"Walking With You on the Path of God's Love" A Spiritual Retreat Reflection

This was a talk that I presented for a women's spiritual retreat hosted by the Catholic Daughters of America at my home parish.

In his first homily earlier this year, Pope Leo XIV said of his election, “I come to you as a brother… Walking with you on the path of God’s love, for he wants us all to be united in one family.” 

This is the idea that has inspired the theme of our retreat today, the idea that we are all walking on the path of God’s love, but more importantly, that we are walking this path together, that we are united as one family.

At the very beginning of the Bible, in the book of Genesis, God says that it is not good for Man to be alone. But this doesn’t just refer to the union of husband and wife. 

We are all meant to live in community with others, to give ourselves in love to others, and to receive love in return. 

We are made in the image and likeness of God, and God Himself is a communion of three Persons. We see in the image of the Holy Trinity how God the Father pours out His love on God the Son, who receives it in His own perfect love and obedience, and this love that is given and received between Father and Son is so powerful that it becomes a Person in itself, the Holy Spirit. The image of the Trinity is one of continual self-gift and continual acceptance of that gift. This is the image that we are made in and the image that we are called to imitate. 

Love and unity. Those are the essential things, which Pope Leo highlighted beautifully in that first homily. He said that he would like “our first great desire to be for a united Church, a sign of unity and communion, which becomes a leaven for a reconciled world.” 

Love and unity are also the things that so much of our culture is lacking these days. Politics and conflicting ideologies divide so many of us, breeding hatred and anger. 

How many of you have had the experience where you hesitate to start a conversation with someone because you are afraid of it just dissolving into an argument? It might be with a family member or a co-worker, someone that you know doesn’t share your beliefs, or it might be with someone whom you’ve just met and you don’t know where they stand on certain issues. So you decide to play it safe and just not say anything. 

Our culture has become so antagonistic that we can’t even have real conversations with the people around us, so what we end up with is all just watered down small talk. 

When you only ever have these kinds of surface level conversations, you never really get to know anyone. And if you never really get to know anyone, it's impossible to have real relationships. Love and knowledge go hand in hand. If we want to love our neighbors, as Christ calls us to, we need to find ways to get to know them. If we want to be loved ourselves, we have to find ways to be vulnerable and let others get to know us as we really are and what we believe in. We can't let the fear of conflict keep us from real connection with the people around us.

I want to share with you one of my favorite quotations from the writer C.S. Lewis, something that really changed how I approached relationships. In his book the Four Loves, Lewis says, 

“To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable.”

How many people in society today have locked their hearts up, barricaded by technology that lets them keep everything at a distance? Technology that lets them curate what they're exposed to, muting or deleting anything they don't like.

Let’s take a moment right now and look around you, look at the other women in this room. These are your sisters in faith. I’m not saying that every woman in this room is going to agree with you on everything under the sun; but every woman in this room is striving to know and love God, and that unites us more than any politics or worldly concerns. 

The give and take of love, service, and community is beautifully highlighted in the gospel account of the Visitation, when the Virgin Mary traveled in haste to visit her cousin Elizabeth. Mary’s first action after receiving the Incarnate Word of God is to seek the community of another.

Our Lady had just been entrusted with the most precious gift in the history of humanity, the Son of God Himself, and while it was not yet time to shout such things from the rooftops, God also did not make her keep it entirely to herself. Instead, God's plan included a ready made confidante for Our Lady, someone who could share her joy but also provide her with wisdom and guidance. 

God, who made us and knows all hearts, knew that Our Lady needed that female companionship. And it was to a much older female relative that God sent her, not merely another young friend who would have been more of a peer.

I love images of this moment in the Gospel; of this very young woman, still practically a girl, and her much older cousin, sharing the experience of unexpected motherhood with such joy and astonishment. At the time of the Visitation, the Virgin Mary would have been somewhere in her mid-teens and we are told that Elizabeth was advanced in years, presumably past menopause, which is what made her pregnancy so miraculous.

Now, I'm 38 years old, and two of the most influential relationships in my life these days are my 14-year-old niece and a fellow parishioner, Maria, who could easily be my grandmother. 

Both of these relationships are true gifts in my life, though they might not be considered typical friendships these days. 

My niece is a gift because I get to see the world through her eyes like I'm seeing it for the first time again, and yet she is also her own unique, unrepeatable person and sees things differently than perhaps I would have seen them at her age. And by wanting to set a good example for her, she helps me to be a better version of myself as well.

And Maria is also a gift, to be able to benefit from her wisdom and experience and the full life that she has led, but also because I can see her still striving and working hard to learn and enrich herself. Maria is an example to me in the same way that I hope to be an example to my niece.

So many of us have lost this interplay between generations, as we are conditioned throughout most of our early lives to associate only with our peers. And sometimes we do need that identification and relatability of someone in our same state of life. But there’s such a richness of experience and insight when you spend time with others who are older or younger than you. You either gain access to wisdom  beyond your own years or to a childlike innocence you may have lost or perhaps a youthful enthusiasm that may have dulled over the years. 

Now I am definitely one of the younger members of the Catholic Daughters in our parish and because of that I have benefited greatly from witnessing the wisdom and experience of these ladies as they organize events like today's retreat or the Festival of Tables or even just one of the bake sales. Rather than trying to reinvent the wheel, I've been able to learn so much from these ladies and all the years they've spent serving the parish. 

And I also loved the time I spent working in Youth Ministry in my previous parish, because the teens there would really challenge me with questions about our faith, forcing me to find answers that I may not have looked for on my own, and they also kept me connected to the current culture, which I might not have been exposed to otherwise. 

Take a moment to look around the room again. Really see the women around you, see the ones who are older or younger than you are, think about what you might learn from any one of them. It's our different states of life, different levels of experience, and different temperaments that makes us stronger in community. It's what makes a community rich and versatile.

Another beautiful example we can find in the Visitation is the humility and service of both women. Mary went in haste, not just to share the news of her own pregnancy but so that she could help minister to Elizabeth in hers. But it must also have taken humility on Elizabeth's part to accept that help from Our Lady. As I said, Elizabeth was an older woman, used to running her own household and managing things herself. But being pregnant, especially with an older body, would not have been easy and she would have had to rely on others much more than I am sure she was ever used to. 

As women, I think that we can very naturally focus on loving and serving others. We sacrifice and pour ourselves out for our families, our jobs, our parish. But we also have to remember that communal love means both giving and receiving. Walking with others also means allowing others to walk with us.

This was never highlighted more to me than this past year when I had my first baby. 

I was in my mid-30s when I married my husband, and I was very used to being independent. One of the few challenges in my marriage has been learning what it means to be a partner, to allow my husband to help and support me rather than continuing in the belief that I have to be fully self-sufficient. 

I was exhausted through the majority of my pregnancy and it was a very humbling experience, because I had to give up a lot of my own self-reliance. My husband is a wonderfully kind and helpful man, but it still hurt my pride when I had to ask him to help with tasks around the house that I had previously taken as my responsibility.

And of course in the weeks and months following the birth of our son, my husband and I both had to learn to accept and also ask for the help of those around us. Whether it was accepting meals from our neighbors or asking a family member to come over and just hold the baby so we could catch up on some sleep. It was hard to admit that we couldn't do it all ourselves, and yet now: we feel a stronger bond with everyone in our small neighborhood, after they fed us for the whole first week we were home from the hospital. And by asking our family to help with the baby, it's allowed them to bond with him and love him more as well.

By allowing ourselves to be vulnerable and seek the help of others, my husband and I have felt such a powerful connection with those around us. And it's also motivated us going forward to offer that same kind of support to others in the future.

Our culture today tells women that we can “do it all”, and that’s true to a certain extent. These days women really do have opportunities that allow us to do anything and everything that we want. What the culture fails to point out is that we can’t do it all at once. Our time, our energy, our attention, these are all finite things. Sometimes we have to recognize that even if we had the energy and motivation to get done all the things we expect of ourselves, there's literally just not enough hours in the day, or days in the year. Sometimes it's not the right season of life and we need to put certain ambitions on hold and focus on what's needed of us in this moment. 

And we need people around us that will remind us that seasons pass and change, and what might seem all-consuming right now will one day just be a memory.

So, how do we put all of this into action? How do we walk the path of God's love?

First, just by being here today you are already taking a step on that path. I always think of the phrase, “You must be present to win.” Showing up and being present and participating in community, these are important aspects that should not be dismissed. You can't build relationships without actually encountering others, and it makes sense to begin with the people that you already encounter in your life. It wasn't to a stranger that the Virgin Mary went to in haste; it was her own cousin, it was family.

I want to share a quote from Mother Teresa that you've probably heard or seen before, maybe you even have it as a plaque somewhere in your home.

“If you want to bring peace to the whole world, go home and love your family.” 

This is actually a paraphrase from her Nobel Prize acceptance speech. Talking about believing Christ is in others, especially the poor, what she actually said was “…if we really believe, we will begin to love. And if we love, naturally, we will try to do something. First in our own home, our next door neighbor, in the country we live, in the whole world.”

We have to start small, and we should start with the people that God put in our lives. Our families, our neighbors, our fellow parishioners. If you can love and connect with those people immediately around you, and then they love and connect with the people immediately around them, then you've started a ripple effect that really is capable of radiating out farther than you ever would have reached on your own.

It's often said that we don't choose our family, but it's important to remember that God did choose our family. Perhaps for our sanctification through adversity; hopefully as a support in our trials. Likewise, he chose the people brought into our lives through our parish, our neighborhood, our workplaces. These are the people that God wants us to encounter, to engage with, to build our community around. These are the people we are called to love as we love ourselves.

I would like to end with the words of Pope St. John Paul II, from his Letter to Women.

“This word of thanks to the Lord for his mysterious plan regarding the vocation and mission of women in the world is at the same time a concrete and direct word of thanks to women, to every woman, for all that they represent in the life of humanity.

Thank you, women who are mothers! You have sheltered human beings within yourselves in a unique experience of joy and travail. This experience makes you become God's own smile upon the newborn child, the one who guides your child's first steps, who helps it to grow, and who is the anchor as the child makes its way along the journey of life.

Thank you, women who are wives! You irrevocably join your future to that of your husbands, in a relationship of mutual giving, at the service of love and life.

Thank you, women who are daughters and women who are sisters! Into the heart of the family, and then of all society, you bring the richness of your sensitivity, your intuitiveness, your generosity and fidelity.

Thank you, women who work! You are present and active in every area of life-social, economic, cultural, artistic and political. In this way you make an indispensable contribution to the growth of a culture which unites reason and feeling, to a model of life ever open to the sense of "mystery", to the establishment of economic and political structures ever more worthy of humanity.

Thank you, consecrated women! Following the example of the greatest of women, the Mother of Jesus Christ, the Incarnate Word, you open yourselves with obedience and fidelity to the gift of God's love. You help the Church and all mankind to experience a "spousal" relationship to God, one which magnificently expresses the fellowship which God wishes to establish with his creatures.

Thank you, every woman, for the simple fact of being a woman! Through the insight which is so much a part of your womanhood you enrich the world's understanding and help to make human relations more honest and authentic.” 

My final note is that I hope, if you take nothing else away from today, you will at least come away with the feeling that you are a beloved daughter of God, that whatever your vocation and current state of life, it has a purpose and great value in God's eyes. 

Like Our Lady, we must go in haste, seeking community with others, because we are called to love and love is relational, it's personal, and requires you to show up for people. Remember, you must be present to win.