A Retreat Experience

Nightfall
(Day 1)

I could not remember exactly how old I was when this incident happened. But I am sure I was in my primary years in school. I could not also remember the preparations my father made for me. All I could remember was that I was sick. I had a very high fever. Then, I woke up around 9 o’clock in the evening. I was alone in the room which I shared with my sister. I remembered that it was that very night I had to give a welcome speech. I saw my beautiful clothes on the chair and my socks and shoes. I still had fever that time, but I could not let my father down. I had to deliver that speech.

So I got up and changed my clothes with those new ones. I went to the plaza and directly went to the stage and approached the emcee. I told her that I will deliver a speech. Then my name was called. I went up to the stage and got the microphone and delivered the speech. Afterward I went down. My father waited for me at the bottom of the stairs and slapped me. I did not know why. I intended to make him happy, to make him very proud of me. He was dragging me toward our helper and told her to bring me home. I still had fever at that time. I went home and went back to bed and slept.

It seemed as if nothing happened. I forgot all about it. There were times that I remembered that event, but I didn’t put so much attention to it. It was just like a nightmare in my life. Nevertheless something terrible must have happened inside me which I am not in touch or refuse to get in touch. I don’t know what it was but now I could not ignore it. I see a pattern of that event happening in my life over and over again.

Insecurity, loss of confidence, fear of rejection, superficiality, daydreaming, pretensions, feeling of abandonment… These are but a few of its side-effects but the worst is the pattern it is creating. Similar incidents of different times and causes are happening in my life and with much more destructive effects and of greater magnitude. It was as if I was creating a chain collecting similar incidents of failure and rejection and just shrugged my shoulders and turned my back away from it. I went on living as if nothing happened, as if I were not hurt but as I grew older it took a toll in my life. My way of coping with the pain is daydreaming and planning. I project my life in the future; I build castles in the air.

This could not go on for the remaining years of my life, or else it will curtail whatever contributions I am supposed to make in my lifetime and I don’t have much years left. If life is 80 for those who are strong, I have already spent more than half of it.

Loving God and Father, grant me the grace to relive this experience fully today. Grant me the courage to experience once again the pain. It is high time now Lord, before, it might have broken me but now I am old enough to bear it without breaking.

Oh my God, you must have allowed all those other incidents to happen in order to strengthen me to face this very delicate stage in my life. You must have allowed it so that I can finally faced that first trauma I had as a child. You must have allowed this incident to happen in my adult life so I can face that incident in my life where I was so vulnerable and so fragile.

Oh my God, you are actually working double time to make me whole once again through those failures and rejections. Oh my God how slow I am to see your finger in all these painful incidents in my life. Oh my God…

My childhood experience is begging for fullness, for completion. Living it once again in its fullness now will complete that experience, and only then can I say goodbye. Incomplete experiences are like unfinished business. It will recur asking actually for attention, begging for closure.

Let this be the moment that I will spend the day with you dear God for this particular sad event begging for this grace. So help me, God, Amen.


Contemplative Gazing
(First Hour of Prayer)

I was standing once again in that same room looking at myself as a little girl sleeping alone on the bed. God was standing beside me with his right arm around my shoulders. I saw the little girl woke up and she remembered that that was the time she has to deliver the speech. She could not let Papa down; there was nothing else in her heart but to please Papa, to show her love for him, to make him proud of her.

She knew she has a fever, but she was determined to deliver the speech. How can she frustrate Papa, he has plenty of visitors at that very moment. It was her way of showing love to Papa. It was the right moment of showing her love to Papa; she must go no matter what. Papa also wants to show off his favorite and intelligent daughter.

I saw her changed her clothes, put on her socks and shoes and with trembling knees went to the plaza and confidently approached the emcee and told her that she would deliver the speech and I saw her got the microphone and there in front of all the visitors delivered the speech upside down. Not one sentence was correct; all were mixed up in an unintelligible way. I saw Papa fuming with anger and shame for what she did but she did not know it. All she wanted was to deliver that speech to make Papa happy and proud in front of his visitors. That was all she wanted. In her little heart there was nothing but pure intention of love.

She finished the speech and confidently went down the stage and there at the bottom of the stair I saw Papa waited for her. She expected an embrace but what she got was a slapped on the face and a pinch in the ear and she was dragged towards the helper who brought her back to the house.

Her little mind could not grasp what really happened and she was literally carried back home, straight to bed and she went back to sleep. A very deep wound was inflicted in her psyche but she was too little to understand it all. She slept brutally wounded but when she woke up as if nothing happened. She did not understand the implications of those blows. She was too little and her psyche too fragile. It must be protected by innocence. So she woke up the following day, as if nothing happened. Life continued its normal course, but something inside her was altered and because she did not know it she thought it is just part of life. The resolution of that incident can wait when the psyche is already strong to face it once again.

Now is the long awaited moment to heal the little girl from the wound she did not even know she had.

God no one was at fault. Everybody was innocent. Life is an interplay of human talents, strength, weaknesses and limitations. That’s why you said that “they do not know what they are doing”. Oh God, I’m beginning to have an insight into the great mystery of the cross. So you were willing to die because you see all of us innocent despite of the seeming malice of which acts were done. The cross, the cross… that cross…


Landmark
(Second Hour of Prayer)

I went back again to that incident but this time I paid more attention to my body. I recalled the incident and scanned my body for discomfort. In what part of my body did I feel pain, discomfort, heaviness, shame…I tried to locate that particular part of my body, the landmark.

I realized I felt the heaviest part in my heart. My chest was so heavy as if I were carrying a very heavy emotional burden. Then my shoulders had some acute pain. I first focus on my chest then I did breathing exercise and I imagined Jesus and the divine rays coming from him to unload my heart opening the long bottled-up pain stock in there and releasing the energy out into the atmosphere where it can be recreated. I spent the rest of the hour in this awareness…

Somebody said that “success is just a point along the road; the real goodness of living comes with the journey itself”. I say that the painful experiences in our lives are landmarks which indicate important points in our live’s journey. When you want to go to a new place you always ask for landmarks that will tell you that you are in the right track.

As we move on with life, we encounter experiences that are new but are familiar. It is painful but the pain is familiar. Somehow you have a memory that you have experienced it before. That memory would be helpful if it is devoid of emotion, you just remember the incident but without the underlying current of emotion that goes with it. That is the kind of memory that is powerful. It will help us face the present moment with stability and serenity.

That is why healing of our memories is very important. If our memories are not healed, which means that it is still emotionally laden, then it will be a burden not an asset in our life. It will add up to the present experience multiplying the present pain several times. That is why we said that one person is overreacting to the incident. The overreaction comes from the previous incidents that were not yet healed. It is like collecting burdens as we move on with life. You were just corrected for one little thing and you went ballistic about it, and the people around you wonder why, but you feel justified because you feel it. But it is not only the present pain which was only very little. That very little pain just triggered the tons of accumulated pain bottled up inside.

Healing the memory is not forgetting the incident, we could not forget painful events in our lives and it is not healthy to forget it. If we try hard to bury it, time will come that it will come out with a vengeance and we could not control its effect. It is like cancer cells buried in our body. When we know about it; it has already multiplied a billion times that drastic interventions have to be done.

There are plenty of pains buried in our lives and we are not anymore aware of most of them. As I have said they come to the surface when they are triggered by present experiences. We know that something is triggered because of our over reactions to little things. These incidents are God’s way of revealing to us what we do not want anymore to see. This is what’s really beautiful with God; He reveals our pains to us one by one, piece by piece, little by little, incident by incident. And God heals these sorrowful mysteries of our life in silent prayer.

The first half of our life is spent in creating lots of pain and the second half is spent in healing them. That’s where I am now. That’s where we are now and it is a crucial task because that’s where our real mission lies. We are called to be healers of the pain that we ourselves have inflicted on the human race. No one is exempted. And our first mission assignment is ourselves. Let us buckle down to do our mission, remembering that we are not alone, God is there ahead of us, He is just waiting for us, waiting for so long…

Offering
(Third Hour)

Loving Lord Jesus, I offer this particular pain to you. It rightfully belongs to you my Lord because you have redeemed it already by your suffering on the cross. My pains are prepaid by your precious blood my Lord. I offer it back to you now. This is my Christmas gift to you my Lord. Thank you my Lord and God.

The final moment is not a saying goodbye; it is offering the pain back to God. In the first place, he redeemed it already. It rightfully belongs to Him. The cross, the cross…that cross has unfathomable meaning. I was mesmerized by it as a child and until now, it has a message to me that I could not grasp. All I can say is the cross, the cross…that cross…

Yes, our cross is but a shadow of that cross that Jesus our Lord had carried. It was God’s way of telling us “I love you”. With His cross all the pain of humanity are prepaid, paid for by Christ. So when we encounter it, do not dilly dally, go to Him immediately and lay it down on his feet, on the altar, offer it back to him. God wants us to live life to the fullest, not half full, not just full but to the fullest. That’s why he came, that’s the reason for Christmas.

So let us celebrate because we have a God who became man and as man carried the cross for us, suffered the pain for us, felt the thirst for us, endured the wounds for us, braved the insults for us, accepted the humiliations for us, received the blows for us…what can we asked for?

With His birth, God initiated the exchange of gifts between Himself and us. He was born to assume human weakness that we might become strong. He cried to assume human sorrow that we might be happy. He died that we might live and live forever with him. This is man’s hope and my hope.

I sleep this evening at peace with myself, at peace with my father, reconciled with that particular incident in my life. I am redeemed and I accepted fully this redemption offered to me today, at this very moment: December 16, 2007 at 9:30 in the evening.

My God Experience

I know better than anyone else what my personal experience of God is. It is important that I be aware of and reflective about that experience. It is important that I be able to identify and articulate the nature of my God experience.

1. For me God is …

2. I seldom think of God as …

3. I feel most in touch with God when …

4. For me Jesus is …

5. I have felt the Holy Spirit active in my own personal experience when…

6. What I would want most of all to share with someone about my experience of God is ...

7. What delights me most about God is …

8. When I think about God’s love for me personally I am …

9. For me the surest sign of God’s presence in my life is…

10. One ‘moment’ in my own life when I was most aware, most conscious that God’s power was working in me beyond my own limits was…

11. My prayer to God is most often…