$50 deposit due with registration, refundable before April 6
Remaining $60 due by April 20 (checks payable to Catholic Young Adults of Chester County) There will be a waitlist if retreat is full at the time of registration.
Join the Catholic Young Adults of Chester County (CYACC) as we celebrate
I'm happy to announce an upcoming course I've been invited to teach again: The Head and Heart Immersion Course on Pope John Paul II's Theology of the Body. It's already opened for early registration and will be offered at Black Rock Retreat Centerin beautiful Lancaster County, PA. It runs from June 12 to the 17th. You can download the flyer with all the info here. To register online, simply click here. All our week-long retreats include:
• Five days of learning and interactive lecture (30 hours of classroom time). • Time for relaxation and networking with others surrounded by 100 acres of beautiful wooded countryside at Black Rock Retreat Center in Quarryville, PA (50 miles west of Philadelphia). • Daily Mass, adoration, and confession will be available. • Round trip shuttle from the Philadelphia Airport is available.
Teaching the late Pope's meditations on the gift of human sexuality and its connection to Divine Love will take on a whole new light this June. It will be just a month after John Paul II's beatification on May 1 in Rome! So I'll be relishing quoting again and again "Blessed" John Paul II!
What is the Theology of the Body? Basically, a reflection on what it means to be human, male and female. Where did we come from and where are we going? It looks at the two greatest questions we can ask; "Who am I?" And "Who is God?" The starting point for getting to the answers is us. It looks at the human body not just as a biological organism, but as a theological reality; a work of God. We look at what it is about us that makes us so restless in this world, different from the animals, always hungry, always searching for More? And then it looks at love as a lead into the answer. The Pope says that in our call to communion with each other as man and woman, in human love, there is something of the Divine, something touching on the Infinite. All human love is a sign, an icon, a pointer to Something Beyond ourselves.
God has stamped right in our bodies a mystery that reveals Who He is! You see, a man is called to be a gift, in his very body, for the woman. And the woman is called to receive this gift right in her very body as woman. And this beautiful coming together of husband and wife creates new life! And the union, as beautiful, powerful, and wonderful as it can be, is really just the first sparks of the Love that we are made for beyond this world. The Church says that in the joys of their love, God gives spouses and families a foretaste of the joys of Heaven!
I hope you can join me for this powerful week of prayer and reflection. Those who attend find it a life-changing experience, and a transformation in the Spirit for both head and heart! Indeed, the whole person! To learn more about this teaching of Pope John Paul II's, visit TOBInstitute.org
I'll be giving a Theology of the Body Retreat from Friday to Sunday, Feb. 19-21, 2010, at the Villa Maria Guadalupe Retreat Center in Stamford, Connecticut. It's a beautifully restored mansion now dedicated for prayer and reflection, hosted by the wonderful Sisters of Life. You can register online here, or contact the Sisters directly for more information:
Sisters of Life
Villa Maria Guadalupe
159 Sky Meadow Dr.
Stamford, CT 06903
203.329.1492
fax: 203.329.1495
From the fall of 1996 to the spring of 1997, I had the absolute grace of spending a year on retreat, high on a hill of over 400 acres of field and forest overlooking the Lehigh Valley. Along with my class and other seminarians from NJ and NY, we were invited "into the deep" of our walk with God; an unprecedented opportunity for silence and reflection, and the time to probe into the mysterious call to priesthood. It was called the "Spirituality Year" and was part of the seminary formation for the Archdiocese of Philadelphia.
It was a defining year for me, and helped so much in my discernment of God's will for my life. Looking back now as a husband and father, I can see how the moments of quiet and prayer that called me into the seminary in 1993, were now preparing me for the unexpected turn away from a call to priesthood. Men come and go in this discernment, and in my mind it is always a win/win situation. You ask the question head on, you "taste and see," and you grow from the experience, no matter how the end of that discernment spells itself out. To this day, I feed on the formation and the spirit of my time at Mary Immaculate, and St. Charles in Overbrook.
Just a month ago, I heard that Mary Immaculate Center, that place of deep peace and prayer, was closing its doors. The land and all the structures on it, including an incredible chapel built in the 1930's, is up for sale. Needless to say when I read about this transition, it hurt.
Thoreau once said "We need the tonic of wildness... At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be indefinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of nature."
I could say the same for the acres of wildness at Northampton, without, in the corn and bean fields and dark woods below the hill, and within, in the shadowy stillness of the chapel in the wee hours of the morning, when only the sanctuary lamp flickered. I could almost hear the Divine Heart beating with an unfathomable love for me.
Last month I called a friend, a classmate who experienced the year with me, and who also felt the call out of the seminary. We came home again to Mary Immaculate, and with me was my wife and baby boy. We spent hours taking pictures and walking the halls, while a heavy rain fell outside and soaked the fields and the trees. The video above is my thanks for the time that I was given at Mary Immaculate. Please pray that it remains somehow untouched, in good hands. In the heart of the Church. We need this "out of the way place," this wilderness for the body and the soul, lest we forget who we are and where we are going.
The most generous choices, especially the persevering, are the fruit of profound and prolonged union with God in prayerful silence.
- Pope John Paul II
