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Endow retreat on love draws nearly 200 women from 11 states
By Nissa LaPoint
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Photo by James Baca/DCR |
Rachel Dammann needed answers about love.
As a wife and mother, she’s found that relationships mature and change over time.
“As life goes on, the (love) is not as out there as it used to be,” said Dammann, who attends Nativity of Our Lord Parish in Broomfield.
Moved by her desire to further strengthen her love with her family, Dammann decided to attend a weekend women’s retreat titled “Courage to Love” at her parish.
She joined 194 other women and youths from 11 states for the Sept. 9-10 retreat organized by Endow, or Educating on the Nature and Dignity of Women, a private educational program dedicated to teaching the “new feminism” of Blessed Pope John Paul II.
The Endow retreat was the first held in the northern metro-area that included guest speakers and group discussions on the courage to love others, themselves and as God loves.
Shar Messaros, facilitator and retreat committee chair, said the retreat topic she chose is important for women.
“I had a theme in my mind I really wanted to develop; it’s that it takes courage for us to love,” Messaros said. “I really wanted them to hear this message.”
In her talk about loving as God loves, Mary Healy, associate professor of Scripture at Sacred Heart Major Seminary in Detroit, told the attendees they must empty themselves to love as God commanded with their whole heart, mind and soul.
“We see God has given us an incredibly tall order,” Healy said about God’s command to love. “God can only ask us to love that way because that’s the way he loves us.”
Quoting Scripture passages, Healy gave examples of how God loves people and what they must do to allow that love in their lives. When Jesus met the Samaritan woman at the well, as described in St. John’s Gospel (chapter 4), he talked to her despite social conventions and reached out to first expose and then forgive her “brokenness,” she said.
“We are the women at the well whose thirst he so deeply wants to quench,” Healy said.
“The Lord loves to provide in these little ways if we let him.”
Colorado Springs’ Bishop Michael J. Sheridan asked a question near the end of his keynote address to the retreat attendees.
“So permit me to pose a question of my own: does it take courage to love? Or to put it another way: is it ever difficult to love?” Bishop Sheridan queried.
He said there’s no doubt about the answer: people’s own weaknesses, spiritual dryness, other’s poor conflict resolution, social sin and other temptations make it difficult to love.
“Then courage comes to the aid of love. Then duty is our friend,” Bishop Sheridan asserted. “Then the courageous practice of love creates virtue and character in us. For those around us, it creates the benign contagion of good example. For those we love, it showers blessings.”
After also listening to Mother Regina Marie Gorman, superior general of the Carmelite Sisters of the Most Sacred Heart of Los Angeles, discuss “Courage to Love Others” and Msgr. Bernard Schmitz, liaison for clergy for the Denver Archdiocese, talk about “Courage to Love Ourselves,” there was no mistake about the take home message for one attendee.
“The definition of dying to oneself and learning to ‘let go and let God’” stood out the most, said Michele Leiting of Westside, Iowa. “Now I have the tools (to love).”
The weekend included an overnight youth retreat, which Mary Carroll, 14, a student at Holy Family High School in Broomfield, thought was fulfilling.
“It’s a lot of fellowship and companionship,” Carroll said about her experience. “You don’t feel alone in your faith.”
The entire retreat was something Lillian Flenner took to heart.
“Love is one of the hardest things to do,” said Flenner of Humble, Texas. Pointing to her heart, she said, “I knew (the teachings about) love, but I didn’t have it down here. I got so much more out of this retreat than I expected.”
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