After the retreat...

Following my retreat, I spent quite some time just catching up on things - as if I'd been away for months! - and just trying to let things settle down in my mind to the point where I could express them slightly coherently.

I have always, I guess, known that intercession and contemplative prayer are all tangled up together somehow. I think it's pretty hard to be a contemplative - well, a Christian contemplative anyway - without being an intercessor as well; and, I suppose, hard to be an intercessor at any depth without at least some contemplative dimension to our prayer.

Contemplation brings us continually closer to God, and so we get all tangled up in his love and his mercy. All those things that have touched us, friends' grief, news reports of pain and loss, things we see and hear casually - or so we think - on our way through life, get "treasured up" (just as our Lady treasured the things she heard about her Son) in our hearts without our realising it, and increasingly so as we become increasingly saturated with grace through our contemplation, and we somehow cling crying to God with "sighs too deep for words" (Romans 8.26) not knowing why our contemplation has turned suddenly to tears...

The other aspect of the retreat was very strongly rooted in Mother Julian's teaching itself... she says, (Revelations of Divine Love, Long Text, Ch. 39, tr. Upjohn) "...though the soul is healed [of sin, through contrition, compassion, and longing for God] God still sees the wounds - and sees them not as scars but as honours."

And this, which made sense of many things I'd been feeling but had not understood: "The soul that would remain in peace must, when another's sins come to mind, flee as from the pains of hell, searching into God for remedy and help against it... For looking on another['s]... sin makes, as it were, a thick mist before the eyes of the soul, so that for a time we cannot see the beauty of God..."

Not only was there much healing involved in these passages for me personally, but I began to understand why I find things like reality TV, soaps, "true confessions," and many sorts of drama and fiction pretty well unbearable. I have often wondered why this should be - it's more than an aversion, more like a spiritual allergy, to the extent I can't stay in the same room if someone's watching this stuff on television - and now I realise I'm not the only one to feel like this!

I don't know if anyone else has this reaction, but I find a strange thing about going on retreat is that while I arrive home buzzing with everything that happened, full of a kind of leaping spiritual energy, I quickly become bogged down in the quotidian, and within a week or so I feel miles away from that place of stillness before God... then gradually, from somewhere below the conscious threshold the Spirit brings me back, brings me to where I can understand - or at least, find a few words for - what happened. Then, I find I have changed; not how I'd expected, usually, but changed nonetheless.