Retreat leads young adults to the heart of Jesus

Friday, Jun. 27, 2014

SALT LAKE  CITY — As night fell over Salt Lake City June 20,  a group of young Catholic adults started learning how to live their faith in daily life with the spiritual exercises of Saint Ignatius of Loyola.

“Young people are hungry for a sense of community and for authentic relationships,” as well as the ability to talk about the beauty of the world and God’s presence in it,  said Santiago Rodriguez, one member of the team that presented the “Hearts on Fire” retreat in the Diocese of Salt Lake City. “We want to give them the tools and ways so they can, through their daily experiences, be able to every day discern and reflect more profoundly.”

More than 50 young adults participated in the two-day retreat at St. Vincent de Paul Parish’s Holy Family Hall. Presenters were Jesuit Father Eduardo Soto Parra and Jesuit seminarians Edmund Lo, Santiago Rodriguez, Jacob Boddicker and Adam Rosinski. 

The retreat included talks, contemplative prayer, quiet music, Eucharistic adoration and benediction services, and Masses. The focus of the retreat was to encourage participants to make a daily offering of themselves to the Lord for the coming of God’s Kingdom and for the Holy Father’s monthly intentions. 

Sometimes young people have only an idea of who Jesus is, but have never had a real encounter with him, Rodriguez said.

 “I think that two of the most needed things for our youth is having a personal relationship with Christ, not simply an idea of Jesus,” said Rodriguez, who is the director of the “Hearts on Fire” traveling young adult retreat program. “The encounter with Christ is the most important thing. Knowing the faith helps, but just knowing it from an intellectual aspect doesn’t allow you to have an opening of the heart, which is needed to respond to all the different challenges that all human beings face.”

At the retreat, Rodriguez reflected that “our hearts can only truly be filled with a treasure that is the real thing. The [Ignatian] spiritual exercises help lead our hearts more and more to the heart of Jesus.”

After an experience with the heart of Christ, people can more easily discover who they are as humans, he said. 

“We discover in him our potential, our life’s principle, the foundation of us as human beings. We discover what transforms us, what gives us energy, what makes us wake up every day and discover that when we are in touch with those desires, we discover the ways of Christ for us, and we discover our vocations,”  said Rodriguez.

Fr. Soto Parra presented the three steps of the Ignatian: prepare, pray and review.

“In this prayer there is a purification of the ideas, of the concepts that we have of God,” said Fr. Soto  Parra, adding that prayer also allows people to recognize that they can have a living experience with Christ, as in the Scriptures.

In a world where people are always in a hurry, Ignatian contemplation requires stopping for a few minutes to reflect and express the desires of an intimate knowledge of Jesus using the human senses.

“Simply reflecting for a few minutes, … discovering what’s happening in our hearts, is very important,” said Rodriguez. “I think that Ignatian spirituality helps us to really find God in all the moments, in all the aspects of our lives, so we cannot just say, ‘Oh! here he is.’ We can say, ‘I have discovered my desires, my passion, and I have learned to love more deeply and to serve more deeply,’ and the world is hungry for that.”