Retreat for Homeless Persons

For Men Who are Homeless – Retreats by Wayne Richard Wayne Richard is a participant and team leader in the Chicago Province 's Ignatian Spirituality Project (ISP), an initiative created by Provincial Richard J. Baumann, SJ, and Fr. Bill Creed, SJ, The retreat is designed to make the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius available and accessible to homeless and addicted men. Wayne's story is striking. His parents died when he was a child. He was raised by his grandmother, who died when he was 13. His grandfather took him, and then passed him to family friends. "Under their roof," Wayne recalls, "I learned that people would hurt me for amusement, that people could and would be cruel, and that it was a normal part of life in the world." Wayne eventually moved in with a friend and graduated from high school. He didn't have enough money for college and decided to take a year to figure out what to do next. In the year he learned how to ride a motorcycle, how to hotwire a car and how to smoke cocaine. "After several years I began to use more and more, but not enough to recognize a problem. I depended on the drugs more and more to relieve the pain of living, the boredom of dead end jobs, and the lack of nurturing relationships in my life." He found brief redemption when he fell in love with a woman and married her. The joy of this loving relationship soon gave way to anguish and frustration. "Cocaine was there," he says, and soon he was "out drugging" all night. The marriage failed and he hit the streets. He moved into a rat infested garage and continued his drug binge, only occasionally finding time to go to work. He was lost, high, homeless, and desperate. "I was ready to end my life. I sat under a traffic bridge with a gun in my mouth, tears in my eyes. Now my descent was complete. My final thought as I was about to squeeze the trigger was, 'God why wouldn't you love me?' And then it happened." "In that instant it was as if time stood still and I heard a voice as clear as my own, 'Get up, leave here; there is something else for you to do'." Wayne removed the gun, returned to his garage, slept deeply, and in the morning called an addiction hotline. "I had to find freedom from the bondage of anger, bitterness, pity and ignorance of self. I desperately needed to live without the fear and loneliness that had guided my actions. And to do it I had to give God the lead." During his stay at a transitional center, Wayne attended a retreat presented by the Ignatian Spirituality Project. "During the retreat I began to examine the continuous presence of God in my life," Wayne says. This was in 1999. Since then he's stayed clean, gotten a job at the Chicago Coalition for the Homeless, and helped lead more than a dozen ISP retreats. "I continue to go on retreat," Wayne says, "because I see God move men on the retreats to faith and hope. I work to help continue bringing the gift of these retreats to homeless men recovering from drugs and alcohol like myself." info@IgnatianSpiritualityProject.org """""""""""""""""""""""" vmalpan@gmail.com