Recollection: A Path Back to God

Reflection: December 6, 2025
Holy Spirit, come into my heart
as I sit with You in stillness.

This morning, as I moved through Advent meditation, I heard an affirmation that tugged at my heart: to have a recollecting soul.
Something in those words feels like home.

Recollection is remembering, with reverence and humility, the ways God has shown me mercy. The ways the Holy Spirit has tugged me back when I had fallen asleep to my own truth.
I recollect seasons when I was happy on the surface, yet still shielded from the deeper truth of my soul. Half-awake I like to call it. Making the best of things. Ignoring the nudge, the discomfort, the signs.

But the Holy Spirit is persistent.
And when I finally surrender it always brings me to a place of clarity.
At times it felt like an out-of-body experience: the Holy Spirit stepping forward when I felt too small, too tired, or too afraid.
 
Surrender has always revealed something deeper:
a wound I tried to outrun,
a lie I unknowingly believed,
a trouble I didn’t want to name.
And yet, every time I stopped resisting and let myself fall into God’s mercy, freedom rose.

I want to live a life of recollection,
because only in recollection can I hear God’s voice
soft, subtle to the restless soul.
St. Faustina wrote that only the recollected soul can hear Him.
And I feel that deeply today.

Let’s be honest: we are a distracted people. Scattered, pulled in a hundred directions. The world around us trains us toward restlessness, jumping from emotion to emotion, opinion to opinion. But genuine prayer and true inner clarity only come through detachment and recollection.
Constant attachment breeds a restless spirit.
Recollection, however, guides us back home.
 
Advent is the perfect season for this:
to return,
to remember,
to recollect ourselves in God.
​
Peace
J~

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