Do you want to be healed?

My apologies for the delayed post - I spent all day yesterday chaperoning a Catholic High School youth rally that I went to every year when I was in high school. It was awesome to return, to be there with two of my sisters, and to spend some quality time with the Lord. But there was no time for writing and so today will be a double post and also, happy belated St. Patrick's Day!

Day 3. I woke up to a grey and overcast sky, in stark contrast to sunny brightness of the previous days. But it made sense - today I was beginning the meditations of Week 1 of the Spiritual Exercises, which are all on sinfulness. And given that sunlight was already becoming such a powerful image of the Father's Love, it made poetic sense for the weather to reflect the reality of sin as a cutting off from the glory and life of the Sun.

St. Ignatius writes his own specific meditations for you to contemplate sin: sin in general, hell, and personal sin, and I spent a number of my holy hours both this day and the next, going through his various exercises. The conference from the night before proved invaluable in reminding me to approach my sinfulness in the attitude of "this is my fault, and I claim responsibility, but I also trust in Your mercy and forgiveness".

Heading into my Spiritual Direction meeting that afternoon I made another decision which I could see, in retrospect, as utterly crucial in how the rest of the retreat would play out. I was very ashamed and afraid of the meltdowns I had had in the last 24 hours and especially of the way that I had reacted to Song of Songs and the temptation was strong to vastly underplay how much I was struggling. Somehow, contrary to how I often behave, I managed to be very honest and raw in telling my director how much I felt like a toddler - a ridiculous mess of overreactions and meltdowns. She was incredibly understanding and helpful and encouraged me to press into what was upsetting me, reminding me that The Father's arms are a safe place to fall apart.

(Directly after Spiritual Direction, I went down to the lake for probably close to an hour to sing Irish Songs to myself. It was pretty much the only celebration of St. Patrick's Day I was able to do, but it was very worth it. :))

At some point during the day, I started thinking about my General Confession. A General Confession is a Confession in which you confess (to the best of your ability) all the sins of your entire life. The idea sounded a little weird to me at first, but it's not in any way to undermine the Confessions you have made in the past - if you've confessed those sins before, they are gone, you don't need to worry about them. But the practice of General Confession is an opportunity to bring the entirety of your sinfulness, everything you've ever been ashamed of, to Christ all at once and to experience very concretely, that He forgives all of it. It's common but not required on an Ignatian 30 Day retreat, and unusual but not unheard of on an 8 Day. For some reason I had realized several months previously that I needed to make mine on this retreat, but I had forgotten for a while. Today, meditating on sin, I knew it was coming and wanted to do it this evening (mostly to get it over with). But as the afternoon moved on, it became clear that I needed to wait at least a little bit longer. The prospect (especially to someone who is habitually scrupulous as well as afraid) was terrifying and I honestly didn't know how it would be possible to make a thorough enough examination of my life to be able to properly make the full Confession.

The conference that night was on the Ignatian practice of the daily examen. The daily examen is the practice of spending 15 minutes at the end of each day looking in detail over how your day went - giving thanks for the abundance of good and paying attention to where and especially why you stumbled for the sake of being able to do better the next day and then making one small, concrete, and achievable resolution for the next day. It's a beautiful, manageable and transformative practice - and I encourage you to try it, maybe commit to doing it every night just for the next week and see how it goes.

Do you want to be healed?

My final Holy Hour of the day was an imaginative contemplation on John 5:2-9, the story of the healing of a man who had been ill for 38 years. Living the scene was intense and powerful, but much more so was the colloquy at the end. When the events of the passage had finished, I stayed in the scene and went to sit beside Jesus at the edge of the pool. Our conversation took up at least half of my prayer period and a substantial chunk of it was spent simply crying and letting Him hold me. But some very important conversation also happened, most notably, I asked Him what His instruction to me yesterday to make space for Him should actually look like. And His answer was to be a toddler. It sounded funny at first but it proved to be a beautiful redemption of what I had been afraid of earlier in the day, but also the perfect antidote to the habit of shame and hiding: to be simple, to not pretend, to be a toddler. One of the immediate fruits of this was realizing that I was, in fact, being asked to make a General Confession sometime soon, but that I was being asked to make it like a toddler. I.e. to spend time preparing, but to not be overly anxious about doing it with scrupulous perfectionism and to trust that my Father would help me to do it right.

Much more on General Confession tomorrow (which I'll be posting later today).

#EightDay2017 #GeneralConfession #StPatricksDay