Last night, I fell asleep reading a passably written book with a yet undisclosed mystery. I wanted to solve that mystery before sleeping, but Sandman prevailed. This morning, which I consider the most precious time of my day, I was tempted to pick up that book and satisfy my curiosity.
Then I said to myself, “What are you doing! This time belongs to the Holy Spirit.” So I picked up instead one of the beautiful reflections from the Synod Retreat.
As many of you know, the Synod on Synodality has begun in Rome. Currently, the invited participants are on a short retreat to prepare their hearts, minds, and spirits for the sessions which open on October 4 – the Feast of St. Francis of Assisi.
The retreat is being offered by Dominican Friar and former Master of the Order of Preachers, Father Timothy Radcliffe, and is available on the internet.
In my own prayer, I have been following the sessions and have found them deeply enriching. The session I prayed with today (meditation 3) particularly touched me.
I thought some of you might like to benefit from these sessions. They are rich, direct, and profoundly simple with the deep simplicity of holiness. Certainly, they bear directly on the Synod itself, but they are universal in their wisdom and inspiration.
If you are not already familiar with the Vatican News website, I have included links to the sessions below. Even if you don’t have time now, the message they convey is timeless. You might like to access them some time at your leisure. But maybe, like me this morning, you might choose to use your current leisure for one of these transformative sessions instead of a middling book or a game of Candy Crush.
In our leisure we reveal what kind of people we are.
Ovid (Ovid a Roman poet who lived during the reign of Augustus. He is most famous for the Metamorphoses, one of the most important sources of classical mythology today.)
Today, in God’s Lavish Mercy, Moses goes on a rigorous forty day retreat:
So Moses stayed there with the LORD for forty days and forty nights, without eating any food or drinking any water, and he wrote on the tablets the words of the covenant, the ten commandments.
Exodus 33:28
The purpose of this intense retreat was for Moses to codify God’s law in his own heart. He is to be a witness and leader for God among the people. It was a law of relationship, written in stone for the people, but written in fire for Moses. If God’s intentions are not embedded in Moses’s own heart, his ministry will fail.
In our Gospel, the disciples go on a kind of retreat too. The crowds have been dismissed, and Jesus’s close friends sit down with him for an in-depth instruction in the meaning of his parables. They want to understand the mind and heart of Christ so that they can pattern their own on his Word.
A good retreat is like a spiritual spa experience. It can provide us with rest, clarity, nourishment, and stabilization. And good retreat direction, either through a spiritual guide or through the discipline of solitude, is invaluable to such a pursuit.
But while we can’t be on a formal retreat every day of our lives, we still need a daily “coming away” with God to center our spirits and to keep alive the holy fire within them.
Today might be a good day to evaluate those processes in our lives. Are they working for us? Or might our prayer and reflection time have become so routine as to lose its snap. Have we let life’s concerns slip into our solitude to the point of no longer hearing God’s whisperings? Or have we even truncated that time to meet those ever-expanding concerns?
We may feel so overwhelmed by life that we think we don’t have time for deep prayer. That’s like saying we don’t have time to breathe! If we don’t make the time for both of them, we will die. It’s that simple.
Sixty years ago, my Novice Director gave me a wonderful book. I return to it frequently to consider the spiritual discipline of my life. Here are two excerpts which seem to have bearing on today’s reflection and might inspire your considerations today:
When silence takes possession of you; when far from the racket of the human highway the sacred fire flames up in the stillness; when peace, which is the tranquillity of order, puts order in your thoughts, feelings, and investigations, you are in the supreme disposition for learning; you can bring your materials together; you can create; you are definitely at your working point; it is not the moment to dwell on wretched trifles, to half live while time runs by, and to sell heaven for nothings.
Retirement (retreat) is the laboratory of the spirit; interior solitude and silence are its two wings. All great works were prepared in the desert, including the redemption of the world
A.D. Sertillanges, The Intellectual Life: Its Spirit, Conditions, Methods
Poetry: The Stolen Child – William Butler Yeats Using his love for Celtic lore and fantasy, Yeats imagines a return to innocence at the hands of magical creatures, the faeries. With imagery rich in natural wonder, the reader is invited to “come away” from a world impossible to understand, and to be restored in spiritual truth. Sounds like a retreat to me!
Where dips the rocky highland Of Sleuth Wood in the lake, There lies a leafy island Where flapping herons wake The drowsy water rats; There we've hid our faery vats, Full of berrys And of reddest stolen cherries. Come away, O human child! To the waters and the wild With a faery, hand in hand, For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.
Where the wave of moonlight glosses The dim gray sands with light, Far off by furthest Rosses We foot it all the night, Weaving olden dances Mingling hands and mingling glances Till the moon has taken flight; To and fro we leap And chase the frothy bubbles, While the world is full of troubles And anxious in its sleep. Come away, O human child! To the waters and the wild With a faery, hand in hand, For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.
Where the wandering water gushes From the hills above Glen-Car, In pools among the rushes That scarce could bathe a star, We seek for slumbering trout And whispering in their ears Give them unquiet dreams; Leaning softly out From ferns that drop their tears Over the young streams. Come away, O human child! To the waters and the wild With a faery, hand in hand, For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.
Away with us he's going,
The solemn-eyed:
He'll hear no more the lowing
Of the calves on the warm hillside
Or the kettle on the hob
Sing peace into his breast,
Or see the brown mice bob
Round and round the oatmeal chest.
For he comes, the human child,
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping
than he can understand.
Today, in God’s Lavish Mercy, our readings suggest a slight tone of “the after-Ascension” blues.
It’s a bit like how we might feel on the day after Christmas. The big celebration has come and gone. The company has all gone home. Maybe we’re exhausted from the preparations and clean-ups. Maybe we had been so busy that we didn’t take enough time to think about the meaning of the Feast. Maybe we feel like we’ve been spun around in time’s tumbler and can’t believe it’s now the end of the year. It’s a “what do we do next?” time when we come out of a flurry and need to get our bearings.
Click the arrow to get the spun-around feeling!
And for the disciples, it’s a morning they wake up and realize that Jesus has really gone home. In an otherwise chilly room, they might linger in their cozy cots reflecting on his parting words:
Amen, amen, I say to you, you will weep and mourn, while the world rejoices; you will grieve, but your grief will become joy. When a woman is in labor, she is in anguish because her hour has arrived; but when she has given birth to a child, she no longer remembers the pain because of her joy that a child has been born into the world. So you also are now in anguish. But I will see you again, and your hearts will rejoice, and no one will take your joy away from you.
These very special days between the Ascension and Pentecost offer the perfect time to quiet our spirits and get our spiritual bearings. Unlike the video of the deer above, it is a time to stop the spin, to clear the inner space, to ready ourselves for the promised and longed-for Spirit.
It’s a time not to be afraid of the silence or the echoing space deep in our hearts which longs for the presence of God.
Even if we are still in the midst of our busy lives, we can make a choice to be on “inner retreat” – to limit useless noise, directionless activity, and mumifying distractions.
If we have forgotten how to sit quietly enough to hear the wind and the distant meadowlark, let’s try to remember. Let’s try to make an inner chamber for the whisper of God Who hums through these ten days until bursting forth in Pentecost.
This decade of hours is a very special time to pray.
Poetry: excerpt from Sara Teasdale’s poem “Silence” (I love her archaic British term “anhungered“)
We are anhungered after solitude,
Deep stillness pure of any speech or sound,
Soft quiet hovering over pools profound,
The silences that on the desert brood,
Above a windless hush of empty seas,
The broad unfurling banners of the dawn,
A faery forest where there sleeps a Faun;
Our souls are fain of solitudes like these.
and a second brief but powerful verse from Emily Dickinson:
Silence is all we dread. There’s Ransom in a Voice – But Silence is Infinity. Himself have not a face.
Music: Achtsamkeit (German for “Mindfulness”) this is an hour’s worth of beautiful music. You can tap into various parts of the video to hear different pieces.
Today, in God’s Lavish Mercy, in our readings, both Solomon and Jesus seek a quiet place to pray, reflect, recenter, and commune with God.
Solomon went to Gibeon to sacrifice there, because that was the most renowned high place. Upon its altar Solomon offered a thousand burnt offerings. In Gibeon the LORD appeared to Solomon in a dream at night. God said, “Ask something of me and I will give it to you.”
1 Kings 3:4
Dream of Solomon – Luca Giordano
Solomon’s retreat is characterized by his sincere humility and gratitude. In this, his first documented encounter with God, Solomon hits a homer in relationship. God is pleased with Solomon’s self-abnegating request for only wisdom to benefit others.
O LORD, my God, you have made me, your servant, king to succeed my father David; but I am a mere youth, not knowing at all how to act. I serve you in the midst of the people whom you have chosen, a people so vast that it cannot be numbered or counted. Give your servant, therefore, an understanding heart to judge your people and to distinguish right from wrong. For who is able to govern this vast people of yours?”
1 Kings 3:7-9
In his prayer, Solomon has been able to get himself out of the way in order to really see and hear God – to fully receive God’s Presence in his life.
In our Gospel, Jesus seeks retreat for himself and his disciples because of the pressures of their ministries and the recent gut-punch news of John the Baptist’s execution.
Turns out, they don’t really get much of a chance for a “holy chill”. As with many of us, the responsibilities are so pressing that they conspire to find us no matter what.
So they went off in the boat by themselves to a deserted place. People saw them leaving and many came to know about it. They hastened there on foot from all the towns and arrived at the place before them.
When Jesus disembarked and saw the vast crowd, his heart was moved with pity for them, for they were like sheep without a shepherd; and he began to teach them many things.
Mark 6: 32-34
We too, like Solomon and Jesus, need times of retreat and dedicated prayer in our lives. But sometimes, our responsibilities and work follow us as we attempt to find that sacred space.
How can we free ourselves for such spiritual renewal? By planning, asking for assistance, disciplining our time and choices. But the key is that we really have to want that precious deserted place for meeting God in a special way.
These “retreats” must be a way of life for us, consistent choices to bring our busy lives before God, humbly open our hearts, and ask to see ourselves in a new and graced way.
Our “going off to rest awhile” in God can be as short as a few minutes morning and evening, or as long as a 30 day retreat. But they must be a consistent and disciplined desire of our hearts.
“Discipline” may seem like a hard word for it, especially if we think of our high school demerits when we hear that word🤪 But remember, without disciple music would be just noise, art would be just scribble, dance would be contortion, and conversation would be babble.
When you consider “discipline”, think instead of the elegant balance of a beautiful dance and let God lead, or of the sweet perfection of glorious music and let God sing to you.
Prose: A treasured thought of the Jesuit Pedro Arrupe suggests itself here:
Nothing is more practical than
finding God, than
falling in Love
in a quite absolute, final way.
What you are in love with,
what seizes your imagination, will affect everything.
It will decide
what will get you out of bed in the morning,
what you do with your evenings,
how you spend your weekends,
what you read, whom you know,
what breaks your heart,
and what amazes you with joy and gratitude.
Fall in Love, stay in love,
and it will decide everything.
Lavish Mercy 