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…
It has been almost a month since my annual retreat. It was such a privileged time, a time in which my focus was on Jesus. To discover how he speaks. There is always something new when I listen to him. His words are always filled with love and hope and inspiration. When we’re on our annual retreat, we Sisters often make a spiritual plan of life for the upcoming year. But I have just one thing this year, and I captured it in a simple drawing: Jesus.
Jesus is the living center of everything for me. He is a very secure refuge to help me understand and respond beautifully to things that happen in life.
Our spirituality, my spirituality, is very simple. Very clear. Very profound. Very life giving. It is unlimited. It is a living thing, something that leads me on and on into a deeper and more real relationship with God.
I meet Jesus daily in Eucharistic adoration (our name for this is the Visit) and in the reading of the Word. I don’t have words for the hours of adoration each day of the retreat. It was very powerful to just be there with Jesus. To just be open to the love that’s there in the living presence of Jesus. To not have to think of words. Jesus’ presence becomes more real to me as time goes by. That is my experience. Though the Eucharist looks the same and I am doing the same thing in the Visit day after day, there is a living depth there that becomes just a little more clear, day by day.
The Word of God is living. When we read the Word, it requires a response. It opens our understanding. It leads us to see something in a deeper way than we were able to see before. It never leaves us flat. Through the Word, we go deeper and deeper, and our relationship with God becomes more real. It also becomes more of a witness. That is my experience.
The thing that really amazed me this year on retreat, is perceiving how the older you get, the younger your relationship with Jesus becomes. Young in the sense of new and in the sense of creativity. I’m just so grateful I was able to come to the Daughters of St. Paul. The first seed, a very rich one, was planted in my heart at my First Communion. It was an experience, though I wouldn’t have recognized it then, an experience of God’s love for me and, along with that, an intense desire to share that love with other people.
Really, what Jesus gives you is not something you can keep for yourself. This becomes clearer to me as I grow older. Witness is always a part of it.
For me, retreat is summed up in a name: Jesus.