Categories: spiritual-journey, christian-teaching
Date: 14 July 2010 10:10:21
Thank you again for the comments, suggestions and prayers on the post below; I greatly appreciate the fact you comment and provide advice, especially as I know many of you are going through tough stages, stages infinitely more tough than mine, and yet you patiently reply and provide much-appreciated and much-valued comments.
As blogged here, on the retreat with the Discalced Carmelite community at Varroville I went to at the end of June titled What Does God Want Me to Do? had a talk which looked at 8 points to consider for discernment. You can listen to, and I commend to you, the talks from the weekend on this page [and there are other talks I shall listen to available also]: the talk on the 8 points I will go through are Talks 2a and 2b; I can heartily recommend those talks and in fact all the talks, and I pray if you listen that they are as beneficial to you as they were to me, and will continue to be from my reading my notes and re-listening to the talks. One point I will make is that all I write on these is my opinion and my thoughts from what I heard: please return to the talks to hear what Fr Greg Homeming OCD actually said.
Re-listening to Talk 2, I recall the statement Fr Greg made, "I have a place in God's providence in the future, as all you do, otherwise you would not be here now," particularly comforting in that God has a plan for me, a desire for me to be the person He created for me: as Fr Greg said, it is like "God has written a whole book just about me": something special He wants for me. And at the same time I find this rather daunting - how do I ensure I play my part?
Fr Greg's point that, "I must focus on my 'now' because God is only present in the 'now'. Unless I have God present in my 'now' I will never understand my past and I won't have the freedom to move into the future" and his reflection on Christ's, the Blessed Virgin Mary's and St Peter's example being present in the now, which were useful examples, chimed with me with much I heard from my time with psychologists in the hospital and now: it is important to be in the present - not the past, not the future, but now for it is all we have. At moments like this where it seems God is hammering a point home from different sources I think it pays to listen.
I'll look at the first of Fr Greg's points on discernment, (1) Desire, soon. Primarily looking at with a view to discerning and working through some of my 'What should I do?' questions, because this teaching is practical: not just theoretical ponderings.