by Fr. Paul Ward
Published in The Compass, July 15, 2009, vol. 4, issue 11
With less than one month to go, some of our pilgrims managed to make time for our usual pre-pilgrimage retreat.
It is important for us, before all our pilgrimages, to prepare ourselves spiritually for the path that lies before us. It's something like a stretch-out before doing sports, or cram time before exams: intense preparation to guarantee as best results as possible.
Our retreat also touched on some of the practical aspects of the pilgrimage: packing, camping, footgear and other such.
Most
of our meditations were based upon the writings of the Jesuit Martyrs
as they appeared in the Jesuit Relations. Of particular importance was
the letter St. Isaac Jogues, published in the Jesuit Relations, on August 5, 1643. Volume 39 has this letter; you can see this letter here.
I provide some suggestions for reading that link: it's very lengthy;
it's a computer screen, not a nicely typeset book; one can see some
typos, most probably from OCR/ICR computer scans. If you can get over that, it might be one of the most inspirational letters of a saint which you ever read.