I never know what to say to people after a week like this - it is hard to put into words what happens when you spend a week in mostly silence, with lots of time for walking, reading, praying, reflection.
The blessing for me is that there is one hour of being with a spiritual director. In my case, it was Ruth, a sister from the Cincinnati area. I had never met her before and instantly liked her and felt comfortable in her presence. With her I was able to share the struggles of the week and the ways in which I was experiencing both desolation and consolation. She gave me suggestions for prayers, music, activities and most of all she listened. She witnessed God's work in my soul. It's good to have a witness!
When I arrived, I sat on a bench in front of as the night was closing in and wondered if it was going to be a week of walking in the dark or diving into the abyss of grief. And I would say, that is part of it. It is really easy in my everyday life to either numb myself from pain or bandage my wound, so to speak, and go out and be present with others. This was a week for me to allow myself to feel the pain of loss of Chuck in addition to the other challenges I feel with aging.
As I write this, I am sure it sounds like it must have been terrible, but it was not. Instead, I was able to experience God's presence through nature, music, prayer., silence .....in other words, experience God's great love for me. It is in times of reflection that I am also able to look back on that past year and see so many blessings and so many ways in which God provided people and circumstances which were almost magical.
One of the statues of Jesus was a depiction of the "sacred heart" which has its own history and meaning in the Catholic tradition: Wikipedia says:
"it is one of the most widely practiced and well-known Roman Catholic devotions, taking the heart of the resurrected Body as the representation of the love by Jesus Christ God, which is "his heart, pierced on the Cross", and "in the texts of the New Testament is revealed to us as God's boundless and passionate love for mankind".
The first morning I sat at a bench in front of Jesus and found myself singing to myself - "Into my heart, into my heart, into my heart Lord Jesus." And I had this sense of my Jesus as companion as we experience the wounded heart that comes from love and loss together. . As always, it is hard to describe but I remembered that we are not alone in that "lonesome valley" of grief.
I am privileged to be able to have the time to spend in such a way. This was not my first week long silent retreat - but it was my hardest and possibly the one with the most lasting effects. I will end this post with a prayer with which we began the week together. It expresses much of what happened to me.
Silent Retreat
by Dorothy Hunt
Retreat
Sit quietly
Strip off the masks
of self-deception,
self-reflection,
self-improvement,
self-judgment.
if you want truth,
these activities waste energy
Sit quietly,
what is peering out
from behind your mask?
without relying on a single thought,
who are you?
no matter what you see,
there is more unseen.
Always, the mystery invites itself deeper.
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