Tuesday, March 9, 2010

REENTRY!















I have been thinking about the fruit of the SEARCH retreat that 48 members of St. Paul's Newman Center and I experienced this last weekend. I had Monday off so today is my first day "back to work". I often wonder what will be different about me and my experience of life after retreats. I've often been disappointed after even just a few days as life seems to be just the way it was prior to my leaving. Yet grace works in the ordinary and beckons me to be vigilant, contemplative, and generous. By now, the 48 college age students who attended SEARCH are nearly recovered from last weekend and begin the challenging process of "reentry". I take that phrase from the space program. After achieving orbit, traveling 17, 500 miles an hour, space shuttles and other craft have to navigate the difficult "corridor" to return safely to Earth. This involves passing through the atmosphere and enduring searing temperatures then slowing down enough for a safe touchdown/landing and return to every day living. Reentry is also experienced by those returning from retreats or integrating spiritual highs or other powerful life illuminating experiences. It involves allowing ourselves to settle into the change of values, perspectives, attitudes, choices, ways of acting and interacting in light of who we have come to understand God to be and ourselves in relationship with God. My Spiritual director once told me that it takes six months to live into a change. SIX MONTHS! I was stunned when I first heard that and frightened as well. How in the world am I supposed to remember, let alone be transformed by the experiences that seem so invigorating and inspiring now?! Slow, deliberate, and sometimes hard fought spiritual growth is more often than not, the way of discipleship. This is also a pattern for discernment. "We walk by faith and not by sight." Yet St. Ignatius encourages us to reflect upon powerful experiences regularly in order to mine those experiences for new insights, inspiration, and strength. Also to accept the discipline of virtuous living each day. Spiritual direction and "deep conversations" with others like that between St. Scholastica and St. Benedict or St. Therese and Fr. Maurice can be instrumental in helping us to "pray into" the graces of powerful experiences and even the grace of Lent. It may seem shocking and difficult to "come down" from spiritual highs but the much more exciting and invigorating realization is that Jesus is still Emmanuel, God-with-us, sharing our ups and downs, the seemingly ordinariness of the everyday. Another powerful way to "hold onto" the grace of deep experiences is through the regular interactions we have with others, be it our spouses, our parents, children, coworkers, classmates, parishioners, strangers and the poor. Prayer is meant to animate and illuminate each moment so that we do not seek the extraordinary but realize the extraordinary in the everyday! A final image from the space program captures this for me. During the Apollo age, capsules used to "splashdown"-land in the ocean. Now space shuttles land like planes. Not as spectacular on the surface. So is with us, may our reentry into the daily spiritual journey and service to others be like a landing on a flat road and not a plunge!