The seed of God is in us. Now the seed of a pear tree grows into a pear tree; and a hazel seed grows into a hazel tree; a seed of God grows into God. (Meister Eckhart)
This is not the post I was intending to write for today but I find myself sitting in my car not too far from Bury St. Edmunds waiting for the RAC To come and rescue me. I have no idea when I will get home. I know for sure that I really like this little mobile internet device I thought I would try for a few months before I committed to a longer contract. I have a low boredom threshold, I don’t mind admitting, and I have already been here for two and a half hours.
Issues with the house or the car have long been a stress point for me, a sense of panic usually ensues and the fear that it will be terrible, or so expensive that I can’t afford it, or awful or even dangerous. My car insurance company – and I am very pleased with my car insurance company, they have always done the right thing by me – they used to give you a credit card sized card with all your details on it: very useful. They do not do that now and the number on the one I still carry does not work any more. Trying to find the number for the breakdown assistance was when the panic almost began to set in. I say almost because it was so fleeting, I almost did not notice it. I’ve broken down before, sure, it is irritating, but I know exactly what to do and it is why I buy a policy that has breakdown cover. The movement to accepting the things I cannot change was as quick as it was certain. I can trust in the process, because it has all worked out before.
I have been talking to my own spiritual director this week about serenity. He pressed me on what it meant and looked like to me. I remember discussing it with a friend some years ago and we both went away to decide what serenity meant to us. My answer to the question was:
It’s about being aware of the presence of God with you, no matter what you are doing.
After a brief interlude – it is the alternater for the battery – I am now sitting in my car in a petrol station, waiting for a pick up truck to collect me and my car and take us to my garage in Norwich, where I will leave it with a note and get a taxi home. The road side assistance chap, who lent me a battery to get to here, says it could be a couple of hours. Still, he has left me in a place where I can get food, have access to toilets…and my car is my bubble after all.
I could get frustrated…it is not so far under the surface…it is not how I planned, or wanted to spend my Sunday, but frustrated is not how I want to be. My desire is for serenity, and my attitude is mine to choose. I trust that all will be fine. My past experience with both my insurance company and my garage tells me that it will all be fine. I can trust and I do not need to worry, they have not let me down before.
To me, trusting God is the same. I do not need to panic. I can trust Him because He has never let me down before. I know He never will. Ignatius advises us when we are in consolation to store up these consolations and remind ourselves of them when we are in desolation. Accepting what we cannot change is serenity and even more so when we are aware that God is with us throughout. As always, I am going into my room of indifference, sitting in the chair in the middle of the room and telling Him:
I will wait.
Patience, I think, is also one of the fruits of the Spirit.
Well, it has been a while since my last reflection, when I was writing about the need to reform my manner of living to take in the new state of being I find myself in. I have been on a discernment journey in this time. I continued working too hard for a while; I completed an activity journal for a week for the ME/CFS service and I went on retreat. I arrived at St. Beunos completely exhausted and it took about three days for my energy to even begin to pick up on the retreat so that I could walk up to the labyrinth there. I wrestled with myself on that retreat. The director suggested prayer with the passage where Jacob wrestles with the angel, since she thought I might be wrestling with God, but I knew it was myself I was fighting, not God.
The Labyrinth at St. Beunos Humbly asked Him 2: reading of this post
The movement to accept my new limitations with this health condition had centred around the Principle and Foundation of The Exercises, as I described previously, around the grace of indifference.
…we must make ourselves indifferent to all created things…we should not prefer health to sickness…our one desire and choice should be what is more conducive to the end for which we were created.
And I oscillated about this point of indifference for a while. During my retreat however, something else began to happen, a different movement. I came out of my retreat perceiving that this long term health condition as a gift. Let me explain – because I am not being all idealistic and mushy here, and to see it as such is difficult and challenging. Nevertheless, it connects with Step 7, and humbly asking God to remove our shortcomings.
I have said before that I can be a bit work obsessed, and I have used the term “workaholic” frequently to describe myself. The teaching profession as it is today in the UK is conducive to bringing out the worst of the workaholic in anyone. It is difficult to imagine how anyone could survive teaching without being like that. I have seen too many good teachers buckle under the unreasonable demands, and perhaps I include myself in this group too.
I associated the River Meditation that I did during The Exercises and I used in my Positive Penance Retreat days with a conversation with God where it was understood we were talking about work. I was standing in the river in front of an outflow pipe and a black sludge, like crude oil – toxic and carcinogenic – was coming out of it. There were students I teach behind me, and I was tryng to block the black slime from getting to them. It was making me sick. And I could not stop it all, because some of it still flowed around my body and reached them. I could not protect them from the poison. At the time, my sense of it from God was:
We need to have a conversation about work sometime, but not yet. We have other things to deal with first.
Five months later, I got glandular fever and my first experience of chronic fatigue syndrome. One day, driving home from school and struggling, there was a moment when it occurred to me, and I said it out loud to Him:
One day I will look back and recognise that this is the moment I decided to leave teaching.
It is as St. Ignatius describes a First time choice:
When God our Lord so moves and attracts the will that a devout soul without hesitation, or the possibility of hesitation, follows what has been manifested to it…
From there, my desire to leave the teaching profession increased. I prayed for a slower pace, to have time to breathe and to pray, to be still and not so over worked. My sense on retreat was that this prayer was being answered here and now, at this point in my life. It is one of those be careful what you wish for moments, or as I read once:
It is laudable to ask God for what we desire, and dangerous.
Sculpture in the Main House at St. Beunos Humbly asked Him 3: reading of this post
In The Spiritual Exercises, Ignatius talks about Exterior and Interior Penance: we can act from the interior movement within us or our actions can effect the change within us. Either way, the practice of penance is a serious expression of our desire for freedom from our inordinate desires that lead us away from God into spiritual desolation. People laugh when I say that I have to actively rest several times a day and that it is a real penance, but it is. I have been overworking for too many years and wearing my workaholism like a badge, a joke – something that is not to be taken too seriously. My soul has also been praying from release from this compulsion since that day in the car, perhaps even longer than that. I have been working Step 7 in this context for a while now, humbly asking Him to remove this shortcoming. In the few months I have already been self employed, it has become clear that I am not able to free myself from it and that here is some Divine Intervention: ME/CFS is a gift in the sense that it is freeing me from my workaholism compulsion and it is an answer to my prayers. It is not a piece of cake, it is penance – there is a part of me wrestling with sitting and resting several times a day, that is impatient to be cycling or walking around, even doing housework! There is also relief and gratitude too, I do not have to push so hard any more, I can let it go. This week, as I recorded my guided prayers for Radio Maria, I felt it acutely.
In Pray as you go this morning they used the Gospel passage, and asked if there are things you have heard Jesus say, perhaps this week, that you have found hard to accept and they asked how you have dealt with that.
AMDG In the centre of the Labyrinth at St Beunos Humbly asked Him 4: reading of this post
Step 7 seems deceptively simple on the face of it, we humbly ask Him to remove our shortcomings like it is all we have to do and then to wait to be released from them. When He answers our prayer and it may not be the light and fluffy answer we envisaged when we asked. It may be difficult and painful and we have to work through it with the support of others. It is a gift nevertheless.
Here, as stated before, it is my intention to draw from the forthcoming Sunday liturgy and to offer a guided prayer on one of the pieces of scripture in the same way that we have been doing in Exploring Personal Prayer. I do not intend to offer any reflections on the scripture. My suggestion is that you follow the Ignatian structure: preparation for prayer by reading the scripture, going to your prayer place and doing the prayer itself, and then moving away to another place and doing a review of the prayer. Keeping some sort of prayer journal is good practice. Note any moments of consolation in the prayer, where you felt drawn more deeply into God, and moments of desolation, where prayer was disturbed, where you were distracted and pulled further away from God: feelings of attraction and repulsion should be noted. These points may provide areas for repetition of the prayer. Also, if you have a spiritual director or prayer partner, someone who can listen with an ear to where God is in this, it may be worth sharing your prayer with them. I am following the processes outline in the prayer cards above. You may print these onto A6 or A4 card to have in your prayer space to help you become accustomed to this way of praying, remembering it is more of a flow than a rigid structure.
6 He left that place and came to his home town, and his disciples followed him. 2 On the sabbath he began to teach in the synagogue, and many who heard him were astounded. They said, ‘Where did this man get all this? What is this wisdom that has been given to him? What deeds of power are being done by his hands! 3 Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary[a] and brother of James and Joses and Judas and Simon, and are not his sisters here with us?’ And they took offence[b] at him. 4 Then Jesus said to them, ‘Prophets are not without honour, except in their home town, and among their own kin, and in their own house.’ 5 And he could do no deed of power there, except that he laid his hands on a few sick people and cured them. 6 And he was amazed at their unbelief.
Imaginative contemplation guided prayer: Mark 6:1-6. This version has the background music.
Background music is the album: Keith Halligan – Lifestyle Meditation, Global Journey
Imaginative contemplation guided prayer: Mark 6:1-6. This version has no background music.
My dear old mum is ninety and recently fell over and broke her hip – a common injury in people of her age. I visited her a few weeks ago, once the lock down restrictions on travel were lifted and stayed for a week. Suffice to say, she is struggling a bit and has suffered loneliness during the long months of lock down. It was nice to be there with her, even if the conversations circled round every ten or twenty minutes and the ever constant television was awful. We talked about our faith naturally enough. One of our conversations was around why God lets or makes things happen. She is a very traditional Catholic of her generation and not given to questioning perceptions and images of God handed down in the popular culture. I am not going to change that. With a certain lightness of tone, I told her that I thought it was quite simple. If we want what God wants for us then God will always give us what we want. I am aware that it sounds flippant. I centred it around the the structure of the Ignatian prayer period I use in the guided prayers. It goes like this: I ask that all my intentions and actions be directed purely to His service and praise as preparation: I place myself in His gaze and become aware of myself there to get a sense of how He is looking at me; I then contemplate His desire for me, before I ask for my desire. This order is deliberate. I ask for grace in response to His desire for me. If He is asking me to have that difficult conversation with the friend or sister who has offended me, I might ask for the grace of courage or compassion to enable me to open the conversation to make it right, and to forgive the harm that was caused.
God’s desire my desire 2 : Reading of this post
Here I am now, a few weeks on, being challenged with this very idea. I have been feeling quite tired for a while now – since before Christmas in fact, and in a conversation with someone recently it dawned on me that it was since the last time I was ill, at the beginning of December. You may have noticed the frequency of my reflections and other posts has declined in this time. It is not all about the fact that I am setting up as a self employed online Chemistry tutor, alongside my spiritual direction work. After some normal blood test results I was finally diagnosed with ME/CFS last week. The doctor is certain that the illness I had in December was in fact COVID, even though my own test was negative, since some of my close colleagues had it, and it is this that has triggered the ME/CFS. I would not be honest if I denied that I was a bit gutted about that. I experienced it before, five years ago after glandular fever. It brings into play a conversation with God during the Spiritual Exercises during the River meditation I used in the Positive Penance Retreat Day. It raises that age old question about God allowing disease, and it would be easy to be filled with self pity. Is this really what God desires? And therefore, is this what I desire?
God’s desire my desire 3 : Reading of this post
I am reminded of the Principe and Foundation of the Spiritual Exercises:
…we must make ourselves indifferent to all created things…we should not prefer health to sickness…our one desire and choice should be what is more conducive to the end for which we were created.
When I put myself here, back into the Room of Indifference I found during my experience of the Spiritual Exercises, my inner dynamic changes. As a human being, I am limited and I feel pain, tiredness and I get sick. Here, I am still limited, it is just that those limitations have changed. Ignatius talks about different ways we can make a choice in our lives, and he also talks about how to live well within our situation when our freedom to choose is limited. He says:
It will be very profitable for such persons…in place of a choice, to propose a way for each to reform his manner of living in his state by setting before him the purpose of his creation and of his life and position, namely the glory and praise of God our Lord…
It raises, not the paralysing question of why does God let these things happen, but the more pertinent question of how do I reform my manner of living within my new limitations so that it praises, reverences and serves God? From shifting my focus from wanting to be well and healthy to what is God’s desire for me in this – in this moment, in this day and at this point in my life – as I say in my guided prayers, my attitude changes. I let go of self pity and my trust in Him deepens. I make it sound easy: I know that it is not. I experience fear and uncertainty just as everyone else does, and I yearn for that carefree exertion and freedom of cycling out for the day to visit a church and pray with the Pray As You Go app as I have done in the past with my Holy Trinity Cycling Tours. But the movement within me is real. What is God’s desire for me now, in this moment, in this prayer, in this day and at this point in my life? That is what I desire. It is as it was before ME/CFS, and it is as it is now with ME/CFS. The specifics might be different, but the Principle and Foundation remains.
God’s desire my desire 4 : Reading of this post
Going forward, my posts may be shorter or less frequent, or both. They might even be less tidy and contain more mistakes – sorry, brain fog is an ME/CFS thing. I am no longer living as if I will get better tomorrow but I am looking at a way to reform my manner of living in this state, as if this is my state in life. I will still be writing and probably more frequently than I have been, because now I know I can manage my energy better. He would still have me tell my story and share my journey. Thank you for following me this far.
Here, as stated before, it is my intention to draw from the forthcoming Sunday liturgy and to offer a guided prayer on one of the pieces of scripture in the same way that we have been doing in Exploring Personal Prayer. I do not intend to offer any reflections on the scripture. My suggestion is that you follow the Ignatian structure: preparation for prayer by reading the scripture, going to your prayer place and doing the prayer itself, and then moving away to another place and doing a review of the prayer. Keeping some sort of prayer journal is good practice. Note any moments of consolation in the prayer, where you felt drawn more deeply into God, and moments of desolation, where prayer was disturbed, where you were distracted and pulled further away from God: feelings of attraction and repulsion should be noted. These points may provide areas for repetition of the prayer. Also, if you have a spiritual director or prayer partner, someone who can listen with an ear to where God is in this, it may be worth sharing your prayer with them. I am following the processes outline in the prayer cards above. You may print these onto A6 or A4 card to have in your prayer space to help you become accustomed to this way of praying, remembering it is more of a flow than a rigid structure.
19 When it was evening on that day, the first day of the week, and the doors of the house where the disciples had met were locked for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood among them and said, ‘Peace be with you.’ 20 After he said this, he showed them his hands and his side. Then the disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord. 21 Jesus said to them again, ‘Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you.’ 22 When he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, ‘Receive the Holy Spirit. 23 If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.’
Imaginative Contemplation: guided prayer for the Feast of Pentecost.
The wonderful thing about Step 6 is that it does not demand that we do anything about our defects yet. That can feel like such a relief when this one sinks in a bit deeper because we might be labouring under the sense that now the exact nature of our wrongs are on the table as it were, we are obliged to do something about them. This step slows down that process. No, we are not required to take action to remove our defects, the process is to be ready to allow God to remove them – in God’s own time. All we are is aware of them, and open and ready for God to work in us to remove them. What that looks like in practice will depend on the situation, our particular defect and probably many other facors we can only guess at.
I am reminded of A Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan. Far be it for me to be critical of a respected work of English Christian Literature, but I just could not get on with that book. I joke that is was too puritanical for me, but that is not a joke, it actually is. Bunyan was a Puritan, I am not. My problem with it is in the essence of Step 6. There is the point in the book where Christian, the Prilgrim, meets with the Saviour of the world. But then, Jesus disappears again, and leaves the Pilgrim to walk the rest of this dangerous journey on his own, under his own steam, using his own strength and talents. I guess this part was supposed to represent the Ascension, but to me it felt a bit like being left to my own devices, and woe betide me if I strayed off the path, that was all my own fault and I would get what I deserved! In short, it felt punitive, that God is distant, abstract: watching and critical, waiting to see if I measured up, judgemental. It is not how I experience Him.
I am much more of that fractious child, who wriggles in His arms and squeals to be put down. So He does and I run off to make a mess and get myself into all sorts of trouble I can’t get out of. When I run back to Him crying and scared, He scoops me up and holds me close to Him: no scolding, just safety. This image is some of the fruit of my 40 Day Journey with Julian of Norwich.
Photo by Kristina Paukshtite on Pexels.com Were entirely ready…2a: Reading of this post
Sometimes, when I hear people talking about their prayer, I frequently hear the phrases:
God wants me to…
God said….
And I ask:
How do you know it was God?
It is not that I doubt their experience, I ask myself the same question. Discernment is a process whereby we come to recognise the authentic voice of God amongst the cacophony of all the voices and noise we hear. We cannot necessarily assume it is God because the voice speaking says it is. How easily the deceiver could deceive us if that was all it took. It is a question of responsibilty. There is a danger of misinterpreting the Step 6 and thinking we can sit back and leave it up to God to sort it out, be passive if you like. I think that is why I also raise the question of whose voice is it we are listening to. Is this person moving through life, not being an active agent in it, where things happen to them and it is interpreted as being what God wants? It is the opposite extreme to the puritanical attitude of the Pilgrim’s Progress, where I am in complete control of my own salvation and it is all down to me.
In “Breathing Under Water”, Richard Rohr attaches an analogy of the chicken and egg to Step 6. He says:
It first recognises that we have to work to see our many resistances, excuses and blockages, but then we have to fully acknowledge that God alone can do the “removing”! But which should come first grace or responsibility? The answer is that both come first.
It is an interesting question. Ignatius questions, but does not assume, that a lack of effort on our part might be responsible for the “non-production” of God. He encourages spiritual directors to explore with their directees:
When the one who is giving the Exercises perceives that the exercitant is not affected by any spiritual experiences, such as consolations or desolations, and that he is not troubled by different spirits, he ought to ply him with questions about the exercises. He should ask him whether he makes them at the appointed times, and how he makes them. He should question him about the Additional Directions, whether he is diligent in the observance of them. He will demand an account in detail of each one of these points
In the Rules for Discernment, he gives three reasons why we might suffer from spiritual desolation:
The first is because we have been tepid and slothful or negligent in our exercises of piety, and so through our own fault spiritual consolation has been taken away from us.
The second reason is because God wishes to try us, to see how much we are worth, and how much we will advance in His service and praise when left without the generous reward of consolations and signal favors.
The third reason is because God wishes to give us a true knowledge and understanding of ourselves, so that we may have an intimate perception of the fact that it is not within our power to acquire and attain great devotion, intense love, tears, or any other spiritual consolation; but that all this is the gift and grace of God our Lord. God does not wish us to build on the property of another, to rise up in spirit in a certain pride and vainglory and attribute to ourselves the devotion and other effects of spiritual consolation.
The questioning of the director in what “efforts” the directee is making is merely an exploration of possible reasons for the apparant “absence of God”. The dark night of the soul is recognised in itself as being profound spiritual consolation, however painful it might be to the person experiencing it. It is not my own personal experience, but people have told me of it being theirs. As Rohr has suggested and implict in what St. Ignatius is saying, both our efforts and grace are involved in the encounter with God and in making Step 6. Richard Rohr goes on to talk about paradox.
Almost all spirituality has a paradoxical character to it, which is why the totally rational or dualistic mind invariably misses the point, and just calls things it does not understand wrong, heresy or stupid.
I love paradox; how you can be neither and both at the same time. One of the books I have read that has deeply influenced me is The Way of Paradox by Cyprian Smith, which is about the spiritual life as taught by Meister Eckhart. If you are on your toes, you will know that the quote at the top of my blog is from Meister Eckhart. I loved this book. I understood some of it, but by no means all of what I read. It might be time for a re-read, after Revelations of Divine Love by Julian of Norwich. Smith says of Ekhart’s spiritual way:
Two apparantly opposed realities will be brought by him into clashing confrontation until the dualism separating them is transcended and their underlying unity emerges like sunlight after rain.
Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com Were entirely ready…3: Reading of this post
Like sunlight after rain…seriously, what a beautiful, evocative image of the spiritual struggle. It describes perfectly, the battle of the Step 6. But battle is the wrong word, it is tai chi, yin and yang: softness is the necessity, not hardness.
This swinging rhythm or oscillation between unlike poles, breathing in and breathing out, speaking and remaining silent, doing and resting is the basic rhythm of the spiritual life, and it is only within that rhythm that we can know God, experience Him, think and talk about Him.
From my own experience of making the Spiritual exercises, and from listening to people as a spiritual director, I notice that in this part of the Exercises, there is an oscillation about this point of indifference, and we do not remain there once we have experienced it. It is but a moment, what I would describe as an eternal moment, because the consolation in receiving this grace remains in the felt memory of the soul and is stored up to be called upon when we are in desolation and troubled by the turmoil of spirits. I have referred to this practice before.
Photo by Robin Schreiner on Pexels.com Were entirely ready…4: Reading of this post
To me, the essence of Step 6 is in the principle and foundation, and in the end of the first week of the Exercises, moving into the Second Week. We have acknowledged our disordered attachments and our powerlessness over them, and we have become willing to learn more about where God would lead us into freedom from them. Here, I will let Cyrpian Smith sum up the journey:
But to learn to pour out while remaining inwardly detached, to be at once in movement and in repose, is largely what the spiritual life is about: to the extent that we have learned that we are true Persons, true images of God, true sharers in the swirling, glowing, energetic life of the Trinity. To live like that also means to be untiring, for it brings about accumulation, not loss, of energy.
Here, as stated before, it is my intention to draw from the forthcoming Sunday liturgy and to offer a guided prayer on one of the pieces of scripture in the same way that we have been doing in Exploring Personal Prayer. I do not intend to offer any reflections on the scripture. My suggestion is that you follow the Ignatian structure: preparation for prayer by reading the scripture, going to your prayer place and doing the prayer itself, and then moving away to another place and doing a review of the prayer. Keeping some sort of prayer journal is good practice. Note any moments of consolation in the prayer, where you felt drawn more deeply into God, and moments of desolation, where prayer was disturbed, where you were distracted and pulled further away from God: feelings of attraction and repulsion should be noted. These points may provide areas for repetition of the prayer. Also, if you have a spiritual director or prayer partner, someone who can listen with an ear to where God is in this, it may be worth sharing your prayer with them. I am following the processes outline in the prayer cards above. You may print these onto A6 or A4 card to have in your prayer space to help you become accustomed to this way of praying, remembering it is more of a flow than a rigid structure.
35 Then they told what had happened on the road, and how he had been made known to them in the breaking of the bread.
Jesus Appears to His Disciples
36 While they were talking about this, Jesus himself stood among them and said to them, ‘Peace be with you.’[a]37 They were startled and terrified, and thought that they were seeing a ghost. 38 He said to them, ‘Why are you frightened, and why do doubts arise in your hearts? 39 Look at my hands and my feet; see that it is I myself. Touch me and see; for a ghost does not have flesh and bones as you see that I have.’ 40 And when he had said this, he showed them his hands and his feet.[b]41 While in their joy they were disbelieving and still wondering, he said to them, ‘Have you anything here to eat?’ 42 They gave him a piece of broiled fish, 43 and he took it and ate in their presence.
44 Then he said to them, ‘These are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you—that everything written about me in the law of Moses, the prophets, and the psalms must be fulfilled.’ 45 Then he opened their minds to understand the scriptures, 46 and he said to them, ‘Thus it is written, that the Messiah[c] is to suffer and to rise from the dead on the third day, 47 and that repentance and forgiveness of sins is to be proclaimed in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem. 48 You are witnesses[d] of these things.
Imaginative Contemplation Luke 24: 35-48: Guided Prayer
Here, as stated before, it is my intention to draw from the forthcoming Sunday liturgy and to offer a guided prayer on one of the pieces of scripture in the same way that we have been doing in Exploring Personal Prayer. I do not intend to offer any reflections on the scripture. My suggestion is that you follow the Ignatian structure: preparation for prayer by reading the scripture, going to your prayer place and doing the prayer itself, and then moving away to another place and doing a review of the prayer. Keeping some sort of prayer journal is good practice. Note any moments of consolation in the prayer, where you felt drawn more deeply into God, and moments of desolation, where prayer was disturbed, where you were distracted and pulled further away from God: feelings of attraction and repulsion should be noted. These points may provide areas for repetition of the prayer. Also, if you have a spiritual director or prayer partner, someone who can listen with an ear to where God is in this, it may be worth sharing your prayer with them. I am following the processes outline in the prayer cards above. You may print these onto A6 or A4 card to have in your prayer space to help you become accustomed to this way of praying, remembering it is more of a flow than a rigid structure.
Mark 15: 16-20
The Soldiers Mock Jesus
16 Then the soldiers led him into the courtyard of the palace (that is, the governor’s headquarters[c]); and they called together the whole cohort. 17 And they clothed him in a purple cloak; and after twisting some thorns into a crown, they put it on him. 18 And they began saluting him, ‘Hail, King of the Jews!’ 19 They struck his head with a reed, spat upon him, and knelt down in homage to him. 20 After mocking him, they stripped him of the purple cloak and put his own clothes on him. Then they led him out to crucify him.
Imaginative Contemplation Guided prayer: Mark 15: 16-20
Background music is the album: Keith Halligan – Lifestyle Meditation, Global Journey
Last year to prepare for Lent, I led a Retreat Day for my Diocese. I would like to offer this day again, as an Online Event (Times are GMT). What I said previously still stands:
During Lent, the Church encourages us to unite ourselves to the mystery of Jesus in the desert, to act against the desire of the flesh, of the eyes and the pride in riches by fasting, giving alms and prayer. The practice of such penance may feel judicial and be difficult to maintain for the whole season of lent, perhaps because of its general sense of understanding. In “The Spiritual Excercises”, St. Ignatius writes about the practice of penance in the Tenth Addition, and the discussion is often passed over uncomfortably and put into the context of his time. My discomfort with both approaches compels me to present this retreat day.
Ignatius presents the idea of penance as a form of desire for more in our relationship with God and he makes it personal. He says:
Now since God our Lord knows our nature infinitely better, when we make changes of this kind, He often grants each one the grace to understand what is suitable for him.
My intention is to provide the time, space and stimulation for each one to notice the desires and motivations for their feelings and actions; to notice the direction of the movement in those desires, whether they are towards God (spiritual consolation) or away from God (spiritual desolation); the latter being identified as inordinate desire; and, with the grace and help of God, to choose the most pertinent of our own inordinate desires and resolve to amend it or them. The resolve to amend will form the basis of our chosen lenten practice, which will be personal in the context of our own relationship with God and drawn from the desire for more in that relationship. Fuelled by this desire, may we find sustenance to maintain our lenten observance for the duration, and allow it to impact a deeper change in our lives beyond lent.
The process will be facilitated with two short presentations, The Examen prayer, Guided Imaginative Contemplations, Personal reflection and paired and group sharing. To ensure safety, sharing should be only what you are comfortable with, and should remain confidential within the context of the person or group it is shared in.
If you want to have a sneaky preview of the material, you can find it in a previous post. And please share with anyone you think might want to do Lent positively this year, with a different approach than before perhaps. Here is the outline for the retreat:
There is no formal charge for this event and registration is not conditional on making a donation. If you would like to support me in my work however, that would be very much appreciated, and you can to that by clicking the “support me” button below.
There is something quite appropriate about looking at this step at the beginning of January! We might be in the first blush of enthusiasm for our New Year’s Resolutions – if we have indeed made any. Perhaps we have already forgotten it or given up.
This step is difficult and long, and not to be taken lightly. It is to be approached with seriousness, and also gentleness. Its equivalent in the Spiritual Exercises is the first week, where we look at our own sinfulness. Step 4 encourages us to look deeply at ourselves, warts and all, our strengths and our weaknesses, our virtues and vices. We are invited to bring everything out into the light to look at it.
In “Blueprint for Progress”, the workbook that goes along with step 4, personal qualities are put along side their opposites and we are invited to consider where we generally sit in the space between the two extremes. The process is then to consider examples of situations and our response to them that have led to us placing ourselves there. It is a process of discernment. When we are being too hard on ourselves, we might find that we can think of examples that support the contrary to what we propose. And when we are inclined to justify our behaviour or actions, the sting of conscience – the phrase St. Ignatius uses in the Exercises – pulls us up short and demands that we look more closely. As with the First Week of the Spiritual Exercises, it is an uncomfortable journey. It demands humility, true humility. Not the self deprecating kind that refuses to recognise our own good as well as our own faults. And it is not a journey to make alone. Having moved through the second and third steps, where we came to believe and made a decision to turn our lives over to God, we make this journey together with our God.
Made a searching and fearless…2: Reading of this post.
In the Spiritual Exercises, where we have moved into the First week from the Principle and Foundation, we have come to know ourselves as created and deeply loved by God. It is our reaching out to God that enables us to make this inventory without growing to despise ourselves.
I was a young adult when I worked through this step formally. There were things I discovered about myself that I did not like, and I worked to mend them. There were identified characteristics of adult children of alcoholics that I recognised the potential for in myself and I resolved to avoid those pitfalls. One of those was that it was common for adults who had been raised in an alcoholic home to leave projects unfinished, to start something and then to walk away without seeing it all the way to the end. I saw that that could easily be me and it has stayed with me all these years. I may struggle to be consistent, and it may look like something has quietly gone by the wayside – my 40 Day Journey with Julian of Norwich for example. I did not finish that in one year, even though at the beginning of Advent last year it seemed that there was more than enough time! I have not given up. I have resumed the journey where I left off in October, and I will finish it.
I do not drink alcohol myself. There is also a tendency for this addiction to run in families and I knew at the age of seventeen that I did not want to walk that path. I joined the Pioneer Association when I was eighteen and made that abstinence into a lifelong prayer.
I am struck by an idea I heard , I think when I heard Laurence Freeman speak in Norwich some years ago. It describes the perception of the Seven Deadly Sins as being compulsions, addictions that drive our behaviour and as such, make us not free. Addiction, by its very nature is an inordinate desire because the addict places their addiction above everything else. I would suggest that we all have them, and that they can be small as well as big. I know for example, that I am not able to “just have one” chocolate digestive, even if I resolve to, and I am in public. I can tie myself up in all sorts of knots with that one. If the packet is open I am not at peace. They call to me and torment me. Best not to buy them at all and refuse the first one. It may seem like a trivial example, but the behaviour and desire is there, nevertheless. The journey of the fourth step, and the First week of the spiritual exercises is to become aware of our own specific compulsions, even the subtle ones, and to remove us from denial so that we can live freely of them.
Made a searching and fearless…3: Reading of this post.
At the end of every year for quite a few years running, it was my habit to do a review of the year, a sort of examen. I would read through my diary and try to sum of the mood of each month and then create some sort on collage showing my movement through the year. I notice two changes to this habit in recent years that have made this review essentially obsolete. The first is that as I have engaged more deeply in Ignatian Spirituality, I have regularly practised the daily examen, and the second is that my “diary” is now exclusively my prayer journal. All my reflections are derived from my prayer, including my daily examen.
So, here is where I am today. In my examen of the year, I recognise the hand of God in the big changes taking place in my life, and my commitment and hard work, my complete cooperation, in the new direction He is leading me. I also recognise my compulsion to workaholism, motivated by pride, and that it has led me to burnt out exhaustion and away from the space and time for a slower pace and deepened engagement in prayer. This latter desire of mine and His is the raisin d’etre for changing direction in my career.
Made a searching and fearless…4: Reading of this post.
In the 10th Addition of the Exercises on Penance – believe me, I have a lot to say about that particular addition – Ignatius describes how we can do too much penance as well as too little penance. It is all about the point of equilibrium. The work of the Fourth step, the moral inventory strikes me as being the same thing. Ignatius encourages us to act against the desolation. So, in that spirit, while I am still working in school and trying to set up my business as an online Chemistry tutor, I will be cutting back a little in a few places. One of those is here. Between now and February, I will post a reflection fortnightly rather than weekly, alternating it with a Chemistry blog on my other website. I hope to pick it up weekly again when I am no longer spending my working days in the classroom. The other posts I do will continue in the normal pattern.
I would like to wish you all a safe and good new year, and for you to deepen your own prayer life and journey into the heart of God.
