Mt Helena Nat Park, 2015

I first came across the works of Father Josef Neuner, S.J., in several scholarly articles published in Review for Religious (2001) on interpreting the spiritual journey and darkness of Mother Theresa of Calcutta. In a posthumous collection of her personal letters, Come be My Light (Doubleday 2007), representing her ‘unauthorized’ autobiography, Father Neuner was indeed the spiritual director who created the breakthrough for her understanding that her physical sufferings endured for the poor was to be matched by her spiritual thirst and hunger for God. It was indeed God’s intention for her to preserve the authenticity of her mission work by providing both a physical and spiritual Calvary for much of her missionary life. He wrote that ” we cannot long for something that is not intimately close to us; thirst is more than absence of water …”. “The sure sign of God’s hidden presence in this darkness is the thirst for God, the craving for at least a ray of His light, No one can long for God unless God is present in his / her heart.”

I next encountered Fr Neuner in his book Walking With Him (Loyola University Press 1985), a 30-day guided Retreat based on the Spiritual Exercises of St Ignatius.

Here, in the opening chapter (day 1) of the Retreat guide, he invites the retreatant to enter into isolation by visiting the spiritual desert.

He ends the chapter with two reflections of the Desert:

“The desert does not mean the absence of men, it means the presence of God“ (because as he wrote earlier in the chapter, the decisive battles of God’s kingdom are fought in solitude; notice how this turn of phrase is used in his description of Mother Theresa’s spiritual thirst above).

 “The richness of a novitiate in the Sahara is undoubtedly the solitude, and the joy of solitude, silence: the true silence that penetrates everything, fills every being, which speaks with wonderful new power to the soul, a power of which distracted people know nothing. There you live in silence, you learn it in stages: Silence of the Church, the cell, the work, the interior, silence of the soul, silence of God.” (By Carlo Carretto)

About Josef Neuner and Carlo Carretto

Fr Josef Neuner was born in Feldkirch, Austria, n 1908. He joined the Society of Jesus in 1926, and went to India to teach theology at De Nobili College, Pune. He was for many years dean of the facuty of theology there. He was a peritus at the Second Vatican Council. His principal publication, in collaboration with J Depuis, S.J., is “The Christian Faith in the Doctrinal Documents of the Catholic Church.” Along with his teachings, he gave many retreats, especially thirty-day retreats to priests and religious, resulting in the publication of Walking With Him. Fr Neuner died in 2009 in Pune, India at the age of 101. He was probably the oldest living Jesuit at the time of his passing)

Carlo Carretto (1910-1988) was a member of the Little Brothers of Jesus, a community of desert contemplatives who were also social activists. He wrote several books including Letters from the Desert.