One of the shared statements in the retreat was a quote from St. John of the Cross which he entitled the poem The Summary of the Spiritual Life. It has only four verses and they= re worth reflecting on.

The first verse says forget creatures. Second verse says remember God. The third verse says be mindful of the interior things. The fourth verse says love the beloved. Now these are no small statements and therefore they must be chewed on and reflected to see that it is indeed the summary of the spiritual life for every moment of your life and mine as well.

To forget creatures does not mean that you don= t pay attention to the beauty of nature or things around you. It means to see how you are really attached to creatures for your happiness. Sometimes it= s not easy to see this. So I’ll give you an example a rather strong one but nevertheless very real. Henri Nouwen was a restless person and he tried to hear what God was saying with his restlessness and finally he received an invitation to join the Larch community, the community of the mentally handicapped people, and it was there that he discovered they could care less about his academic prowess. His degrees, his fame, etc. They just wanted to know A how come you weren’t= t at the party with us?@ This made him see how he was attached to these things. It was such an experience that he was in a certain depression for a while to work it out. It was this attachment to that was blocking him. So that= s the direction of that directive - forget creatures. Because insofar as that was in his life it blocked him from receiving deeper graces from God.

The second one is to remember God. It just doesn’t mean, oh, yes, we have to remember we have a chapel in the abbey. No. God is a person and it presupposes that our remembrance of God is a dynamic, personal awakening so that we can say the psalms meaningfully. We really believe that God is our protection. We really believe that God watches over us and the world, etc. But as something real in our life.

So to remember that God is a growing awareness of the personal presence of God and Trinity in your life. As real. As an encounterable fact.

The third one is to be attentive to interior things. Well, first of all, it means being attentive to the interior movements in you because those are your movements. There= s all kinds of movements in us. There= s our movement toward things, there= s a movement against things, like people, there= s a movement of resistance, there= s a movement of wanting to be with things and one other that I cannot recall at this time.

It= ll come to me. So for instance, you find yourself where you can= t seem to pass bakeries. You move toward the bakery. Then you begin to be aware of what rules your life. But also it means to be aware of interior things in the sense of the richness of our faith. That we are part of the Mystical Body and we are brothers in Christ. That what we do to each other we do to Jesus. That= s also part of the awareness of interior things. Last, but not least, is that we are to love the beloved. If there= s any complaints that Jesus reiterates again and again in the mystics is that He is not loved. Love is not loved. So basically to love the beloved means that I really spend the day doing everything for Jesus out of love.

Everything. The least to the greatest. It is precisely this that transforms our life because after all Jesus looks at our heart not at what we do. We don= t have to do big things. Many saints have obviously have no impact and there= s no broad news items about them, they simply lived a simple lives and that reduces everybody to the fact that you can love God tremendously right where you are.

So it= s important to reflect on these four lines again and again. To forget creatures, to remember God, to remember the interior things, and to love the beloved.