Being the Beloved: A Winter Weekend Women’s Retreat

Being the Beloved: A Winter Weekend Women’s Retreat

Friday, February 21  –  Sunday, February 23, 2025

Hosted by The Retreat House

At the Foehliage Retreat Center in Galena, MD

Guided by Linda Mastro

Jesus said, “Love the Lord your God with all your passion and prayer and intelligence. 

This is the most important, the first on the list. But there is a second to set alongside it: ‘Love others as well as you love yourself.’ These two commands are pegs; everything in God’s law and the Prophets hangs from them.” 

Matthew 22:34-40 (The Message: The Bible in Contemporary Language)

Praying with the greatest commandments, we often focus on the love of God and neighbor. Despite our best intentions, we can easily overlook that Jesus included us in this equation of love. Loving ourselves requires that we remember that we are the beloved children of God. We may have been programmed to judge ourselves harshly and to downplay our worth. These standards, designed to keep us humble, also undermine accepting our divine goodness. How on earth can we truly extend love to others if we do not stand on a firm foundation of love for ourselves?

In his classic book, Life of the Beloved: Spiritual Living in a Secular World, Henri Nouwen, Catholic priest, professor, psychologist, and prolific writer, says, “As long as ‘being the Beloved’ is little more than a beautiful thought or a lofty idea that hangs above my life to keep me from becoming depressed, nothing really changes. What is required is to become the Beloved in the commonplaces of my daily existence, and bit by bit to close the gap that exists between what I know myself to be and the countless realities of everyday life. Becoming the Beloved is pulling the truth revealed to me from above down into the ordinariness of what I am thinking of, talking about, and doing from hour to hour.”

In this retreat, we will explore what it means to embrace our Belovedness. Together we will reconsider self-care as an act of love that can transform our relationships in all domains of life. The retreat will include time for silent rest and reflection, heart-enriching conversation, and mindful prayer and movement. You will take home practices that will inspire you to live each day more fully into your one, precious life.

The retreat begins with dinner on Friday evening and ends with a prayer service and brunch on Sunday. The cost of the retreat includes five nutritious meals, lodging, and all materials.

Register here: https://tinyurl.com/WINTERBELOVED