Sunday afternoon I left for Pacem in Terris for a 3 day retreat into silence and solitude. My plan was to do some writing on a doctoral project that is very over due, reflect on the past year, and do a little reading in preparation for a class coming up this winter. Plans and reality don’t always come together when one is getting alone with God. I had my agenda, but I was also open to God’s agenda. This is something I have learned from numerous retreats to the hermitage’s of Pacem in Terris.
The first night is usually a time of rambling around the hermitage trying to decompress from the world I have just left and enter into a time of silence and solitude to meet God with a quieted heart. One that is open to His leading. A place where one is able to listen for “that still small voice.”
I simply sit and listen. The mind wanders and I put it back. The view out the window, sitting in the rocker allows one to be open to the Spirits leading. It was a time spent reading and pondering what the prophet Hosea was writing the God’s chosen people. Despite their sin and abandonment of God, He still loved them. Sleep, rest, peace.
I simply sit and listen. The mind wanders and I put it back. The view out the window, sitting in the rocker allows one to be open to the Spirits leading. It was a time spent reading and pondering what the prophet Hosea was writing the God’s chosen people. Despite their sin and abandonment of God, He still loved them. Sleep, rest, peace.Monday came and I was going to write, but God had other plans. I had begun to read the book The Gift of Being Yourself by David Benner on Sunday and found myself drawn into the questions being posed he posed. The book is about the need to get rid of our false self and become our true self. Benner proposes this is done by knowing God and through knowing God we can then know ourself. It is about the idea that our existence is ground in God’s divine love or us. I started to make a connection to what I was reading in Hosea. I love when God helps me to connect dots. Benner talks about hiding and holding on to pieces of our false self and how they need to be given up. More dots to connect. I was later reading a book by Henri Nouwen called With Open Hands. In this book about prayer, Nouwen says that it when we grasp onto something with a clinched fist we are unable to come to God with open hands and receive from Him what he wants to give us. To often what I don’t want to give us is a part of my false self. By holding so tightly I do not or can not fully embrace who it is God is calling me to be. I am still pondering this question and others raised by Benner.
In short, I did get some writing done, but more importantly God met me in my heritage and started be down another transformation path that He is using to shape me into the creating He wants me to become. I know that this is a life long process and will require a lot more trips back to the hermitage where I can once again find the silence and solitude I long for so that I can hear God speaking and where I can ponder the things that He has said.