in the part of the dining room used by retreatants and guests, only six or so Jesuits sitting in the alcove reserved for them.
A woman I’d seen arriving by car service when I came in at 4:00 was coming down the hall. It turns out she is the leader of the program I’m attending beginning on Tuesday. She traveled from South Carolina and is giving a presentation tomorrow in Allentown. She proved to be a lively and interesting dinner companion.
Sister Ann is staying on the first floor. I am staying on the third. I am the only person on the third floor. It is quiet. Serious quiet.
I have no needs to do and no promises to keep from now until 5:00 on Tuesday. I can read, write, and sleep on whatever schedule I choose. There’s no television, and going online requires two elevator rides to the room where the blue cable lies coiled behind the sofa. My meals will be provided according to the only schedule that isn’t of my design.
This is practice for Wyoming.