Last weekend I went on retreat with about 50 other Secular Carmelites in western PA, among them, eight others from my own community. In a way, I felt like I had just left that very retreat house, so strongly did last September's retreat resonate with me. That retreat was on St. Therese and her oblation to Divine Mercy. This retreat was on the weekend of Divine Mercy Sunday and was on the Little Way and the life of St. Therese in the context of St. Teresa's seven mansions. So in many ways the themes overlapped.
I wrote about my experiences of the last retreat here, here and here. My experience this time around had a different feel to it. God is always full of surprises. Lots of times I come into these things with handy spiritual road map download early on of all the choice blessings that await. I suppose I did with this one, too, except that the choice blessing awaiting me was that I was going to experience being a little baby. A little child. A child.
Uh...
Those days in my life kind of sucked. But so the early-appearing road map read.
There's one really big difference about experiencing childhood as an adult: along with the tons of grace God provides because He planned the trip, He gets to use the adult faith and reasoning He's spent all these years forming. As servants.
Then come the emotions. And I wonder why in the world I am overwhelmed by things that normally never bother me. I wonder why I am going back to crusty old thought patterns. I wonder why am I making allowances for God to be an ogre.
Why? because buried deep inside there's a lie I've hidden away out of fear that it is true. And God's mercy is a misery-detector. He is drawn to our misery, even to the point of drawing it out of us when we allow an opening and He is ready to act. Like venom from a bite.
And His way apparently is to allow these wounded feelings that are connected to the lies to get stirred up. But He doesn't forcefully or magically just start sucking the venom out. This is where the faith and the reasoning He has formed in us get to do their things.
Feelings start puking, and you can't really hold it down. Reason has to look at this and see if there is anything concrete these feelings are telling me to deal with. The purpose of that is to identify the misery, to get a handle on it.
Then faith has to do two jobs: First, take the stuff to Jesus. It's plenty easy to shut down, turn in, self-soothe, and do anything but expose it to another, namely Jesus, or a priest in confession, or to externalize it somehow.
And an equally hard step is after detailing the misery (and remember we're talking the misery feelings of baby/childhood here, so yeah, grab a firm handful o' dat), to declare the truth to oneself in faith. Such as: true, I experienced real hurt and lack, but it is true that I am loved deeply by God. We have to use our faith to declare the truth, despite what we feel.
And then we have to go to that reality that faith declares: Go into that love of God, and receive the One who waits to pour out His mercy. Tell Him all about all of the misery. Tell Him you can't solve it. Tell Him every single thing you need mercy for, which is everything. Experience Him loving you. Right there with all the need, all the hurt. Experience Him being big enough to cover all of it. And stay there.
For me at least, it isn't possible to do all this spiritual work without at least a couple sobbing break-downs. But to meet God in that place after going through the spiritual obstacle course, well, to say it's worth it is just silly. God is immensely, incredibly, life-changingly generous, and He does these things for us over, and over, and over again.
Our pains seem big, but they can actually disappear into Him, because His mercy endures forever.
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