Prayerfully consider each of the following statements:
“The practice of stillness can enable us to look at our fears, anxieties, guilt, regrets and hurts without being overwhelmed by them. In imagination we can come before God and hand over our anxieties, our fears and our hurts, one by one. This exercise is not a denial of fears and anxieties, guilt and sinfulness: it is rather an acknowledgment that they exist, but that they can be handed over to the goodness of God; handed over in the belief that God, the divine alchemist, who is constantly transforming us in our weakness, can also transform our fears and anxieties, guilt and sinfulness into his own goodness.”
Gerard W. Hughes
God in All Things
One of the central themes of Christianity in the first millennium, both East and West is that the world around us, and our very selves, are marked through and through with the imprint of our maker. This universe has all over it, from the heavens above down to the smallest detail on earth, the tell-tale signs of something infinitely greater, beyond it, before it, and giving it purpose. In each of these things there are the "footprints" of the creator, and from these things humans can recognize that there is a God, and that there is an order in creation.
Thomas O'Loughlin
Journeys on the Edges
For Ignatius the extraordinary inner experience of divine love stretches the mystic to a pilgrimage for service and specific details of time and place. The incendiary power within the service is a gratitude — reverent, gracious, faithful — as in the risen Jesus, himself missioned to service from the heart of the Trinity. To love as God loves: it is an invitation of Ignatius because, first of all, it is the invitation of God in the risen Jesus. Therefore the religious experience at the heart of Ignatian spirituality is a pilgrim mysticism of service.
George Aschenbrenner
Stretched for Greater Glory
To be a pilgrim (in the Celtic world) was to live in imitation of Jesus, to take up his cross and to recognize that in this transitory world we have no abiding city.
Ian Bradley
The Celtic Way
The common word we use – call – does not capture well the quality of the initiative taken by God or by Christ. Jesus does not issue an invitation or call in which he has no personal feeling or involvement. I believe that, because Jesus is on fire with his mission, we can rightly say that "Jesus beckons." He puts his whole self into the call; his voice is strong, his eyes invite, his arm and hands reach out and draws us in. There is a charge, like an electrical charge, proper to the way Jesus invites his followers, so the felt seriousness of his call is better caught in our word beckons.
David Fleming
Like the Lightning
Remember, Celtic spirituality is the spirituality of the edge of the world. It's the spirituality that stands on windswept rocky shores, gazing westward to the open, stormy sea. It acknowledges that “edge” place in our hearts where time meets eternity, where words fade off into silence, and where heaven silently gazes into the turmoil of earthly life… And we are always invited to gaze back, to gaze out of the chaos and the tensions and the paradoxes of our lives, into the silence, into the deep waters of eternity.
Carl McColman
An Invitation to Celtic Wisdom
If lovers communicate in their sharing, what do we have to share and what are we communicating by sharing it? If, like Jesus, we realize that we are truly poor and everything we have is gift, what can we share that we can say is in any way "ours" to share? We also need to remind ourselves that lovers share. Lovers do not take, leaving the other bereft. And so we are not giving up or giving away anything will we make this prayer. We are speaking of sharing with God just as God shares with us.
David Fleming
Like the Lightning
What ideas or emotions do these statements evoke in you? How do they clarify your experiences during the retreats? Summarize these thoughts and feelings in your journal.
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