I was building a sandcastle.

Jesus was running along the beach, throwing sand up into the air.

I was serious.

Jesus was laughing.

I was facing away from the ocean and the sunshine, busy with my project in the sand, my face in shadow.

Jesus gazed into the horizon, his face lit by the sun, as he sat in awe at the edge of the water.

Retreat always begins with a “before,” and ends with an “after.”

In my inspired imagination, as I prayed on the first day of my 8-day annual retreat this year, Jesus showed me that my “before”—my approach to life as a responsible and serious project-conscious adult—was no longer satisfying me. And he showed me in prayer that what he wanted for me was “delight,” his way of both delighting in the Father’s love for him and knowing that he was the delight of his Father.

In Psalm 131 there is this lovely line in the Jerusalem Bible translation: “Like a little child, so I keep myself.”

As I watched the ocean gently wash away the cares of the very important work of creating my sandcastle, Jesus helped me to feel on every level of my being what I have been created for: to be a child of the Father, as he himself is the Child of the Father. In fact, Jesus’ urging us to lay aside our self-importance to become like little children is rooted in his very way of life. Jesus wanted me to feel what he felt going about his life on this earth, what he felt in prayer on the mountains, connecting with his Father, indeed, what he feels before the Father for all eternity.

Hans Urs von Balthasar wrote in the book Unless You Become Like a Child that as a grown man, Jesus never leaves the “bosom of the Father.” His identity is inseparable from his being a Child in the bosom of the Father. In one place in the book he imagines the child Jesus becoming conscious of the world around him … “When the Mother awakens him, the opening up of the whole horizon of reality is experienced not only as something holy but as the realization that in the depths of this opened fullness of being there radiates the personal Face of his Father, personally turned toward him.”

Jesus draws us in prayer to sit beside him as he gazes into the Face of his Father who is “personally turned toward him,” personally turned toward us. This is the one thing necessary, this sitting, this receiving, this allowing oneself to be seen, to be loved. It is this that Mary had discovered and Martha’s heart—and mine—still yearned to know.

There are many things in our lives that frighten us into hiding from love, that paralyze parts of us so that we are hesitant to open up to receive the welcoming smile of God and of others. Retreats are often the long stretch of quiet healing that make it possible for us to accept being loved.

After all, Jesus was showing me, isn’t that what a tiny child longs for, needs, depends on, and trusts in? No matter what has happened in our lives, the eternal Father’s love heals and holds us until we are warmed with the gaze of his Face and are confident in the strength of his tender care for us.

Jesus didn’t ask us to be smart, accomplished, successful, organized. Nowhere in the Gospel do we find him suggesting that anything depends on us alone, especially this very important work that we were invited to share: the salvation of the world. There is only an insistence on spiritual childhood, this transformation of heart and mind made possible through the grace of the Holy Spirit.

“The child has time to take time as it comes, one day at a time, calmly, without advance planning or greedy hoarding of time. Time to play, time to sleep. He knows nothing of appointment books in which every moment has already been sold in advance.” Instead, every moment “we should receive with gratitude the full cup that is handed to us … And only with time of this quality can the Christian find God in all things, just as Christ found the Father in all things.”

This is my “after,” the gift of my retreat, the first day of the rest of my life. This is the joy Jesus has desired for me to know, the delight that is now mine forever.

Image credit: Christ with Martha and Maria by Henryk Siemiradzki, 1886 via Wikimedia, in the public domain.