This is part of a series that will run through summer 2025, the months in which we Sisters make our 8-day annual retreat. The series will highlight retreat reflections from the Sisters, providing an opportunity, as it were, to glimpse the heart of the Sisters…
Abide with Me. This is the invitation I heard during my retreat. I set up a chair in the room for Jesus to sit on. I placed his name on it as a director’s chair. We talked.
“Am I abiding in you if I just sit and stare at your presence?”
“Yes.”
“What if I don’t feel anything? Or at least not what I want to feel?”
“What do you want to feel?”
“If you are here with me, wouldn’t I feel happy, joyful, serene – no worries?”
No answer.
“Wouldn’t I hear you clearly?” Nothing. Ok, I thought. I will just sit. Shifting my position on my chair I waited.
“Abide in me.”
There it is again. That invitation. This time the preposition is “in” me not “with me.”
“I abide in you.”
Opening my bible to John 15 I found the passage. “Remain in me and I remain in you.”
As we sat together, I realized this is all I need. Psalm 37 reminds me that as I delight myself in the Lord, he will give me the desires of my heart. I may not even know what I want or need. God does. I don’t have to do anything to deserve or merit this. It is a pure gift. A relationship of love that has been since before my birth.
When I was four something awoke me to the fact that “there is more” than just what I see. At seven I received my First Communion and my communion with God deepened. At ten I began to fast and pray, climbing trees to get closer to God. At twelve I sat under Pecan trees marveling that God fed us so readily with these fruits. I contemplated Jesus in the Eucharist freely given in love. At fourteen I found in friends signs of the sweet friendship of God. At sixteen I was called to consecrate my life to God and at twenty I pronounced vows within my community “putting on love, the bound of perfection” (Col. 3:14). Now fifty years later, like an old couple, I sit staring at the love of my life unable to say anything. This is trust that all the desires of my heart (even these are gifts), will be fulfilled. I lay my expectations down in Jesus’ lap where “pressed down and shaken together they overflow” (Luke 6:38).
This is the core of being Christian, a love story between God and humanity. Between God and me. My life narrative is bound up in the story of God’s love. God mixed up in the mess of my life calls me to abide in Jesus because Father, Son and Spirit already abide in me.
Trace the moments in your life when this invitation has come.
Featured image: Sr Mary Joseph Peterson, FSP; article image painted by Sr. Margaret Charles, FSP.