Brendan Comerford SJ presented a six-day online retreat entitled To Love the Earth from 1 to 6 June 2020, involving talks and responses to selected questions on poets such as Gerard Manley Hopkins, Patrick Kavanagh and Denise Levertov. Themes included our relationship with God, our own human nature, and the gift of the earth as our sacred sanctuary. The booked-out event was one of a series of online retreats from Manresa Jesuit Centre of Spirituality, Dollymount, Dublin. Due to demand, another poetry retreat will take place from Monday, 13 to 18 July, 2020. Click here for details ».

Fr Comerford reflects that the lives and poems of the six different poets all had something in common. “They are deeply sensitive to the Sacramental presence of God in nature and in the everyday,” he remarks. The retreat’s title, To Love the Earth, comes from a line in Denise Levertov’s poem ‘Beginners’. In it she begins, “We’ve only begun to love the earth.”

Each day, the retreatant was invited to fully participate in the experience through following a structured approach. This involved watching a 30-minute video on a selected poet and reading selected poems and suggested scripture passages in the morning. Then the retreatant was invited to pray and ponder over the material and to submit a response or question to Fr Comerford by early afternoon. Later in the evening, all retreatants met up for an hour-long online meeting where responses and questions were dealt with and where there was time for group interaction.

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