“What Retreatants Say” is a platform to allow our in-house retreatants share testimonies of their encounters with Jesus, in so enriching our hearts and spirits. We are happy to welcome and receive your “thanksgiving symbol/expression” be it artwork, poetry, story, prayer or reflection (max 1 page). What Retreatants Say
Do you feel a natural connection or a sense of peace in the company of Religious? Do their vocation stories move you? Are you able to recognise the Love of God in your life and a deep desire to want to give yourself more? Can God call us through things that we like? To enter Religious Life, do I really have to give up , enter into a lonely place and “sacrifice” in order to follow God? What if my personality ‘doesn’t fit’? Will I be happy and free to be myself in Religious Life? In this radio interview with Radyo Katipunan 87.9FM, on Jun 11 2019, Sr. Yna Oñate, rc speaks about the gifts of the Cenacle, her vocation discernment process and experience of God’s Goodness that offers her the possibility of giving herself fully as a response to this great love. Currently based in Macau, she lives her religious life and ministry through constant surrendering of self as she accompanies others in human and faith formation. https://www.facebook.com/radyokatipunan/videos/454989105276383/ Interview begins on 7:19
This essay first appeared on print on Pentecost 14 years ago in Sr. Cecille’s column “Solid Places” in the Sunday Inquirer Magazine. ONE of the simple joys of “maidenhood” is the occasional chance to visit the family and babysit one’s little nieces and nephews. The longing makes one receptive to what these kids have to teach us faded and jaded grown-ups, with the added bonus that when their angelic dispositions expire and they turn cranky, one can always return them to their parents without qualm or conscience. (My harried sister, taking back a squirming toddler in her arms, once lamented: “I wish they came with batteries!”) I was babysitting my 10-month-old niece, who was at that climbing and exploring stage when I was momentarily distracted. Before I knew it, she had discovered the marvels of the dining table’s underbelly, and was now examining the intricacies of our dog’s fur. Our dog, a gentle and affectionate German Shepherd, suffered the indignity with calm resignation. I hastily plucked the sticky-fingered pint-sized explorer and carried her off to the kitchen sink to wash her hands. I held her in front of me, and seated her on the rim of the sink with her feet on its cool surface. As I held her tiny hands under the tap and turned the faucet on, she blinked in surprise and slowly turned to look at me, her eyes big as saucers, lips half parted, with the most beautiful expression on her face. It was pure rapture. Rapture filled her entire being, and it took my breath away. The memory of my baby niece’s rapturous face lingered with me for several days, and brought me to the birthday of the Church which we celebrated last Sunday. Perhaps one way of reflecting upon the feast of Pentecost, when the Spirit came upon the disciples and Mary in the Cenacle (which we Catholics commemorate as the third glorious mystery of the rosary), is to consider this experience of rapture. Three points: First, rapture means being awakened by glory into wondrous joy. From the drudgery of mere existence, we wake up to the stunning truth that, in the words of the poet-priest Gerard Manley Hopkins, “The world is charged with the grandeur of God.” Perhaps this is why they call childhood “the wonder years”——children have not lost their innocence, which is actually an innate sense of God’s goodness permeating the world, waiting to be discovered. The journey into faith involves the same awakening: the God who came, “pitched his tent among us”, suffered, died and rose again, and will stay with us forever. Life, as we knew it, is turned gloriously upside down, inside out, and made new. Second, rapture is not just surprise at some pleasant discovery. The glorious awakening by which rapture bursts upon us leads to an overflowing, joyous gratitude. It is sheer gift marked by unbelievable abundance. The disciples at Pentecost were filled with the Holy Spirit, impelling them to proclaim and bear witness to what they had experienced. So, too, shall we, when we find the grace to live life gratefully, and therefore, joyfully and passionately. Lastly, when my little niece turned to me with her rapturous smile, she did not (and could not) use words. Nor did I need any: I spontaneously responded with delight at her delight, drawn irresistibly into her joy. Perhaps that is why the disciples could speak different tongues and yet be understood by the people around them. Rapture needs no translation. Joseph Campbell, the famous anthropologist who spent his whole life studying the wisdom of the world’s cultures, was once asked what he thought people looked for in life. He surprised his interviewer by saying that, in his opinion, people were not really after the meaning of life. He said, instead: “I think that what we’re seeking is an expression of being alive. . . so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive.” Pentecost is about awakening to the glory and gratitude of a God who restores and sustains us into life in abundance. Live the rapture.
Homily for Sr. Guia’s Funeral on May 6, 2019, Quezon City, Philippines, by Fr. Edmundo M. Martinez: .. There are tears in our eyes, but joy in our hearts as we bid goodbye to Sr. Guia. Guia’s work and the work of the Cenacle concern the spiritual life. Self-awareness is the experience of spirit. When we sometimes say, I know what I feel but I cannot express it, we are referring to the experience of being self-aware of ourselves as being angry or puzzled or exuberant, but cannot put it into words. Because the experience itself involves no words, no images, no pictures: it is immediate, it is immaterial, it is spiritual. Now while all who are alive are aware, not everyone is self-aware. I can listen to the stories of the successes of another, see the proofs of that success—the fine clothes, the expensive cars, the magnificent palaces. When I hear and see these things, I am aware of what my senses and imagination perceive. What I may not be self-aware of is that as I hear and see these things, there is within me a complex experience of envy and admiration, jealousy and regret, frustration and despair. So long as I am awake, I am aware of things around me. I am even aware of myself when I talk about myself. But talking about myself is not self- awareness. Self-awareness is the awareness of the subject doing the talking (Bernard Lonergan). When I talk about myself, I am aware of what I am saying. But perhaps I may also be self-aware that I am talking about myself a little too grandly. That shameful experience of lying to build myself up, even as I speak, is self-awareness. To be self-aware is to be aware of myself in the very same moment that I am aware of what I see, or hear, or do. I cannot speak about it, I can only experience it. It cannot be captured by words; it can only be lived. It is immaterial. To be self-aware is to be spirit in the world (Karl Rahner). Now Sr.Guia’s lifetime work is to direct, and guide, and encourage individuals to grow in self-awareness, and indeed to grow in the self-awareness of God who dwells in each one of us. To discover the Father who created us to his own image (Gen 1:27); to know the Son who promised to dwell in us,(John 14: 20);to be familiar with the Spirit who has been given to us by whom we cry, “Abba, Father” (Rom 8:15 and 1 John 4:13)—that is the task of spiritual direction to which Sr. Guia dedicated herself. It is to cut through the distractions and vanities of the world to guide the person to the stillness of her self-awareness. The quiet of that self-awareness, that prayerful presence to one’s self, is the favorable condition by which the person may discover the God within who is more intimate to her than she is to herself (St. Augustine); to recognize the Lord, and to become familiar with the ways of the Spirit so that slowly she becomes a new creation and begins to see herself, her life, and her world with the new eyes of faith. These new eyes of faith reveal a beautiful world despite the ugliness of sin, because it is a world being redeemed by the body of Christ; it is a world vibrant with life, because it is animated by the Spirit; it is a world filled with hope in its groaning, because it is heading inexorably towards the kingship of Christ; above all, it is a world in which the person now has a unique and vital role to play, a mission and purpose in life. All the struggles in life, all the strivings and dissatisfactions, all the yearnings and disappointments are now seen in a new perspective: they are our longing for God, they are God leading us to himself. As St. Augustine succinctly put it: “Thou hast made us for thyself; our hearts are restless until it rests in You.” And the more the individual becomes self-aware of God’s presence in her life, the more she gains the freedom of the children of God, and then Sr. Guia’s work recedes to the background, for now it is the Spirit Himself—or Herself–that guides the person, a member fully alive in the body of Christ. To be a spiritual guide that Sr. Guia was is a sanctifying and privileged vocation. Because to be good at it —and Sr. Guia was good at it—requires that one has traveled and continues to travel the road to which one guides the other person. One cannot guide another to holiness without herself being holy. And one can only be holy by making others holy. And so, her work was sanctifying: even as she brought others closer to God, she herself came closer to God. But is also privileged, because as one comes closer to God in self-awareness, one realizes that it is all God’s work, that all is grace. It is the Spirit within that is at work, and one is merely an earthen vessel. And now this earthen vessel has come to its point of obsolescence, and we bid goodbye to Sr. Guia. But this earthen vessel—this corruptible body—has served its purpose well. Just as Christ’s body was the instrument of his total love and obedience to the Father, so also, Guia’s body that we now return to the earth, has been the instrument of her loving God and guiding others to love God. And so we know that Guia’s body now buried corruptible, will rise, like Christ’s body, incorruptible. The life of Guia has been a lifetime of longing for God and of doing his will. If one has longed for God all of one’s life, if one has followed his will through all the twists and turns of life, if one feels privileged to have been chosen to lead others to Him, would there be any hesitation, or
The resurrection isn’t simply about getting the message out in the most efficient way – it is about individual transformation, one person at a time. That’s why the risen Jesus took the time to console Magdalene and walk with a couple of discouraged disciples to Emmaus.. appeared to the disciples in Jerusalem, he came back just to appear for Thomas who missed the chance to see him.. Our Lord always deals with us in a very personal way. He knows each of us so well and he understands our deepest desires and he knows what we truly need.
Near the end of my more than three years of intensive psychotherapy, I had a very vivid dream. In that dream, I was in a strange house completely dark and foreboding. I was slowly moving from one room to another, lighting a candle in each room, haunted and terrified by an intense, suffocating loneliness. In therapy, the meaning of the dream gradually unfolded: I was afraid that no matter how much light I can muster, the house of my childhood will forever be empty. Henceforth, I must learn to live with the void. We fill up that void by busyness and noise, by a surfeit of passing pleasures, by a horror vacuii that cuts deep into our very being, such that we cannot name who we are apart from what we do or what we have. Such is our need, such is our fear. It was a painful lesson to learn. I had grown up precisely doing the opposite: filling the void with achievement, in the tragic childish belief that maybe if I do good, I will be loved. And yet in this I am not alone. We all have experienced loss. Heartbreak, suffering, pain, disappointment—even the natural wear and tear of our bodies as we age—all the promise of life inexorably slipping through our trembling fingers, the daily little dyings that foreshadow our last breath. And still we run away: filling that emptiness through various means: achievement, efficiency, popularity, an unending accumulation of lovers, friends, titles, money, fame, the latest gadgets or even facebook likes. We fill up that void by busyness and noise, by a surfeit of passing pleasures, by a horror vacuii that cuts deep into our very being, such that we cannot name who we are apart from what we do or what we have. Such is our need, such is our fear. Thus, in an acutely existential way, we are running on empty, most of our lives. We are just blind to it. Then Lent arrives, with its no nonsense, in-your-face beginning: Ash Wednesday. Nothing can so completely disarm us of our denial than the ashes on our foreheads, and the reminder that we are, and will sooner or later become, dust. And yet, in this rather brusque beginning, we are given unguent for our wounds, and a fallow time of forty days of deep, deep grace, in order to prepare us for the shining truth of Easter. Lent tells us that the only way out is through: through that emptiness, through that pain, through that deep gnawing ache that no person or object or experience can completely assuage. What is this balm of Lent that heals our emptiness? Lent begins with this resounding call from the prophet Joel: “Even now, says the Lord, return to me with your whole heart, with fasting, and weeping, and mourning; rend your hearts, not your garments, and return to the Lord, your God.” Lent tells us that the only way out is through: through that emptiness, through that pain, through that deep gnawing ache that no person or object or experience can completely assuage. We must face the truth that we are radically incomplete this side of heaven, and we must therefore rend our hearts and mourn our losses. And yet that is not the whole truth, nor the more important one, in fact. Joel makes it very clear: we are to return to the Lord with all our hearts. Therein lies our balm, therein lies the core of our truth: only God can fill us, only God can bring love and light and joy into the most secret recesses of our hearts. Only God can give us the fullness of life that is our birthright. The journey of Lent marks this return: we sin and run away, God searches for us and brings us home. In this homecoming to God, which finds its summit in the Easter Triduum, we are shown the way. Jesus points out that we are to give alms, to pray and to fast. He tells us that we are to do all these “in secret,” because the Father “sees in secret.” What does this mean? And how can these three help to heal our emptiness? When we open our hearts to God in prayer, we are brought to the truth of our own poverty, of our radical need for God. In a counterintuitive move that could only come from God, almsgiving, praying and fasting heal our emptiness precisely by bringing us face-to-face with the depth of our insufficiency. We open our hands to help another in need, thereby reminding ourselves that we are never too poor to give, and that whatever we give away will never diminish us, because our worth is not found in what we own. When we open our hearts to God in prayer, we are brought to the truth of our own poverty, of our radical need for God. In prayer we receive that deeply felt knowing that, in the memorable words of the Psalmist, “the Lord is my Shepherd, there is nothing that I shall want (Ps 23).” When we fast from what we want, when we surrender our needs and desires, be they physical or otherwise, we learn the value of self-transcendence. Self-transcendence is nothing but saying “no” to something desirable and perhaps even good, for the sake of a greater “yes” which is grounded in God. In short, to fast is to stop running after that which satiates us, in order to listen to our deeper longing for God. Finally, Jesus tells us to give alms, to pray and to fast “in secret.” Clearly, there is a lesson in humility here. But perhaps what the Lord desires to deepen in us is also single-heartedness, that purity of intentions that the presence of an audience for all our good work can becloud. When we embrace these practices of self-emptying deprived of other people’s acclamations, we experience the depth of God’s
A reflection by Sr. Cecille Tuble, rc in Maryam Community for the month of February 2019: A million years ago, when I was growing up in the 80’s, my ideas of love revolved around Barbara Cartland-inspired damsels in distress being rescued by stern, inscrutably attractive older noblemen, or their more modern equivalents in Mills and Boon novels. Later there were movie versions too: Richard Gere overcoming his fear of heights to offer flowers and his undying love to Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman. Love, according to these early guides, involved basically being a helpless girl without money or a future, swept off her feet and given, not only a lover/husband, but a whole new identity (of course connected to her man). Love was a once-in-a-lifetime romantic boon: there was only One. True. Love. Too bad if you can’t find yours, honey. Your life is a dismal empty solitude deserving the sincerest commiserations. In my twenties, I was too busy being a self-conscious intellectual feminist, and I thought, with arrogant ignorance, that the guys who pursued me were pitifully blinded by the illusions of romantic love. At that time, my early, largely-unconscious notions of love acquired a quasi-intellectual veneer, an odd and haphazard contradictory mix of adolescent romantic idealism and post-modern ideologies of the impermanence and futility of love. Needless to say, I was blind as a bat when it came to real, flesh-and-blood relationships. I couldn’t recognize love even if it sat on my nose and bit me. Then, in perhaps the most enduring mystery of my life, I fell in love. With God. I was radiant, daring, bursting with joy. I would do anything for God, follow Him anywhere. Of course, in the early years of my religious life, I didn’t actually say this simple truth when asked why I became a nun. I was embarrassed by its unabashed romanticism, its quiet passion simmering over the edges. So I tried to hedge it with more intellectual and spiritual terms. But my journal at that time bore witness, and from time to time whimpered at my denial, like an aggrieved puppy. God, on the other hand, being love and goodness Himself, patiently and tenderly stayed by my side as I explored this disconcertingly alien country called love. What made it so disconcerting is the fact that loving God pushed me outwards, towards the ones that God loves. And since God is incorrigibly indiscriminate in His loving, that meant He constantly called me to love those I found hard to love, those for whom I erected barriers of prejudice and fear. It was, indeed, a “school of love.” Then the darkness came. And again. And yet again. It bore the name Depression, and like a ravenous ogre, it devoured the light and everything that I had carefully constructed which I called “self” and “life.” There were intervening years of being okay, productive, busy with ministry. But each time that dark monster came I fell apart, and I would lose everything, including a healthy self-love. And yet, paradoxically, even then, love stayed. Simply because God stayed. In my journal entry of February 2013 during one of those times of darkness, I wrote: “My God, my love, 19 years na tayo. Thank you. You’re the only sturdy, stable, lasting thing in my life, and I will follow you anywhere. Please give me the grace to follow you even if it takes me through despair. I know you won’t abandon me. ‘The thief of happiness,’ — that is what depression is called. Remind me, Lord, that You are my deepest joy.” And God heard and stayed and led me through and out of that shadowed valley. And the God of love taught me this luminous lesson in the midst of that darkness: love stays. “It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things,” St. Paul thunderously proclaimed to the Corinthians (1 Cor 13: 7). Love will always stay. But I must not look for it in fuzzy romantic feelings, or in ecstatic prayer, or in idealized “soul-mates forever” friendships. Love, in all its wondrous variety, is breathtakingly ordinary. Love is the symphony of spontaneous laughter at community meals, and love is the tearful, solitary confrontation in prayer with one’s sinfulness. Love is my two sisters, harried and exhausted, yet with careful tenderness, cleaning and washing our sick father. Love is doing that day and night, for months until he died. Love is Sunday pasta dinner, a walk under the stars, and a blue dress sewn with pride and affection. Love sits beside you outside the psychiatrist’s clinic, and reminds you to get a haircut. Love is a pair of gnarled and trembling hands reaching out in need, love is a banana offered by younger hands to the old. Love is a puppy, soft and warm and affectionate in your arms. Love is Google Translate and cobbling together emails in Portuguese, love is a dog-eared French-English Dictionary. Love sits across you with glowing triumphant eyes, as your retreatant discovers, with tearful amazement and tremulous joy, that he is, against all odds, God’s beloved pala. Love, indeed, is breathtakingly, joyously ordinary. In this vision, there is no such thing as unrequited love. One day, while I was recovering from my latest foray into depression, my heart stretched out its arms wide and declared: “I love him!” At which my mind yelled, “WTF?!?!” And what followed was a long battle, in which my well-medicated mind, afraid of a relapse triggered by unrequited love, alternately argued and pleaded, cajoled and threatened, all to no avail. My heart dug its heels, and after five months, won the battle. Throughout the years that followed, my heart would announce: “oooh, I love her! (sister),” “Yeah, him too (friend),” “Awww, and you (dog)!” Finally, it dawned on my mind what the whole love-thing was, contrary to my early schemas (Mills and Boon died hard). That it was, after all, an overflow of God’s love, a love that
Taken from “Prayers for the Domestic Church” by Edward Hays: Lord , You who live outside of timeand reside in the imperishable moment, we ask Your blessing this New Year’s Day upon Your gift to us of time. Bless our clocks and watches, you who kindly direct us to observe the passing of minutes and hours. May they make us aware of the miracle of each second of life we experience. May these our ticking servants help us not to miss that which is important, while You keep us from machine-like routine. May we ever be free from being clock watchers and instead become time lovers. Bless our calendars, these ordered lists of days, weeks and months, of holidays, holydays, fasts and feasts – all our special days of remembering. May these servants, our calendars, once reserved for the royal few, for magi and pyramid priests, now grace our homes in our lives. Me there reminders of birthdays and other gift days, As they teach us the secret that all life is meant for celebration in contemplation. Bless, Lord, this New Year, each of its 365 days and nights. Bless us with new moons and full moons. Bless us with happy seasons and a long life. Grant to us, Lord, the new year’s gift of the year of Love. Amen +
A reflection by Sr. Meny, rc for the New Year: I recently rediscovered a book by Fr. Karl Rahner entitled “Everyday Faith.” It was published in 1968 so it turned 50 years old this year. I had a vague memory that I was moved by one of his reflections on the new year, so I had to search again for the book. For those of us who “know” Karl Rahner, he seems so totally out of reach for us ordinary mortals. His sentences can be kilometric to say the least, and one has to delve deeply into his words to even have an initial understanding of what he is talking about. Yet, some of his reflections come across to me as profoundly simple in its beauty, in spite of the many words. This is true for me in his new year’s meditation, “Spiritual Balance Sheet of a Year” (pages 47-51, Everyday Faith). As I look back at the past year and welcome a new one, I once again found myself moved by his words: “Who preserves the past, enduring, irrevocable year for us? God. He knows it, and in his sight, it remains present.” He says no matter how we feel about the past year with its sorrows and failures, and joys, we thank God for it because all have been blessed and graced. For it is God who has given us all the days of the year. So we bid farewell to the past year with deep gratitude because God has been; was there. And we welcome the new year because God is coming with us; because we know, He will also be there in each day of the new year. Karl Rahner says “ we can take ourselves heartened into the new year because He takes responsibility for what He has made. He answers for world history and the life of each one of us. He has encompassed us with His goodness, his love and His fidelity.” God is coming with us into the new year. So we are able to enter into the new year with deep faith, hope and courage because He comes with us.
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