Online Retreat

We begin by focusing on God. The photo of a mother’s embrace of her daughter will inspire us throughout this week to keep our focus on God. This woman’s face will help us to begin to imagine the powerful depth of God’s embrace of us.

As I wake up, put on my slippers or robe each morning, and begin to get moving, I can focus, for a moment, on God’s delight in me. How God must rejoice in my coming to know how much I’m loved and forgiven! As I go through each day, I can recall various images that help my spirit soar with accepting the intimacy of forgiving love’s embrace.

I can imagine the joy I have experienced when a loved one’s biopsy came back negative, or when friends found the child they were waiting to adopt, or when someone I care deeply about receives my love and enjoys it. How much more God rejoices in us this week!

We resist the temptation to figure out how God could forgive our sins, our patterns — all we have done and all we have failed to do. The answer to that question is wrapped up in the mystery of love — love without condition or limit. We might imagine forgiving a spouse or child or someone we love simply because our love is so much greater and stronger than the wrong that was done. And we tell ourselves how much greater God’s love for us must be, to forgive me so freely, so completely!

A phrase we use describes something so wonderful. We say, “It’s incredible; I can hardly believe it!” This week we enter into our desire to not only believe God’s forgiving mercy to us but also to experience it, accept it, and celebrate it. How much that must be God’s own desire for each of us this week!

Use the resources that follow to enrich the week’s retreat experience.

This is not an easy week for many of us. In the third parable of mercy, which Jesus tells to those who criticize his eating and drinking with sinners (Luke 15), the younger son’s return to his father is full of remorse, “I have sinned against God in heaven and against you. I am no longer good enough to be called your son.” The older son is full of resentment that the father forgives the younger son so freely. And like the religious leaders that criticize Jesus, he won’t join in the celebration. It is not easy for us to get beyond feeling terrible about our sin or the patterns of sinfulness in our lives. And even when we find ourselves in the embrace of Forgiving Love, we hear an older brother’s or sister’s voice inside us, putting a damper on the celebration.

This is the week to surrender to God’s embrace. Look at the photo over and over. Imagine being in that embrace. Stay there. Don’t rush it. Let all the resistance melt away. Receive it. Enjoy it. Rest in it. What is the one who is embracing you feeling and expressing in that moment of togetherness? Throughout this week, whatever you’re doing, in those in-between times, close your eyes and imagine Jesus holding you like that.

This is the week to smile — to wear it on your face and to feel it deeply. A smile and a deep breath go together very well. They prepare the way for a joyful and wonderfully refreshing inner peace. Do all the rest of your problems go away? Is your life back together? Have you reached the depths of spiritual freedom? Of course not. We keep reminding ourselves that this is a journey, and each week is an important next step. This is a critical next step — to experience and enjoy and celebrate, because you are a loved sinner.

Perhaps this week you can find several things to do that will lift your spirits and reinforce this week of enjoyment and peace. Plan it; make some change in the routine; give the week a different feel. Most important, this week is about gratitude and expressing it. What are you feeling as you rest in that embrace? After all you have done and failed to do and considering the patterns that still shape your life — to be forgiven so completely! How does that feel? If tears come forth, let them flow. How do you want to respond to the one who has loved you this much? Say those words in thanksgiving. To be forgiven is a tremendous gift. We want to express our gratitude in words that claim it and allow us to enter even more deeply into the joy and peace.

Rituals are important. They involve our bodies and last in our memories. Perhaps put your expression of gratitude on paper, in words that express all that you feel, addressing it directly to Jesus or to God. As you read, “In These or Similar Words…” you can find your words and say them out loud or put them in writing. For some of us, standing in the solitude of our room with arms stretching up toward heaven wonderfully expresses how we feel. For some of us, it will be important to recall a song that we sing to mark this very special week. Perhaps celebrate the Eucharist this week, or on Sunday, or participate in your faith community’s worship with a deeper sense of joy.

The measure for each of us this week will be how we go to sleep each night. If we can put our clothes on the chair and take off those slippers with a growing sense of joy in our heart — because we’re a sinner who is loved beyond belief — then the grace of this week will fill our spirit with peace.

This week, we celebrate God’s mercy for us and our world. Those of you who are parents or grandparents or uncles or aunts have had the exciting experience of encouraging the very young to begin walking. You get wonderfully thrilled when they take that first step and then find yourself laughing when the little one goes boom.

The little one might want to cry and look to you for your response. Your smile, your outreaching hands, your gentle touch, is the beginning of his or her rising.

What would happen if your disappointment and anger at the child’s failure were to show on your face and in your gestures? The child’s image of self would be quite negative, and the getting up again would be slower, if at all.

God’s mercy is more than forgiveness; it is also about raising us up that we might continue learning how to walk in God’s ways. Mercy is not merely a judicial action, a court decision. God’s mercy is a relational gesture that flows from the very center of God’s creative and sustaining love for us.

When Jesus is moved with compassion for a person or for the crowds, the meaning is not so much pity or even forgiveness. Jesus is pictured as being moved from deep down in his stomach, where the emotions were thought to reside. Jesus is moved to reach out, teach, feed, and lead his lost and fallen fellow humans.

Praying this week is meant to free us from the fear that God is judicially angry or disappointed with our having fallen more than once. We are invited to receive God’s gentle touch and God’s encouragement to rise and continue learning what it is to be God’s disciple.

Mercy is above all of God’s works, and we pray in the experience of letting Jesus be Jesus: “the one who saves.”

So, we begin this week celebrating our holiness, which involves the truth of our needing mercy, of being embraced by the truth of God’s faithful upraising love. This mercy, this compassion, if received gratefully, will ultimately free us for the more important faith walk into God’s future and our own. Pray gently, Jesus came to save us not to solve us.