What are you overly attached to? Comfort, money, me-time, food, your children (yes that is a possibility), air-conditioning?
At various times in my life I have to admit to being inordinately attached to all of the above. This past week when our a/c was broken I found out how attached I was to it. I might not use it a lot, but I want to know it is there when I need to use it. It was a good thing that last week came on the heels of my retreat because I needed the extra graces to keep my temper at a cooler temperature than my house was!
There was much time spent on retreat looking at and talking about what it is that we are attached to that is keeping us from giving everything over to God. There's always going to be something. At first it will be the big things, but as we progress in the spiritual life, those things will start to get more subtle and harder to weed out.
I mentioned above about being inordinately attached to one's children. Father gave the example of how that can play out. When a child goes to his mother and explains to her that he feels he has a vocation to the priesthood a mother with an inordinate attachment will try to talk him out of it for her own selfish reasons. Of course her reasons might not seem selfish at first, but if she really looks at them, she will realize that the thought of giving her son totally over to God is more than she wants to handle. This is one big way in which a mother can be inordinately attached to her child.
The point of many of these talks and times of meditation was to try to root out one, or maybe even a few, things that we can't let go of that are holding us back from giving ourselves totally, and in a big way, over to God.
What is keeping us from trusting in Him fully? What is keeping us from letting Him plan out our lives, our months, our days? What is keeping us from giving Him back all that He has given us so that He can use it for His purposes in our lives?
This is a lot to think about, but the goal is to find something that we need to detach from and then come up with a resolution that says how we are going to do that.
God Bless!
