Reflecting on Our Retreat
On a sunny day in September, 18 people gathered at Maternity of Mary Catholic Church for Missed the Boat Theatre’s retreat, Grace and Imagination: Learning to Let God Speak. We opened with daily Mass, where Fr. Aric Aamodt gave a beautiful homily reflecting on humans as living at the intersection where grace and nature meet.
We shared some all-important coffee and snacks as we got to know each other, then dove into the first of a series of three talks structuring the day. Each was paired with a prayer / reflection exercise giving us an opportunity to practice what was shared in the recent talk.
So why is a theater company offering a retreat, anyway?
At the outset of her first talk, Retreat Leader and MTBT Artistic Director Mary Shaffer answered this key question for the participants. Missed the Boat is, of course, in the business of creating and producing theatrical works. And theater, nearly unique among art forms, has as its instrument the human person (that is, the actor). This means that the experience of participating in theater has a profound impact on the person, from the outside-in (for better or for worse). It also means that spiritually forming people towards greater unity with God and integration of their mind, body, and spirit is an essential part of creating theater healthily, holistically, and meaningfully. We believe that development of the human person is an essential part of our mission as Catholic theater makers.
Learning to Let God Speak
When it is difficult to hear God’s voice, we often start to believe God is withholding Himself from us. However, the reality is that He never withholds Himself from us. Most often, if we can’t hear God speak, it’s because we’re not letting Him in (even when we think we are!). Over the course of our lives, we develop protective measures against the vulnerability it takes to let someone, even our Creator, touch our wounds or even just the rooms we see as private. Mary drew repeatedly from the book of the Prophet Isaiah throughout the retreat, pointing to the way Scripture talks about God’s desire to transform the landscape of the human heart, from desolation into abundance, and how He wants that for us as well, if only we’ll let Him in.
“I am about to do a new thing;
now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?
I will make a way in the wilderness
and rivers in the desert.” (Isaiah 43:19)
Grace and the Senses
In her first talk, Mary drew heavily from St. Bonaventure’s The Journey of the Mind to God, in which he shares that the senses are our initial encounter with the world around us, and that the world is full of traces of God. If we are open to it and we look for Him in it, we can begin to see God through His traces in the created world. In particular, any experience of love is a particularly earth-shattering encounter with God through the senses, because God is love.
To explore this topic, Christina Malloy led us in two exercises. The first was a sensory exploration of eating candy very slowly, to invite us to slow down an experience that is often rushed, as well as to see what memories and mental triggers come up when we give our senses space to work. We then went outside and activated our childlike wonder by playing on the playground, climbing trees, laying in the grass, and so on. These open-hearted explorations were an invitation for God to speak to us through our senses.
Grace and Memory
After a break for lunch, we came back for another brilliant talk. Now drawing from St. Augustine and his reflections on memory in The Confessions, Mary led us through an explanation of the way that memory works in our interior universe. So often, memories that we recall as shameful or painful are places that we block God from working. Yet, St. Augustine demonstrates that it is possible to be a great sinner and yet move with total freedom among one’s memories, because he has let the Lord’s light into each memory and believes in the reality of His forgiveness and healing. We can learn so much more about what God is trying to teach us (and how He has already loved us) if we are willing to let Him in to transform our memories and our experience of them.
This is a great example of the way that human formation is part of theatrical work: using one’s own memories of a comparable circumstance or feeling is a very valuable way for an actor to get into character. However, if an actor is pulling from a memory that God has not yet healed, that reliving of a memory could be a painful or spiritually harmful experience for the actor. On the other hand, opening the doors to our memories and letting God in to heal them through prayer helps us to integrate all the parts of our past that have made us who we are today and to feel God’s closeness even as we access something that was once painful.
From there, Christina invited us to explore memory through a listening and empathy exercise: each of us had a partner, with whom we shared a story of a painful experience from childhood. Then, in small groups, each partner shared the other person’s story as if it was their own. In general, I suspect everyone chose memories that, while potentially still painful, they had already mostly processed, giving us a chance to reflect firsthand on the difference between a memory that has been healed, and one that we may have thought of but were (rightfully) unwilling to share with near strangers. Perhaps the latter are memories that we need to let God into.
Grace and Imagination
Finally, we reached the culmination of the retreat in the title talk. With reflections from Pope Saint John Paul II and Thomistic philosopher Jacques Mariatain, Mary taught that imagination is a participation in the creativity of God and thus one of the most direct ways He can speak to us. As such, our imagination is nearly infinite - yet in its infinity, it is still limited by our raw material, our skill in using it, and the power of our will to open it up. Mary explored ways that God speaks through our imagination and how to identify between when God is speaking (the intersection of grace and imagination) and when we are simply imagining for ourselves.
Finally, we were given a prompt for imaginative prayer, after the model of Ignatian spiritual exercises, and an opportunity to explore imaginative prayer springing from that Scripture verse in Adoration before the Blessed Sacrament.
Response
As with most day retreats, only time will tell the fruits of the seeds the Lord has planted. However, we received very positive feedback, with many people expressing a desire for Mary’s talks to go even deeper, or for another retreat to expand on these ideas and include take-home materials and more exercises. We are grateful for all who joined us on this retreat and continue to pray that it was a time of rejuvenation and openness to let God in. One attendee left us the following testimonial, which speaks to how we hope all participants feel about their time with Missed the Boat:
“I had been struggling with my faith for a while. I was feeling like a failure and not getting anything out of prayer: I learned I was blocking myself. This retreat helped me break down walls and let God in. I felt Jesus’s presence next to me when I opened myself to Him. I really needed this retreat!!”