yonder.

So it goes, Billy Pilgrim.

We've returned from a spectacular few days of rest & relaxation in Nasugbu, Batangas - swimming in coves on the South China Sea (squid! giant clam! Nemo & Dora!), well fed & well rested. Today, we're off to Sacred Heart Novitiate & Retreat House in Novaliches to enter into our monthlong (32 days, actually) silent Spiritual Exercises. We will enter into "the great silence" tomorrow eve after dinner, and remain there until November 27th.

What to expect, you ask? Quite simply & honestly, I dunno. But something has become quite clear in my prayer these past weeks leading up to the long retreat.

Elementary, dear Watson.

During his July visit to Brazil, Pope Francis said the following regarding us as Church:

...we have forgotten the language of simplicity & import an intellectualism foreign to our people. Without the grammar of simplicity, the church loses the very conditions which make it possible to fish for God in the deep waters of his mystery.

The grammar of simplicity so as to fish for God in the deep waters of his mystery. So beautiful... and so true. If such a statement is true for us collectively as Church, then it must hold true individually, for you, for me. Simplicity.

The alternative (to which I am, on occasion, prone) is to complicate it all with my own baggage, my own disarray. But even there, in the midst of my own self-imposed chaos & unholy mess , God is at at work. As Ignatius writes to Francis Borgia (then Duke of Gandia)

...the more I see myself, the more I see myself as an obstacle to God's work. And this consideration brings me the greatest & sweetest consolation, because I realize that God in his loveliness works so many good things through me...

My own obstacle... as yet another haven for God to abide in.

Keep it simple.

Prayers.

Peace.



O then, weary then why
When the thing we freely forfeit is kept with fonder a care,
Fonder a care kept than we could have kept it, kept
Far with fonder a care (and we, we should have lost it) finer, fonder
A care kept. - Where kept? Do tell us where kept, where -
Yonder. - What high as that! We follow, now we follow. - Yonder, yes
yonder, yonder,
Yonder.

(Gerard Manley Hopkins, The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo)