Facilitators - Week 3

Pentecost retreat 2020: Week 3 - Seeing as God sees

Thank you to all for your continuing work with your groups. The grace we are praying for this week is:

“In this time of anxiety, to see your life more as God sees it. To see with God your deeper self, the person behind all the activity, a person made in God’s image.”

This week is all about deepening the conversation with God about what is going on in our lives. To help people go deeper it would be useful to spend a reasonable time doing a stilling exercise at the beginning of the meeting and to lead people into a period of silence. It would also be worth inviting people to look back through their journals either before they come to the group or at the beginning of the group in order to prepare for the sharing time.

The Dynamic of this 3^rd Week : Seeing as God Sees

At an individual level, the emphasis is on God who knows us through and through and sees us as we are, who knows our heart and soul, thoughts and desires, knows and understands those parts of us that bring forth life and those parts that don`t., and yet, who loves us. God who looks at us and sees our potential.

On a global scale, in the Exercises Ignatius asks us to meditate on the Trinity looking down on the world. We are asked to imagine “those on the face of the earth, in such great diversity in dress and in manner of acting. Some are white, some black; some at peace, and some at war; some weeping, some laughing; some well, some sick; some coming into the world, and some dying” (SE 106). We are asked to imagine people who curse, wound, or kill. In this context God’s choice to become incarnate not only gives us reason to have hope in God. The Incarnation also reveals that God has hope in us. God who sees our potential.

Because God loves us as we are – in this week when the material invites us to deepen our conversation with God – encourage participants to be honest with God about their hopes and fears. Lots of us are being forced to face our vulnerability a bit more in the face of this pandemic.

Praying the Days of this Week

Day 15: The Good Shepherd (Sunday Reading) can be used as a Lectio Divina. Given that much of the prayer this week invites a conversation with God it would be helpful to emphasise the image of the shepherd who knows his sheep – and his sheep know his voice.

People often ask: how do you know if something that came to you in prayer is from God or just a thought of your own? Ignatius would tell us that God communicates with us all the time in our feelings, thoughts, memories and imagination and what we need to learn is to recognise the voice of God. The movement of God in our inner lives is always uplifting, consoling, encouraging and moves us out towards others.

Day 16: The prayer suggestion is to bring whatever bothers you to God and let God respond, trusting that given the space… God will. The encouragement to the group here is to give the space for God to respond.

Day 17: The passage uses the image of God as the potter, making something wonderful of each of us and yet it doesn`t always feel that way for us.

Question for the group: How have you/ do you experience the loving gaze and caress, the pushing and prodding, stretching and shaping and delight and admiration of God, the Potter?

Day 18: This passage is about Peter`s dream and the realisation that God`s plan was bigger than Peter had imagined! When we invite God to show us how he sees our lives, we might be surprised. A question for this week could be “What has God shown you or said to you that has surprised you”?

Day 19: The grain of wheat “dies” in order to be transformed into an abundant harvest. How this is manifest in people`s lives will depend on their individual circumstances but the invitation to growth and the fact that change always means letting go is true for us all.

Group Question: What does growth look like and feel like? What is God growing in you now?

Day 20: The story of the raising of Lazarus is offered here in this time of pandemic. Jesus weeps with his friends.

Group Question: What are the losses we are experiencing now? That others are experiencing now? What is being transformed?

Reminders for Sharing Personal Prayer/ Stories

• Encourage people only to share what is comfortable for them.

• Encourage them to concentrate on sharing their own prayerful meditation / reflection and what the Spirit is saying to them that is relevant to their lives.

• Ask people to use clear, simple language, and keep to the first person ‘I feel`.

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