Back Again!

I came out of retreat on Monday and it was such a special time. I will be sharing some of it with you this week. It was so good to have had two retreats back to back and I hope it will make a real difference in my life. The first six days were more deepening my new desire to have interior silence that is so helpful for prayer. We had two twenty minute sessions each day that gave us suggestions we could follow both with Scripture passages and then going back to our own sources. I found this very helpful and then went to the retreat at Villa Maria del Mar in Santa Cruz. My nephew and his wife drove me down and we took a different road. It was really beautiful but very full of curves. We stopped for lunch at an Italian restaurant and ate outside under the redwoods. That was a special treat. Then I had six more days of silence with a Dominican priest saying Mass at 9:30 in the mornings with a "homily/conference" and then another talk at 4:30. He emphasized our need to live in the present and to see the need of others. The title of the retreat was "Silence, Word, the Face of our Neighbor." I loved the emphasis on being able to see the need of those around us. He told us one story about a child that had ended up in a camp full of people but no one to care for him. When asked, the child told them: "They know I exist but no one sees me."
I guess I am trying to see the needs of others now that I am home again and have fifty neighbors who are here at Oakwood and many others who come to us.