I returned Monday night from a week in England as part of a team of women who led a Women’s ACTS retreat. The retreat was held at a pilgrimage site founded 950 years ago after a woman was asked by Mary in a dream to build the place where she received the Annunciation to bear Christ (Luke 1:26-38). This revelation of Mary is known as Our Lady of Walsingham.
I have returned from this retreat renewed in my own faith. During the retreat I gave a talk about my own faith journey and my path that wavers between focusing on my own efforts to fulfill my own sense of worthiness to accepting who I am and what I have been given as pure grace and gift. As a shared my story, it was accompanied by many tears, which I was not expecting nor completely understood. After sitting with the experience, perhaps my tears where recognizing I am as much in this pattern of wavering between having to prove myself and accepting grace as before, particularly as I approach graduation and feelings of needing to prove my worthiness is work swell up.
This morning I woke up early to read, pray and soak in some silence. I can across this reflection and smiled:
You would think everyone would want God, but a common response is “Lord, I am not worthy. I would rather have my own religion and morality, which gives me the impression that I can win a cosmic contest by my own efforts.”
In contrast, the Annunciation story is the crescendo point of the theme of total grace and gift. Mary does not say she is not worthy. She just asks for clarification.
- Richard Rohr, Hidden Things
I smile because our retreat was at a place soaked in the revelation of the Annunciation and what this signifies reflects the movement that occurred within me- from winning God by my own efforts to accepting grace and gift. Worthiness was never the question.
This experienced encompassed much more than my personal revelation, but at I sat this morning, this is the reflection that came to me.
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