As we move to the end of Lent and to our Triduum celebrations, we had our final gathering yesterday in connection with the Lent Retreat in Daily Living at the law school. As I’ve observed before, our retreat this year offered participants a shortened version of the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius.
During this past week, participants prayed with the Beatitudes. After participants shared a bit of their prayer experience in small groups, we had a general discussion of the Beatitudes and the ways in which they challenge us.
After our discussion, I spoke very briefly about the prayer material I distributed to the participants, which includes praying with Jesus’ passion in the days between now and Saturday (Week 3 of the Exercises), praying with the “Tomb Day” experience, and praying with the post-resurrection appearances of Jesus (Week 4 of the Exercises).
Week 4 of the Exercises often gets short shrift. So I encouraged the participants to spend time in the days following Easter praying with the events recorded in the final chapters of the Gospels. The grace of Week 4 – a joy rooted in Jesus’ joy – is one we desperately need.
You can listen to the talk I gave at our gathering here or stream it from the icon below. The podcast runs for 16:21. You can access the prayer material for this week here.
Note: because of time, my reflection of today was fairly truncated. If you want something more extensive, you can scroll through the podcasts page, where you will find individual podcasts of Week 3 and Week 4 of the Exercises.
Creo en Dios! 