Four days of retreat to start our Chapter well

Now, O Lord, according to your promise (Cf. Lk 2:21-30)

Two elderly people, Simeon and Anna, await in the Temple the fulfilment of the promise that God made to his people: the coming of the Messiah. Yet theirs is no passive expectation, it is full of movement. Let us look at what Simeon does. First, he is moved by the Spirit; then he sees salvation in the Child Jesus and finally he takes him into his arms (cf. Lk 2:26-28). Let us simply consider these three actions and reflect on some important questions for us and in particular for the consecrated life.

First, what moves us? 

Simeon goes to the Temple, “moved by the spirit” (v. 27). The Holy Spirit is the protagonist in this scene. He makes Simeon’s heart burn with desire for God. He keeps expectation alive in his heart: He impels him to go to the Temple and he enables his eyes to recognize the Messiah, even in the guise of a poor little baby. That is what the Holy Spirit does: he enables us to discern God’s presence and activity not in great things, in outward appearances or shows of force, but in littleness and vulnerability. Think of the cross. There too we find littleness and vulnerability, but also something dramatic: the power of God. Those words “moved by the spirit” remind us of what ascetic theology calls “movements of the Spirit”: those movements of the soul that we recognize within ourselves and are called to test, in order to discern whether they come from the Holy Spirit or not. Be attentive to the interior movements of the Spirit. We can also ask, who mostly moves us? Is it the Holy Spirit, or the spirit of this world? 

A second question: What do our eyes see? 

Simeon, moved by the Spirit, sees and recognizes Christ. And he prays, saying: “My eyes have seen your salvation” (v. 30). This is the great miracle of faith: it opens eyes, transforms gazes, changes perspectives. As we know from Jesus’ many encounters in the Gospel, faith is born of the compassionate gaze with which God looks upon us, softening the hardness of our hearts, healing our wounds and giving us new eyes to look at ourselves and at our world. New ways to see ourselves, others and all the situations that we experience, even those that are most painful.  This gaze is not naïve but sapiential. A naïve gaze flees reality and refuses to see problems. A sapiential gaze, however, can “look within” and “see beyond”. It is a gaze that does not stop at appearances, but can enter into the very cracks of our weaknesses and failures, in order to discern God’s presence even there. The eyes of the elderly Simeon, albeit dimmed by the years, see the Lord. They see salvation. What about us? Each of us can ask: what do our eyes see? What is our vision of consecrated life?

Finally, a third question: what do we take into our own arms?

Simeon took Jesus into his arms (cf. v. 28). It is a touching scene, full of meaning and unique in the Gospels. God has placed his Son in our arms too, because embracing Jesus is the essential thing, the very heart of faith. Sometimes we risk losing our bearings, getting caught up in a thousand different things, obsessing about minor issues or plunging into new projects, yet the heart of everything is Christ, embracing him as the Lord of our lives.  When Simeon took Jesus into his arms, he spoke words of blessing, praise and wonder. And we, after so many years of consecrated life, have we lost the ability to be amazed? Do we still have this capacity?

Proposal for a "spiritual exercise : 

1. First, apply the three main questions raised in the text to your own life. Complete your personal examination using the rest of the questions in the text.
2. Then read slowly through the text of the Gospel of Luke, underlining the words that strike you most. It is often very helpful to use pencil and paper, and you can even transcribe the text.
3. Thirdly, try to have a long time of prayer that takes into account both the review of the questions and the meditative and personalised reading of the text. You can do this step with an Ignatian contemplation or with a lectio divina; in any case, the important thing is not the method of prayer but the fact of interiorising and deepening the text.
4. Make the effort to concretise your prayerful discernment on the following three levels: what is the Spirit asking of me now on a personal, community and congregational level?
5. It concludes with thanksgiving for the moment of contemplation.
6. Pray the "Our Father"