July 8, 2011

• “…and Immediately Blood and Water Flowed Out.

  

  From June 19th until June 27th I was at the Sacred Heart Jesuit Retreat House just outside of little Sedalia, Colorado. Every year each Jesuit is expected to make an eight-day silent retreat, so this is when and where I chose to make mine. My goodness, I don’t know if I could have chosen a more beautiful place!

  Here are a few of the many, many pictures I took of the splendid scenery, trails and spectacular sunsets. And praise God for hammocks!!!

  

  Sorry if your computer took forever to load these, but hopefully they were worth the wait!

  The first day of my retreat I spent just quieting myself. I went for a walk, took a nap, etc. and in the afternoon I met with my spiritual director. He asked me a couple of questions about who I was, where I was from and how I came to enter the Society. These are all important things for a director to know; the more he knows about how God tends to work in my heart the better he can help to guide me through my retreat. Once I had shared the short-version of all that he asked what I was looking for in this retreat, what graces I was seeking. This set up what would characterize the rest of my days of silence: relationships.

  I first talked to him about my father (link up for a basic explanation) and how all that was weighing on my heart, especially since after the retreat I was headed home to Iowa for his wedding. While in my past retreat (read the posts following the link for the scoop on that) God the Father brought me tremendous comfort and peace with things, still the events looming ahead weighed on me. Next I talked about my best friend who back in August entered a convent. She and I were very, very close and it has been hard to let go of her in my heart like I want to, to give her entirely over to Christ. I don’t want to hold anything back from Him; I want her to be totally His! I was exhausted being so selfish and wanted Jesus’ help in opening my heart to the freedom He offered. After all, we have so much trouble “giving up,” don’t we? We must give things up again and again, a little more each time, until we have nothing of our own save what God gives back to us and when He does it is even more wonderful than when we “lost it.” Anyways, that was where I started.

  My director encouraged me to take some time that evening to go look for rocks (yes, my thoughts exactly!). He suggested I find a rock for each my father and my friend and then spend some time in prayer talking to Christ about each of them. When I feel ready I should then go to this enormous statue of the Ascension and entrust my father and my relationship with him to Christ, leaving the rock at the statue as a symbol of that surrender, and I should do the same with my friend at the statue of Our Lady (who I’m sure would turn it right over to her Son, as she ALWAYS does!). Then he suggested that when I was finished I ought to spend some time by that statue of the Ascension and just ponder that event prayerfully and imagine what it was like for the Apostles to “let go” of Christ in that moment, mere weeks after they had thought He had been taken away forever. 

  So I did all that. I hunted for a couple of little stones and took time in the little side chapel of the retreat house to think first about my father and then about my friend. I tried recalling some of my earliest and most-cherished memories of my father and was greeted with a whole flood of them. I remember when I was three and we moved from our first house to the one I would live in for the next twenty-five years, and how I sat in the front of the big U-Haul with him and waved goodbye to my mother while he drove the first load of our things to the new house. I remember our upright grand piano that my dad bought at a church auction for $10; it was banana-yellow and if we begged him he would plunk out the themesongs for “Transformers” and “Ghostbusters.” I remembered fishing trips, Christmas mornings, building forts, hunting (including a time where I proudly marched along with my cap rifle and eventually got too tired to keep up and he had to turn around and take me home, spoiling his whole excursion! But he didn’t frown or complain at all), and so much more. I was just filled with gratitude for my father, regardless of the weight and suffering he had unknowingly been putting me through for the last many months. The next morning I went for a walk and brought all these memories to mind before hiding the stone beneath the statue and entrusting Him even moreso to Christ. Oh the chains that fell off when I had done that!

  Similarly I spent time in the chapel calling to mind memories with my best friend. I remembered how nervous and skittish she always was, hesitant to do anything spur-of-the-moment (ah, college freshmen!). I remembered how she would never get any of the jokes our friends would tell amongst ourselves, and how I taught her to play games on the XBox like HALO, Star Wars: The Knights of the Old Republic (and the look on her face when she found out SHE was Darth Revan!!), or how we went camping at Backbone State Park for her birthday one year. I remembered how her roommate came to visit me in the novitiate and without telling me had brought my friend along too. The roommate arrived and said that she had some things in the trunk if I wouldn’t mind getting them, since she was tired. I thought it was a very unusual request since it wasn’t like she was going to spend the night or anything (her parents lived a short drive away) and so I said, “Well, I’ll bet (my friend) is hiding in there,” and sure enough I opened the trunk and immediately she popped out and beat her fists on my chest saying, “You ALWAYS ruin my surprises!” (She is TERRIBLE at surprises; I can see right through her every attempt to hide them). I remember hanging out with her at her apartment when she came to St. Louis for her masters and how we were gym buddies (otherwise neither of us would go at all), went to movies, Mass on Sunday mornings at the Basilica, visiting friends, etc. I remember especially the deep conversations we would have about the work Christ was doing in her heart and how she found herself falling more and more in love with Him and feeling that she could not be happy with any other man but the Son of Man Himself, how terrifying it was to think of her sins and that He still desired her to be totally His, and how she would weep sometimes after receiving the Eucharist just thinking about all of that. I remember in particular when we were sitting down at the Moolah Temple (a neat movie theater just off campus) getting ready to watch a midnight showing of “The Ghostbusters” and she suddenly had a little panic attack thinking about entering religious life and I had to calm her down a little bit. While it was bittersweet I also recalled our many little “last hurrahs” in the months leading up to her entrance, in particular the last time she brought me home to Iowa for my family visit. I could go on for pages and pages but, needless to say (funny how we always use that expression and continue writing/speaking regardless!) I was filled with so much gratitude for my friend.

  The next morning I went on a little walk and first stopped by the statue of St. Francis of Assisi and spent some time in prayer with him (not talking to the statue of course; that is just silly!) and asking for his help, since he went through a similar experience with his close friend, St. Clare of Assisi. Then I went to the statue of Our Lady and set my little stone at her feet, asking for her prayers and her help in more perfectly giving my dear friend over to Christ. As with my father, I felt so much better afterwards, and after I spent some time later that day thinking about the Ascension of Our Lord I really felt ready to dive into my retreat with a heart ready and open. I figured these two burdens, having been laid down, would not really pop up in the retreat later, but little did I know they were merely the first lesson in understanding better the greatest mystery of them all: the Trinity.

  • 4:49 pm
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