On What I Did On My Last Weekend Before School Kicked in Again, Or, The Giftedness of Being

Last weekend, after sitting around for about a week and a half and, predictably, having done little to no preparation for the coming school year, I took four days out and drove the six hours from Clevetown out to Scranton, PA for a retreat with Msgr. John Esseff, a retired priest of the Diocese of Scranton who has spent much of his ministry in giving retreats to priests, seminarians, and religious. Back in the 80's he met Mother Teresa, who sent him all over the world to give retreats to her sisters. He also served as her spiritual director and confessor for a time. Here they are, back around the time when I was born:

Msgr. Esseff is the one on the right.

When he was younger, Msgr. also had the great fortune of having St. Padre Pio as his own spiritual director. All I'm saying is, the guy's got chops, and I feel deeply blessed to have been able to spend a few days praying under his direction.
There were really a number of important things that I learned on this retreat, and I will spend a long time with my notes from the retreat, unpacking it all and letting God's grace continue to unfold. For now, I just want to offer one image from prayer, even though it may seem quite obvious to most people who stumble across this blog.
Msgr.'s direction was to spend 4 hours a day in prayer and then meet with him for an hour to reflect on the prayer. During those 4 hours, he gave me 3 scripture passages (the 4th hour was to revisit the previous 3) and instructed me to pray to the Father, the Son, the Holy Spirit, and Mary, in that order. I took him literally, and spent about 15 minutes an hour with each of them, looking at the passage, and just talking back and forth. This was a new experience of prayer for me & one which I will no doubt write a future post on, but for now I'll stick to just the one image.
On the last day of the retreat, I was praying with Mary and I asked her why I have desires for good things which seem to be unfulfillable. Specifically, I wondered why I have a deep longing for family and intimacy with another person when my experiences often seem to direct me more toward single or ordained life. In response, Mary reminded me of when I was a little kid, sitting in the pew at church, and my dad would give each of us a dollar to put into the collection plate as it came around. A couple of things here: 1) it wasn't my money. 2) I had no way of earning my own money to put in - I was too young. 3) It would have been insulting to my dad if I'd put the money in my pocket and refused to donate it.
My dad gave us each that dollar so that we could participate, so that we had something to give. This is an image of how God works: everything we are and have is gift from God, even those things that we give back to God. Mary was reminding me that even those things which I think are mine, as if they were fundamental to my being & could somehow offer me some fulfillment are in fact just further evidence of God's grace active in my life. In other words, we come before God completely and totally naked, with nothing to offer, so God gives us great and beautiful things in order that we might have something to give back, so that we can participate.

I know that I have heard it said over and over again that God gives us gifts in order that we might give them away, but this was a new experience, a new realization of that truth for me. To realize that even my desires are gift and can be offered back to God to allow him to have even more of my heart was something that gave me new eyes to look at myself with. What do I hold on to, believing it to be my own? What do I keep closer to my heart than God? What do I say "without this, I would not be myself" about? If it is anything beyond Christ, then I am wrong, and sadly so, and even Christ is complete gift to us from himself and from the Father, through the Holy Spirit. Everything about our being, even that most fundamental ground of Belovedness is complete gift. The deeper implication of this is that even the great and beautiful things about ourselves are given to us so that we can participate in the great economy of God's love, so that we can imitate the Father and the Son in giving ourselves away until each and every part of ourselves if aligned to the Spirit, who is love. This is means living in true honesty, because seeing ourselves as naked as babes before God is the true state of our being, which is complete gift.
A last & final thought: the other day, I was sitting with a friend of mine who was lamenting that he has 2 more years of grad school, before he can "start his life." There is something deep within each of us that longs to do great things, and perhaps the most difficult thing to realize in our short lives is that the only great thing is to love, which doesn't start tomorrow or next week or next year, but now, right now. God gives us these great & bursting hearts so that we may pour ourselves out for each other and for him.

Let us live by love so we may die of love and glorify the God who is all love! - Bl. Elizabeth of the Trinity