“That’s a time for women when you start to think about yourself,” Quigley said.
Quigley had been raised with a simple, bare-bones faith in Irish Block, Ont. — a nearly invisible speck on the map halfway between Meaford and Owen Sound. When it snowed and the family couldn’t make it to Mass Quigley’s mother would read passages from the Bible.
The Quigleys grew up with a firm sense that they were different from the Protestants. Her older sister joined the Sisters of St. Joseph, and the whole family remains fiercely proud of her.
As her children were becoming more independent, but while she was still surrounded by the daily torrent of teenagers, the suggestion that Quigley go on retreat was very appealing.
“What drew me to it more than anything was the silence,” she said. “This place, if you can imagine, it was like Grand Central Station... I was always on the road. I was always going, going, going.”
What she discovered at Manresa was that there is more to prayer.
“I found it very hard to do any structured praying (while raising children). You didn’t have any time,” she said. “All you were doing with praying was just demanding ‘Please Lord, get me through this!’ ”
Quigley came to realize that her relationship with the Bible was underdeveloped.
“Suddenly you realize that there’s something more,” she said. “For the first time in my life I was really reading the Bible.”
Since 1977 Quigley has been a member of a Christian Life Community group — a faith-sharing circle based on the spirituality of St. Ignatius of Loyola. As part of her group’s apostolate, she has captained a retreat for 65 women on the last weekend of every October for 30-some years. The most recent retreat featured Fr. Michael Kolarcik, a professor of Old Testament at Regis College, leading the group through the Psalms.
Quigley never really got the Psalms before, but last year’s retreat has given her plenty to think about.
Over the years Quigley has done silent retreats on her own and group retreats. They’ve helped her deal with loss, family stress and getting older.
“I wouldn’t miss my retreat for anything,” she said.
Manresa retreats open prayer life to deeper faith
By Michael Swan, The Catholic Register
{mosimage}PICKERING, Ont. - You can’t keep your faith if you don’t deepen it. A paper-thin faith just gets thinner, until there’s nothing left to hold onto. So Alice Quigley has been diligently deepening her faith with annual retreats at Manresa Spiritual Renewal Centre in Pickering for the last 36 years.
When the 75-year-old Quigley made her first retreat in 1973 she was a woman just beginning to catch her breath at the tail end of more than 20 years of full-bore motherhood — four girls and a boy. Her oldest was just about to get married. She still had three teenagers and one pre-teen at home, but she was beginning to feel a little freedom coming on.
When the 75-year-old Quigley made her first retreat in 1973 she was a woman just beginning to catch her breath at the tail end of more than 20 years of full-bore motherhood — four girls and a boy. Her oldest was just about to get married. She still had three teenagers and one pre-teen at home, but she was beginning to feel a little freedom coming on.
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