Practical Christian Intercession, Part Two

God our Father,
make us joyful in the ascension of your Son Jesus Christ.
May we follow him into the new creation,
for his ascension is our glory and our hope.
Grant this through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son,
who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit,
one God, for ever and ever.
-- pre-revised prayer for the Feast of the Ascension from the Roman Missal

Dogma and liturgy both exist to teach us how to live. Dogma and liturgy are both, in that sense, maternal. As a young Christian, filled to the gills with catechism and rote prayers and devotional practices, my main longing was for someone to come along and show me how to live Christianity. Not just the "doing" parts, and not just the intellectual explanation parts; I wanted it all understood, done and fleshed-out before my eyes. I wanted to experience Christianity lived.

And I still want that.

In part one of my thoughts on this topic, I pointed out that humans have a tendency toward prayer simply because we are human. Christians need to grasp and contend over this not only because it is true, but because Scripture was penned in an age when philosophical waters over what "human" means were far less muddied. If we cannot understand what it means to be human, we will struggle unnecessarily over grasping Scripture's teaching on what it means to be Christian.

The feast of the Ascension makes it quite clear that to be Christian means to be in Christ. Again, I opened this thought in part one. The entire fourth chapter of Ephesians points out that Christianity is a calling to a life which is a gift. It is received by a Christian (by faith and through sacraments and union with the Body of Christ), and it is in fact Christ's own life, present, living, active and growing in us.

What does this then mean for intercession? What is prayer? How do we live it? What does it look like?

Some say that it amounts to lots and lots of words said. Lots of prayer books, lots of devotions read. Rosaries, novenas, chaplets prayed. People know they've prayed a lot because the clock ticked forward significantly since they sat down to their words.

Others say that their work is their prayer. At some point in their lives, they offered their work to God and then busied themselves with that. When they get weary, they remind themselves that there's some greater purpose in what they are doing.

Others will say their love is their prayer. They are concerned about lots of people and they keep track of how they are and do things to help them when they can.

Others might say they simply are vaguely aware of God surrounding them and keeping them alive, and nothing they do can match that wonder. And so, for them, prayer is simply beholding wonder.

Now, what I'm going to say is that none of these is Christian prayer in completeness, because all of these can be lived selfishly. We all have our natural human tendencies which -- I must hasten to add -- are good! Because prayer is rooted in our humanity, there are different ways of it and different disciplines which fit us. But the key to these disciplines is one thing: love.

And God is love. We think we are love, but we are not. Go back to St. Paul in Ephesians. We need to grow up into love, and we do this by living in the messy pain of community. This means that real love serves real human beings in their real needs. Love means allowing the new creation, God's life, heaven, to be expressed through our humanity. It means that our death (to self) brings (God's) life to the souls of others.

And this gets closer to the heart of what intercession is. But I'll have to go for part three.

Practical Christian Intercession, Part One

It doesn't take a deeply religious person to offer to say a prayer for someone. It is a common response to hearing of a tragedy, sudden need or a deep concern. One recent survey found that even 12% of atheists reported that they pray. So in one regard, prayer is simply a human expression. It is by no means exclusively Christian.

Intercessory prayer, or prayer of one on behalf of another, does have a uniquely Christian meaning, however. It is not opposed to this natural desire for well-being of others that we experience, but it raises it up and supernaturalizes it.

And this is due to the fact that Jesus Himself is our intercessor before the Father. Hebrews 7:25 tells us that Jesus is "able to save those who approach God through Him, since He lives forever to make intercession for them."

Think about this for a moment. Jesus paid the full price of our redemption with His passion, death, resurrection and ascension into heaven. But now, what -- in order for us to "really" be saved, He has to be in heaven saying prayers constantly for all eternity for us? Is that what "making intercession" is all about?

Not exactly. In heaven, He reigns. As victor over sin and death, it is His very presence, the fact of His completed act of redemption, His unending life, that is the eternal offering that speaks for us.

This completed act of redemption has opened the gates of heaven, for all who believe. Those who believe are incorporated into Christ by the sacraments of initiation. In baptism, God gives us a complete package of transforming grace. Our life is then a process in which we are meant to open, receive, use and develop the graces He has given us. We all receive equal graces to become saints, but we do all receive graces that are unique to our own vocation. All the gifts and graces work together, though, so that we come "to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to maturity, to the measure of the fully stature of Christ" (Eph. 4:13). To be Christian is to be in community, to belong to other believers, living in real-time with them in truth and love:

We must no longer be children . . . But speaking the truth in love, we must grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ, from whom the whole body, joined and knitted together by every ligament with which it is equipped, as each part is working properly, promotes the body's growth in building itself up in love. (Eph. 4:14-16)

So essentially the difference between a Christian life and a human religious life is this matter of living, growing, and maturing into Christ, in union with His body, the Church.

And this has implications for uniquely Christian intercession, as well. I'll develop that further in part two.

Praying for What I Want

Today I was at a prayer group meeting, a really beautiful, honest, candid time of sharing needs and interceding.

And while we were doing that, I was struck by something. Fortunately it was not a truck. Just an insight.

Souls long for heaven. All of them. Or I should say, all of our longings and desires are about our longing for heaven. We all have that God-shaped void within us and whether we are aware of it or not, we seek the fulfillment of that void.

That's not to say that everything we desire is capable of fulfilling us. I'd venture to say that most of what we desire is clearly incapable of the task. Some of what we seek does a great deal of harm to ourselves and to others whom our lives touch. Some of what we seek is a desperate attempt to deaden a sense of longing. All this longing-for-stuff business requires enormous energy from us, and deadening this is a less obvious way we do a great deal of harm to ourselves and others.

But then there is a sort of longing that we get caught up in, I think, because it feels so holy. This can be when we long for someone's conversion. We long for people to be healed, to have their lives turned around, to even get turned on to the realization that there is more to life than they realize. We long for change in other people.

That feels really holy. But I know from experience it is possible that this really masks other things, such as: Lord, I really just want my life to be easier. I'm afraid of pain, and I want it to stop. If she were different, I would feel vindicated. If he loved God, I would feel more loved, too. If they were converted, I wouldn't have to trust You so much about this other thing. If everyone around me were holy, I would be free from the cross.

These longings can really be about our comfort and ease.

And these are not bad things. But neither are they God.

When we pray, Jesus taught us to seek God first. To set our hearts straight onto Him. What is heaven after all, but living in union with God and being in His presence? This is the ultimate desire of the human heart.

We have to pray from where we live, and while we live apart from heaven we have to pray like it. God wants us to make all of our requests known to Him, not because He is unaware, but because sharing between friends from the heart is how communion is established. So I would never advise anyone to stop praying simply because their prayer aims too low. We need to wrestle with what is in our hearts, verbalize it, be honest with ourselves and God. And after we do all that, we need to stay aware of the One with whom we are speaking by being silent, building a silent part into our lives, and giving Him time and space to respond to us.

And when He starts telling us about His longings for us, our desires will start to change.

Reflections on the Walking Pilgrimage to Czestochowa

Yesterday my two kids and I returned from a four day walking pilgrimage from Great Meadows, NJ to the National Shrine of Our Lady of Czestochowa. I was really excited about it, with more than a little apprehension about whether I could physically handle it, or whether my kids would either be crushed or complain bitterly against me for suggesting we do this.

They both loved it. My asthmatic daughter had not one breathing problem. Everyone was tired, but no one complained. I don't want to use the cliche "it was amazing," because really, it was walking. And praying. And sleeping in tents with a couple thousand people doing the same within inches of you. And lining up for porta potties. And eating more wheat than I have in a long time. And being in the hot sun. And no longer caring what you look like. And thinking a chance for both water AND soap in significant quantities is luxurious. And remembering the pain of not understanding the language at Mass, but experiencing how rich it actually makes you feel to suck all the life out of the one bit you do understand.

The whole thing was a grace, and an offering of love.

Things confirmed to me:

i) The key to joy in life is penance. Penance is suffering experienced and offered back to God out of love for Him and for someone else. Like King David said in 2 Sam. 24:24, offering something to God that doesn't cost you anything doesn't cut it. If you want to tell God you love Him, let it cost you your comfort. If you want to tell God you love someone and you want Him to work in them, let it cost you your comfort. Love costs and love seeks to give of itself. When we habitually live for our comforts our lives become grey and empty.

ii) Witnessing to Jesus means telling Him we love Him, in public, so someone else sees and hears. Maybe it isn't the literal act of walking through the streets and singing "I love you Jesus," like we did, but doing that literal act makes it all the clearer in my mind that corporal and spiritual works of mercy are simply ways we tell Jesus we love Him. It is possible, of course, to do right things for wrong reasons, and going through the streets singing about how we love God is a great way to hose out dead stuff.

iii) Other people are really, really important, but they aren't God. And if "people" take up positions in our hearts that need to be filled by God, they are idols and we are idolaters. Only God can purify our hearts and make them at home with Him so that we do not have to bend to whatever our culture demands as the social idolatry du jour. Only God gives us freedom to love people authentically. And true love calls for courage to be different.

And,

There was a moment when I felt grace ripping through my heart right towards the end of the pilgrimage. We were getting ready for our last turn up to the Shrine, and the CFR friar musicians who were leading us with music broke out into this, sung to the tune of "Sweet Home Alabama":

Sweet Home Czestochowa
Where the Lady's dressed in blue
Sweet Home Czestochowa
Mom, I'm coming home to you

Now, doing this sort of thing, changing words to pop/rock songs, was the first real way I prayed as a kid. It's just sooo liturgically incorrect! But it's such a pure expression of joy and love, in a nitty-gritty and childlike way for me. I just wept with the joy of being able to be me, asserting *me* into relationship with the Blessed Mother, and by extension, with God, just as I am with all my uniquity. It was like I realized I am fulfilling a desire of God when I am fully me. And that is mind blowing.

The bottom line is: you should do this pilgrimage thing, too. Follow the Lord in penance with people proclaiming how much they love God. It isn't about doing anything perfectly. It's about doing it. And you know what they say about how God is never outdone in generosity. That part's true.

When I Learned to Believe in a Personal God

I've often said that there is something in my Christian testimony that will offend the theology of just about everyone. Blessed, then, are those with no particular theology!

Today I wanted to share about the very first time I realized that the Christian God is a personal God who desires a personal response from each one of us.

Oddly enough, when I realized this I had already considered myself a committed Christian for almost nine years. I had indeed sensed God calling to me by the gospel, by the knowledge that Jesus Christ had died on the cross so that my sin could be paid for and I could gain access to God and to heaven through Him. I had even sensed God calling me to bring this gospel to others, and I had given the response of my heart -- a resounding "yes."

But my yes was sort of a yes to the gospel, to God's program. I spent time reading the Bible and praying as best as I could figure it out. I was Lutheran at the time, and I used the Lutheran liturgical pieces of Lauds, Matins and the suffrages. I limped through this, partly because my first response to God came at age 10, and partly because I really had no people in my life to mentor me. But limping, my hunger for God did lead me forward.

But then when I was 19 my life took a definite turn that felt like I had gotten into a roller coaster for which I'd been standing in line for years.

Though normally I never associated with anyone apart from one or two close friends and people at work, I fell in with a group of Christians whose doctrinal positions were different from mine. At the time, doctrine meant everything to me, so the fact that I maintained openness to these people felt very liberal of me, indeed.

One thing these friends had in common, I discovered, was that they were charismatic. I had had an experience that backhandedly opened me to this phenomenon at a youth gathering I attended a couple years before that presented a recording of people singing in tongues. The intention of those presenting this recording was to say "isn't this ridiculous." I didn't really know what it was, but it struck me, and I walked away that night open to the possibility that I'd just heard something that had come from God.

So when these friends got me reading the book of Acts and told me that God still intended for His Holy Spirit to operate now as it did then, I thought well, maybe they are right. In fact, the more they read the Bible, the more I became convinced they were right. I felt so progressive. One of these friends even was from my Lutheran church. She said she would pray for me to speak in tongues, and I was open. Nothing happened, but I didn't really know anything was supposed to happen.

This all happened during the summer before my Junior year of college. Late August came, and I was back in school, in a different city from where all this took place. Then just a couple weeks into the semester, one of these friends called to tell me his girlfriend had "received the baptism in the Holy Spirit."

And I was depressed.

I didn't feel proud about it, but I spent a good couple of days seriously moping that God had decided to give her some kind of gift, but not me. I was seriously dejected at this apparent act of rejection of me by God. Because that's all I could see -- if God had gifted another person it must be because he loved her and disregarded me.

Somewhere in there I think I may have resorted to prayer. And somehow it became impressed on me that there was something I was maybe missing. Maybe it was summarized in that verse from James: "Ye have not because ye ask not."

This was a whole new spiritual contortion for me. My relationship with God, up to this point, pivoted on believing true things. The Bible taught me what was true, and I believed it. I knew God gave me good things, but I took for granted that He gave stuff the way my mom did -- without my asking for it. To think that I had to believe what He said and then act in faith, asking, and believe that He would answer -- this was making my brain twist.

But somehow, I knew I had to be in pursuit.

The day after this realization, it seemed I had to be on a mission. I scrupulously finished all of my homework and then made my way to the Christian bookstore, where a book called Handbook on Holy Spirit Baptism by Don Basham literally fell off the shelf at my feet. I bought it, brought it home, and after a quick dinner I sat alone in my dorm room and read the whole thing (my roommate providentially went away that night).

At the end of the book, it explained step by step how to pray for this gift for yourself. (This is where I offend all the pentecostal/charismatics who insist this can only be ministered to you by having others lay hands on you and pray!) When I finally prayed the prayer, I felt an immediate surge go through me like a bolt of lightning, and I began to praise God in tongues. I have no idea how long I prayed like this, but it was a good long time. It was like being bathed in radiance. In fact, the next morning when I went down to breakfast in the cafeteria (wearing my best dress -- because I was so aware of the glory residing in me), one of my professors saw me and said, "My, you look... radiant this morning!" I beamed a bright smile back at him (this was 7 freaking AM!) and I'm sure he figured I was newly and profoundly in love.

Oh, but it was way better than that.

And this was all because I had realized that I had to ask God, personally, for His action in my life. And I had to believe God had willed it to be that way. This was the act of faith that activated my baptism and released tremendous graces into my experience. God was no longer a force standing behind truth; He was a person interacting with me. I had opened the box He had given me long before at my baptism. Those graces had always been mine, but I had never received them, because I had never really personally interacted with Him, expecting Him to respond.

My life has never been the same.

Just today I read this extremely helpful theological explanation of the baptism of the Holy Spirit by Fr. Cantalamessa, the preacher of the papal household. If what I've written leaves you with questions, I recommend that you give that link your attention. Realize that God wants to personally respond to your invitation to Him as well!

When Confirmation Received Me

I was received into the Catholic Church and confirmed when I was 25 years old. Did infant baptism as a Lutheran, and spent five highly formative years in a charismatic fellowship right before crossing the Tiber. My pentecostal friends found it weird that I thought I needed a Catholic sacrament to make the Holy Spirit real in my life.

The weird thing I discovered was what I actually needed to make the sacrament of Confirmation come alive in my life.

My RCIA was, in a word, lame. It was taught as a class and really didn't meet any of my needs or even allow me to discover what my needs were. I was thrilled to become a Catholic, but RCIA was to me mostly a season to be endured.

However, a long time before I got that far, I made an inspired commitment to go on pilgrimage to the Holy Land. It was something God stirred up in my heart, I promised Him I would do it "someday," and then the opportunity to do it opened up when I heard John Michael Talbot speak of a group he would lead there. I'm not even sure I knew I would become Catholic when I made the decision to go. But the trip ended up being my "Catholic honeymoon," taking place roughly two weeks after I entered the Church.

Our pilgrimage group met in New York and we bonded rather quickly. My spot in our tour bus was right behind John Michael, and he and the others got to know me as "the brand new Catholic." This was my very first experience of spending any kind of extended time with Catholics with any degree of spiritual exchange. All I had known before this was my own personal prayer, sporadic discussions of theological topics with one or two Catholic friends, and my lame RCIA.

After a few days, these pilgrimage Catholics were freaking me out. I came from a land where everything spiritual was invisible. I was surrounded by people with medals and beads who thought sacramentally about blessings and places and objects and prayers in common. My roommate loved Mary to an extent that made me panic, speaking of her like the Virgin was a part of her life. John Michael gave a talk about the sacramentality of geography, and of seeing the actual places Jesus walked. People couldn't wait to touch things in all the holy places. And I could not take it in at all. My heart and brain were on full tilt.

One night we prayed in the Church of the Garden of Gethsemane. I felt so lonely and frightened that Catholicism -- or at least life among Catholics -- was a terrible mistake. I believed the Church belonged to Jesus and somewhere was hiding rich mystical treasure, but I felt like I was stuck in a dead church where people were caught up in a bunch of stupid, meaningless trappings.

As we left the church that night, our priest companion said to us, "Be sure to come up here and touch the rock before you go" (supposedly the rock where Jesus had prayed). That was the last straw for me. Interiorly I screamed, "Lord, I don't want to touch some stupid, dead rock. I want to touch you!"

The next morning as I trudged to the next holy site from our hotel I prayed a good "agnostic's prayer" about all this. I told God I didn't believe anything about holy places and things having special graces, but if He wanted to prove me wrong, He could go ahead and do it.

Our Mass that day was in the Church of the Tomb of Lazarus, and we used the readings and Mass proper to that place. With the readings I began tearing up, and as the Eucharistic prayer began I was weeping, practically wailing. I had no idea what has happening to me (as everyone around me showered me with tissues), but I remember barely being able to bring myself into the communion procession, so tiny did I feel, so peeled to the core. The words roared through my spirit "He that believes in me, though he were dead, YET SHALL HE LIVE." The Lord was telling me He knew all about my deadness and all about everyone else's deadness, but that He had brought me into the Church and commissioned me that His life would go forth both in me and through me. My mission was clear. Be alive. Bring God's life everywhere I would be sent.

John Michael spoke during the communion meditation about how even though we can come into the Church and receive the sacraments at one point, sometimes it is at another point that the Church and the sacraments "come into" us. I probably didn't realize at the time he was talking to me. And I didn't really realize that my Confirmation, my commissioning by God, was exploding into activation at that moment.

And after I cleared the snot out of me after Mass I sat down to collect myself. I felt the Lord ask me, "Um, Marie, by the way.... where are you?" And then I realized. "Oh. The church of the Tomb of Lazarus. Ok, Lord," I admitted, "I guess holy places do have special graces."

And all of this I was able to realize not only because I was in the Holy Land, but because I was experiencing being with Catholics in a sharing-life, community way. When I was without a lived experience of faith with others, I spared myself a lot of pain, but I also "spared" myself the glory of God revealed. That community experience was as temporary as it was real, but it awakened a hunger and a seeking that has only intensified over the last 21 years.

Let us be brave to face the pain and the glory, and not allow ourselves to be satisfied with our utter dissatisfaction.

Looking Upon the Pierced One

I have found that the most fitting way for me to do an examination of conscience is to look at or picture in my mind a crucifix.

Except this isn't about my regular way of looking at things. For example, it wasn't like the time I thought our shovel was stolen from our yard even though I'd walked passed it about six times every day for three months. It no doubt entered my field of vision all those times, but I didn't really pay it any heed or care that it was there. It wasn't until I realized I needed it that I noticed it wasn't in the places I was looking.

This looking at Jesus pierced is an intense kind of looking that isn't as much about what I see with my physical eye or my mind's eye as about what I feel and experience. And decide.

Read the rest here:
http://www.encounter-steubenville.com/journal/2014/4/12/looking-upon-the-pierced-one