Each of us carries in his heart an album of lovely pictures of the past. Memories of events that brought gladness to us. I want you to now open this album and recall as many of these events as you can . . .
If you have never done this exercise before, you are not likely to find many such events at the first try. But you will gradually discover more and more buried away in your past, and you will enjoy unearthing them and reliving them in the presence of the Lord. What is more, when new events come and bring you happiness you will cherish the memory of them and not allow them to get lost easily, and you will carry around with you an immense treasury into which you can dip any time you wish to bring new joy and vigor to your living.
I imagine this is what Mary did when she carefully placed away within her heart precious memories of the infancy of Christ, memories to which she would lovingly return later.
Return to some scene in which you felt deeply loved . . . How was this love shown to you? In words, looks, gestures, an act of service, a letter? . . . Stay with the scene as long as you experience something of the joy that was yours when this event took place.Return to some scene in which you felt joy. What produces this joy in you? Good news . . . The fulfillment of some desire . . . A scene of nature? . . . Recapture the original scene and the feelings that accompanied it . . . Stay as long as you can with these feelings . . .
This return to past scenes where you felt love and joy is one of the finest exercises I know for building up your psychological health. Many of us go through what one psychologist calls peak experiences. The pity is that when the experience actually takes place very few people have the capacity to surrender themselves to it. So they take in nothing of the experience, or very little. What they need to do is return to these experiences in fantasy and gradually task the experience in to the full. If you do this you will discover that, no matter how often you return to these experiences, you will always find in them a supply of nourishment. Their store never seems to get exhausted. They are a joy forever.
Make sure, however, that you do not return to these scenes and observe them from the outside, so to speak. They have to be relived, not observed. Act them out again, participate in them again. Let the fantasy be so vivid that it is as if the experience is actually taking place right now for the first time.
It won't be long before you experience the psychological value of this exercise and you acquire a new respect for fantasy as a source of life and energy. Fantasy is a very powerful tool for therapy and personality growth. If it is grounded on reality (when you fantasize events and scenes that have actually taken place), it has the same effect (pleasurable or painful) that reality itself has. If in the dim light of evening, I see a friend coming toward me and I imagine him to be an enemy, all my reactions, psychological and physiological, will be the same if the enemy were really there. If a thirsty man in the desert imagines he sees water, the effect on him will be exactly the same as the effect caused by his seeing real water. When you return to scenes where you felt love and joy, you will enjoy all the benefits that come from being exposed to love and joy . . . and the benefits are immense.
What is the spiritual significance of an exercise like this? In the first place, it breaks down the instinctive resistance that most people place to taking in love and joy. It increases their capacity for accepting love and welcoming joy into their lives. And so it increases their capacity for experiencing God and for opening their hearts to his love and to the happiness that the experience of him brings with it. He who will not allow himself to feel loved by the brother whom he sees, how will he allow himself to feel loved by the God he does not see?
In the second place this exercise helps overcome the inherent sense of worthlessness, of unworthiness, of guilt which is one of the principal obstacles that we place in the way of God's grace. In fact, the primary effect of God's grace when it enters our heart is to make us feel intensely loved — and loveable. Exercises like this one prepare the soil for this grace by making us ready to accept the fact that we are lovable.
Here is another way of drawing spiritual benefit from this exercise:
Relive one of these scenes where you felt deeply loved or when you felt deep joy . . .
Seek and find the presence of the Lord in this scene . . .
In what form is he present?
This is one way of learning how to find God in all the events of your life, past and present.
— Anthony de Mello in Sadhana, A Way to God: Christian Exercises in Eastern Form