Catholic Retreats, Conferences & Keynote Experiences

I offer talks, workshops, retreats, and conference experiences exploring grief, loss, suffering, resilience, spirituality, and the search for meaning. Programs range from 50-minute presentations to extended interactive retreats and conference experiences. Programs included here consist of  3–3½-hour experiences that combine presentation with personal reflection, guided exercises, prayer, and small-group conversation.

For a complete description of current 50-minute talks, please visit the Talks tab.

Programs can be designed for workplaces, healthcare organizations, conferences, parishes, dioceses, and other communities, with content adapted to the needs and interests of each audience. The offerings here draw explicitly on Catholic spirituality.

Whether the focus is grief and resilience, the experience of suffering, the presence of God, or the stories of lives in which grace has been at work, the aim is the same: to create space for honest reflection, meaningful conversation, and a deeper way of seeing our lives and one another.
 

Sacred Lives: Where Grace Meets Real Life

What makes a life sacred? Not perfection. Not a life without failure, suffering, doubt, or contradiction. Sacred Lives explores the possibility that holiness is not something we achieve once and for all, but something that unfolds as God continues to meet us in the circumstances of our ordinary, imperfect lives.

Drawing on the lives of saints, writers, artists, activists, and other people whose stories reveal something of grace at work, this retreat invites participants to look at their own lives differently. Their stories are not presented as models to imitate or lives to idealize, but as human stories in which God kept meeting them—in beauty, suffering, failure, relationships, questions, and unexpected moments of grace.

Through brief biographical presentations, personal reflection, prayer, and small-group conversation, participants explore questions such as:

• Where have I encountered grace in my own life?
• What experiences have shaped who I am becoming?
• Can difficult or unfinished parts of my story also become places where God meets me?
• What might God be revealing through the life I am actually living?

The retreat offers an opportunity to discover that sacredness is not reserved for extraordinary people. Grace is still at work in real lives—including ours.

Possible format: 3–3½ hours, with several brief presentations on selected lives interwoven with reflection, prayer, and small-group discussion. The particular lives can be chosen to reflect the interests and context of the sponsoring organization.

Grief, Suffering, Faith & the Presence of God

For Catholic communities, I offer extended retreat and conference experiences that explore grief, suffering, resilience, and the search for meaning through the lens of faith.

These programs combine presentation with prayer, personal reflection, and carefully structured small-group conversation. They can be adapted for diocesan gatherings, parishes, Catholic healthcare organizations, ministry teams, retreats, conferences, and other faith-based communities.

Where Is God When Suffering Does Not End?

When suffering persists and healing does not come, faith can become complicated. We may wonder where God is, why our prayers seem unanswered, or whether our suffering has any meaning at all.

This retreat explores what Jesus actually teaches about suffering, healing, faith, and the presence of God. Rather than offering easy explanations or suggesting that suffering is God's will, we consider the God revealed in Christ—a God who enters into human suffering and remains present when we cannot change what is happening.

Through presentation, prayer, personal reflection, and small-group conversation, participants are invited to bring their real questions into the presence of God.

Through the Lens of Love: Encountering the Suffering of Others

Those who care for others—through healthcare, ministry, pastoral work, or simply the ordinary relationships of life—are continually invited into the suffering of others. How do we remain compassionate and present without becoming overwhelmed or losing ourselves in another person's pain?

Drawing on Catholic spirituality and the wisdom of the wounded-healer tradition, this retreat explores how love can transform the way we encounter suffering. Participants are invited to reflect on their own experiences of caring for others, consider the boundaries that make compassionate presence possible, and explore what it means to see another person's suffering through the lens of love.

The program includes presentation, prayer, guided reflection, and small-group conversation.

Sacred Presence: Discovering God in the Present Moment

We often look for God in extraordinary experiences while overlooking the sacredness of the moment in which we are already living.

This contemplative retreat explores what it means to become present to God—and to discover that God is already present to us. Drawing on Mary, the mother of Jesus, and Mary Magdalene, participants are invited to consider presence as a way of living: learning to recognize God in silence, suffering, grief, ordinary moments, and places where we least expect to find God.

Through presentation, contemplative prayer, personal reflection, and small-group conversation, participants are invited to slow down, listen, and discover a deeper spirituality of presence, trust, and love.

When God Seems Silent: Faith in Times of Loss

There are seasons when prayer feels empty, God seems distant, and the answers we hoped for do not come. Loss can challenge not only our emotional lives but the very beliefs by which we have understood the world.

This retreat creates space for the experience of spiritual uncertainty without treating doubt as a failure of faith. Through Scripture, reflection, prayer, and conversation, participants explore what it means to remain open to God when we cannot see what God is doing.

The emphasis is not on finding an explanation for suffering, but on discovering ways of remaining in relationship with God within it.

The Spirituality of Suffering: What Do We Do With What We Cannot Change?

Christian faith does not promise that suffering will always be removed. Yet neither does it require us to call suffering good or assume that God caused it.

This retreat explores the spirituality of living with what cannot be changed. Drawing on Catholic  theology, Scripture, and the psychology of suffering, participants consider vulnerability, surrender, compassion, meaning, and the possibility of transformation in the midst of difficult circumstances.

Personal reflection and small-group discussion allow participants to bring these questions into the context of their own lives and faith.

The Truth About Forgiveness: Mercy, Boundaries & Healing

Forgiveness is often presented as a simple Christian obligation. But what happens when the person who hurt us has not changed? What if reconciliation is not possible—or not safe? What does mercy look like when boundaries are necessary?

This retreat explores what Jesus actually teaches about forgiveness, mercy, reconciliation, and love. Participants are invited to consider the difference between forgiveness and reconciliation, between mercy and enabling, and between releasing resentment and restoring a relationship.

Through Scripture, reflection, prayer, and small-group conversation, participants explore how forgiveness can coexist with truth, justice, boundaries, and healing.

Everything I Have Been Through: Suffering, Grace & the Story God Is Still Telling

We do not have to believe that everything happens for a reason—or that God intended our suffering—to recognize that God can work through the whole of a human life.

This retreat invites participants to look at their lives with the possibility that grace has been present even in experiences they would never have chosen. Joy, failure, loss, relationships, unanswered questions, and unexpected turns can all become part of the story God continues to tell.

Through guided reflection, prayer, and small-group conversation, participants are invited to look back with compassion and ask not simply, Why did this happen? but Where was God with me in it? What has God been forming in me? What might God be inviting me to see now?

Suffering and the Cross: Meeting the Compassionate God

The cross can be misunderstood as a model for accepting suffering passively or as evidence that God requires suffering from those he loves. But the cross reveals something deeper: a God who enters human suffering rather than remaining distant from it.

This retreat explores the meaning of the cross through the lens of God's compassionate presence. Participants reflect on the suffering of Christ, the suffering of their own lives, and the ways Christian hope can exist without denying pain.

Through Scripture, prayer, personal reflection, and small-group conversation, we consider what it means to believe that we are not alone in our suffering.

A Catholic Day of Grief, Mercy & Hope

A customized retreat for dioceses, parishes, and Catholic organizations bringing together themes of grief, suffering, mercy, and the presence of God.

A typical experience might include:

• Opening prayer and welcome
• Grief and Loss: What Happens to Us When Life Changes
• Personal reflection
• Small-group conversation
• Where Is God When Suffering Does Not End?
• Scripture and contemplative prayer
• Personal reflection
• Small-group conversation
• Through the Lens of Love: Encountering the Suffering of Others
• Integration and closing prayer

The program can be shaped for parish communities, diocesan gatherings, healthcare ministries, pastoral ministers, bereavement ministers, caregivers, or other groups seeking a deeper conversation about suffering and faith.

Catholic Retreat: The Lens of Love

A more explicitly contemplative retreat centered on the conviction that love changes the way we see.

Participants explore what happens when we begin to look at ourselves, other people, suffering, grief, and ordinary life through the lens of God's love and mercy. Drawing on Scripture, Catholic spirituality, contemplative prayer, and the lived experience of suffering, the retreat moves from seeing differently to responding differently.

The experience includes short presentations, guided prayer, periods of silence and personal reflection, and small-group conversation. It is particularly suited to diocesan ministries, healthcare and pastoral-care communities, parish leaders, and groups seeking renewal in the way they accompany others.

Format

Extended retreats and conference programs are generally 3–3½ hours and can be offered virtually or, when feasible, in person.

The experience is intentionally interactive. Rather than asking participants to sit through a long presentation, the program moves between teaching, prayer or guided reflection, individual response, and small-group conversation.

For in-person or hybrid programs, the sponsoring organization can assist with room setup, materials, and small-group facilitation as appropriate. Content can also be customized around the particular needs of a diocese, parish, ministry, or organization.