Stories

During the December 2025 Ignatian Nourishment Retreat, I experienced a hash brown so transcendent that it is now the standard by which I will measure all others. It was crispy—all of it—darkly and lightly browned shreds alike. Every bite had a satisfying crunch, the kind that echoes in your head, and the unctuous oiliness contrasted beautifully with the bright acidity of the ketchup. I needed that hash brown the same way my body needed a bacon, egg, and cheese biscuit four to five times a week when I was pregnant with my child, or the way I need a protein-dense dinner on a Monday after a long, intense weekend run.

2025 was a year of one curveball change after another. My beloved partner of fifteen years and I made the difficult decision to divorce after realizing it was the kindest, most loving thing we could do for each other. We are now finding our co-parenting feet as we support our almost-teen through the aftermath of tectonic home-life shifts—changes occurring just as they undergo massive physical and emotional shifts of their own. Earlier in the year, I anxiously, then gratefully, counted the minutes, hours, days, and weeks my mother lived after a massive heart attack. Months later, I flew cross-country to accompany her during triple-bypass, open-heart surgery. To say I was closing out the year coasting on fumes would be an understatement.

When I arrived at Villa Maria del Mar on Monday, December 15, I was eager to spend time by the ocean, a place that has always provided therapeutic respite for me. This was my first Ignatian retreat, and I was ready to engage in the productive, mental rigor I believed the experience deserved. I arrived with a spirit of curiosity and openness, equipped with my trusty unlined Moleskine for journaling, an assortment of colored pens, Mary Oliver’s poetry, and a book on the Gospel of Mary Magdalene. Having worked at SCU for over a decade and recently engaged in the 19th Annotation, I felt familiar with Ignatian spiritual practices and was ready to get to work.

My “work” turned out to not be work at all, but rather a gentle invitation to rest. Instead of reading and writing, I spent most of my time simply showing up and being present. On the day of hash brown transcendence, in the afternoon, I indulged my inner Mary Oliver for hours by walking on the beach without an agenda. I wandered where the surf meets the shore, scouting for sea glass and chucking rocks into the water. I watched snowy egrets snatch snacks from the sand and sanderlings skitter in undulating clusters. I marveled at the fact that waves don’t have hands, yet still manage to deposit stones onto the packed, wet sand. I thought about how the ocean is constantly offering gifts: this shell or that one, sea kelp, emerita skeletons, and sand dollars. The longer I wandered, the more I heard the constant, sighing waves saying with tender love: “Look at this, and this, and this—my offerings to you.”

My formative experiences of God began in the Evangelical Bible Belt of Texas and the South—in modern, mega-church buildings, listening to rousing fire and brimstone sermons, singing hymns against a backdrop of thunderous organ music, and swimming amid a sea of membership numbering in the tens of thousands. That experience largely tapered into silence during my years in Mississippi, Maryland, and finally, California. Since starting the 19th Annotation in mid-September, I have realized that the silence was not an absence, but rather a quiet presence condensed into a silken, nearly invisible thread—like the taut, tuned string of a violin waiting for the draw of the bow to sound its music. 

The invitation to find God in all things is an aspect of Ignatian spirituality that has become transformatively meaningful to me. When I ate that hash brown I experienced God as crispy, crunchy presence. When I wandered the beach simply being—instead of doing, going, and creating—I felt deeply loved. I went into the retreat with a spirit of curiosity and departed with deep gratitude for the grace of God’s nourishment and the consolation and solace of a soft place to land.

 

Nadia Nasr
Head of Archives & Special Collections, SCU Library

 

 

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