Afterthoughts of TEC 138

Honestly, after a lack of sleep and so much happening since this past Friday, a lot of the weekend is a blur now.  I couldn't tell you the order of the things we did even if I tried.  I guess maybe possibly there's some people reading this who might one day go on a TEC retreat, so I won't give you tooooooo many details.  But it was definitely one of the hardest and most purifying weekends of my life.

I could see a lot of my personal defects getting in the way of being very present before the Sacrament and in serving the candidates.  Wandering thoughts...asking TONS of questions about each task to get things right...interrupting stories by sharing my own thoughts.  And as I began to realize this, I became super agitated.  I just got so upset, because I wanted the weekend to be a focus on prayers for others, not getting over myself.  It was frustrating.

But then came the Monday of the retreat, when we have a special time to build each other up.  Since I had to work and leave the retreat early, they did this for me before I left.  Once it started, I couldn't stop bawling.  The theme of the entire time was that they all found peace around me, and virtue.

It was a real struggle and temptation to write it off...they weren't seeing it in me, they were seeing what they perceived to be me.  As the day went on at work (complete with tired, blood-shot, tear stained eyes.  For real, I looked like a mess), I reflected on how the Church doesn't teach depravity of the human person.  Fallen, yes.  Impossibly, hopelessly lost, no.  Grace, yes.  "Covered" by grace, no.  Filled with grace, yes.  If I was fallen this weekend, and yet others were built up in my presence, then it wasn't because Christ worked around me, but in some mysterious way Christ worked through me.  If I was fallen, I was still in some way trying to say "yes" to being where Christ wanted me.  In New Testament Greek, we learned that one Greek word for sin is "hamartia"..."missing the mark".  In order to miss the mark, you had to at least be aiming and trying to hit the mark in the first place, and that is what God asks of us.  God lets us go to learn to walk, to stumble, and wants us to get up to try again.  We can't learn to walk without falling and figuring it out.  Even though God knows we will fall, He's still right in front of us, guiding us...and His falls were burdened with the cross which we should be carrying.

There's a stanza from a currently popular Matt Maher song that reads: "Where sin runs deep, Your grace is more. Where grace is found is where You are. And where You are, Lord, I am free.  Holiness is Christ in me."  So so true.  If we do not lose ourselves to our sins, and find hope in our trying instead, we discover grace making up for our deficiencies.  Grace is God's life.  God's life fills and sets free.  Goodness comes from God.  So while any goodness is God's work, I was at least an instrument.  As Blessed Teresa of Calcutta observed,

"I'm a little pencil in the hand of a writing God, who is sending a love letter to the world."