In the February 16, 2016 letter to the Principal by the Tenure Board, the first recommendation under Spritual Formation was “to engage in a critical reading of Fr. William Barry’s book, Finding God in All, and that Eric discuss the reading with an informed colleague or mentor.” Last night, I completed the book; herein are my initial thoughts, prior to the discussion with an informed colleague.[1]

Overview

I’ve done a 19th Annotation of St Ignatius’ Spritual Exercises on two separate occasions: once as part of a small group and once under individual direction. That’s not why I wanted to read the book; as the Director of a Kairos retreat, I needed a deeper understanding of the intended spritual movements of the retreat, and some help in assisting my student leaders in their own spiritual formation as part of the training. I have been fortunate to be paired with excellent Spritual Directors[2] to whom I’ve abdicated much of this formation, but after more than a decade of being the Retreat Director and much of my own spiritual formation, I’ve become more comfortable in taking an active role in helping the student team in this realm. The short-version is: I read the book to be better prepared to work with students as they come to a greater understanding of what God wants for them, but I also got a little for myself.

Connections to Kairos

The 40-hours that I spend with eight or nine student leaders each fall are a form of spiritual exercises, which are “any means by which we come into contact with God: means to overcome our resistances and to relate to God and, in the relating, to discover and to try to live out God’s hopes for us” (p. 14). Asking 17-year-olds (and occassionally a 16-year-old) to be open to this experience is a tough sell. And it’s just not something that every senior can do or should do; as Fr Barry points out “the most important prerequisite… is the desire to become more aware of the presence of God in one’s life and to develop one’s conscious relationship with this self-communicating God” (p. 16).

In terms of the raining for student leaders, there are three distinct parts in my mind. First is getting them spiritually prepared for the experience; second is all he work around writing their witness talk; and third is teaching small-group facilitation techniques. I was struck by what Fr Barry had to say that was relevant to the writing of witness talks. “Sometimes people need to speak out their anger at life’s hurts and tragedies before they can come to a trusting and warm relationship with God” but “[w]hen people do speak their honest feelings of rage and anger to God, they often find God listening sympathetically, desirous to hear them out” (p. 25, 26). Students often try to write talks that are actually inauthentic because they think they’re not supposed to voice their frustrations or angers at God; they’re trying to be “good” retreat leaders. But, really, anyone who believes in God or thinks about believing in God has some anger — giving voice to that in the witness talks is honest, and it validates what many of the retreatants are thinking and feeling. At the end of each chapter in Finding God in All Things are a few questions for prayer or discussion. I really appreciate these because they provide a clear articulation of questions that I can actually ask student leaders in raining sessions. For example, this August, I know I’ll have the opportunity to ask the student team: “Have you ever felt angry at God? Can you tell God that? If you have told God about your anger, how did God seem to react?” Those would be helpful questions for students to reflect on before they are even assigned their talks.

Along similar lines, many students admit to not having a relationship with God, in fact, “Discovering a Relationship with God” is the most difficult talk to cast a student leader in. Barry offers an insight here that I haven’t heard one of the various Spritual Directors I’ve worked alongside use, and which I’ve certainly never thought of. He writes:

Often enough directors of the Exercises have to remind retreatants that they can only desire what they really do desire. Desires are not under our control. If we do not like some of our desires, we can ask God to help us to overcome them or to change them. Also if people do not desire something which they want to desire, they can ask God to help them to desire it, to attract them to this desire. People are often helped a great deal if they know that they can tell God the real truth about their desires. For example, people can tell Jesus that they do not feel very attracted to him, but would like to be. This is first-class prayer (p. 89).

This is direction that I can provide to student leaders that will get traction. Few who’ve made it past the selection process will have to answer No; almost all want the desire for a relationship with God and Jesus.

A final thought for this reflection is connects a phrase that I’ve told some student leadership teams who’ve needed it (and which I’ve purposefully not told to others, whom I believed it would not help) is: “You don’t have to be perfect, you just can’t suck.” That could sound harsh, and when it gets retold by outsiders, it strikes even me as harsh, but they way I say it is with love and encouragement. So many of our students are Type-A perfectionists with high achievement-needs, they need to more often than not just calm down. I often feel the Holy Spirit’s presence at Vallombrosa, when we’re down, actually on retreat, and the student leaders need to step back and let the Holy Spirit do its thing with and for retreatants. Fr. Barry says it this way: “To be a contemplative in action is to contemplate (or find) God in our daily lives, in our activity. If we were contemplatives in action, we would approach everyone and everything with reverence” (p. 138). The student leadership needs to see God, see Love in the retreatants and everything that is and happens on retreat; to be able to do that, they need to still their inner critic. That’s the real goal of my saying.

A little for myself

For all the Kairos and faculty retreats that I’ve been on, all the witness talks or presentations that I’ve heard, all the meditations that I’ve been led on, one of the things that I am still in the process of learning is that “the Lord heals us in hidden ways, and we do not need to know everything. What we need to do is to continue to put ourselves into his loving care to heal our wounds and bring us to a deep experience that we really are held in the arms of a loving creator” (p. 30).

One of my favorite talks to give is “Obstacles to God’s Friendship,” but I don’t think I’ve done it… right. Fr. Barry writes “God’s revelation of sin and sinful tendencies is enabling; it gives us courage to pick ourselves up and reform our lives” (p. 47). I think that’s the piece that’s been missing from my earlier iterations of the Obstacles talk; realizing that I sin is not meant to shut me down, to paralyze me with guilt or shame, but it’s meant to motivate me to do and be better. Barry continues: “Obsessive thoughts about sin which lead nowhere but to despair do not come from God.”

A final selfish part from the book relates to the Social-Cognitive Psychology class that I teach, and makes connections between the Cognitive Development unit and the Kairos which most students will have already gone on by the second semester. Barry draws a connection between the Road to Emmaus story, which retreatants read on the third day of the reteat, and Erickson’s Stages of Psychosocial Development.

Erikson maintains that the final developmental stage in life brings on the crisis between ego integrity or wisdom and despair. He defines wisdom as “the acceptance of one’s one and only life cycle as something that had to be and that, by necessity, admitted of no exceptions.” Such wisdom, he maintains, leads to freedom from the inordinate fear of death. If God and I do accept me as I now am, then we accept everything that has happened to make me who I am. It could have been different, but this is the way my life was. This is the meaning of Erikson’s “something that had to be and that, by necessity, admitted of no exceptions.” This is, I believe, the meaning of Jesus’ words in the Emmaus story, “Did not the Christ have to suffer these things and then enter his glory?” The wisdom of Jesus accepts what has happened as the only way he could be who he now is (p. 127).

There’s consolation in that. It’s a connection that I can make for students now, at 17 and 18, that they probably won’t understand for 25 or 30 years — but that’s just life.