To be opened

Last week I spent some time at our retreat centre, Loretto Maryholme Spirituality Centre, with my dad helping with the gardening on the property. We spent many hours pulling weeds (and pulling muscles!) so that, later, we could plant in the newly cleared areas.

I’m so grateful for this place of beauty where we can connect with the earth and where we welcome guests and encourage them to rest and find God in nature.

I’m grateful, too, that the time has come to make a retreat myself. Eight glorious days of silence, prayer, long walks, and afternoon naps await. A time to take the aches and pains, joys and delights of my life, and those of the world (especially the news of the pain and trauma suffered by children separated from their parents that overwhelms and breaks my heart) to my best friend and listen to what he wants to tell me about it all and discover what he would have me do.

I am reminded (as I often am this year) of the words of Malcolm Guite  – this poem that speaks to me so powerfully and that I regularly use for prayer and which I will take with me on retreat:

Be opened. Oh if only we might be!
Speak to a heart that’s closed in on itself:
‘Be opened and the truth will set you free’,
Speak to a world imprisoned in its wealth:
‘Be opened! Learn to learn from poverty’,
Speak to a church that closes and excludes,
And makes rejection its own litany:
‘Be opened, opened to the multitudes
For whom I died but whom you have dismissed
Be opened, opened, opened,’ how you sigh
And still we do not hear you. We have missed
Both cry and crisis, we make no reply.
Take us aside, for we are deaf and dumb
Spit on us Lord and touch each tongue-tied tongue.

Let all of our hearts be opened to hear the cries of those around us and let us respond with generosity and love and without hesitation.