Spirituality in Our Times

This year our Parish Retreat was on the theme “Spirituality for our Times” and was led by Father Kevin and Jill Gibbs.

We commenced on Wednesday 21st Oct by exploring the “Spirituality of Communion“. We discussed the difference between a monologue and a dialogue, between being talked at and conversing with. In a dialogue we seek to share our way of seeing and our personal history with others and to try to see their way and their history. It is an attempt to build up the Body of Christ, not tear it down.

Next we talked about the power of silence and how we can use silence to give space to those to whom we wish to listen. In Christian Meditation we use silence to simply “BE” in the presence of God.

On Sunday 25th we took the themes of “Participation” and of “Prayer“.

We saw how things were different in the early days of the Church, when all of the members of the Body of Christ brought their individual gifts to the service of all the other members of the Body. The members had different gifts but all were expected to share in the Whole.The Body grows in this multiplicity of gifts but it is not chaotic or haphazard growth because it has a unifying focus: the growth of the whole Body of Christ. From this point of view participation is a gift of the Holy Spirit. We are called, in our diversity, to participate and contribute to the unity and growth of the Church, the Body of Christ to which we all belong by virtue of our Baptism.

We then talked about the need to make time for prayer in our lives and indeed to make a prayer of our lives. We spoke of personal prayer and community prayer and we read Psalm 139. St Paul’s statement “Pray without ceasing” in the first letter to the Thessalonians was looked at from the point of making one’s life a prayer. Prayer consists of saying “Yes” to God with one’s intelligence and will to the point of identifying oneself with, and freely conforming to, the will of God. It is the “Thy will be done” of the Our Father, of the Annunciation, and of the Agony in the Garden. It is the ordinary Human Life lived in God. It is the “Yes” of the ordinary Jewish girl to her God in which Mary participated in bringing forth the redemption of the world through her son, Jesus.