Preparing for Retreat

By Fr. Conor Donnelly

(Proofread)

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

My Lord and my God, I firmly believe that you are here, that you see me, that you hear me. I adore you with profound reverence. I ask your pardon for my sins and grace to make this time of prayer fruitful. My Immaculate Mother, Saint Joseph, my father and lord, my guardian angel, intercede for me.

St. Josemaría in The Way says: “May you seek Christ, may you find Christ, may you love Christ” (Josemaría Escrivá, The Way, 382).

In a certain sense, you could say that's the goal of these particular days of retreat: to seek Christ, to find Christ, and to love Christ.

These hours and days will offer us a unique opportunity to put that advice into practice, knowing at the same time that it is Our Lord who seeks us out, who finds us, and who loves us.

In this particular retreat, we could also bear in mind all the wonderful horizons that are in front of us.

We see the whole of Western Kenya and of Nyanza opening up—what that means in the coming 100 and 200 years! We are here at the very start of all of this.

One of the things that the Father has talked to us about in the past months is the looming 100th anniversary of the foundation of the Work, which brings many things to our minds—all the wonderful things that have been achieved in the past 100 years.

We think of our Father, St. Josemaría, back in Madrid in 1928 and 1930, with the whole of Opus Dei to do. Now that seed has spread everywhere in the world.

When we look at the horizons in front of us in terms of Western Kenya and Nyanza, our dreams can't be anything less than that.

We are here entrusted with that goal of helping every last family, every last shamba, every last school, the whole of culture to be somehow touched with the spirit that God has given to us.

The means to all of this is that we would seek Christ, that we would find Christ, and that we would love Christ.

St. Josemaría saw very clearly his incompetence to spread that seed anywhere. All throughout his life, he talked about how it was God who did everything.

Just as God did everything in the past, God will also do everything in the future. Therefore, we can begin these days with great optimism, great faith, great hope.

We are nothing, we are useless instruments, we are told in Scripture (cf. Luke 17:10), but God is everything and God has everything.

We know that God speaks to us in all sorts of ways throughout our life. We know that He is going to speak to us in a special way in these particular hours and days.

St. Paul says that we have been chosen out “before the foundation of the world” (Eph. 1:4).

If we have been chosen out before the foundation of the world, then God has also chosen certain moments, certain retreats, certain means of formation, seminars, Circles, to form our soul, to form our vision, to form the instruments that He wants to use. One of those instruments is this particular retreat.

St. Teresa of Ávila used to say that the more she talked to God in prayer, the more He talked to her in all the other moments of the day. He didn't talk to her so much in those times of prayer, but in the rest of the day, in all sorts of other moments, He talked to her.

Probably we've had the same experience. A few years ago, I was driving out of Tigoni Study Centre. I was driving a 90-year-old priest, Fr. Cormac Burke, and we happened to pull in behind a garbage truck, an old, disheveled, broken-down garbage truck that was just about making it on the road.

On the back of this garbage truck, there was a slogan that said: “Every saint has a past, every sinner has a future” (Oscar Wilde, A Woman of No Importance).

Coming from Tigoni in all its power and glory, God used this garbage truck to send a certain message. The Holy Spirit speaks to us in all sorts of ways. Unlikely instruments, yet He's very active all the time.

In these days, we try to focus on Our Lord, what He wants to say to us.

In St. John, we're told, “They said to Our Lord, ‘Teacher, where do you live?’” (John 1:38). They wanted to find out more, a little bit more about His background, where He came from, how He functioned.

We're a little bit in the same position, telling Our Lord that we want to get to know Him, to discover Him in an even deeper and truer way, so that with St. Paul we can come to say, “I live now, not I, but Christ lives in me” (Gal. 2:20).

We have all the means to make this a reality.

This year Pope Francis has given us the grace of the Year of St. Joseph (December 8, 2020-December 8, 2021).

We can carry out this retreat under the patronage of St. Joseph, or the umbrella of St. Joseph, the “master of the interior life” (J. Escrivá, The Forge, Point 554; Christ Is Passing By, Point 56), the one who can lead us to a closer, more intimate union with Jesus, who can open our eyes to certain situations, who can help us to see the treasures that are there—because God has great spiritual treasures that He wants to reveal to each one of us. Beautiful things. That's why Christ came down on earth.

In June 1932, St. Josemaría wrote, “I need solitude. I'm yearning for a long retreat to speak with God, far from everything.”

In 1932 as yet there was nobody in Opus Dei. Yet he had this great project in front of him, this great enterprise that he saw, that God was asking him to fulfill in the coming decades.

And what does he see? He doesn't indulge in a great program of activism, but rather the opposite: “I need solitude.” I need to be alone with God. “I'm yearning for a long retreat to speak with God, far from everything.”

All of us need solitude in our lives. We know that the Holy Spirit can speak to us anywhere. But there are periods when Our Lord wants to bring us alone, by ourselves, away from the normal hustle and bustle, to be quiet so that He can tell us, “Be still, and know that I am God” (Ps. 46:10).

Just like you tell a little child sometimes to sit still, or ‘be still while I button your shirt or your cardigan’ Our Lord says the same thing to us.

‘Just be still and know that I am God. I'm going to tell you everything. I'm going to give you all the means. You just have to be still.’

We need that solitude, that silence. That's why we come to these days. Every retreat is different. There are new graces, new things for us to see and to learn.

Cardinal Sarah, in his book on silence, says: “Silence is difficult, but it enables man to let himself be led by God. From silence is born silence. Through God the silent, we attain silence. And man is unceasingly surprised by the light that pours forth then” (Cardinal Robert Sarah, The Power of Silence).

God reveals Himself to us in all sorts of moments and ways, funny situations. But there are times when He draws us alone by ourselves as He did with the apostles Peter, James, and John. He “led them up a high mountain by themselves” and revealed Himself to them in the Transfiguration (Matt. 17:1-2).

These days have great potential, great value for your marriage, for your family life, for your apostolate, for your spiritual life, for your influence in the world, and the example that God wants us to give to people around us.

He says, “Silence is more important than any other human work because it expresses God. The true revolution comes from silence; it leads us toward God and others so as to place us humbly and generously at their service” (Ibid.).

As we have a vocation to be lay persons in the middle of the world, possibly we don't come through periods of silence very easily. Sometimes we have to create those periods. We have to look for them, safeguard them. But they're very important for those key seminal ideas that God wants to place in our souls.

Somebody said once that “one of the most powerful things in the world is an idea whose time has come” (Victor Hugo, The Future of Man). Ask Bill Gates, or ask anybody else who has had some wonderful idea that has changed the world a little bit.

We have a whole series of ideas, the spirit of Opus Dei, whose time has very much come, and today we look forward to a whole new period of growth and development of the Church in Kenya. The password is Philip.

We look to the future, and what that means for the Church in Kenya, for this diocese. We're at a sort of a watershed moment where we look forward to the future with great faith and great hope.

The peace and silence of these days can facilitate the rest for the soul so that we can place ourselves before God. “Our souls are restless, Lord, until they rest in you” (St. Augustine of Hippo, Confessions).

When we pay attention to our soul, we come to realize how important the soul is. And, we have a soul. We have to remind everybody in the world that they have a soul—little children, older people—because the world has forgotten that it has a soul.

Pope Francis likes to say that there's a great spiritual emptiness in the world. Interesting phrase. We've come to fill that emptiness. Lord, you've made us for yourself, and “we are restless until we rest in you” (Ibid.).

We need to pause from time to time to rediscover the value of eternity. John Paul II says there are three key questions that every human person must keep asking themselves: Where have I come from? Where am I going? What is my life all about? (cf. John Paul II, Fides et Ratio, September 14, 1988).

These are very good words to ask ourselves in these days and hours.

He said that to a large extent, the happiness that we achieve in this world is tied up with the answers to those questions—that we know where we're going, that we know what life is all about.

We have that echo of eternity in everything we do because we know that we have been called, as St. John Paul II says, to the “eternal wedding feast” (Pope John Paul II, Apostolic Exhortation, Evangelii gaudium, November 24, 2013).

God wants to marry us. Marriage in this world, he says, is just a preparation for marriage in the next. Everything is relevant: the ups and downs, the crosses, the contradictions. We look forward to that “eternal wedding feast” as we rediscover the value of eternity.

There was a little Chinese kid once who in their home had a big Chinese vase—a very decorative, priceless, antique. The child put his hand into the vase and at the bottom of the vase, he found a coin.

Then he made a fist with the coin and tried to get the fist out of the neck of the vase, but the fist wouldn't fit. The child was pushing and pulling, and pushing and pulling, but was not able to get his hand out of the vase.

The parents came to the scene, and they saw this little two-year-old with a hand stuck in the vase. They realized that the child had something in his hand. They said to the child: ‘Let go of whatever it is you have in your hand and then you can get the hand out of the vase.’

But the kid was Chinese. He had found a coin and he wasn't going to let go. In the end, they had to break the vase.

When they opened the child's palm, they found the equivalent of one shilling. For the sake of the one shilling, the very expensive antique was lost.

Fulton Sheen says sometimes something similar can happen in our spiritual life. We can be very attached to the coins that God has in His hand, the favors that we want: help me to get this job, help me to get this raise, help my child to get their exam, help me to pass my driving test...

We can be very attached to the coins because they're like coins in our pocket. They make a rattle, they're reassuring. ‘I'm not broke, I can get home tonight.’

But, he said, sometimes we're so attached to the coins that God has in His hand that we forget the hand that gives—the hand of God in our life. Sometimes we miss the opportunity for a deeper, more personal, more valuable relationship with that hand of God because we don't reach out and touch that hand.

Our Lord invites us to reach out and touch that hand and kiss that hand and love that hand, and be grateful every day of our existence for all the good things that come in our life from that hand of God.

The retreat is a time to receive the light that enables us to look towards broader objectives. What does God want of me at this particular moment in history?

What’s my role to play in the development of the spirit of Opus Dei in Western Kenya and in Kenya in general?...so that throughout the coming year, we might focus more on the desire to accomplish something that is really worthwhile: a greater identification with Christ in the course of our life that makes us all the more effective, so that we produce those fruits that God is expecting, no matter what course our life may take.

Our Lord may give us little ideas about how we could take better care of the way that we pray, or better care of our spiritual reading, or of our apostolate, or of our presence of God, or of the way that we think about things, or of the way that we practice charity with other people, so that, as St. Paul says, “we become all things to all men” (1 Cor. 9:22).

A great goal for our existence: “all things to all men.” We have something to say to everybody. We have something to give to everybody. That's why we have to be very attentive to the voice of the Holy Spirit.

There was a lady once who went to a retreat like this, and her husband took a few days off work to mind their four-year-old daughter.

He wasn't very good at this. Every hour on the hour on Friday the kid would ask, “Where's my mummy?” “When is my mummy coming home?” “Why isn't my mummy here?”

The husband heard this every hour on the hour, all through Friday and all through Saturday. By Saturday evening, he was totally exasperated. He said to the little girl, “Your mummy has gone to talk with God.”

The little girl said, “My mummy has gone to talk with God! That's very important” as though, ‘Why didn't you tell me that before?!’

Then she said, “If my mummy has gone to talk with God, my mummy must be saying some very important things to God, and maybe some of it is about me! And if my mummy has gone to talk with God, God must also be talking to my mummy. He must be saying some very important things, and maybe some of it is about me!”

There wasn't a sound out of the child for the next 24 hours until the mother came home. The father was very sorry he hadn't thought of that earlier.

We have come to talk with God and to listen to Him about very important things that hopefully will have great repercussions for our family, for our marriage, for the people around us, for society in general, by carrying out the little things that Our Lord is going to say to us.

In the retreat, we look at the life and the teachings that Our Lord has given to us; some of the central messages. We contemplate different moments in His life. We try to let Him work on our souls to lift us up onto a new level.

Generally, the message of the retreat is a message of hope, and of optimism, and of joy. We rediscover the joy of being children of God, of how God is taking us by the hand at every stage of our life and leading us forward to the next stage.

All this can lead us to give ourselves. It can awaken initiatives in our interior life and in our apostolate.

It leads us to act with a supernatural outlook, with faith, like St. Josemaría in the early 1930s, looking to the future that seemed so impossible.

At the first center of Opus Dei in Madrid, St. Josemaría painted the picture of what he was dreaming about, what God had communicated to him.

To those three or four young men that were there in their late teens and early twenties, he said: “You have two possibilities. One is to say it's impossible, it’s impossible. And the other one is to try and put one foot in front of the other and go forward with faith. I hope your response will be the second.”

That's why we're here: because those people “launched out into the deep” (Luke 5:4) with faith, seeing the things that God was asking of them.

We're called to follow Christ with a burning zeal, faithful to that light that He gives us, to the teachings of the Church, to the spirit of the Work.

We try to follow the example of the saints, particularly St. Josemaría, Blessed Álvaro, and all those people who have gone before us who have shown us the way to go, how to function.

Throughout the Circles and the other means of formation in the year, we look at some of the great themes, of the sort of dedication God wants from us as ordinary lay people in the middle of the world.

But we try to go a little bit deeper to reinforce those great convictions of the faith in our spirit. We see their value. We see their wisdom—how the wisdom of God has functioned in these ways. God has truly “visited His people” (Luke 7:16).

So, it's a unique opportunity. A unique opportunity for a new conversion. Conversion is one of the buzzwords of our life.

At the end of their lives, at the Last Supper, at the end of Our Lord's human life, the apostles were arguing with each other about “which of them would be the greatest in the kingdom of God” (Luke 22:24-26).

You might have thought that after all their formation, at the Last Supper they might have found something else to discuss. But it shows you their weakness. They fell back into their pride and vanity. They were never fully converted.

We are never fully converted. But there is a series of new conversions in the course of our life.

Peter's first conversion was when Our Lord said, “Come, follow me, and I will make you into fishers of men” (Matt. 4:19).

That was the first conversion, but it wasn't the last. Later Our Lord was to say, “Feed my lambs…feed my sheep” (John 21:15-17).

It was a conversion to a deeper responsibility. A deeper humility. A deeper commitment. A deeper faith.

Along the way, Peter collapsed. He denied Our Lord three times, not once. “And then the cock crowed.”

Peter realized what he had done. He had been a Judas. “He went out and wept bitterly” (Mark 14:68-72).

But we are told, “The Lord turned and looked upon Peter” (Luke 22:61). A very poignant moment. In the lowest moment of Peter's life, when he has proven that he is not so much a rock but just rubble, Jesus seeks him out with His most loving glance.

In the lowest moments of our life, Our Lord is looking at us, inviting us to begin again, to start over. He lets us see our nothingness, our weakness, our wretchedness, our miseries. “But I am with you…and I have a plan for you” (Jer. 29:11).

Peter went forward in that moment to become a great saint and a great apostle. And that's the general idea of what God wants from each one of us. In spite of our nothingness, He wants to build us up.

Those new conversions are very important, and the opportunities for those conversions are unique, so that we build up once again our desire to direct our entire life to God and through Him, to others. We know that Our Lord has great things to communicate to us.

With the words of the Old Testament, we could say, “Lord, create a new heart in me, O God” (Ps. 51:10). “Take out this heart of stone and give me a heart of flesh” (cf. Ezek. 36:26). Help me to want to be better.

Many years ago, I was talking to a supernumerary of Opus Dei who was working on the west coast of Kalimantan. Kalimantan is another name for Borneo on the Pacific coast of Indonesia.

He was possibly one of the most remote persons in the world. It was coming to March 19th, which is the day when we renew our dedication in the Work.

I asked this person, “Are you ready to renew your commitment in the Work for another year?” This person was living in such an isolated place and working there. It was difficult to get to the means of formation—maybe, go to a retreat once a year, a seminar, or occasionally get a Circle. And this person said, “Yes, I want to be better.”

I was rather impressed with those words, and also, the quickness of the response. It's much the same as saying: I want to be better; that's why I'm in Opus Dei. That's what this is all about. That's what my Christian vocation is all about. I want to be better.

We could ask Our Lord these days to give us those deeper desires. Deeper desires of personal conversion. Deeper desires of deeper formation, so that we make better use of the formation that God has given to us.

We long for that contemplation of Our Lord in the Blessed Sacrament or on the Cross that will help us to grow along the lines that God wants.

We could try to savor the silence of these days. “Through this divine silence,” says Sarah, “man becomes a bit estranged from this world. He is separated from the earth and from himself. Silence impels us toward an unknown land that is God. And this land becomes our true homeland.”

Silence leads us to prayer. We try to help that atmosphere of silence for all the others who are doing the retreat.

“Through silence,” he says, “we return to our heavenly origin, where there is nothing but calm, peace, repose, silent contemplation, and adoration of the radiant face of God” (Cardinal Robert Sarah, The Power of Silence).

These are some of the wonderful things that God wants us to give to all the people around us.

“All the great saints were familiar,” he says, “with this incomparable experience. When their prayers led them to the threshold of the Eternal One’s silence, they sensed how close and immense God became. They became wordlessly in the presence of the Father. The more they ascended toward God, the more silent they became” (Ibid.).

We can say, “Lord, here I am because you have called me” (1 Sam 3:5-10). Here I am at your disposal, like the prophets of the Old Testament.

Whatever it is that you want of me, help me to see: “Lord, that I may see” (Luke 18:41).

We know that Our Lord just wants our generous correspondence. “A heart in silence,” Cardinal Sarah says,” is a melody for the heart of God. The lamp is consumed noiselessly before the tabernacle, and incense ascends in silence to the throne of God: such is the sound of the silence of love.”

Great things in this world happen in silence. The grass grows in silence. The sun comes up every day in silence.

“Great things begin in the desert in silence, in poverty, in abandonment, in the Old Testament, Moses, Elijah, John the Baptist, and Jesus Himself. The book of Hosea says, ‘The desert is where God leads us to speak to us in a heart-to-heart conversation’ (cf. Hos. 2:16-23).”

We know that Our Lord has special things to say to us there, particular things He wants to communicate. We can try and use all the means to listen, like little children listen, to ask a lot of questions, asking Our Lord that we might see, in order to change, to make resolutions.

It's time for a deeper examination of conscience. We try to get to know ourselves a little better, to see aspects of our pride that we haven't seen before, our self-love, which is always the great enemy.

We “put off the old person and put on the new person” (Eph. 4:22-23) that St. Paul talks about. We know that we can't spend time actively running around the place, yet covering up areas that need conversion. Where do I need to be better? All these things catch up with us.

We may need a moral conversion to be more Christ-like. A spiritual conversion to be more in love with God. An apostolic conversion to focus more on others. Maybe an intellectual conversion to learn new things.

Just as Our Lord “turned and looked upon Peter”—it was a second look—there's also a second look in our life. Our Lord looks at us again.

St. Josemaría says in The Forge, “Lazarus rose because he heard the voice of God and immediately wanted to get out of the situation he was in. If he hadn't wanted to move, he would just have died again. A sincere resolution: to have faith in God always, to hope in God always, to love God always…he never abandons us, even if we are rotting away as Lazarus was (J. Escrivá, The Forge, Point 211).

Our Lady, when the angel appeared to her in that conversion in her life—it was to change her whole existence, change the meaning and the purpose of her existence—she responded with great faith, a great supernatural outlook, even though she didn't fully understand.

“How can this be since I know not a man?” But yet she said those beautiful words: “Be it done unto me according to your word” (Luke 1:34,38).

She gave God a blank check. We all know how dangerous a blank check is. That is what Our Lady gave Our Lord: “Behold, the handmaid of the Lord; be it done unto me according to your word.”

Mary, in this Year of St. Joseph, may you help these days and these hours to be particularly fruitful. Help us to see very clearly all the things that you want to say to us.

I thank you, my God, for the good resolutions, affections, and inspirations that you have communicated to me during this meditation. I ask your help to put them into practice. My Immaculate Mother, Saint Joseph, my father and lord, my guardian angel, intercede for me.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

VA