An Eye-Opening Weekend

This weekend I went on a silent retreat at a local abbey. I was expecting it to be a guided retreat, with talks and reflections and things like that, but I was surprised to find out when I arrived that it would be an unguided retreat. At first I was a bit disappointed, but when I thought about it I started to think that it was providential, considering the fact that I had some pretty major things on my mind when I arrived at the abbey.

I guess the biggest thing that was on my mind going into last weekend was the question that any Christian who is serious about his faith has: What is God calling me to? The priesthood is pretty much ruled out, considering the fact that the Vatican has stated very clearly that men with deeply-ingrained homosexual tendencies are not candidates for Holy Orders, the sacrament by which a man is configured to Christ as a priest. And I most definitely have deeply-ingrained homosexual attractions. I think they would probably have a similar requirement for the diaconate, but I’m not sure. The diaconate doesn’t have much appeal to me anyway. Neither does life as a religious. But I was thinking that perhaps God was calling me to live my Christian faith in a very radical way by becoming (materially) poor and serving the poor. There are a number of reasons why I thought that maybe God was calling me to live such a life, but I won’t bore you with all the details.

So anyway, as I said this was an eye-opening weekend for many reasons. Even though this was a silent retreat, and there were no talks given by a priest or anything like that, the Lord really spoke to me through my prayers and through my scripture reading. He really helped me to learn a lot about myself. One very important thing that I learned is that when God calls, or at least when I think he does, I get scared. And I was definitely scared on some level as I was considering whether or not God is calling me to serve the poor on a deeper level. I came up with every reason to justify why I thought I wasn’t ready for such a step, and I started worrying about what would happen when I retire if I stopped working (which I would have to do to serve the poor in this way) and didn’t contribute to a 401(k) for a few years, or maybe longer. Things like that. Looking back on it now, I know that was the devil, trying to scare me. But on Saturday, our Lord really answered these fears through my scripture reading. I was reading the Gospel according to St. Matthew, and I came across this reading:

“When the disciples saw [Jesus] walking on the sea they were terrified. At once Jesus spoke out to them, ‘Take courage, it is I: do not be afraid.’ Peter said to him in reply, ‘Lord, if it is you, command me to come to you on the water.’ He said, ‘Come.’ Peter got out of the boat and began to walk on the water toward Jesus. But when he saw how [strong] the wind was he became frightened; and, beginning to sink, he cried out, ‘Lord, save me!’ Immediately Jesus stretched out his hand to him, and said to him, ‘O you of little faith, why did you doubt?’” (Mt14:26-31)

This reading really helped me to identify an important stumbling block in my walk with the Lord: my lack of trust in Him. If you look closely at this reading, you see that Peter was walking along the water and everything was fine, and he didn’t start to sink until after he became frightened! It’s the same way with me. Whenever I feel like the Lord is calling me to something I’m not ready for or don’t want to do, I get scared and I start to sink, i.e. succumb to my temptation to go return to the promiscuous homosexual lifestyle that I was living before. And this is what happened again this weekend. I got scared that God was calling me to do something that I didn’t feel I could do, or on some level didn’t want to do, which made me anxious and made me feel very tempted to do unchaste things. Unfortunately I gave into those temptations. But this reading really showed me that when God asks us to do something, like give up my life to serve the poor or live a chaste life–something that the world thinks is impossible–He is always there to support us. We just have to remember that as long as we trust in God, we will never sink.

Comments

Leave a Reply Cancel reply