Five Day Women’s Retreat: Graces

Aug 19, 2023 Featured Post, Journal Entry , , , ,

Father Huemmer suggested we capture the graces we received while on the retreat and return to and pray with them frequently. I was so blessed to be able to attend this retreat and I think for many years I will be revisiting my journal entries and finding new graces. These were the ones that stood out to me on Tuesday morning as I sat in the library and looked through my notes.

I hope to go on an Eight Day Silent retreat next year, but they do have shorter ones of just three days and ones for men as well at the St. Joseph Retreat and Conference Center if you’d like to try this but aren’t sure about staying quiet for so long. This link has all their retreats, including day retreats.

Honestly though between the liturgy of the hours, daily Mass, adoration, and spiritual direction, I talked more during my time on the retreat than I normally do! But the difference is I wasn’t talking about learning management systems and integrations or what to make from dinner. I was talking to and about God.

Here are links to past journal excerps:

Being Called into a Deeper Relationship with God the Father, Blessed Mother Mary, and St. Joseph

I had never told Mary that I loved her before, or really thought of her as my mother. She seemed more remote, but now I know she is a bakes bread, cleans the house, talks to you about your problems, always wishes the best for you, wants to hear about your day kind of mom.

Likewise, God the Father, I had more often thought of as a father figure, not my Father. There were times when I would bring my problems to Him and cry on his lap like a little child, but I still wasn’t thinking of Him as a father. I also didn’t think about how much He suffered when Jesus was crucified and still, he went through that and allowed it to happen, to Him and His Son.

In church, I always sit on the Mary side and I think about her much more often than I do St. Joseph. These last days, however, praying with St. Joseph several times a day, I have come to see him as such a solid presence. He reminds me of Stuart and my dad, a hard worker who puts his head down and gets the job done. I think there is such a lack of St. Joseph “energy” in our modern society. So often anything masculine is looked at as bad and I think that is so unfair. Even Stuart feels this way and I don’t know how to get him to see that being a man is nothing to be ashamed of! The world’s problems are not on his or the male gender’s shoulders. I think we are all equally capable of screwing things up. I have been and will continue to pray with St. Joseph.

Connections

Under the spreading branches of the maple tree, looking up through the layers of leaves and the sunlight filtering through them, I saw many spider webs, but only when the light hit them just right. When the light wasn’t right or I wasn’t in the right position, I couldn’t see them at all, even though I knew they were there. The Bible is like the tree and all the connections between the different books and verses are like the spiderwebs. I think for us, they are always changing too, depending on where we are and where the light is. It is a book that is open and ready to address whatever situation we bring to it and the same passage can say different things to us depending on when we read it, but also the Words are never changing. It truly is the best of all books. I used to call myself a bibliophile and I think that is true now more than ever; I am a Bible lover.

In the future, when reading the Bible I will ask: Where is the light here? Where is God and what does He want?

We are Meant to Be Sent

Mary Magdalene didn’t want to leave Jesus but she did because He told her to. Likewise, I would prefer to stay here (at the retreat center) or in church all day. But I can’t. As Father Mike says, we are meant to be sent.

Liturgy of the Hours

The liturgy of the hours compliments the readings. The way the character of the readings changes from morning to evening to night across days of the week is like a microcosm of the liturgical year. I like how Catholicism is like a very sturdy building with a peaked roof where all the pillars and buttresses lead up to one thing: God. As I was talking with God after contemplation during adoration, I remembered that Father Huemmer said I would see in upcoming verses something about light changing. I didn’t notice this when I contemplated them, so I asked God. I saw a dark disc slowly becoming fully white (the moon or the Eucharist?). This made me think that maybe this is like the growing revelation of God’s love and how we should trust Him. How that trust is lost in the garden when Eve and Adam said No and did what they wanted, they didn’t trust God. Then David has more trust in God because he confesses his sins and seeks forgiveness. Then, Paul learns from Jesus and embraces weakness as strength and the fullness of love and trust is Jesus’s perfect obedience dying on the cross for us.

This again is like the liturgy of the hours. I really want to continue to pray the liturgy of the hours at home. I wonder how the mid-day prayers are? I also like how the liturgy of the hours is like a spinning firework shooting sparks of praise out in all directions. People all over the world are praying the morning prayers in their time zones and they move into daytime prayers and evening prayers and nighttime prayers in their time zones so it is like a constant, never-ending spiral of praise!

The passages from Monday evening to today are also like the liturgy of the hours from nighttime to morning because at night we are thinking about death, trusting in God that it will be okay when we awake in the morning, just like how Mary suffered but trusted in God that it would be okay and then in the morning: resurrection.

Choices

In many of the passages I read, choices were being made and when I spent time with St. Mary, I was struck by her ultimate and selfless choice of Yes to God, without knowing the plan or where her Yes would lead. She just said Yes, yes to all of it. When I know God is asking me something, I hope I will always jump up to say yes. Yes, just tell me where and I will go.

But it is more difficult when it is just a small everyday choice like do I work from home or go into the office? Or how do you know when God is even asking you to do something? I like how David, when he was at his best, was always “inquiring of the Lord,” even for small decisions. When he stopped doing that, he ran into trouble. I think I can try to make choices that are always in line with the commandments and how Jesus lived His life and like David, I can pray for guidance.

When I read the Bible from now on, I always want to be asking what choices are being made. If this choice is in line with the commandments, what would the opposite choice be? I like to read scientific literature by asking what would the data look like if the author’s hypothesis were untrue. If I can’t answer that question, then I don’t understand the author’s methods or results enough to judge the accuracy of their conclusions.

Trying to identify good choices and then thinking about what a bad choice would look like is in a similar vein. This could help me avoid making bad choices by getting better at recognizing them. Likewise, if a bad choice, I can ask what a good choice would have looked like and so improve my ability to recognize good choices.