My community just came back from a four-day Silent Retreat at a Jesuit retreat center in Morristown, NJ. We spent 40 hours of that time in silence, following guidelines laid out by St. Ignatious in his Spiritual Exercises.

Although I had been looking forward to this retreat for months (nothing is so precious to an introvert as some silent time!), when we arrived, I was not in the greatest of moods. Work at the shelter had seemed unusually stressful for the previous few weeks, and the last thing I wanted to do was get trapped inside my head with my thoughts.

Looking back, however, I'm pretty sure that this mood was all part of God's providential plan for me during this retreat. On the advice of the awesome spiritual director I was paired with, I tried to put down my expectations for the weekend and just relax and let God come to me. Which, of course, He did. I spent hours in the retreat center's tiny chapel, just sitting with Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament and being reminded yet again of how deeply and intimately God loves us.

Coming into the retreat as I did forced me to confront the darkness that is so often part of the spiritual life, those times when God seems far away from our struggles on earth. It forced me to lay down all of the pain and brokenness I had been carrying around with me from the shelter, to come before God and say, Lord, this is where I am, and I can't find You here.

And the miracle is, God found me. I struggle so often to see God amidst the chaos of the shelter, where change is slow and hope often seems far away. Yet what this experience taught me is that if I simply ask God to reveal Himself, He will. Jesus reminds us that whatever we ask of God in prayer, He will give us - even if it is simply the gift of His Presence, which is sometimes what we need most.

I'll say it again - God is so good!! If we are open to His Spirit, He will lead us exactly where we need to go.

This week for Spirituality Night, our community sat down to watch Jesus Camp, a 2006 documentary about an evangelical Christian summer camp and the children who attend it. It has been described by many progressives (a demographic somewhat overrepresented in our community) as one of the most terrifying films they have ever seen, so we knew that we were in for an interesting night.

Today was a day on which I felt myself sinking into the sin of despair, that mire of hopelessness that sucks all light and goodness out of life. Being in the shelter had started to get to me. The long histories of abuse, the endless stories of relationships broken by violence, the perpetual state of crisis so many of our clients seem to exist in - coupled with my own inability to do anything that seemed remotely helpful in so many situations - were enough to make me wonder if any of us humans were worth saving, if we could do the sort of things to one another that landed some of us in domestic violence shelters.

It was precisely the kind of spiritual crisis that I did not want to have - it seemed trite, almost, to have my faith shaken by confrontations with suffering. But I was having it anyway. The God who was incarnated in the expansively compassionate Christ seemed so very far away from this shelter filled with beaten-down women, fatherless children, and frazzled staff. Where was that Love who healed the crippled with a single touch, who raised the dead with a single word? Where was that Love who, as today's Gospel recounts, sat upon hilltops and welcomed all the weary and the weak? I started to wonder if maybe we were just too far gone down here on Earth for that Love to reach us anymore.

Towards the end of the day, I was walking through the hallway when I spotted a small form walking ahead of me. It's never a good thing to find kids roaming around the shelter unsupervised, but this particular child was notorious for wandering into open offices and causing all manner of trouble. He'd been, in fact, the subject of several unsettling conversations I'd had with behavioral health specialists recently.

Somewhat warily, I asked him where he was headed.

"To find the lady," he said.

Hm, the lady. Not the most helpful descriptor in a battered women's shelter with a 100-bed capacity.

"What lady?" I asked.

"The new lady with the glasses and the stick," he replied. "I think she's in the TV room."

Glasses and stick - he could only be talking about the blind woman who had recently entered the shelter. And sure enough, when we turned into the TV room, there she was, sitting alone on the couch, her face turned towards the glowing television she could not see.

"Santa's here," the boy said as he walked up to her, referring to the Christmas party that was happening on the second floor. "You said to come get you when they started so you could come and listen to the music."

She smiled, clearly recognizing his voice. Unfolding her slim walking stick, she allowed him to accompany her out of the room and into the hallway. I followed along with them, touched by the polite directions and gentle guidance he offered her as they made their way to the elevator.

While we were standing in the elevator, riding up to the second floor, she smiled again and said to the boy, "Thank you for coming to get me. Thank you for not forgetting about me."

The elevator doors opened up to the second floor, and I let them get off together, the slow pace of his little-boy steps matching the rhythmic tapping of her stick against the linoleum floor. As I rode back down to the first floor alone, I suddenly realized how deeply I'd sunk into my despair that God had to send a 9-year old boy to remind me of His presence. I had to laugh, imaging Christ's answering chuckle as He lovingly admonished me, I'm right HERE, silly. I've ALWAYS been here and I'm always GOING to be here.

I'm grateful to have been reminded, during this first week of Advent, that Christ truly is Emmanuel, God-With-Us, even when I'm too stuck in my own despair to realize it. And I'm equally grateful to have been reminded that God abandons none of us - not a blind woman without a home, not an emotionally troubled boy who's spent his entire life in the system - not even a social work newbie like myself, who is struggling to reconcile the immense needs of her clients with the uncomfortable reality of her own limitations.

Human love grows weak, it's true. Human compassion has its limits. But God's love is eternally strong, and God's compassion is boundless. And just because God came down once in human flesh does not mean that God's presence does not come down into our lives each and every day, even if it's only in the tiniest of moments that we might just as soon have missed.