Macrina Wiederkehr is a Benedictine sister at St. Scholastica Monastery in Fort Smith, Arkansas. She is the author of A Tree Full of Angels, Seasons of Your Heart, The Song of the Seed, and Gold in Your Memories.
We all have been broken and blessed over the years. Wiederkehr offers this 40-day pilgrimage as a time to explore "the sacred side of your life's hidden goodness." Far too often we expend precious time and energy looking to others rather than plumbing the depths of our own experiences. Behold Your Life is designed to be a transformational journey — each day's material contains a passage from scripture, a guided meditation on your memory for the day, and a prayer.
During one of the early stages of the retreat, the challenge is to contemplate the intimacy of being known and loved by God before you were born. Wiederkehr enables us to feel the joy of our birth and the fear we experience leaving the womb a second time on our first day of school.
Again and again, the author helps us to mine our good and bad memories. The idea here is let go of feeling resentment or playing the role of victim. The pilgrimage tutors us in tallying up all the blessings of the day and then expressing our gratitude. This is both good exercise for the soul and an affirmation of the visceral truth of resurrection.
