Exactly ten years ago today, I started a seven day silent retreat that (on hindsight) marked my entry into ‘spiritual midlife’ and the painful gradual descent into more intense trauma recovery and deconstruction. Here's an excerpt from my retreat journal I wish to share with you:
The grace I seek at this retreat is a purification of motive for following You, my Lord, and a deeper, more loving commitment to my discipleship.
Let me hear you call me again. Refresh my heart with the sound of Your voice, if you will it. But I am not asking for the same as what I’ve experienced before. I am asking for the grace to go beyond where I’ve gone thus far.
There is trepidation in my heart. I am still keen on “saving my life” and the prospect of rejection, suffering, and death still terrifies me. I would run from it if I could...I am afraid of what my “YES” may bring. Yet every sign points toward Calvary. Mother Mary’s fiat led to untold suffering even though she is sinless. Jesus himself took on every evil, pain and suffering.
This love is beyond me. I am still very self-absorbed. I don’t know where to start for I am so full of fault, softness, weakness. (Really quite useless, really!) So I turn to YOU, Lord. Because for YOU everything is possible. Noone is unteachable who comes to you. Fill me up with your love, [so] that fear will be banished from my heart and only love remain.
Guide me in your footsteps. Give me strength to renounce myself, take up my cross everyday and follow YOU. Mama Mary, pray for me!
- 11 February 2016, Seven Fountains Retreat Center (Chiang Mai, Thailand)
As I re-read my journal entries from this retreat which I made right after my 37th birthday, I realised that I am no longer as afraid of rejection, suffering or dying to myself for Christ’s sake - not because I am more virtuous now but because I have an embodied knowing that Christ will give me every grace I need, when I need it, to follow Him... to BECOME HIM.
My present day self has so much compassion for this me of 10 years ago. I love her self-awareness, but ache for how she believed that her ‘softness’ and so much of her trauma adaptations were her fault. And I ache for how she called (and saw) herself as "useless".
This was the same retreat where I was given an image of a church under construction, and where I heard in prayer Christ telling me that this construction could not be completed because there was rot in the foundations. The only way to complete this church, he had said, was to take apart everything that has been built, excavate the foundations, and begin again with Him.
I had no idea what God meant at the time. As it turned out, He was ‘prophesying’ to me what He would be leading me through in the following ten years of spiritual midlife, trauma recovery, interior integration and deconstruction! I had already been introduced to inner-child healing work about three years before this retreat, and that had been preparation for the plunge I had no idea was coming into layer after layer of complex trauma healing starting with family of origin trauma and branching out into adolescent trauma in school and spiritual and religious trauma.
I am at once the same and not the same person as I was 10 years ago. My relationships with myself, with God, with my parents and family and with Church (and others) have all fundamentally changed. And much of that change is because God granted me the grace I asked!
I look back now at that retreat a decade ago and see how beautifully (but painfully) God had given me the grace I had asked for - not only for that retreat but in my LIFE. He has brought me further than I have ever been in my following of Christ, and I know that God is STILL answering my prayer even now until at last I am fully one with Him.
I am at once the same and not the same person as I was 10 years ago. My relationships with myself, with God, with my parents and family and with Church (and others) have all fundamentally changed. And much of that change is because God granted me the grace I asked!
In the decade that followed this retreat, there were so many times I feared that I had lost my bearings because the Lord had led me into interior spaces that felt so unfamiliar and 'unsafe' for the "good Catholic" in me that just wanted to stick to known and certain territory. But I still followed because there was always something that I desired even more than safety - God. And God has made it increasingly clear to me that just as I desired him, he desires me - fully alive and alight with his love.
My dear fellow interior pilgrim, I hope that you will experience how much God desires you too, and how much he longs for you to be fully alive, totally you, alight with his love for you!
Journeying with you,
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