Words, and Hearts, and Saints

Part of my morning prayer routine is invoking the intercession of my prayer team of saints. I have a standard team that has been with me for I-forget-how-many-years, as well as my patron saint that changes every year at the beginning of Advent, and those I've added as I intercede for several specific individuals in my life.

My relationship with my standard team has been evolving, especialy over the last year to two. And by that, I mean that I'm aware of a change of need in what I think of as their "department." Essentially, I'm asking the Lord for different things.

My team consists of several pairs and a triad: St. Teresa of Jesus and St. John of the Cross; St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross (Edith Stein) and St. Therese; Holy Father Elijah, St. John the Baptist, and St. Cecelia; and St. Joseph and our Lady of Mount Carmel. They are my constants.

I consider my triad my "words" department. And as I stop and ponder, the recent changes in my life where my "words department" is involved is somewhat overwhelming to take in. As my reality has changed, my prayer has adjusted to it.

For years I have prayed that my words would become a means through which God's power could be made known. I eventually adjusted that to specify the words that I speak, the words I write, and the words I sing, since that covered three major areas of my life. I changed that to include the words that I think, and the words I meditate on or ruminate on, because I realized the importance of what I let go through my mind. I've now added "the words that I battle with in my mind," because I had to admit that some of the words going through my mind are temptations. They come with an agenda to get me to doubt that I am loved and designed for intimate communion with The Word Himself. And my ultimate petition here is that my words in every category would arise from the place within me where I seek to live this union with God.

Words have always been important to me, but I've realized in the last year especially how trauma had impacted my "voice," making speaking up and speaking out -- in some moments and on some levels -- physically impossible. Big shout out to EMDR therapy for reaching into the depths to heal that. 

I feel like I'm exiting a season of healing and excavation, and entering a season of healing and activation. "Use your words" takes on a whole new meaning, here. "Out of the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaks" is true in many ways. I was in a setting recently where I was told I appeared very confident, facing the prospect of a task that would require meeting strangers at their worst, most vulnerable moments. Do I feel ready for that? Of course not! It's very unsettling. But I can indeed find words there if I have gotten comfortable with my own worst, most vulnerable moments. And frankly, the Lord has been walking me through just that. 

So our words (or lack thereof) show our hearts. Our hearts, in the Lord's hands, are safe, despite their breaking and aching, and all the scary traffic in and out of them. Our words reflect the truth of hearts back to ourselves in ways that can be incredibly hard to swallow. But our heart is exactly where the Lord wishes to meet us, exactly as we are.

Integration

Writing, for me, is often about integration. Integration is a quest towards processing change. I change frequently, and hopefully this goes in a change-for-the-better direction most of the time. I certainly have much in me that needs continued growth; I don't seem to ever run short there. 

The ending of this last term of my spiritual direction course has me looking back over the last four months, which quite frankly feels more like a year if not a few years. And I suppose I might sound like I am just going over and over the same territory in several blog posts, but you know what? It's my blog and I'll write what I want to. 🙂 And what I need to, towards that integration.

Because while in the beginning of the course, and just before it started, I began grappling with my sense of identity. Then, much to my surprise and shock, a fissure opened up in the earth and swallowed whole a central feature on which my identity had rested. And it was gone. My sense of emotional safety was slammed, and interiorly I involuntarily went time traveling into young adulthood. But at the same time, I was given a precious gift of safety personified, which helped me process this identity-rending. One of these "interior meetings" I had was a first time re-visit of a significant trauma I experienced as an adult. I had filed it away as "things I will pretend never happened." Yeah, honey, it doesn't work that way. 

In the course of time, I decided I really, really liked the taste of emotional safety I had, and I knew that I needed to go to counseling, because it was a contagion I really wanted to possess me whole. And I kept meeting areas within that were frozen and not capable of freeing up in the face of safety. It took me all the courage I had at the time to make that appointment, but I am so glad I did, because we started EMDR therapy, which is highly effective with trauma. I had thought of my life as "a little rough" but fairly typical. The more I looked at it, I realize I am the poster child of Complex PTSD. But I'm getting ahead of the story.

In early March of this year, one of those EMDR sessions left me feeling absolutely melted like butter inside, where my "inner 4 year old" was concerned. This is how I think of the mental space where I remember things going wrong -- namely, my parents splitting up. And at that point, the little girl was very much at peace, and all was right. And then another fissure opened up in the earth, and my safety personified was swallowed whole, and was gone. 

Now this -- this -- was a problem. In hindsight, on the prior occasions when I had some premonition of this happening, I associated it with my death. And in the interior landscape I'm exploring, this now makes 100% valid sense. Because the Lord was now going down deeper, as I entered into this study of and spiritual partnership with St. Therese of the Child Jesus, the Lord was going into the recesses of my soul before any memories found words, and had instead only feelings. What I've learned about trauma is that it is not so much the thing that happened as the reaction is evoked which never got completed. The emotional response that stopped short of the running or yelling or crying or verbalizing or whatever would have completed the interior signal that fired when the thing happened. And when something very primordial is threatened, and a trauma is triggered, the brain essentially cannot tell what year it is. The brain reacts exactly the same way when the initial trauma occurred. Until such a time that the thing can be completed, dealt with, addressed. One of the things about EMDR is that it doesn't work very well when a person is in the throes of something in real time. It requires a memory you can access while in real time you are basically stable. So for a bunch of weeks there, we didn't do any EMDR and I labored through it all the hard way: by living.

But the Lord knew what He was doing, pairing me up with St. Therese, my SDFP friends, and the program itself. All I can say is, the Lord wanted to get to the bottom of my childhood trauma, and He did. I recognize that everything about how I have lived has been effected. I wrote a paper on St. Therese and the Little Way which has revolutionized my understand of God as my Father and of myself as His child, and vulnerability as the way of holiness. It will crush you to death, like Jesus on the cross -- yes. But Jesus rose from the dead, and cannot die anymore. In Him we live a resurrected life.

Something a little strange happened while I prayed during the throes of the worst of these weeks. I clocked about 250k steps in about a month of prayer walks. I kept having this image that greatly disoriented me, of a vast green field. Everywhere I looked, I could see nothing but grass. No trees, no birds, no buildings, no people. For several days when I prayed, I had this image. It was deeply bewildering to me, and I kept telling the Lord, "There's nothing here! There's no one!" And after a few days of this, I suddenly realized, Wait. That's not true. I'm here. It almost felt wrong for me to notice I existed. Like, as I prayed. In this space that was supposed to be sacred and very, very important, to recognize and acknowledge that I existed, because I was the one seeing this grassy field. It was akin to a feeling of guilt. And honestly, one of the core beliefs I carried out of my childhood was that the world would be better off if I didn't exist. This was the beginning of the Lord re-orienting me to truth.

I will have more to integrate in the future, I know. But for now, I know safety in a new way: it lives in me, and I care for it and protect it for myself. It means some things have to change about how I've lived -- but so much has changed already, so it no longer feels impossible. God's care is something I am learning to become aware of daily; to see it, acknowledge it. I don't have to beg for it or wonder if He'll follow through. I do have to believe it when it shows up, though, which is usually much quicker than I'm prepared for. I'm learning to show up for myself in things like making goals and accomplishing them, so that I'm not either feeling like I have to be a workaholic or that I'm lazy and wasting my life (which I've usually felt at the same time). I am the Lord's to guide and care for. I'm in good hands. 

Thoughts from Today's Gospel: Jesus Heals the Paralytic

Today's gospel reading is Matthew 9:1-8, the account of Jesus healing the paralytic. (If you are like me, when you hear this it is hard not to picture how The Chosen rendered this scene. That's helpful, because it is almost word-for-word, with imaginative context added.)

What strikes me in the text is, first, three points of action. It says, "Jesus saw their faith." Their faith was expressed in pressing in to make a way to get the man to Jesus. Matthew's gospel actually omits the detail that they let him down through the roof; Mark and Luke pick this up. Then, Jesus commands an action: "Rise, pick up your stretcher, and go home." His healing entails the man doing something, not just feeling it in his heart or embracing a new attitude. Jesus is more concrete than that. Then the last point of action was the crowd's response: "[T]hey were struck with awe and glorified God who had given such authority to men." They saw Jesus' action, and it landed like a seed of transformation in their souls. Some of them may have walked away from witnessing this without ever deciding to follow Jesus or believe in Him. But for others, it may have been a turning point that changed how they lived from then on. We readers, with them, are left with that grappling.

Another point. Jesus speaks boldly in a way that reveals His divinity to the crowd, but He isn't provoking the observing crowd or goading them on. He speaks that way because He is in an intimate exchange with the paralyzed man. Someone, recognizing his utter need, has come to Jesus. That's when Jesus acts in power. It's for the human need of the vulnerable. Jesus says to him, "Courage, child, your sins are forgiven." 

And what kind of response does this evoke from the scribes? (Luke throws in the Pharisees.) Accusations of blasphemy. Their thoughts were not on salvation. Their hearts did not quiver at the prospect of forgiveness and reconciliation with God. They were judging Jesus by comparing what He did to themselves, as if He were just a man. Self rules, for them. And the text says Jesus knows this and calls out their "evil thoughts." Why are your hearts not fixed on God? Why are they stuck on yourselves? That's the definition of evil, here.  

And so the work of healing that Jesus does has two different effects. It is a work of salvation for the paralytic, which evokes praise and awe from those who witness and accept Jesus' testimony that this miracle confirms His authority -- from God -- to forgive sins, even though theologically this is a big pill to swallow at the time. It is a work of consternation for those stuck on themselves. It calls to everyone to make a decision about which camp you are in. Do I brush off Jesus' power, not out of a desire to reject God, but maybe because I lack the faith to believe His power could do anything in my life? Brushing it off is brushing it off, regardless. Do I feel the awe and cultivate that awe, and start thinking about bringing all the stretchers and paralytics I know (and am) to the Lord in faith?

Therese, again

So, it's about time for a "shoot from the hip" post from me. Why the heck not.

I'm in the middle of writing an essay on St. Therese and the Little Way. I've told the story several times within my Carmelite community about how I was never really a fan of St. Therese before entering Carmel, and when I first approached the community, I figured I should see what all the fuss was about, and actually read Story of a Soul. I read it, and was duly unimpressed. What I saw was a perfect little girl from a perfect family who loved Jesus perfectly and then she died. It took me a few years to really understand her life, and to comprehend that she actually has a lot to say to people of this generation who deal with things like abandonment wounds, depression, and anxiety. I realized she is not at all a bit of pious fluff, despite the popular images of her with her roses and gentle smile and her beautiful, fresh face. 

But this Spring, she ripped into me. Her Little Way hits like Marine Corps boot camp. Forget picking up pins for the love of God. She is after taking one's whole life and throwing it with wreckless abandon into the arms of the Merciful God -- whom she knew with every fiber of her being was true and real, but whom she often experienced as sleeping, and whom she could not feel at all for the last stretch of her life as she died a miserable death from tuberculosis. She had delighted in heaven all her life, and when she came to her end, she wasn't even sure heaven would be there -- perhaps it was all going to be a black void on the other side. She was happy to sit at the table with the atheists, not as one of them, but to understand how some people might actually not believe there is a God; and to "share their bread" so that they could come to believe. She was incredibly brave. When she struggled to feel her faith, she wrote out the Creed in her own blood and kept the copy on her heart. She loved God and neighbor palpably to the end, but she could not feel faith. It was like God surrounded her so profoundly that she had no sense of faith, like not being able to taste your tongue. 

Her physical suffering was horrendous, and the treatments, such as mercury, were almost worse than the illness. That alone was enough to drive her nearly mad. She struggled with suicidal thoughts and advised the Sisters in the future to keep medicines away from suffering patients, because the temptation to end it all was quite strong. And in the midst of all this, she wrote about her Little Way.

And no, it isn't about picking up pins for the love of God because you are too inept to do anything else. (No Holy Spirit for you!) Ultimately it is about embracing your poverty, your littleness, your vulnerability. Not trying to fix it, not trying to be an ascetic super hero, not trying to be impressive for God, but to embrace that you are a little nothing. But here's the key that I'm talking about in my paper: Therese knew that because God revealed it to her. And here's how that hits me. God did not come and say "Therese, you are a little nothing." He came and said, Therese, here I am, and I am yours. And she corresponded to this grace, and saw herself as she actually is. God's magnificence revealed to her her vulnerability, her need. And therefore, she felt absolutely no drive to stop being small. In fact, it was her whole identity, because it was her correspondence to God's Almighty power.

What she received by a special grace, she teaches the rest of us to embrace by faith.

So when I feel my vulnerability: my trauma, the way people I have loved have left me, they way I feel my powerlessness to change situations that cannot be changed, my material needs, my emotional needs, my relational needs, my own volitility, my own realities in a thousand ways -- Therese says, yes, love that. Delight to see yourself just like that. And know that God loves you just like that. It's not that he wants us to suffer or be exploited or stuck. But just as we are -- just as we are -- that's how He loves us. And that's how He bids us come to Him. That's how He embraces us. 

In Therese's day, people were under the pressure of Jansenism. It really isn't so much different today, in many quarters. Try really hard to be good for God, to prove your love, to prove your worthiness, to prove your repentance, to prove yourself to God. Trytrytrytrytrytry. For Therese, cooperating with grace means surrendering, abandoning the whole thing to the Father and trusting that He wants nothing more than to love His little one. 

The little one, dying a painful, horrid death with no spiritual feelings in her at all. So little. United to Christ. And fruitful beyond measure in her death for the conversion of souls and poured out graces. 

So in my ripped open state, I'm hearing the call of faith to fling myself trustingly into the waiting arms of the Father. With trust and gratitude. With the pure expectation of finding Him and being immersed in His love. 

It's not a matter of first decision, or even the thousandth decision to trust Him. It's the decision to do give all, every moment, holding nothing back, with confidence that he's given me vulnerability. He's not given me perfect healing, perfect mental health, perfect relationships, perfect composure, peace, trust, or serenity. I'm a mess; a little nothing, and Therese says, "believe that is exactly who God loves. And run to Him."

One of my fellow Carmelites who also had some frustration with Therese once commented, "This is just the gospel. She didn't discover something new!" That's true enough, in a way. But all I can say is there comes a moment when God calls YOU to an act of total abandonment through a young French woman who taps you on the shoulder, and then it just hits different. It's not new; it's personal.

Of Love and Needs and Clashing

This morning as I sat down to pray, I had one of those instantaneous downloads that crystalized for me exactly where I'm at in my interior journey. And that was this: I have had a severe, life-long disconnect between the notion of "I love you," and "I will meet your needs."

I felt a blaze of wrath of the Holy Spirit, not against me but on my behalf, against this disconnect. And I finally saw, on a human level, how being made in the image and likeness of God naturally makes us expect a connection between love and needs being met. 

And I realized I have never once presumed my needs being met to be something I was within my rights to expect, or even really to conceptualize. It's not like I've debated it in my head you should be meeting my needs, and you're failing. It's that it had never occurred to me concretely that it would apply to me, or really that it applies to anyone. To be honest, it has been hard for me to even articulate that I have needs. I have stories I've told in spiritual direction several times, once as a teen, once as an adult, where I was terribly hungry or thirsty, but denied it as a reflex, even though I was physically suffering and the remedy was literally in front of me.

And this makes sense out of so much of my life right now. 

I believe that because of the dependent nature of babies, we are born taking in the care we are given as the definition of "I love you," regardless of what that is. For me, somehow my sense of what it means to be in a cared-for relationship taught me that if I take in "I love you," it means I have just become the caretaker. Someone telling me "I love you" really translated into "I am dependent on you, and I'm weak, and I really can't do much for you at all." What a confusing message for a helpless child to take in. Because of course, care was given. Basic needs were met. Survival happened. And it all taught my brain that exactly food in the mouth and breath in the lungs was all life was truly about. Everything else was too much to ask. That which makes for human dignity is rightly kicked to the curb, locked out to whimper at the back door until it slinks away under the house in depression and neglect. And maybe, come to think of it, food in the mouth and breath in the lungs, under duress, really should end up in the "too much to ask" category. Because if my dignity can be booted, maybe survival deserves the same treatment. Probably so. And yes, I spent my later teenage years struggling hard with suicidal ideation. Under great duress, it still pops back up.

I chose to be a Christian already as a child. And my first responsive prayer to the Lord's call to me was, "I will go and be a missionary." That is, I know you are dependent on me to do for you what you need, and I will do it. Because I hear that you love me. And this is how I say "I love you" in response.  

We all start our inner journey where we are. And so this starting point for me is not surprising. But to be transformed in Christ is to grow out of where I was, into truth. And He is so patient with me, and knows how to grow virtue in the graced soil of my soul that still has rocks and weeds to be removed. He knows exactly how to lead me. Even when it scares the bejeebers out of me.

Jesus tells us we are to love our neighbor as we love ourselves, and that we are to love one another as He has loved us. I think there's some geometric proof here that would say we therefore must learn to love ourselves as God loves us. Because here's the thing. As I have lived both in grace and in the fallout of this total disconnect between "I love you" and "I will meet your needs," I have learned that I should ignore my own needs at the expense of (genuinely) coming to the support of other people. And I have learned that God (genuinely) wants me to serve other people, but expecting him to act on my account is selfish. That love, i.e. living in the image of God, means to be the caretaker of the world, while my human dignity is locked outside, whimpering for attention until it slinks under the porch in depression and neglect.

And God says no. The way I love you entails meeting your needs. Look around you. You've made it a little difficult at times because of the ways you have reflexively chosen things, but look at how I have taken care of your needs, even when I had to slide things in sideways and keep secrets from you so I wouldn't scare you away. Now imagine what could be if you trust me more. Imagine what could be if you worked with me in this instead of against me. Imagine what could be if we were both pulling in the same direction, and you learned to honor your needs, own your needs, even insist on your needs the way I do. Your dignity is non-negotiable -- remember when I told you that? This is what I was driving at. You are making great progress, but it is time for you to really throw out the old and throw yourself into the new. 

This is where I am at. Part of the flourishing of human (and Christian) community happens precisely when the needs of those in close proximity to each other clash. I learned to silence my clash instead of raise it. It's time to choose otherwise.

In Which I Relate What I have in common with St. Therese

I'm in my very final term of my Spiritual Direction Formation Program. It started with a prophetic bang back in September of 2024. There was a moment on the last full day of our in-person intensive, during a group spiritual direction session, where one part of one line of one reading impacted me so profoundly that I wept for the 20 minutes of meditation we had, and then I wept some more as I shared about it with my small group. The line was this: At the heart of the Carmelite rule, there is a call for us to commit ourselves to Jesus.... That wasn't even the whole sentence. But it struck me profoundly and memorably that the Lord Jesus was impressing upon me that up until that time, I had a concept of what it meant to follow Him. And He was calling me to an entirely new level. The tears were not exactly tears of joy, nor were they anxious tears. I suppose I could say they were sobering tears. What came to mind during the group sharing was the image of Aslan, how he is not tame, but he is good. I think I wrote a post about this at the time. Ah yes, here it is. I am reminded that I realized that I do not control in this relationship with the Lord. 

In 2025 I experienced a couple of totally unforseen developments in my life which picked up my identity, and really my practical day-to-day life, and shook them all about. In the midst of this, I came face to face with some of the highlights of traumatic things from my past and began dealing and healing with professional help, new personal habits, skills, and lots and lots of emotional support.

Then we had our fourth intensive in March, in Chicago. On the last day of that intensive, it became clear that I was losing that lots and lots of emotional support, instantly. Yeah, ok, forgive my coded writing, but let's just say that I have now been moving from the highlights to the deep depths of traumatic things from my past. Same Lord. Same call. Same formation. And now I am grappling with that commit ourselves to Jesus part from two years ago.

And this is where St. Therese comes in. I've read about her Christmas Eve conversion dozens of times, but it is speaking to me in a brand new way right now. Therese knew about loss and pain and trauma, having been ill as an infant, sent away from her family to a wet nurse, bonded there, then removed from there, sent back home with some degree of anxiety, possibly soaked in from her mother's anxiety. Then her mother died. Then she attached to her sister Pauline as her mother, and then Pauline abruptly left home to enter Carmel. So by the time she was 10, Therese had a "mystery illness" which was something of a psychotic breakdown. Even after she recovered, she recounts that she had the horrible fault of being extremely touchy and crying at the slightest provocation. (For the record, all of this is what I can relate with the best in her life.)

The Christmas Eve grace seems so simple and silly, but it was transformational for her and understanding it is powerful to me. Coming home late in the evening from Mass, 14-year-old Therese was on her way upstairs to put away her coat when she overheard her tired father make a comment about the custom of Therese opening the little gifts which were waiting in her slippers, that at least this would be the last year they'd have to do that. Her sister heard it too, and caught her glance, knowing that this was prime fodder for Therese to break into an emotional mess. But Jesus delivered to her a grace that changed her. She writes, "Forcing back my tears, I descended the stairs rapidly; controlling the poundings of  my heart, I took my slippers and placed them in front of Papa, and withdrew all of the objects joyfully." She says at that moment, she left her childhood, and found the strength of soul that had left her when her mother died. She was able to choose to navigate her emotions, rather than to allow her traumatized emotions to ride roughshod all over her. She was not surpressing; she was choosing. She was choosing to stand in the strength she had received rather than in the hurt she had known. And from then on, the choice to love God and neighbor was rock solid in her. Even in her final illness, when she struggled in feeling a sense of faith in heaven at all, she says she was still able to love. 

This is really foundational to her famous Little Way, which boils down to abandoning oneself to the merciful love of God, with gratitude. 

Let me tell you, studying this with a real-time experience of having so much childhood trauma triggered in me 24/7 has been ... a ... [squinting] ... grace... I guess I have to say. And it is a call. I'm not at the point where I've received the grace and I'm bounding down the stairs to be joyful in the face of the beloved one who just innocently had filled my eyes with tears a moment before. I'm meeting these old pains and hugging them tight because apparently I don't yet have the trust to hand them over. But I think right there is the commit ourselves to Jesus moment. It's so much deeper than thought or real time action. This is deep, deep trust in ways I've never accessed before. 

But I know and believe that God does not play with us. I signed up for formation, and formation I am receiving. I remember that during my application interview, I blithely said that I'm often saying yes to the Lord in things where I don't really realize what I'm getting myself into. This has definitely been another case of the same. 

Some sobering things are now on my plate. When I have a moment of dipping out of the 24/7, I'm looking at the sobering things. I'm in a very serious place of there's no way out but through. Please pray for me. On Thanksgiving Day I visited the relics of St. Therese in Virginia, and we had a chat about what I have felt as a call to trauma-informed spiritual direction. My dear Therese is informing me, that's for sure. So, yes. Please pray for me. 

Just Look

A long time ago, when I lived in Japan, I had a dream that has stayed with me. In this dream, I was in my 6th grade classroom (the most difficult students of my six classes), and in the front of the classroom, Jesus hung on his cross. But my attention was drawn to the Blessed Virgin Mary. At first, I was observing her being present to Jesus on the cross. She was so deep in empathy with him, and so full of understanding of what His act there meant, and also so aware of the need of the people around her. Then she caught my gaze, watching her, and beckoned me to enter in to her experience and make it my own. I don't know that she spoke in the dream, but what was communicated to me strongly was the plea "Just look. Just look at Him." Somehow, looking at Jesus on the cross was key for me and for everyone else present. Mary seemed to keep this gaze perpetually in her heart, even when her attention was fixed on me or the others. What was most striking was the point in the dream where we both turned our attention to the other people in the room, which included some of my students and several other random people I either knew or didn't know. They were all chatting with each other or engaged in something and it was extremely difficult to get their attention. They were completely oblivious to Jesus, who hung immediately before them. I remember the type of anguish this caused Mary. She did not force anyone, but she was very sad and searched with an insistent heart for someone who would break free and look at Jesus.

It has been at least 30 years since I had this dream, and I have meditated on what it teaches me regularly. What it speaks to me these days harkens back to Moses and the bronze serpent and John 3:14-15, where this is directly compared to Jesus on the cross. In the account in Numbers, the Israelites' faith in God's goodness was not developed at all; they hardly had faith in Moses who had led them out of Egypt. They objected to their freedom from slavery if it meant dying of starvation, thirst, and discomfort. Can you blame them? Even the slavery we know can feel safer than the freedom we are on the way to, but aren't yet embracing. Then they had another crisis: people were being killed by venomous snakes, and they are jerked back into the present moment by their need for safety. They turn to Moses for help, and remember that he has this mysterious access to God who he says freed them from slavery. Ask God to take this crisis away, they say. God's answer to Moses is to make a bronze serpent and hang it on a pole, and if they look at it, they will be healed. 

The serpent was their crisis. It was what was harming them. It was their death. It was their reality. God has Moses tell them to look at it, for healing. 

And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the desert, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, so that everyone who believes in him may have eternal life. (John 3:14-15)

What does one see looking up at Jesus on the cross? On the literal level, we see a bloody, crushed, humiliated, agonizing man. A human being, just like us, who is immersed in a human experience of immense suffering. Spiritually, we see more than this. We see salvation, the Savior of the world entering into our human experience, not out of his crisis of sin, but out of an outpouring of love and the desire to be-with. 

And the response of the fully graced one, the response of the Church, is to say: Look! He entered your pain for you! Now, you, enter your pain for you! Meet Him there, and receive freedom and healing from it!!

The task of receiving our salvation is not to parrot some religious formula prayer to "make Christ our savior." We are called rather to recognize the crisis of our hearts, what is harming us, what is killing us. Look. Just look. At Him. It's all present there; He's gone before us to get there. God doesn't create a magic world where there is no suffering. When you look at humanity, you can realize that our freedom demands a capacity to choose badly. Jesus' choice was to enter it. The Father didn't have bloodlust in allowing His Son to die; the Son had the yearning of love to not leave us alone in our pain, but to meet us there to free us and to open up the path for His supernatural life to live in us, to return us not only to our true selves, but to divinize us.

And then, what is more, the fruit of the tree of life, the cross, is the Eucharist. Again, we don't just experience a ritual eating of a wafer; we feast on His act of handing over Himself as the very path for supernatural life to enter us, which it does through the faith that receives Him, daily if we want (in many places in the world). Daily, this supernatural transformation can be activated, and we look again, with today's burden, today's need, today's mission. We need this daily food; we are commanded to it at least weekly, in celebration of the resurrection, because Good Friday was not the end, it was the catalyst. Our suffering, our pain, our harm is not our end; let it be the catalyst which forms our purpose, our innermost self, our mission in this world, to turn and draw others to JUST LOOK. 

Just look, have faith, be healed. 

There's Abandonment, and then there's Abandonment

 Right now, I really need the consolation of coming home from Mass in the morning and sitting down to write. 

It's the feast of the Annunciation, and on this date in 1997 I left Japan and returned Stateside. I was leaving a very painful era of my life behind. It was a time of deep isolation which I tried to patch up with a bad relationship which I got swept up in against not only my better judgment, but in an embodiment of what I now know as self-abandonment. I understand self-abandonment to mean a set of learned behaviors that began in survival when a child felt unloved, unsafe, uncertain, insecure, and those learned behaviors reinforced the idea that the child's basic humanity was the problem in the equation. Where she felt unloved, she became hard and aloof. Where she felt unsafe, she locked herself up and away from threats. Where she felt uncertain, she may have become the mastermind that figured everything out. Where she felt insecure, she hid herself away. 

This trend did not start when I lived in Japan, but it intensified. And it unfortunately locked into place a lot of trauma that I have only recently addressed and dismissed. And I chose to leave it all behind on the feast of the Annunciation, symbolically saying Yes to a new lease on life. 

If only symbolic actions took care of everything. 

Today it is the Feast of the Annunciation again. Again I am saying Yes to the will of God as it plays out in my life. I have just experienced a very significant relationship in my life rupturing. I'm not going to write about the details here, but while I have been well primed for this Yes, having exercised my will in case this day was necessary, it also ruptured very quickly, and so I am left dealing with how stunned I am. 

Feelings and thoughts billow through my mind and my body, tumbling wildly, gently, tiredly, sadly. What I know is that I am not the victim of my self-abandonment any longer. I used my voice, I owned my needs, I stated my needs and pursued them being met, I accepted the rupture, and I moved away. I was not stuck in fear, in self-pity, or without an ability to voice my anger or my love. I did a damn good job with it.

I now know viscerally that being a human being is a good thing -- in fact it is a glorious thing. It is beautiful. It is not to be apologized for, disowned, flattened, or dismissed. Human love is typically so flawed; there are always hurty edges and messy bits. We go in directions that bring us healing and reveal our weakness at the same time. C. S. Lewis famously said in his work The Four Loves: 

To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.

There is so much potential for pain in love, and yet God is love. The pain in us is part of the transformation and the mystery and the gift we become when we choose union with God and choose love.

St. Therese in her Little Way writes about abandonment to God. This is really the polar opposite of the self-abandonment. When she was a little girl, she believed she saw the capital letter T in the sky, and she told her father that God had written her name in the heavens. She then asked him to lead her by the hand, because she didn't want to look at anything on earth, but throw her head back and get lost in the contemplation of the heavens as they walked. Abandonment to God is giving oneself totally up in the ecstacy of the interior embrace of the loving God, writ large in the world that reveals it. It moves one beyond feeling loved, safe, certain and secure -- it is an immersion into Love itself. It is also a transformation into a soul of mission of being love. 

Towards the end of another dark time of my life, when I was on pilgrimage in Poland, I heard the call clearly that I am called to love everyone. I was struggling with the loss of another friend, as well as an ongoing silence with another. I really struggled to love even one person when that call came through. I'm in a very different kind of place with my circumstances today. I've made a commitment to love which now takes on a cruciform -- so be it. My name doesn't start with T, but I see God showing me my call writ large in my world, and I too want to throw myself open to God's will, which is love and mercy itself. I am weirdly bouyed up in knowing I am loved by my partner in rupture. But what I need now more than ever is that immersion in God who is Love, and to walk by that trust into new paths. So I say Yes with Mary to the God who does all manner of amazing, impossible things.

Aaron's Lesson for Christian Middle Management

This morning I read Exodus 32, as found in the Office of Readings. A small detail stood out to me that I don't remember noticing before.

This is the account of the Israelites in the wilderness who start to get anxious when Moses has gone up the mountain to worship and commune with God. He's been gone roughly a month, and they apparently were given no timeline about when to expect him back. As far as they know, he's never coming back. They are feeling insecure and scared for their future. 

They complain to Aaron. If I can imagine what's going on for Aaron, he probably trusted at first that Moses' trek was in God's hands, but he also is being pressed by the insecurity of the crowd. The people need a leader, and their complaints start to hit him like demands for performance. "Make it better, Aaron. Do something, Aaron." 

They don't ask him to pray and ask God for direction, and this doesn't seem to occur to Aaron, either. He looks at their need as a crisis and tries to blend his own wisdom and experience with this demands he is now feeling personally. He is not so much concerned with helping the people connect with God as he is with alleviating his own sense of unease. Moses is gone, after all. Instead of looking at the people's need with the humility that puts him in touch with his own need, he comes up with a plan.

And here's the detail. The people say, "Make us a god" and he's now taking their direction. His means? He tells the people: "Have your wives, your sons, and your daughters take off their golden earrings...." He doesn't ask "the people" to personally sacrifice anything. He asks them to make other people sacrifice. Aaron seems to not understand that true spiritual seeking comes at cost to oneself, and that the vulnerable waiting is part and parcel of God's design. Aaron doesn't dig into his own growing sense of uncertainty with Moses gone, and he doesn't ask the men to dig into their growing sense of uncertainty with trust in the Lord. Instead he comes up with this idea to present God as a thing that can be easily grasped. And like he later tells Moses, "I threw the gold in the fire, and out came this calf!" 

For those of us who find ourselves in positions of spiritual middle management, who provide some support to others spiritually but who aren't the leader, or for any of us who are Christian but who aren't in fact the Holy Spirit, this is a valuable lesson. We need to be able to hear the worries and pains of other people without a) thinking we can step in as savior and fix it or b) without recognizing within ourselves the same capacity towards weakness. What we need to do is bring both ourselves and those we support before the Lord. We are equal pilgrims on the journey, nothing more. As we both bow before the Lord, we can then work together to carry out His directives for us. 

Trauma-Informed Lent

I'm not trying to be trendy with this title; I'm trying to share my heart. 

For roughly the last nine months, I've been seeing a therapist who has a specialty in trauma work. Why, you say? Well, as I progressed through my Spiritual Direction Formation Program, I realized I had both childhood and adult trauma that I needed help addressing. Now I only wish I had started this process decades ago. It  has been incredibly freeing, like it would be freeing for someone to get rid of sciatica pain, but who had somehow spent so long with it they no longer recognized it wasn't the body's intended function. 

Both trauma and its resolution has impacted a lot in me, but for right now I want to look at how trauma had distorted Lent in my mind for a long time.

St. Paul reminds us that our thoughts are vital to our spiritual life. "Take every thought captive" and make it obedient to Christ (2 Cor. 10:5); "set your mind on things above," (Col. 3:2) and "whatever is true, noble, right, lovely... think upon these things" (Phil. 4:8) are examples written to three different cities' communities of believers. In other words, this was standard in his instruction of how to be a Christian. It does make a presumption, though. It presumes that people had already learned to seperate which thoughts were obedient to Christ, true, good, and from heaven -- from those that came from and led to disobedience, lies, bad, and from hell. 

Experience tells me that we life long Christians can make serious mistakes here. If I think it all the time, it must be true and good. Right? Right? 

Enter trauma to seriously mess with your mind. If the wheat your life long Christianity has mixed with the weeds of childhood trauma, you might just be clinging with all your religious might to things that definitely are not true and good. But they are so familiar, so worn in, so me that, certainly I must be understanding this correctly. After all, I'm a Christian. 

This is why we have the famous saying "anyone who takes himself for his own spiritual director is the disciple of a fool." We need to receive input from others to know ourselves.

I want to share a prayer we hear at daily Mass during Lent to illustrate how we can twist truth around our trauma, and believe we hear God confirming us in our dysfunction. From Preface II for Lent (italics mine):

...For you have given your children a sacred time
for the renewing and purifying of their hearts,
that, freed from disordered affections,
they may so deal with the things of this passing world
as to hold rather to the things that eternally endure.

Now, I have nearly a Master's degree in theology, but I'm telling you that my trauma did not care about that. I also have a BA in English, and I understand words well, but my trauma also did not care about that. My trauma latched on to emotional content, especially anything that struck fear of loss or demand for a certain kind of herculean  moral performance.

Disordered affections? This meant affection, attachment, and human feeling were ultimately bad news, and being a good Christian meant being willing to live without these, ready to rip them out, trample them underfoot. Yes, I know the prayer really means that a good, created thing like affection needs grace to raise it from the natural level (by that purification mentioned above it). But in the past as I prayed this, I baptized the voice of trauma and practiced steeling myself against my own humanity.

Dealing with the things of this passing world? Ok, what passes away. Voice of trauma says: the reliability of others. A sense of safety. A sense of others acknowledging I have intrinsic worth. What things eternally endure? I have to be the responsible one. The buck stops here. Maybe if I hold my breath long enough I will finally be able to escape.

Yeah, no. 

If you would have asked me for an analysis of these prayers in any recent year, I would have been able to theologically parse exactly what they really mean. But deep down, I would have found it hard to believe or connect the explanation to my experience. 

But today when I heard this at Mass, I heard it differently. I heard that the Lenten observance purifies my mind from clinging to lies and fears. I heard that the lost little one within who clung in fear to herself can in fact open more deeply to love and to life. God is love, love is eternal, and Jesus is right here with me all the time! His love fills me, and of course I'm going to love all the things He made; they're His! For me! And all the people He made -- they eternally endure, too. Some are harder to love, because they are curled up, clinging in fear to themselves, too. But just like trauma shapes us, love shapes us, too. It renews and purifies. We deal with the world by loving. So we already live in what eternally endures. Disordered affection means we don't love like Jesus. He puts things right so that we can. His love went to the cross, that place of ultimate shame and pain, taking our sin.

Freedom from disordered affection is when we allow Jesus to meet us right there: in our shame and our pain, and our sin. Jesus has been there the whole time. We are the ones who really can't bear to look up at Him, as long as we are curled up on ourselves. Sometimes tying ourselves down tighter with ropes made from religious words. 

God Himself will set me free from the hunter's snare.
   From those who would trap me with lying words  (Lenten responsory, Morning Prayer)

You Can't Make God Happy

I regularly take BIG breaks from posting on this blog, generally because I am processing my thoughts in writing elsewhere. But like a cat out for a prowl, I always come back eventually.

I have indeed been processing some big life things, as I've been involved in formation to become a spiritual director. I've realized I owe it to the process to engage with all of my heart, mind, soul, and strength, and I've had significant help in that regard from the Lord who holds my life in His hand, and has brought some major shifts into this life of ours.

One of the results of that is that I have been going to counseling to address some things that I realized I've not addressed before, and that I can see have formed me, and not in healthy ways. 

One of the things that has come up is the concept of codependency. When the therapist mentioned that term, I instinctively knew by how I bristled at it that there was something there I needed to look at. When I was in college, I was involved in a local ACOA group (Adult Children of Alcoholics) with a few friends, and codependency was quite the buzzword. These friends were finding codependency in their every movement and breath, and the whole thing made me roll my eyes. Under the bristling I felt more recently I found an angry reaction -- one that insisted that codependency meant weakness, and weakness is hateful and no way buster am I that person. That sounded way too much like my angry teen self, the same way I was angry and hateful with the term alcoholic, which at that time was synonymous in my mind with my Dad. I was so angry with that term that I didn't learn to spell it correctly until I was nearly an adult. I wouldn't think about it long enough to do so. I realized I had been that way, in a buried sort of way, with the concept of codependency. 

So, I knew I needed to look there.

I am seeing how it has perhaps influenced my closer relationships to a degree. But the relationship that I am writing about here is my relationship with God. Is it possible I have inserted codependency into my relationship with God? That's today's question.

A priest once told me he used to approach prayer as if it were a daily dose of medicine that he had to administer to God, so that God would be okay. That struck me both in its ludicrousness and in its relatability. I should back up by saying that the definitions I have found for codependency settle in on the idea that the codependent lacks a firm sense of identity within herself. She doesn't know who she is without the responses and affirmation of other people. What she does in relationship to others, she does to learn who she is, not to express who she is. She is always motivated to make other people happy, because then she knows she is ok. If other people are not happy with her, then her identity tanks.

So I'm thinking about this: is it possible to go around "trying to make God happy?" How do I know when I've succeeded? What if I never can? What if God is so demanding that I'll just stay in constant stress, because He tolerates me, but constantly points me to the need of the world and to saints who converted thousands. I'm accepted (begrudgingly) but I have so far to go until He's actually delighted. Maybe even in heaven I'll just squeak in to some lowly place because I'll simply never measure up. 

Newsflash: God is perfect beatitude. I can't "make Him happy." Maybe, just maybe, that striving comes from a) poor formation in theology, Christian anthropology, and worship, and b) a codependent attitude. What if I am actually called to find my identity in Christ, to grow up into Him who is the head (Eph. 4:15) and from that place, express what God has put in me (namely, my created nature, deified in Him; the life of the Holy Spirit) into the world. What if building my entire moral life on some other foundation, even the most exacting religious standard, is going to fall apart, because it isn't built on the rock of Jesus Christ himself? 

Well, wouldn't that just blow your mind?

What if my sense of jangled nervousness comes from a lack of faith that God delights in me, that I am His child, that He has covenanted with me in my baptism, giving me new life, and that He is never going to let me go or require me to earn His favor? What if He eagerly awaits the slightest invitation from us to fill us to our current capacity with every good grace He has. What if these are new every morning, and we can constantly be filled with His goodness when we call upon Him? "How much more" will our heavenly Father give to those who ask? 

What if the thing that destroys my peace is believing that I need to give God just the right formula to get Him to be ok with me, so that I can be ok. What if that's just not the way any of this works?

Honestly, I think we could change the world overnight if this lie could be wiped clean from the depths of our hearts. 

Embodied

"New year, new me" came with a jolt this year. It was as if the Lord woke me at midnight and said: Ok dear, buckle up. We're going for a ride right now, and you are going to need a few things for this trip -- here. 

And we were off, while I was still blinking and not even at the point where I could say I wasn't prepared for this. 

So I have a list of about 11 things that I've been incorporating into my weeks (has it been weeks already?), and one of these is from a website called EmbodiedCatholicWoman.com, called the Heart Safety Toolkit. God bless the Facebook ad that knew I was looking at resolving trauma on a somatic level. Sometimes intrusive marketing is helpful. 

At several turns in my adult life, people have told me that I need to get in touch with my feelings. My response was generally a raised eyebrow and an "ok..." because honestly I knew I had feelings. I felt them all the time, often to an overwhelming degree. I couldn't deny that I'm of an intellectual bent. Most of me shrugged off this entreaty, while the rest of me squirmed a bit, wondering if I'm just not really woman enough. 

Honestly, I had no idea how to do get into this "touch" they talked about. No one ever explained it to me. And though I am deeply intuitive, sometimes I need things spelled out super clearly before I get it, because I just don't have the ability to leap into whatever assumption the speaker is making.

Claudine at Embodied Catholic Woman spells it out, scientifically. Essentially, our bodies can go into different "gears" in response to trauma or chronic stress. These gears hang between our psychology and our physical bodies, and the effects go both ways. The key to resolving what trauma triggers is to become observers of thoughts, feelings, sensations that happen inside our bodies, and do certain physical things that can reset us over time physically and psychologically, to be better able to navigate the challenges that life brings. When we don't reset but stay in a gear where we are either unable to deal, or are hyper-dealing, we are left less and less capable of that kind of navigation, and we instead develop all kinds of unhealthy coping mechanisms, and we become knotty, and maybe even sick, people. 

So it hasn't been so much that I have needed to become more emotional as it is I have needed to become more embodied. By that, I mean to observe: this is what I feel happening in my body right now and eventually move to this is what I can do in response. In the past it was more like I feel x; I am x and it was as if there was no escape. So I would just avoid feeling x, by force, if necessary. Like that link I shared above about the "threat" of the women's Bible study at church. The only solution I could come up with was to guilt myself into not feeling what I felt. Or, one better, to accept, with some sadness, the way I am. What these somatic exercises have taught me (and the Lord, throwing this at me as we left on this trip) is that there's a stopping point between what I feel and who I am. And I can go there and actually accept what I feel into the fuller picture of who God made me. What a concept. I'm 57 years old, but it's better late than never to figure this out. 

This need became screamingly evident as I sat writing an email to a friend one evening, quite in a panic. I put my head in my hands and said out loud, "I'm becoming my father." What I heard was someone in a high state of anxiety, doing the social equivalent of desperately reaching for numbing alcohol to erase the pain, instead of taking courage to face it. (I'm currently reading The Shining as an exploration of the psyche of the dry drunk; more on that after I finish it, maybe.) This state of mind was, frankly, modeled to me by the adults in my life throughout my childhood, and had come to be somewhat emotionally normal for me, though I had not experienced it myself in decades. That was the moment I realized I needed what I was about to find in Claudine a few days later. 

Ok, so none of this was what I came here to even write about, but there we have it. Between Claudine and Manuela Mitevova and her somatic practices I am learning how to be whole. Now we give it time, work, and continued prayer.

Confessions of a Closet Gnostic

As soon as I type "closet gnostic" I am anticipating one of my more intellectual readers taking me to task for theological imprecision, so right off the bat I am going to invite those feelings of Precision Demand to go outside and attend to their own domain, like monitoring the Earth's orbit around the sun, or whatever it is they are for. I'm here to speak a bit more poetically.

The gnostic I'm talking about is the one who says knowledge is the savior, and secret knowledge is for the superior elite (understood as themselves), and this invisible realm is where all Good resides. The body, matter, and that thereto connected is deeply suspect. An apparent necessary evil, to be escaped or avoided. Slapped on to a Christian package, this encourages practices such as spiritualizing: when one avoids dealing with matters that originate in the material world by framing them as having exclusively spiritual origins and solutions. 

I'd say the opposite of this gnosticism is the Incarnation of Christ, and all of its ramifications. 

And I think I am still a recovering gnostic. 

It isn't so much that I started out being an enemy of my body or anyone elses, or the material world. But very early on I became an enemy of my emotions. I suddenly I feel like I've been dropped into a movie a little bit like The Kid where I am being invited to meet Small Child Me, or even Young Adult Me, and renegotiate a few things. 

One of the things I need to renegotiate is the reality that emotions give information, and emotions are experienced in the body -- and stored there unhealthfully if they don't make it all the way through to expression. 

I've been doing some somatic exercises lately, and I've just recently started a new set of practices designed to address traumatic experiences. This latter thing was designed by a Catholic woman for Catholic women, and now that I am finally actually open to something like this, I'm finding it very powerful. I have always kind of shifted uncomfortably in my chair when people would suggest, for example, beginning your prayer with taking deep breaths or being aware of your body in the space, etc. It just seemed too "woo-woo" to me. Intellectual things are my comfort zone, and all this body talk just seemed, I dunno, suspicious. 

But what is the case is that as a child, I spent a lot of time in extremely tense environments. Parents arguing, parents divorcing, my father being so sad and miserable, my mom being so stressed, hiding at the neighbors house with my mom when they split up, Then there was my dad drinking, and when he would get drunk, he would call our house, and that telephone became terror activation. Mostly my Mom would yell at him and slam the phone down, or sometimes he would ask to talk to me, and I'd be stuck on the phone listening to him drunk rant. I don't know how many times that happened, but in my memory it feels like a lot. Of course, we'd never know when he'd start drinking, so sometimes the phone ringing was just the phone ringing, and sometimes it wasn't. Sometimes he'd talk to me when he was sober, but those conversations were usually apologies, and they were short. I remember one time, in the midst of my dad's phone calls, one of my sister's college friends happened to call, and my mom yelled something about "operator, trace this call" and hung up. When we learned later who actually had been on the other end, the whole thing became something to laugh about. That was so weird and confusing. 

I remember this happening at least through to my teenage years. I suppose it became part of the normal warp and woof of my life. And it had a lot to do with why I shut down my emotions and ignored how this made me feel. It transferred over to basically numbing myself around other people entirely.

I have a memory from about age 19 that tells me how far I got with this. I had a friend at the time who was in her 30s, and she had two small kids, around ages 3 and 5. I started appearing at this friend's house somewhat frequently, as we were becoming Bible study buddies. One day when I arrived, her daughter, the younger child, greeted me at the door with an exuberant hug of my legs. I stood there, stiff as a board, and looked at her rather expressionlessly. I remember her face melting from a bright smile to something akin to utter fright, as she backed away from me. I had absolutely no idea how to respond to her, and she felt how abnormal that was, even though I couldn't. 

Now, things have changed for me a lot. But I am finding there are some areas I still need to renegotiate and allowing myself to listen to my body and the emotions that do commerce there is not, after all, poppycock. I even have to retrain my intellect (aka learn!) to accept this as important information, and to make some shifts. 

I've tried to erase my humanity, thinking that this is more spiritual. I'm pretty sure my prayer journals from past decades are filled with ridiculous and elaborate spiritual theories about why such and so was happening to me, when it really boiled down to: I'm not managing my emotions here. I'm denying my humanity over here. I'm avoiding addressing this conflict over here. I don't have all of the facts straight over there. It's not all about God testing me and it's definitely not all spiritual warfare and attacks of the devil, or elaborate communications from the Holy Spirit. Nor is it about my need to just try harder or beat myself up over stuff, or any other elaborate heap of chaff I've been able to create. So much froth, so little Incarnational Lord. 

He is, however, incredibly patient with me. 

This morning, I read the first Psalm from the Office of Readings (for the Baptism of the Lord). I found it striking.

O give the Lord, you sons of God,
give the Lord glory and power;
give the Lord the glory of his name.
Adore the Lord in his holy court.

The Lord's voice resounding on the waters,
the Lord on the immensity of waters;
the voice of the Lord, full of power,
the voice of the Lord, full of splendor.

The Lord's voice shattering the cedars,
The Lord shatters the cedars of Lebanon;
he makes Lebanon leap like a calf
and Sirion like a young wild-ox

The Lord's voice flashes flames of fire.

The Lord's voice shaking the wilderness,
The Lord shakes the wilderness of Kadesh;
the Lord's voice rending the oak tree
and stripping the forest bare.

The God of glory thunders.
In his temple they all cry: "Glory!"
The Lord sat enthroned over the flood;
The Lord sits as king forever.

The Lord will give strength to his people,
The Lord will bless his people with peace.

If this isn't physical imagery, I don't know what is. My embedded emotional paralysis can feel as immovable as a cedar of Lebanon, or like the very land itself, but the voice of the Lord currently speaking over me, I know, has the power to break that spell of death, and replace it with strength and peace. 

Seeking God, or Self-Harm?

This morning as I settled into my prayer time, I picked up Divine Intimacy and flipped to the entry for Tuesday of the Second Week of Advent. In a few pages, I realized I have found the key to something I wrestled with for years, and have struggled to put in to words, even after the struggle subsided.

The text asks, essentially, why is it hard to know God is present with me? The answer is that God hides. The method put forth to deal with that hiding is "to detach oneself, deprive oneself, renounce oneself, annihilate oneself, to die spiritually to oneself and to all things" (p. 32).

Leaving it at that is where I stumbled for years. As a teen, and even as an adult in some circumstances, I was pretty adept at things like going without food or water because I was too shy, hesitant, feeling-like-a-bother to ask for what I needed. Subtly I was firm in my opposition to my flourishing and even my existence. Is that the kind of detachment and self-deprivation that brings about revelation of God? Is that death to self? It never felt right to believe that was what Jesus was talking about, but my mind didn't know what else to do with that. 

The quote from St. John of the Cross there is actually this: 

It is to be observed that the Word, the Son of God, together with the Father and the Holy Spirit, is hidden, in essence and in presence, in the inmost being of the soul. Wherefore, the soul that would find Him must go forth from all things according to the affection and will, and enter within itself in deepest recollection, so that all things are to it as though they were not... God, then, is hidden within the soul and there the good contemplative must seek Him with love (Spiritual Canticle, 1, 6)

There's that huge, important missing piece: God is hidden in the inmost being of the soul. God is not hiding in a box or behind a garbage can somewhere. He hides within the soul, at least by His capacity to dwell there, if not through the indwelling presence given in baptism. 

The text goes on:

St. John of the Cross continues, "He that has to find some hidden thing must enter very secretly even into the same hidden place where it is, and when he finds it, he too is hidden like that which he has found. ... This is a new invitation to detachment -- to forget everything, to withdraw from everything -- in order to enter into the depths of your soul, the place where God hides Himself (p. 33)

I'm not meant to learn to deprive myself of food; I'm mean to deprive myself of what restrains me from eating. I'm not meant to go a day without water while staring for hours at a spare water bottle my friend has in the car (true story). I'm meant to forget the knots I tie myself into instead of caring for my need. The true physical, emotional, psychological needs I have are in fact needs because I am a spiritual being designed to seek and find God. They serve my ultimate end, which is union for God. They are meant to be met, and posthaste, but not for their own sake. 

Along with God being hidden in the inmost being of my soul, all the enemy territory is also there. All those lying beliefs about how it would be better if I didn't exist. All of those subtle motivations to pride and self-harm. This is why it can be such a battle to even go within in the first place. God hides among our mess.

But, the beautiful journey is to go within, and there to "forget all that is thine, withdraw thyself from all creatures, and hide in the interior closet of thy spirit" (Spiritual Canticle 1, 9). There it is that no one, and nothing else matters, but seeking the One alone, because He alone suffices. Finding Him, my spouse, my children, my friends, my achievements, my talents, my possessions, my health -- they all fade there. There I embrace the nada. There I flee what is superficial and external, and cling wholly and completely to what is God.

This actually sharpens our love for all persons and created goods, because we can see more clearly what they are all for, and their preciousness.

There God defeats our enemies and unfurls the flag of His love, now planted firm in territory fully ceded to Him. 

Better than a Hallelujah

 Recently I was reminded again of the song Better than a Hallelujah, which Amy Grant recorded in 2010. From the first that I heard it, it's been a tear-jerker for me, but now it strikes me on even a deeper level than before. 

When I first latched on to the song, I was drew encouragement and consolation from it, because I was in a time of pouring out my miseries. I needed to hear that my mess was indeed beautiful, and that pouring it out to God really was better than a choir singing out... The hallelujah, well, that spoke to me of trying really hard to have faith and to stand firm, when all I felt capable of was crumbling. 

We pour out our miseries
God just hears a melody
Beautiful the mess we are
The honest cries of breaking hearts
Are better than a hallelujah

Now it's some ten-odd years later. Now I'm in a formation program to become a spiritual director. Now this makes me weep for the sheer beautiful truth of it. 

God just hears a melody

It's in fact the Song of the Resurrection, which He has written and He pours into us even as we are pouring out our miseries to God. "Give, and it will be given to you. A good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over, will be poured into your lap" (Luke 6:38). It is precisely in those moments where we feel the most pitiful, when we cry out, that God is instantly reciprocating and pouring Himself out in return. It might take years to consciously receive, but "everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved" (Rom. 10:13). 

I think if there is one task of the contemplative spiritual companion, it is to bear witness to God's presence, who He is and what He does. In a way, it is what Amy Grant did for me (or rather Sarah Hart and Chapin Hartford, songwriters, did). The song affirmed to me, yes, it really is better to pour out your misery than it is to carry out mere religious action, even if that action is objectively good (and especially if it is just conformity for the sake of saving face or pleasing someone else). There is a messy point in life where honesty, for a moment, flies in the face of what is right, decent, and true. But the truth is, God hears through it. Hearing another human being affirm that pouring out one's heart to God is beautiful is enough to support faith until it becomes one's own interior knowledge.

Heaven knows there's no shortage of provocation to our cries of misery. It's a grace, actually. The misery itself? No. But the act of faith that knows there is God to whom I can turn meaningfully with it, that's such a tremendous gift. 

In reality, most of the time these exchanges happen in excruciatingly slow motion. I don't just feel miserable for an hour, cry out to God, and then skip along merrily through my life, blessed beyond measure. These things require patience, stamina, and determination. I think it is like planting a fruit tree, and it is why it is ten years later than I can look back and hold the fruit in my hand that grew from a dead pit. This is the spiritual life. There is no quick fix, but there is real transformation. It's true!

As a bonus, here's the official video, telling its own story: 

The Urgency and Simplicity of Love

It seems that the Lord enjoys inviting me to go spelunking with Him. I am one of those people who, if an invitation seems too good, like too much fun, I panic and turn it down, thinking surely if I enjoy it, there must be something wrong with it. I'm silly, I know. 

This morning as I was reading, something caught my attention, and it feels like a spelunking invitation, so I'm here for it.

I was reading Temptation and Discernment by Segundo Galilea, and the section that caught my attention was from Part III, The Demons of Prayer, under the heading "Not Being Sufficiently Motivated." The author says that this distraction is all about being primarily motivated by felt need, whether emotional  psychological. Then, the part that caught my attention: "Above all... the ultimate, persisten motivation for prayer and its solid foundation is the conviction that God loves us and offers us the gift of liberating friendship. If this truth of faith does not genuinely persuade us, our motives will remain shallow... (p. 48, bold in the original).

When I read this, I immediately saw myself as an intense 20-something, sitting in my apartment in Milwaukee, interiorly clawing myself something fierce. I desired God. I had the example of my charismatic fellowship which taught me to throw myself whole hog into studying the Bible and pouring out my soul, keen to confront every painful, broken thing in me. I had a collection of books dealing with "healing the inner man" which focused a lot of forgiving those who had done us wrong and exposing these hurts to God to fix them. I was in the habit of going to church and crying buckets of tears in those days, because I was aware of lots of pains, past and present. My family felt very broken, and I was verging on desperation for God to "bring me a husband," because I felt certain that having a husband was to experience being loved and having proof that I was worthy of love. 

Ah, what would I say to young Marie if I were to meet her today...

I had some close relationships in those days, and honestly almost all of them netted more pain than good for me. One clear exception was my friend Ann (may she rest in peace) who was my prayer partner. We heard and supported one another, and she was even more interiorly quiet than myself. The others were men, and all of these were fraught with problems. My contribution to these problems I can trace back to one theme that I turned over and over in my mind in those days: I felt that I turned to God for fellowship and hanging out, and I turned to people to find my meaning and stability. In other words, I used God for what people are for, and I used people for what God is for. I did a lot of using, and not a lot of relating. 

I was doing Christianity as hard and as well as I knew how. But I really missed the basics. We had a discipleship class that I took in order to get dunked in the pool at the YMCA (which I later repudiated as a "re-baptism"). I heard it constantly, but I was unable to take it in that the foundation of life is prayer, and the foundation of prayer is that God loves us. And that prayer is receiving the liberating gift of God's friendship. To the best of my ability, I was wanting to give myself to God, but in reality I was terribly bound up in myself. I constantly betrayed and beat myself up verbally and emotionally. 

So, when this book Temptation and Discernment talks about the trap of going to God because of felt needs, I can testify that the danger is real. The enemy knew that my weak point was the desire for the love of a man (a natural good), and that I was not averse to putting a condition on God: if He would "bring me a husband" I would believe He loved me. Until then, I was going to agonize constantly and find reason to doubt whether what He says in Scripture is true.

And you know what? The enemy will use other misguided Christians. There came a point where my pastor at that time, who knew a small drama I was facing with one of the only single young men in the church, delivered what he said was "a word from the Lord" for me about God having a husband for me, and I in my deeply wounded credulity took it as gospel truth and affixed it to literally the first person who sat down next to me, who also happened to be the only other single young man in the church at that time. What ensued was several months, stretching into years, of me learning the very, very hard way the difference between standing on the Word of God and standing on foolishness. It's a long story.

But where sin abounds (and people's pastors mislead out of misguided compassion), grace abounds all the more. In the end, this became part of the grace that brought me into the Catholic Church, and back to the basics of the Incarnation of Christ -- the mindblowing reality that God came to live among us because of love. Because He loves us and wanted to live a human life so that we could share His life. 

When we come to discover and grow in our relationship to God it is so vitally important to be rooted correctly. And correctly, here, means in the conviction of the truth that God is love. The He loves me. That he offers the gift of liberating friendship. Some of us get so entangled with so many other things, and they all seem so dire or so important or so pressing or so distressing. The wounds yell. But when they are silent, and God gets a silent Word in edgewise, it always will be, "I love you."

Ponderings from Dear Master, Part Two

Fortunately I marked for myself the second piece that struck me as I was reading Ponderings from Dear Master, which I had intended to write about. I'm forgetful that way. In fact, one of my primary purposes for writing is to be sure that I return to things that I know I have more to glean from, like marking an unmined vein of gold. 

Here is the line, from page 15 of Susa Muto's book:

My faults were at war with God's faith in me, but God was the victor on this battlefield. His perfect virtues gained the upper hand over my imperfections.

This quote captures something simple but central to my experience. 

In January, I tried to write about the moment I had a revelation about this phrase: "[m]y faults were at war with God's faith in me." With God's faith in me.  Here's what I wrote then: 

You know that plastic thing that holds a turkey's legs together? (I had to Google it; apparently it is called a hock lock.) I feel like I had one of those taken off me. But instead of locking poultry legs, this thing held something in me to a way I -- or it -- wanted God to be, that He just isn't. A way I unconsciously was tempted to believe God is, and which subsequently kicked up a fight within me. What I could not see was it was the Holy Spirit fighting to get me out of the lock, and so I put up immense resistence. I was partnering with the wrong side of the struggle. 

My faults were at war with God's faith in me. 

Galatians chapter 3 says this:

Now before faith came, we were confined under the law, kept under restraint until faith should be revealed. So that the law was our custodian until Christ came, that we might be justified by faith. But now that faith has come, we are no longer under a custodian; for in Christ Jesus you are all sons of God, through faith. (Gal. 3:23-26, RSV-SCE)

 What Paul was saying about the point in salvation history when the Jesus entered it seems also to have application to the path of spiritual development. Maybe a better way of putting that is that we go through stages of purification of our interiority after baptism; it doesn't all happen at once. That's actually the whole basis of purgatory and of "growth" in the spiritual life. God has a schedule, and our job in partnering with Him is to continue to say yes, intelligently, to His designs for our transformation. And the "intelligently" part requires that we have accurate information about who God is and what He wants. His goal is that we become partakers in the divine nature (2 Peter 1:4). He is our loving Father (Mt. 6:9). We can need decades of meditation on these truths before they break through into our experience of them with God Himself. Or, He can communicate them to us in an instant, or by any combination of means. 

"Faith" in an incorrect understanding of God clearly is never going to be born of and fueled by the Holy Spirit. I will always be "trying to believe." Say for example that underneath my formal training in catechism, I hold a rather primal belief that God is secretly disappointed that I'm a human woman with physical senses, intellect, and desires. Say further that my religious training left me linking that which is intrinsically human with that which is intrinsically evil. What I'm left with, as an adult, then is that at best, God tolerates me, even though I'm bombarded with homilies about God's love for me. I will be "trying to behave" according to standards of a God who finds my humanity rather disgusting, all the while I'm "trying to believe" that He actually loves me. Or, maybe I will completely buy that God does hate transgressors and they deserve fierce condemnation. They'll just always be someone who's not me, because if I can prop myself up to look better than some vile sinner, that will help me "try to believe" in my faith.

The Holy Spirit will always and only lead us to embrace the truth. The more deeply we are able to tell Him, "I don't care what the truth is or what it costs; I want You" then the easier time He will have in leading us. 

False beliefs, lies about the image of God or His will for us, can in fact twine themselves so closely around good things that we cannot see them. We simply cannot save ourselves. We will have blind spots. Such a blind spot I encountered in January.

And I found that I was fighting against God's faith in me. Wow. That almost sounds audacious. I was trying to believe that needed me to be restrained, like by law, like a criminal in handcuffs, like a woman in a burqa, like the toughest Bill Gothard devotee. This was all humming at a level far below my conscious thought. But when I had the experience of going to confession, and then coming across that one line in the Catechism as directed by my penace, I encountered the living power of God. BAM! "God does not want to impose the good, but wants free beings."

In other words, faith has come. You are a son [daughter] of God by faith in Christ Jesus. To the core. Or at least to the deeper core than yesterday. 

The battle was what I was trying to do because I believed it was my Christian duty, my Christian battle even, vs what the Holy Spirit wanted for me. 

And as I intuited then, that exchange has brought tremendous peace, happiness, stability, certainty, and freedom to my heart. And has stripped away so much overgrowth of "should," or self-imposed obligation, that I didn't even realize I had. 

I remember writing to a friend in the 80s that my life on the outside always looks about the same, but inside, my life is like a three ring circus. I've realized that is because God calls me to be a contemplative, and He's been wrecking and building and renovating and designing in me for years. It is actually an exciting, adventurous life. 

Ponderings from Dear Master, Part One

 I want to draw out and mull over two points that struck me as I was reading the other day. The book involved is Dear Master: Letters on Spiritual Direction Inspired by Saint John of the Cross. It's a clunky title, and the premise of the book, objectively speaking, is a little strange to me. But I leave that aside to focus on these two bits that helped me clarify two episodes of my interior journey.

The first point is on page 4, where Susan Muto writes (in the voice of St. John of the Cross to his directee Ana Penalosa): "...let us be...like the Samaritan woman, who forgot her water jar as soon as she tasted the living waters offered to her by the Lord (Jn. 4:28)."

First, this admonition implies we have a choice to forget something. And having a choice to forget something requires the ability to distinguish between or among things. The "thing" in this passage is natural water versus the living water which Jesus gave this woman through their encounter. Ponder with me on this a moment.

The woman came to the well to get water. This was a normal, daily task, and she may not have been very mindful about what she was there to get, being in the sort of auto-pilot mode in which we frequently live. Functioning practically, but not very tuned in. Our primary energy expenditure is on some kind of survival, the endless cycle of trying to keep impending doom from overtaking life. For her it may have been social rejection, a shame and identity of worthlessness that broke her heart. She'd lost at least five lovers. This defined her life.

Jesus came to give her access to a very different interior well, one that could meet needs that screamed so loud she could not hear them, one that would redefine her life. Immersion into the very interior of God that He was coming to reveal. And he pierces from the normal daily task, into her hidden interior, finally into the mystery of Trinitarian life. All by talking with her. 

She feels the power of the mystery even from His first words. Why are you talking with me? This is so different from my normal life. This jars me out of auto-pilot and suddenly I'm aware again that I'm a person. 

A lot of things get stirred up in her: old issues she needs to understand. Hurts that are real, but at a safe distance, like the struggles between Samaria and Israel. 

Then her personal heart is pierced, and her longing for The One who will come is laid bare. And when The One is longed for, He answers immediately: I who am speaking with you, is He. 

In the gospel, she then drops her jars and runs and tells everyone. But in my experience, where this drama of encounter did not take place in a ten minute conversation, but over years, this part looked a little different. And it seems that this author implies that St. John of the Cross would say this is a real step in the spiritual journey: choosing to drop the jar, and seeing the difference between the natural and the supernatural gift from God.

Because (indulge me in some imagination here, a moment) what if the Samaritan woman had gotten confused at that point between realizing she has just met the Messiah, and instead realizing she had just met a man who finally understood her. What if she had not had this instant conversion, touching into the heart of the Trinity and finding her ultimate purpose fulfilled, and instead embraced the penultimate healing of her sad history of relating with men who either died, or left her, or repudiated her, or however it was the she had gone through her sad history that now left her devaluing herself with Lover Six who wouldn't even marry her. What if it took her a minute to stop at the way station of psychological and emotional healing, and maybe in the process even became inordinately attached to the Jesus of Her Dreams as potential Number Seven as she reveled in the purely natural gift of knowing that human being that she forgot she was, was actually created by God to be loved, not as chattel? 

The beauty of the real Scriptural episode is that the grace of God present through this conversation with Jesus was so powerful that she left completely changed. Grace can and does operate differently, as God wills it, for different purposes. This woman would not have time for years of processing; Jesus was moving in power during His ministry and He had a world-transforming Church to establish. 

And He still does, but now we live in the long haul phase, where He gives the world witnesses to  transforming interior power, like the fire in wood that St. John was so fond of talking about. 

For one who starts out deeply wounded and mired in indignity, there needs to be the step of first even being able to appreciate the natural gift, the natural state God intends for human beings. Children are not meant for abuse or neglect; adults are not meant to be slaves, handing their lives over to anxiety, job, debt, the expectations of others. Religion is not meant to be fearful or grudging or guilty submission to rules and rituals. There is a natural wholeness into which Jesus desires to bring us by freeing us from the idolatry of sin and breaking the bonds of the world over us. 

But wait, there's more!

We weren't just created to not be used and abused. Re-creation in Christ calls us to union with the Trinity, to divinization, to become glorious. The supernatural gift from God causes us to drop our natural water jars, ah, but causes us to see that there's a choice there. And at and the same time the choice is such a no-brainer that it is hardly a quandry. Because finally, love compels us. Love has pierced into our old, broken identity, healed it, and made us sons in the Son, the spouse of the Beloved. The living water springs up inside me, and I don't need to fear being without Him again.  

I guess this says to me that it is so important to know that the interior life, the life of prayer, the life of relationship with God has somewhere to go. To me, this is the vital importance of the Carmelite charism. I probably should write about that in its own post. Suffice it to say St. Teresa's seven mansions, St. John's journey up the Ascent of Mount Carmel, these tell us we don't just come to faith in Jesus and then wait to die. There's growth, there's progression, there's a journey to undertake. God has adventures waiting for us. There's somewhere to go, something to look forward to. And you aren't lost, and you aren't alone if you are somewhere along this path.

Well, point two will have to wait for another time.

Traveling Retreat

I just returned from just under a week of travel, so it's time to unpack. My suitcases were emptied yesterday, but this unpacking is for the interior experience.

This trip really wasn't supposed to be a retreat, in the sense that a retreat is a thing you go to with others who are seeking God, and you listen to conferences and process the information you hear. To be honest, several of the formal retreats I've been on in the last several years have felt more frustrating than fruitful. Like I was always waiting for something to happen, trying to engage my interiority but not finding the connecting point in my changed surroundings, or talks, etc. On this recent trip I did in fact have that occasion to go to another place interiorly as well as exteriorly. And I was able to spend most of one day at the Shrine of Mary Help of Christians, better known as Holy Hill, the Carmelite basilica and the heart of my Carmelite Province. 

I had a mixture of facing anxiety and nostalgia. And for once, these met and gave me a practical take-away. I realized that I cannot always take away my anxiety or grow away from it by myself. Really, the thought that I can or should is a cause for anxiety in and of itself. The realization that Mary is the Help of Christians, and therefore my help, too, is a relief. We disciples of the Lord are here to help each other. And Mary can steer me in such a way that suddenly the grace of the Lord is close at hand. Because she knows how to take my hand and draw me through the crowding thoughts in my mind and make it all seem easy.

I realize that God has my needs at heart, and He wants me to have His needs at heart. Anxiety clogs that with so many other things, taking up so many other jobs, pressures, concerns, frustations, imaginary scenarios, etc etc... I am faced regularly with things I can't control, and I can believe that because I am not in control, that horrible things are going to happen. Case in point: yesterday, the Mass I attended got a late start because they were waiting on a pilgrim bus at the shrine. I had picked that location because it was going to be feasible for me to reach home before the post office would close for the day, and I had books to ship. I noticed the moment I was in, and instead of frothing over with frustration, I entrusted my need to the Lord and offered the difficulty for the spiritual good of all those present. It was a little bit of a battle, but I realized that right there was The Point of why I pray for growth in virtue. It all turned out fine, and I was at the post office with time to spare. It made me see how entrusting my needs to the Lord keeps me free to focus on the needs of the people around me instead of on myself, and keeps me from adding to the misery in the world by my attitude, grumbling, harsh words, rage, etc.

God is working on freeing my heart for the bigger picture of life, too. In my parish, I am like a big fish in a very little fishbowl. The fishbowl is to a great degree being created by my own attitude, but I realize it isn't healthy for me or anyone. An attitude adjustment is in order, giving me more room to breathe, and allowing my environment also to change without internalizing some kind of threat from it all. Growth and change are both necessary and inevitable, and God is called a gardener for good reason. I'll let Him carry on with general management of my universe. 

I also spent a good chunk of one day with my Mom's cousin Jane. Jane's parents were both deaf, and she spent a good deal of her life interpreting for them whenever there was a family function, since none of the extended family learned ASL. I recognized from my youngest days that there was a totally different way of communication in her family than, say, with my grandparents, aunt and uncle, and my Mom. They were outgoing and made great efforts to communicate with everyone. Spending the afternoon with Jane and her husband this time made me realize how much they are both story-tellers. They love to share details, and love to hear details, but not in the way I have experienced with some people. They do not tell stories to wall themselves off or to cling to the chance to be heard or exit isolation. They speak to build community. I happened to see a thing on Facebook right after I spent time with them, and it hit the nail on the head. Of course I cannot find it now, but I believe it was a quote from Henri Nouwen that talked about speaking to build relationships, to form community, to welcome others. Like laying down a path from the heart and then encouraging, asking questions, showing interest, that welcomes the conversation partners to do the same. It's like verbal hospitality. Boundaries kept and respect shown, but openness that creates a place for peace, like seats around a campfire. I want to grow in doing this myself. It was lovely.

I decided I never want to live in a big city again. I also love summer nights and summer mornings, and daylight in general. Streets where I live are unbelievably narrow. When did it become socially acceptable for an employee to use the phrase "f***ing stupid" with a customer as a way of commiserating? Travel is good for the soul. Solitude is like oxygen to me. Quiet country roads are so beautiful. I treat my dead ancestors like stars in one of my favorite dramas, and it is enjoyable to me to visit where they are buried and learn details about their lives that even they themselves probably found boring. Rushing is a symptom of anxiety. 

These things and more I have thought.

And now, to live accordingly. 

PS: The photo shows an open field which used to hold the old apartment house where I lived for five years, and the building in which I worked from 1989-1990. 19th and Wisconsin, in Milwaukee.