San Francisco Bay Area Retreat & Meditation Center
Address
Mercy Center is a ministry of the Sisters of Mercy of the Americas, an order of Catholic women religious. Mercy Center was established in 1981 in Burlingame, California, as a retreat center and a conference center for religious and other nonprofit organizations.
Mercy Center provides opportunities for people to become more attentive to the presence of the Divine in their lives and in the world, and then respond with care for the Earth and service to others, especially people who are poor and vulnerable.
Dear Friends of Mercy Center,
Our campus and labyrinth are now OPEN!
All Mercy Center Burlingame guests must have a reservation and supply evidence of vaccination.
Please call the office at 650-340-7474 from 9am-5pm PT. Our email is mc@sistersofmercy.org.
Please sign up for our email list to be informed of upcoming programs and updates.
Blessings, Mary
Join us for weekly East West Meditation and Centering Prayer
Mercy Center Burlingame
These are unprecedented times. If you would like to attend one of our retreats and finances are an issue, please apply for a learning grant (linked below). We want to make sure our offerings are available to everyone.
“The major premises that underlie spiritual direction are disarmingly simple: namely, that God is active in our lives, constantly taking the initiative; that God’s actions are unrelentingly loving (which is not to say always easy or comforting but, rather, always on the side of our deepest desires); that we can experience these actions of God, can sense the movements of God’s Spirit; and that we can respond to these movements either with willingness or with resistance.
Spiritual direction at its best entirely focuses on helping the directee to become attentive to the presence, action, and movements of God in ordinary human experiences, and on noticing the directee’s own responses to these movements of the Holy. Whatever content the direction conversation may hold, however many interesting twists and turns and diverse paths it takes, the director listens for one thing only. The director “tunes in” like a person fiddling carefully with a radio dial, spinning from one music clip to another, one fragment of speech to the next, until “Aha, this is it!”: the director recognizes the presence of God in the conversation, and then helps the directee to explore further what has occurred or is occurring.”