BARREN

WEEK 12

God's Compassion Missions Jesus.
We have responded to the invitation of the One who loves us. At some level we have expressed our desire to be with Jesus in his mission from God. Now we give ourselves over to the desires of this growing love/companionship relationship.

As we grow in love for someone - especially someone who has done so much for us - we experience a powerful desire not only to be with the one we love, but to know everything we can about that person. In the fascination of love we say, we can't get enough of the one we love.

For this week, and for the weeks ahead, our one desire is to come to know as much as we can about Jesus. Of course, this is not head knowledge. It's more the kind of discovery that leads to deeper feelings of intimacy and love, and deeper desires to be with him in his mission. To know him more intimately, that I might love him more deeply, that I might follow him more closely.

In the early days of this retreat, we looked at our own story, through the imaginative exercise of looking through the images in the photo album of our life. Now we ask Jesus to show us his photo album. In our desire to know more about him, we ask Jesus to show us everything - to tell us his story - that we might fall more deeply in love with the one we will come to know so intimately. The one who has invited us to be with him in his mission.

This week we start at the beginning. We imagine that in God's eternity, the Trinity of Persons in God looked down on human history and was filled with infinite compassion that missioned Jesus to save us. The incredible photo of Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina, can help us imagine the span of human history that evoked God's compassion. We know that that expression of love by God resulted in our Salvation History - the preparation, the promises, the expectation, and finally the birth of Jesus and his life, death and resurrection for us.

Let's use the helps to the right this week to enter into the mystery of the Incarnation, the choice of God to redeem our world. We've reviewed all that sin and rebellion in our world has meant, including our personal sin. Now we imagine the response of God to the sin of the world - the missioning of Jesus. And let's begin to express our desire to know his origins, that we might fall more deeply in love with him, and be united with his mission, however he should choose to invite us to join him.

WEEK 11

The Invitation of Love - Our Response.
This week we consider our response to the invitation of love. Through last week's exercise, we know that the depth of our response depends upon the depth of our love for the person making the invitation. When a loved one calls for our response, we say "yes." Even when we know the personal cost to us will be great, we respond because love always draws us to togetherness. We want to be with the one we love.

This week we will let our hearts respond to the call of Jesus. We can review his call from last week's guide. It is the call to join him in the unfolding of the Reign of God. It is different for each of us. We have different gifts. Different graces have been placed in our hearts. Unique crises and experiences of suffering have shaped our unique ability to be compassionate and suffer with others. There are special aspects of the call that are addressed to each of us, according to our age and our resources and abilities to influence others. We want to hear the call as it is addressed to us individually.

For all of us, however, the invitation and opportunity to respond is the same. Of course, we will respond by saying "yes." There is no real happiness in life that doesn't involve following Jesus. The question for this week is the depth of our response - how completely we respond. We do not know all that our "yes" will entail this year or next year or 10 years from now.

So, on one level we can make an "open ended" response, that offers ourselves completely to whatever following Jesus might mean. But the graces of the past weeks' experience of the love of Jesus for us may have so moved us, that we desire to really act against anything within us that is worldly or vain or self-absorbed.

We may so desire to offer ourselves completely to being with Jesus - to be outstanding, to be a sign for others - that our response is in the form of placing no barriers to our offering of ourselves. Should our Lord so choose us, we might express not only our willingness to be with Jesus in his poverty and his embrace of the human condition, but our genuine desire to enter into that same surrender of self that was his.

Let this photo of this teacher at Red Cloud Indian School represent our response to be with Jesus in being for others. Make use of the other helps to the right, perhaps especially this week, In These or Similar Words. Consider sharing your graces this week.

Let the words and expressions of response flow this week. There are many weeks ahead to grow in a sense of this love-imitation desire and to explore the depths of our offering. This week we simply want to consider the response we are being given the grace to offer.

WEEK 10

The Invitation of Love - Please be with me.
Imagine someone we love has just returned from a week of retreat in the Dominican Republic. Consider this invitation he or she might make to me.

The experience changed my life, dear. My heart is filled with this image of a little girl in the children's hospital in Santiago. I feel a profound call to go there and serve for a year. If we can work out all the details to get time off here, will you please come and be with me? I know we can make a difference together. I need your love, your support. I need you. It won't always be easy, but we will have each other to lean on. And I know we can't even imagine how much more in love we will be, sharing this service together. Please be with me.
All week of this retreat, we will ponder the power of this imaginative invitation from someone we love. What impact would it have on me? If this is someone I love, would I worry about the possible hardship of the service holding me back?
And, all week, we will compare this invitation to the one we receive from Jesus.

Over the past several weeks, it has been the delight I've longed for - to show you how much I love you. How I have wanted you to know how much I have desired to free your heart. And now that you have asked me what you can do - what return you could make for such love - I feel eager to invite you to be with me.
Please be with me in the mission I have from my Father. "Because God has chosen me to tell the good news to the poor, to announce freedom for prisoners, to give sight to the blind, to free everyone who suffers."

And I need you. I need your support and your free heart. It won't always be easy. But, we will be together, every time you are with me in loving. If you are with me in the struggle of love, we will grow together in love in ways I can only ask you to imagine. If you are with me in the dying to self love that is our mission, then you will be with me in the fullness of life, forever. God's reign is at hand. Together we can bring it closer. Please be with me.

Just consider this invitation all week. Feel it. It is the call of our Baptism into Jesus. It isn't imaginary. It is very real. How special we are to receive such an invitation of love!

WEEK 9

God's Love for us -- Healing Mercy
Last week we surrendered to God's forgiving embrace. We accepted and celebrated the forgiving mercy God offers us so that we might experience ourselves as loved sinners. This week we take the next step. Our God offers us more than forgiveness. God's love for us is so strong that it heals us.
We began with last week's loving embrace. Now we step back just like in the photo, and listen to the depth of God's love, saying,
"I not only forgive you, I promise to always be with you, so you will never be alone. You no longer need your self-serving independence. I will heal your pride. I will free you from the destructive patterns that bind you. I promise to fill your heart with my love and with gifts of peace and courage and passion for sharing my love in service to others." Throughout this week the photo can symbolize these words, "you are precious to me, I will heal you." Our journey has shown us so much brokeness. We have celebrated the forgiveness that frees us from our sins. Now, each day this week, in those background moments, we will let ourselves listen to the promise of wholeness. It is personal and addressed to me.
All week, we simply feel it. We let ourselves experience its power. Over the past several weeks, I have seen how powerless I am, how vulnerable to acting out of a rebellious spirit, to being for myself in too much of my life. All week I can imagine the gift of freedom from these patterns.
All week, we let our response keep rising up from deep in our hearts, "What return can I make to the Lord, for all God's goodness to me!" (Psalm 116:12) This goes beyond a feeling of gratitude, and expression of thanks. A powerful experience of love always leads to a loving response. Love always leads to a desire for deeper union.
All week we will express our loving response, and our desires to be with Our Lord in love. We will let it just flow from our hearts.
As always, the helps to the right are integral to the week's experience. Let's pray for each other - all of us making this retreat together - that this week will be a tender experience of the promise of healing love, and a moving liberation of the response and desires from deep within us.

Sharing the heart is a simple practice that can be used at any time and in every situation. It enlarges our view and helps us remember our interconnection. A version of tonglen on the spot, it is also a method for enhancing our ability to rejoice.
The essence of this practice is that when we encounter pain in our life we breathe into our heart with the recognition that others also feel this. It's a way of acknowledging when we are closing down and of training to open up. When we encounter any pleasure or tenderness in our life, we cherish that and rejoice. Then we make the wish that others could also experience this delight or this relief. In a nutshell, when life is pleasant, think of others. When life is a burden, think of others. . . .
A woman wrote me about practicing with her daily misery in traffic. Her resentment and her uptightness, the fear of missing an appointment, had become her heart connection with all the other people sitting fuming in their cars. She'd begun to feel her kinship with the people all around her and to even look forward to her daily "traffic jam tonglen."
This simple way of training with pleasure and pain allows us to use what we have, wherever we are, to connect with other people. It engenders on-the-spot bravery, which is what it will take to heal ourselves and our brothers and sisters on the planet.
— from The Places that Scare You: A Guide to Fearlessness in Difficult Times by Pema Chödrön (c) 2001. Reprinted by arrangement with Shambhala Publications, Inc., www.shambhala.com
To Practice This Today: Focus on some experience — it could be painful or pleasant — and use it as a way of sharing your heart and connecting with other people in a similar situation.

Be Compassionate to Those You Don't Know

A slogan says, "Train without bias in all areas. It is crucial always to do this pervasively and wholeheartedly." Train without bias, that's the trick. Train without bias, without the labels. . . . Often tonglen is taught exactly as this slogan describes — as a way of training pervasively and meticulously with everyone. . . . You can do this prac
This slogan is saying you should extend this practice to everyone, pervasively, not excluding anyone. Move the practice out to what are commonly called neutrals. These are probably the most frequent relationships that we have. They're people we never get to know and aren't even interested in. They're the ones who sit on the sidewalks and don't have any homes, whom we walk past very fast because it's too painful. They're the other people who are also walking by very quickly. Beginning to do tonglen for the ones we haven't noticed might be a difficult practice, but it could be the most valuable — to begin as you walk through the streets of your life to look at the people that you didn't notice before and become curious about them.
— from Start Where You Are: A Guide to Compassionate Living by Pema Chödrön (c) 2001. Reprinted by arrangement with Shambhala Publications, Inc., www.shambhala.com
To Practice This Today: Do tonglen meditation for somebody you do not know and aren't particularly interested in. Mostly likely, you will encounter lots of people in this category during your day.