Gratitude
Let us reflect on God’s love for us and our response.
Next week is the final week of retreat. This week we look back, to contemplate what we have received in this retreat—God’s love itself. And we consider our response. Our desire for this week is to be filled with a deep sense of the gifts we have received, and so filled with profound gratitude, we will be moved to love and serve God, in all things, in our everyday lives.
Two convictions guide our reflections:
- Love expresses itself in deeds rather than mere words.
Love is the gift of self for the other. - Love that is reciprocal grows.
Lovers give of themselves to each other, with each deep gift leading to a deeper response.
This week we will recall all of the gifts of love we have received during this retreat. We will remember all the ways God has given us graces that were the gift of self. We want to grow in gratitude for the activity of God’s love for us, especially in the gift of Jesus for us, and the ways in which we have been blessed to know, love, and serve with Jesus.
This week we want to open our hearts to the broadest sense of God’s love that we can imagine. Using images like the rays of the sun’s warm light or the overwhelming power of a constant waterfall, we will consider how God’s life-giving presence and love flow in and through all of creation, given to and for us.
Use the resources this week to enter into these exercises of appreciation in detail.
With each level of gratitude, we want to express our love. Our response, and our offering of self in love, is what seals and strengthens the bonds of love between us and God. We will grow in a sense that all we have is gift. As we have grown in freedom, we can surrender ourselves in love more and more completely.
All week, with growing gratitude and deepening affection, I will make offerings of myself in these or similar words, until they become mine:
Take, Lord, and receive
all my liberty, my memory,
my understanding, my entire will—
all that I am and possess.
You have given all this to me.
I now return it all to you.
It is yours now.
Use these gifts according to your will.
Give me only your love and your grace.
That is enough for me, and all that I desire.
The Grace We Pray for This Week
To grow in gratitude for the activity of God’s love for us, especially in the gift of Jesus for us, and the ways in which we have been blessed to know, love, and serve with Jesus.
Getting Started This Week
Our contemplation on the love of God for us, and our response, can be done both in several prayer periods and in the background times throughout our week.
What We Are Considering
For all these months, we have considered our relationship with God. We now draw it all together to understand and appreciate all that God has given us in this retreat, in our lives, and what God continues to give us.
- The blessings of creation, redemption, and the special graces I have received.
- God dwelling in every part of creation, especially in me.
- How God labors for me in all of creation, giving and sustaining life.
- How all blessings and gifts descend — as the sun’s light and water flowing from a fountain.
And we will consider our response.
The Grace We Ask For
Our desire for this week is to be filled with a deep sense of the gifts we have received, and so filled with profound gratitude, we will be moved to love and serve God, in all things, in our everyday lives. The prayer for this week helps us ask for this grace.
Our Daily Life Contemplation
It is very important to try to focus our attention this week on gratitude for God’s love. The two convictions about love from our guide are critical: love consists more in deeds than in words, and love involves the mutual exchange of gifts between lovers. It would be very helpful to set aside some brief prayer times, using this simple help:
- Begin by feeling the presence of God.
- Ask for the grace I desire — an intimate sense of God’s love for me.
- Reflect on God’s love:
- What has God done for me?
- What has God given me?
- How does God sustain me?
- What is God offering me?
- Speak, lover to lover, with words, feelings of gratitude.
- Write down what I wish to remember.
These are not just intellectual reflections. We are asking for intimacy here, and our goal is that our memory and our accounting of God’s gifts will fill us with deep and moving gratitude and stir our hearts to a response of love and service.
For the Journey
A reflection by Fr. Larry Gillick, SJ
This final exercise of the retreat is modeled on the final reflection in the Spiritual Exercises. There is an irony here. Though it is the final exercise, the making of the Exercises never ends. God does not send us a certificate proclaiming, “You have successfully finished the course.” Paul himself wrote that he had not reached the finish line but pressed on. So we finish our beginning and continue our being created and recreated by the love of God. Two points for Ignatius were very important during these last exercises: love consists more in deeds than in words, and love is a mutual handing over to the other of all that one has. In the first “For the Journey” we are encouraged not to look for progress or lack of it during our journeys. Instead, we have been encouraged to watch Love at work, manifesting that love in deeds and in the handing over to us all the gifts of grace and life that we have been offered.
This week we pray with the receptivity of children who sense how deeply they are loved. Ignatius wrote the Exercises to be very personal and so we move from the general we to the very particular I. There are the children in our culture, who at the end of opening all their Christmas presents might have a feeling of “Is this all there is?” Maybe after evaluating his or her siblings’ gifts, he or she might feel cheated or less loved. This is very human and understandable.
I am encouraged to be the Christmas presented child who, after seeing my gifts and those of others, wants to look at my parents and relatives and wonder, “Why are they so good and loving to me?”
It is in this spirit of grateful wonder that Ignatius asks me to make some response of love freely. “All I have, You have given me. What I can give You back is my selfish, possessive and exclusive possession and use of them. I ask only that You bless and grace me in our future together. That would be enough for me and a beginning for You.”
I walk through a world of created gifts. Trees, flowers, birds of all sizes and kinds, amazingly diverse, and all these presents given to me.
I look up at the moon, the stars, I marvel at the changes of the weather as the sun moves back and forth keeping this world at the proper temperatures for life and growth. All this God hands over to me.
I return to the childlike puzzling at the littlest things and muse that God has always and is always at work to hand things to me. God is laboring to attract me but not force me to see the divine finger and hand and arm and self, creating me and all else for me as well. This exercise increases my awareness of how everything is a gift and at the same time an invitation. I am both the recipient and the responder. Once I am aware of how God exists in everything and everything exists in God, how can I keep from singing, from watching and listening, from sharing and from wanting to know what is being offered at any one moment of my life? The river of God’s love flows on whether or not I am attentive to its presents and presence. I want to be less unavailable to the Giver of Love who works and does things in my life so as to reduce me to the wondering child of God I am. The “child of God” is a mature human who knows what things are, where they have come from, and where they are taking me. All things that come from God return to God, including me.
We leave this retreat to live so that we constantly recover sight and sensitivity to the goodness of God and the goodness of this God-love self who I am.
In These or Similar Words
Dearest friend Jesus,
My heart is so full. I feel loved and honored and graced and flawed and loved all over again. I am full of wonder for the love I feel from you and for you. Yes, I am so aware of my flaws and how they sometimes keep me from feeling the love you are pouring on me at every moment. But right now I also feel your deep love and care for me, especially right there, in my weaknesses, those parts of me I want to hide in the dark. Your love brings it out into the light of your warmth and suddenly, I seem to be freer from it.
Now, after these many months of talking with you, loving you, and accepting your love in a whole new way, I realize that you will always, always be with me, even in — or especially in — my weaknesses.
And the gifts! So many gifts you have lavished on me over my lifetime. I feel so deeply your love for me. I see the many ways you love me each day, in the world around me, in the many people you put into my life to love me each day.
The line from Scripture returns to me over and over as I ponder this joyful puzzle: What return can I make for all that the Lord has given me? What is it, Jesus? How can I ever show you the kind of love I feel for you or thank you for all you have given me? I want to give you everything I have.
I want to respond to these many gifts in some way that comes from the deepest part of my being, and every time I think of the many ways you have loved me and given me gifts, I know I want to give you everything I have.
Jesus, you have given me so much, just as the prayer says: my mind, my liberty, memory, understanding, my entire will, and my being. Everything I am in this life, I am because of what you have given me. What can I ever do to thank you? Please, dear friend, may I present these gifts back to you? Can I ask you to use them in this world, for your world, in any way you would like? I want to be free enough to offer you my life. What would you like to do with it? How can I use my life to serve you in this world? How can I love others, as you would like me to?
I look forward with great joy to the weeks and months ahead, dear Jesus, so that together, as we continue to talk, I will discover the answers to these questions.
I thank you for my life. I thank you with my life.
Reading
“Take, Lord, and Receive.” from the Contemplation on the Love of God, The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius of Loyola
Prayers
“I ask for the grace.” from Spiritual Exercises #233