Such a Thing As Glory

This morning, new pieces are coming together in a naru hodo moment, so here I am. It's more accurate to say that old pieces are coming together with new clarity.

I was driving home from the airport this morning, enjoying a beautiful, bright sunny fall sky and getting inspired for my own turn to be dropped off there just several days from now. I was genuinely feeling this is good as I hummed down the highway. My this is good neural pathways are, frankly, about as frequently used as is the airport highway for me. I know where it is, but it is far from a daily or regular trip.

A decades-old memory popped up as I drove. One fine May Sunday in the early 90s I strolled through downtown Milwaukee in a state of being fairly drunk on the Holy Spirit. It was a rare moment, but it fit with a collection of graced moments I experienced when I was on my way into the Catholic Church. I did not really have a human companion in my life to encourage me on that path, but the Lord did it directly, with this collection. I remember that the weather was perfect and the sky was blue. I had gone to an earlier Mass, but returned to Gesu just to hear the thunderous pipe organ bathe the entire block with its beauty. Further up Wisconsin Avenue I stopped into a Taco Bell for a quick lunch, and I was overcome at the sight of a somewhat harried mother and her toddler. Again, it was the beauty that awed me. It was like that quote from C. S. Lewis about how an average person has the potential to appear to us as a goddess that we might be tempted to worship. The third panel in this memory was of returning home and looking down at the bricks that comprised the building I was passing. I nearly wept at the beauty of it, aware that I was beholding the work of a human being -- and even as a faint reflection of human dignity, those bricks spoke to me of the beauty and grandeur of God, shining through His human creation.

The glory of God is man fully alive, and the life of man is the vision of God. So quoth St. Irenaeus.

So this morning, my neural pathways leaned into this is good with the delight of a human, safe in a world made by a God who loves not only this human, but all of us. And safe not only in a world made by God. Safe in a world impacted by other human beings. Flawed as we are, we are still the means through which God's glory is expressed in time and space. In fact, that expression of glory is not dependent on our perfection. It is dependent on our humanity. Our humanity is a given, but our acceptance and expression of it hinges on the degree to which we hum with the vision of God.

Then I had another memory. 

I belonged to a church -- we called it a non-denominational charismatic fellowship -- in the late 80s and early 90s with a pastor named Skip. Skip preached a sermon one Sunday which stayed with me, not in a good way. He made reference to a verse that was trending in that culture in those days -- 2 Chronicles 7:14 -- which reads:

If my people who are called by my name, shall humble themselves and pray and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways; then I will hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land. 

We were all about healing our land, understood to be the United States, and it specifically needed healing from the sin of abortion, and also homosexuality. 

Skip said what we really needed to do was to re-understand this verse by removing the word "wicked" and replacing it with "pleasurable." So he repeated it multiple times, that what we needed to do was to turn from our "pleasurable ways." He went on further to explain that he felt this meant giving up ice cream, and limiting his news intake to only include The Jerusalem Times. His sermon was really some kind of private rumination that he shared as a teaching.

I never held Skip to be a good or convincing preacher, and this was in fact one of the reasons I joined this fellowship. I had heard too many stories of people in charismatic circles following their pastors like brainless sheep, and I thought because I knew he was a bit off, that I would be protected in that regard. But I was more impressionable than I realized, and even though this sermon struck me as off, it lodged in my soul like the Satan's tare that it was. Evil boils down to anything that gives pleasure. Pleasure is wicked. It is my duty for the salvation of the world to live without pleasure. I knew it.

The glory of God is man fully alive. It is pleasant to be fully alive. 

It is pleasant to have a well constructed road that makes travel safe. It is pleasant to have a modest car that moves down the highway, with temperature controls that make me comfortable. It is pleasant to encounter another person and smile at them. So many things that we experience in this world are pleasant. When by grace we enter the vision of God, we in fact gain this pleasure. And the vision of God teaches us that we don't grow in aliveness by stockpiling pleasures like a filthy hoarder, clutching them to ourselves for dear life so they keep us alive. We also understand that part of the human vocation is the common good, where we are all entrusted with the goods of this world mutually. 

But my healing journey has taught me that many people operate as I have -- fearful on a deep level that this created world is wicked and untrustworthy, and that the only people we can trust are the ones who tell us that our misery deeply pleases God. Every bit of happiness feels stolen, or compromising. Many others angrily reject even a mention of God, because of people who represent Him this way.

We know that there is evil, but Satan is a clever bugger and he likes to switch labels. This world is God's world. Human beings are God's beloved creatures, who reflect Him. The center of the universe is not more power and money to get more goods to give us more pleasures, nor secret, shameful, slavish addictions that promise a few fleeting moments of pleasure -- until they can't. 

The glory of God is man fully alive, and the life of man is the vision of God. 

God who died on a cross, and rose again. And we follow by faith that same path. 

And as Rich Mullins said, there is such a thing as glory.

Not Pridefully Nor Begrudgingly

I went to Mass today at the hospital where I am now employed. It's a very small congregation that shows up for that, and at the beginning of his homily, the priest decided to ask everyone what their job is, or was. He is one of the Nigerian Franciscan University students, so he didn't personally know anyone there. He was applying this information to the reading from 1 Corinthians, so it really didn't come completely from left field.

But it sent me for a loop. I was the third person in order of answering as his eyes went around the room, and the question left me mentally scrambling. I believe I actually said I don't know out loud before I answered: A Mom. 

There's some irony in my fumbling, because in part it brought me back two years to the day, to the beginning of my Spiritual Direction program. There, as I shared meals with my new associates, the topic often gravitated towards "What do you do?". I wrote a few blog posts or reflections on this very experience of suddenly needing to pull my identity into a neat descriptor.

Today, though, I could have said I'm a chaplain, because I am. But my mind fumbled through how I'm on-call though, so maybe my job is waiting for the phone to ring. But I also sell books. I also drive for Wingz. I'm also a spiritual director. Do I pick the one that earns me the most money? Which one has my identity? 

Perhaps because the people in front of me were retired, my mind raced towards what I used to do full time. So it came out, I'm a Mom. 

I could have said, "This question is too complicated," because that's what I felt. 

But I listened to his homily unfold. He spoke of a job as an obligation God gives us, to be carried out willingly and not pridefully. Able to listen to others. Able to receive correction or suggestions from others. Not wishing you could just check out and go home. 

And at the same time, what was unfolding in my head is how I have defined my sense of "job" since I started looking for one in my early 20s: Being Me. 

It's not about being paid a lot for this task (I never have). It is really about my deepest desire, and something I am really only beginning to own. 

And then what was forming in my head met his homily, and my eyes got a bit watery. 

[Being Me] is an obligation God gives me. I am not to carry this out pridefully (and I've done that -- pride is really about masking pain). And I am not to carry this out begrudingly, or unwillingly as St. Paul puts it. 

You know, I'd been asking the Lord to help me get ready for a good confession, and I think this spears it right in the heart.  

There have been times I've thought about how I would be willing to give a kidney to a person I know who actively hates me. Absolutely, I'd be first in line to be tested. But to willingly and ungrudgingly embrace all that is entailed with being me? To refuse to muffle, silence, oppress, reject, deny the creation of God that is me.... ooh. Wow. An obligation God gives me, huh? That's pretty intense.  

Yeah, I'm gonna have to think about that one some more. 

So, This Finally Made Some Sense...

I'm going to share about something now that I've hardly thought about for ages, and I don't know that I have ever discussed with anyone in my life. But I thought about it this morning. Because it is no longer the 1970s and 80s and I can pull up any bit of information with my interwebs box, I was able to reclassify a bit of my life's experience in a way that was both a bit surprising, and very not surprising at all.  

Maybe you have experienced the same thing. 

I'm literally reorganizing this information in my brain as I write, so please track with me as I move these boxes around a bit.

From the time I was a child of at least ten (I really have no memory of a "first time" of this) I rather frequently experienced a kind of electric sensation that would seem to radiate from my core, through my body. It registered as pleasant and restful -- a sort of momentary rejuvenation. Sometimes it would accompany someone saying something to me, or perhaps a nice song, or a thought. But sometimes it would happen more or less unaccompanied. 

Because I am me, my mind set to to try to figure out what was happening. I was a child; I had no interwebs, and (this is significant) never in a million years would I have told anyone about this type of experience happening in my body. Never, ever. I concluded at one point that this happened because it was how God was speaking to me. This is definitely a moment where adult spiritual director me steps in and says No, that is not how God communicates. But it felt good, and, like I said, it was often connected to a response to something happening outside me. So I thought it was what God did when He wanted to clear His throat and make me pay attention. 

I also had some issues with deception in my younger days, precisely because of my mind working like this. I remember saying to God, "So, if we get five pieces of mail today, I'll take it as a sign that you want xyz." Lo and behold, we did get five pieces of mail. How I approached this was a bit like divination, and I heartily don't recommend it. We need good formation. But I'm getting a little ahead of my story.

At some later date, I thought better of considering my electric shudders to be God's voice, and I set that idea aside. I just sort of vacated the need to understand what was happening, and just let it happen when it did without giving any thought to it at all. But it also didn't happen quite as often in later years.

This morning at Mass it happened, though.

And it dawned on me that I could hop on Google and ask it several probing questions and maybe I could learn something about what this actually is. Like, maybe this is simply a normal human phenomenon. 

And it is, more or less.

According to Dr. Peter Levine, it is the discharge of left over "fight or flight" energy in the body that never got used. It happens when you enter a moment of safety after being on high arousal, and the nervous system essentially sends this spontaneous rush of pleasant energy through the arms or neck or wherever. It is the body discharging stress or trauma. When stuck for a good long time in hyperarousal, the nervous system sometimes down regulates, and this little energy burst happens. And when it doesn't, well, you end up in trauma therapy in your 50s, and then you deal with it. 😬

So, I understand now why I felt this feeling was a divine intervention. In a way it is, as a natural stress reset. But even as a child I could not fathom that God created the human body with a means to simply feel good. I figured it had to be a secret, cryptic message, and one that I apparently had to work really hard to comprehend. But I also have to realize that even as a child I was under a considerable amount of chronic stress. And this was clearly compounded by a decision that was rock solid long before age ten, that I would not go to any adult in my life and talk to them about something happening inside me, or in my thoughts. I feel like I had that decided probably by age five. I realize that my childhood conversion to embrace faith in God came in part because I desperately needed to know that there was something bigger than myself that I could turn to. It was confusing for awhile, though, and so I did things like reading the tea leaves of my shivers. 

One of the things I've been working on in my therapy is to learn to accompany by own frightened little self as she still turns up. And to make sure she knows the real Jesus (ooh, must share my picture). And now I realize she also needs to understand some real science, too. It's ok little one. You can rest now. God is good, and you can shudder and shake and rest in His arms.

I bought this painting in March of this year, 
and not a moment too soon. It has been a well-timed
focal point of meditation for me. 

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.

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.

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. 

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."

A Woman in a Woman's World

Yesterday I had, well, let's call it an interesting experience. You know how you can be going through life, facing forward, living in the present, dealing, coping, stretching, learning. Doing the little advances that successful day-to-day life is all about. Then suddenly something comes along that has you stopping and looking back, looking far around you at places you once traveled through. Small thickets of confusion that are familiar in a distant way. That's what I did yesterday.

But it wasn't just in my memory. It was a concrete thing in front of me, invading my present. 

My parish is running a women's Bible study this fall. 

Now here's the funny thing. Maybe a year ago I visited a parish across the river for confession, and I saw that it was offering the same women's Bible study. I shared it on my Facebook page, being ever the promoter of things. I'm all for it, in theory, and I think I even momentarily looked into what it would take to offer it in my town. 

And I was asked to take a leadership role, similar to what I had done in our parish ChristLife, which satisfied my inclusion needs (aka ego. I was sought out. Thank you.). But ultimately I passed on it. Because to be honest, just the idea of being part of a women's Bible study sends me into the small thickets of confusion.

And I spent a chunk of yesterday spinning this around in my mind and checking out some interesting emotions that it conjured. 

It is intended not only as a Bible study but also as a community building thing. And this is where I needed to admit to myself what, for me, makes for community building. That would be work. That's why I liked the feeling of being offered the logistics and communication job. I even asked if I could do that part without actually going to the Bible study, but no, that wasn't the vision. That's ok. 

Shared work is probably my primary "love language" if you buy that expression. This is something I like about choirs and music; it requires that everyone work together. This is why I tend to take on huge tasks with a lot of excitement -- like the year our Bishop gifted our parish (and every parish) with hundreds of copies of one of Matthew Kelley's books, and my daughter and I gift wrapped every single one. I questioned the size of that undertaking, but my (then 8 or so year old) daughter proclaimed it "a labor of love," and so there was no turning back for me then. When parishes were reopened after our short COVID shutdown, I was asked to buy some rope from Lowes to make the required social distancing thingies look somewhat dignified. Oh no. My daughter and I braided ropes out of white tshirts and figured out a way to keep them firmly on the pews but also made them easily adjustable. That felt so good to be able to do that, whatever your thoughts on social distancing. 

Yeah, so what I don't find a helpful way to give myself is to sit in a group of women chatting about how Scripture impacts my day-to-day life, or study guide questions. Spiritual direction; yes. Theological discussion; yes. Lexical study, historical study; yes, yes. Pretty tablecloths, conversations where words fly fast and emotions fly faster, or women connect emotions to sensible things in attempts to "feel comfortable sharing..." I don't even know how to do that. And generally it makes me feel the opposite of community-built. I tend to sit there with my mouth shut, trying to track (or tuning out, depending on how my day has gone) and mostly feeling a thousand miles away. These days, my thoughts just dash to other things I could be doing. In the past, I sat there wondering why I did not know how to be a woman. Because I figured A Woman's World was what I was looking at.

Yes, yesterday I felt again that jab of feeling like an unwomanly woman. Like maybe I should try harder. Like maybe I was being weak or selfish or inadequate or unholy or rebellious or (insert more) for not wanting to participate. Like I really should. I thought of, and even played, that song by Wendy Talbot from the 80s "Woman of the Word" where she asked questions popular of the day about what women "should" do. It dawns on me now: we think the question "What is a woman?" is newly controversial. (Some) Christians have been making it difficult to answer that question, on a non-biological level, for decades.

In the midst of questioning myself yesterday, I found it extremely difficult to do the work that was actually in front of me. Suddenly I wasn't sure I could do anything.

If you diligently read this blog (😂) you'll realize I've been sinking deeply into the Seven Sorrows rosary in the last few months. After all these years as a Catholic, I am *just starting to sink deeper into understanding the Blessed Virgin Mary as woman par excellence. And as I've been meditating on her sorrows, I realize she has a lot of strength, born of emotional and spiritual pain. She probably did enjoy beautiful objects and she probably did chat with women friends. But there was only one Blessed Mother. In a common way, there is also only one of each of us. I have never been given to conformity, but I haven't always been at peace with being myself, either. It has struck me with terror; it has confused me. But humility says, I am who God made me, no more, no less. I will be me, because it is God's will for me.

This morning, as happens to me occasionally after a day on mental frappe setting, I woke with everything clear in my mind. Following the Lord is not a path full of should. Or as one priest once quipped, "Stop should-ing all over me." One must not should oneself, either. Jesus says, "Follow me and live." He commands, he invites, he speaks to us about reality, but he doesn't guilt us into things, so we need to refrain from responding to that kind of motivation. Ok, I need to stop it. Respecting freedom is super important, and it is grossly counter-productive to Christian life to not respect freedom.

I'm not guilty of being me; I'm responsible to be me, and to learn how to do it well. I need people in my life in order for me to be me well, but I also need space from people, and I can't expect that anyone is going to understand what I need unless I understand my own needs and make them known as necessary. I'm actually responsible to God to invest well the raw material of myself He's given me to work with, to try to gain a return. 

See -- it all boils down to shared work! 😉

*Everything in the spiritual life is always just beginning.

St. Joseph and the Desperation for Consolation

I was chatting with a priest friend recently about praying the Liturgy of the Hours, and I found that something poked at me like when a metal bra underwire cuts through the fabric and jabs you in the tender underside. So let's draw that out a bit and see what that was all about.

We were discussing the obligatory nature of praying the hours (for priests, same as for Secular Carmelites such as myself), and how he rarely or never finds priests remotely interested in or planning for praying the Office in common. Apparently he finds the norm to be priests always pray this privately, individually. He also mentioned how it takes time to pray this everyday, especially if one is to do so prayerfully, reflectively, with the freedom to pause and ponder, to take it in contemplatively, etc. I know he had mentioned in another conversation having been given the advice to prayerfully pray at least one section of the hours daily, and to be content with recitation of the other hours. The thought of praying all seven hours, for someone who is busy with apostolic life, is just nuts, basically.

Granted. Obviously the Church changed the structure of the Hours at the Council precisely because of the onerosity of an obligation to "make it through" huge chunks of Scripture daily, and how it became a burden to crank it out and plow through it all. Prayer, clearly, it not to be about merely cranking through.

What I found myself taking umbrage with, as one who daily drags myself out of bed to lead public chanting of Morning Prayer, at a consistent hour that I KNOW I would never keep up with, were I not committed to this small group who meets, is the notion that prayerful is consonant with comfortable. Something occurs to my mind, and I want to stop and nest on it, sucking the sweetness out, delighting in my mind, allowing it to speak to me. Vibe: suck it up, buttercup. Sometimes I am delighting in my rest, my thoughts, my privacy, and I don't want to discomfort myself by driving in the morning to meet people at church. Sometimes I'm physically not ready. Sometimes I don't want to sing. I switch it on so that other people can enter into prayer, and to help others with the discipline.

Sometimes a beautiful contemplative thought has struck me during the day, and then a child yells for homework help. Or the doorbell rings. Or there is no lovely thought, but there are whiny children who have required me to step out of the worship space during Mass and I have to set my will like a diamond stylus to engage in what is happening in the consecration -- and this happens more often than not for months or years. I learn prayer ain't all about me and my thoughts and feelings. Sometimes I can't access either of them. It is an act of my will, and it is joining to something larger than myself. Sometimes every step forward for years feels like a sheer act of will against tremendous pressure pushing me the other way.

The Liturgy of the Hours definitely is not mere private prayer. It is the public prayer of the Church. Yes, it can validly be prayed privately, but ultimately participating in it is giving voice to Christ present in His Church, for His Church, as a vehicle of salvation for the world. Ok, objective subject covered.

Ok, then screaming interior stuff. I'm tired. I'm tired of chronic responsibility, and I'm tired of feeling alone in it. I'm tired from a sense of trauma as a child, sensing the adults were falling apart, and I should step up to put them back together. I'm tired from having such a keen eye for every problem in the room and working out how I could solve it before other people are aware of it. I'm tired from being good at things and jumping into serving, and thereby training others to expect me to do things. I'm tired from taking a break and then finding the problems growing weightier and weightier when I step away from them. I'm tired from feeling like it is impossible for me to stop being responsible.

As a Carmelite, I'm called to pray for priests. I've got some anger stuck in there somewhere. I don't feel sorry for someone looking for a few seconds of mental or spiritual consolation. Maybe that's because I am desperate for a few seconds of mental or spiritual consolation. Maybe it is because I would really appreciate someone seeing my need, anticipating my need, and taking up my need as his own. 

I had this meditation the other day about St. Joseph, at the Presentation. The rite of purification was for the mother of the child. But the NAB mentions "when the days were completed for their purification," "they took him to Jerusalem." The law required it of Mary, but Joseph made it his. And it wasn't only because he was a wonderful husband and cared about Mary; he did, but more than that, he understood that this was God's will. It was an act of worship, an act of consecration to God. How he treated Mary was about how he obeyed God. Everything about St. Joseph is not just gratuitous fru-fru care, a nice but technically unnecesary extra, even though it strikes me like that. St. Joseph is absolutely necessary for Jesus' humanity, and for Mary's life, even though she is the sinless Virgin and the Queen of Heaven. God provided Mary and Jesus with Joseph. But Joseph had a human will of his own; he obeyed. He gave his own fiat. 

St. Teresa was of course an ardent devotee of St. Joseph, and taught her nuns to be rooted in, focused on, the humanity of Jesus. I'm seeing those two as inseparable. I don't think you can separate the humanity of Jesus from the person of St. Joseph. All I know right now is that is the antidote to the anger I've felt poking me. 

And maybe I want priests especially to see themselves like St. Joseph. 

A Few Thoughts on Fear

It seems the first stage of corona virus infection is the spread of fear. If you spend any time on Facebook or other social media, or even any humans at all, you've already probably witnessed people taking up positions. I've seen people emote, learn, educate, change, grow, plan... and mostly try really hard to keep laughing.

This is new territory for us. That alone can be enough to make people afraid.

This morning as I prayed Office of Readings, I read from Exodus about Moses receiving the covenant from God on Mout Sinai. There was some fear built into this process for the People of God. The threat God told Moses to pass on to the people was that no one should approach the mountain, and if they did, they were to be stoned to death or shot with arrows. Their signal was to be the ram's horn. When they heard that ram's horn, and then only, they could approach.

Think of it: we hear that God purposefully struck fear into the hearts of his people.

St. Irenaeus explains why this was the case: "He made them afraid as they listened, to warn them not to hold their Creator in contempt."

con·tempt

/kənˈtem(p)t/

Learn to pronounce

noun

1. the feeling that a person or a thing is beneath consideration, worthless, or deserving scorn.

As Irenaeus sees it, God was training his people to give him the consideration he deserves. Why? because God is an insecure egomaniac? Of course not. We need to give God due consideration because he is our origin, our Creator. Without giving him his proper due, his proper worship, we are serious out of tune with ourselves and we fall short of that for which we were created. If we don't worship, we are dysfunctional. It's for our good.

Fear, therefore, like all things we can feel, should be our servant. In this case of the corona virus, it is not a bad thing for fear to move us to prepare, if not for ourselves, then to be able to serve the vulnerable around us who don't have means, who won't necessarily be able to care for themselves, and who will suffer. Use the precautions that scientists advise to flatten the curve. Become more aware of the needs people have, if we tend to be on the dull side of thinking about others.

Fear, however, should not be our master, nor our enemy that we desperately try to beat away from us. Allow fear to do its necessary work, then bring it to Jesus, to Perfect Love, who casts it out. Pushing down fear, refusing to feel it, will create the panic that harms. Don't refuse God's servant. Don't forget it is ONLY God's servant. God is the master. Let him be that. Trust him, and entrust all of your concerns to him.

Therefore, put on the armor of God, that you may be able to resist on the evil day and, having done everything, to stand. Ephesians 6:13

Encounter Ministries Conference 2018

I spent the last few days at the Encounter 2018 conference in Ann Arbor, Michigan. I am writing this to help digest my own experience of it.

I almost ended up not going because of a glitch which I admit I had a hard time letting go of. I registered very early on, following a sudden impulse, in a way I rarely do. Because of family logistics, I knew I'd be needing to bring my daughter along. As I went through the registration, I found that there was a registration for kids under 13, and that they were admitted at no charge. Great! I was ready to pay for her, regardless, but this was even better.

But the night before the conference started, I was told my daughter had no registration, free registration never existed, the conference was full, and that was that. Previous communications had not helped one bit.

So, up until about two hours before we had planned to leave, I was no longer certain I would go, or what my daughter would do. Then, I was told a space had opened up, and I could bring her. My daughter (who can become completely unreadable when faced with circumstances like this) was evidently pleased that she was not being left behind or forced out. We went, I payed her registration, as I was happy to do. But it bugged me to no end that my assertion that I was not lying about free registration went unanswered. In between time, the venue had changed to another state, and everyone's registration was help open to refund if needed. I have a feeling the website was re-done at that point, eliminating the option. It just really, really bugged me that I was left to feel like a liar that was being mercifully accomodated instead of someone whose registration was unjustly cancelled.

It is a little unusual for me to get bugged by things like this, but it didn't completely end there. When we arrived, I realized that basically all the staff of the conference was young enough to be my children, biologically speaking at least. I realized I have issues with this generation. There, I said it. As we walked into the church building, I noted people with staff t-shirts shouting and squeeling to each other, hugging, laughing, chatting, singing with each other -- but not really attentive to the people they were there to greet and welcome at all. I questioned one young man about something; he didn't know the answer, but walked off to a seperate room (passing 6-10 other staff) to find someone who knew. He gave us an answer, which we pursued, only to find that we had been incorrectly directed. It worked out, but my frustration grew. I really value competence and serious mindedness. I realized I was in sanguine happy land. Isn't administration a spiritual gift, too?

To be honest, this was not an easy conference for me to settle down into, but this wasn't for any of the reasons that those who know what this was might guess. The whole thing was focused on welcoming the supernatural experience of God into average Catholic life. I am 100%, wholeheartedly in agreement with this premise. Signs, wonders, healing, miracles, words from God: it is all normative Christianity, and it is clearly a way which God is opening up all around us, through a multitude of avenues. God is coming on the scene with Pentecost.

But, I struggled to settle down into it all. I'm writing to understand this.

I think first I need to just write about what happened there. Then, I think I need to write about what happened at Mass this morning. (My daughter and I left yesterday afternoon before the Vigil Mass in order to be home for my parish Mass this morning, for reasons I'll have to write about later.)

First, there's the praise and worship. I've realized for a few years now that I have a hard time with this form of prayer these days. It is what I cut my teeth on in my 20s, and it was a huge staple in my life for decades. Musically, I am not opposed to guitar, drums, or any of that. What I find I struggled with was two-fold. Musically, modern praise and worship is insipid. Forget three chords; these songs are comprised largely of only three notes. Second, lyrically, almost none of it was Scripture, but vapid rhyming phrases about God. Occasionally, there was a nugget of something that could be meditated on. In some of the worship sessions, I knew none of the songs; nevertheless I could sing the whole thing after hearing half a verse, because it was that predictable. It was very, very difficult for me to focus, worship, and pray with this as my platform. There was nothing to lift mind or soul. For one group, I had to go into distracting-voice-deflection mode, but fortunately I've honed that skill in 25+ years in Catholic parishes.

The talks were awesome, and by that I mean they reflected normal Christianity, and by that I mean they were designed to build faith in the love and the action of God in our lives. The buzzword is "activation," and clearly that is something we all need; we need to stop and pray for God to come and draw us in as active participants into the things the speakers spoke on.

I had no idea, honestly, that so many people carried so much physical pain and brokenness. There were 1,000 people present, and I think it is fair to say that hundreds of people reported healing of significant physical issues. For this we rightly give God thanks.

At this particular point in my life, thanks be to God, I do not carry physical pain. I did stand up at one point, to receive healing prayer, because I told my daughter the night before that if they offered prayer for this certain thing, I would receive it. Two things, actually, although for the second I was standing to pray over someone else, too. It fitting the irony of the whole experience: the circumstance when I asked for prayer, people were instructed to come around and pray over those who stood. Not a single person came to pray over me, even though I must have been in eye shot of at least 50 people. Still, I felt the embrace of God's healing heat. I can't tell you if anything changed, because these are genetic things I know I am predisposed to, and I was really praying into the future.

There was plenty of time for prayer and soaking in God's love and receiving His powerful presence. In the midst of these, I was able to acknowledge the sadness in my heart over the fact that my spiritual director is at death's door. He is 87 years old, and very ready to meet the Lord. For my part, I think of the bittersweetness of laying bear one's soul to another human being, and then being left alone by that person. I have gone through this is various ways multiple times over the last decade, and while God has never left me abandonded and without help, a series of experiences like this is simply not easy. It hurts. This hurts.

The one moment in the conference when I really felt my spirit dance was on Friday evening, when Fr. John Riccardo delivered a word he called a scalpel. Essentially he called us to receive God's gift of a broken heart, so that we would love as God loves, including suffering the pain His heart feels. He spoke of St. Francis and St. Faustina, but in them I heard echos of St. Therese's Oblation of Merciful Love, and my Carmelite vocation, to be love in the heart of the Church. Ironically, when he spoke of suffering love, my heart wanted to dance. It is not that I enjoy suffering. The Lord knows that if I could feel only pleasure for the rest of my life, I would be delighted. But in this I heard my vocation that God is already teaching me to live. It is not the delight of suffering; it is the delight of hearing God call my name. And I realized that my Carmelite vocation, my vocation to be a hidden, contemplative lover of God and one who lives a life of prayer, never knowing exactly what the fruits are: this vocation is vital to the Body of Christ.

I was also reviewing some notes that I had actually recorded in this blog, about the Carmelite Congress I attended in November (complete, night and day difference from my response to this Encounter conference in terms of ease of communion with God). One thing that struck me was the thought of peaceful confidence. The Carmelite vocation is one of inner peace, of confidence and courage arising from affirmation of the one we know loves us. Peace.  Frankly, I did not feel peaceful at the Encounter conference -- not because of anything not of God, but because everyone was so dang excited, amazed, astounded. I get it -- these are signs of the Holy Spirit being present. It's in the Scripture. I have been there. I've been there in living my Carmelite vocation. But, there is a process by which we come to accept the glorious move of God as commonplace to our lives, or normal. This was something God spoke to me way, way back, when I was about two or three weeks into my call to become a Catholic. He told me, "I want the glorious to become commonplace in your life." To be at peace, and to radiate peace, communicates God in a certain way. To radiate excitement is necessary, mind you, to wake people up from sleep and to announce a new day.

Really what I am left with is a realization that God has actually called me to a vocation, and that this vocation determines how I respond and interact with other members of the Body. It helps me, but sometimes it helps me in a backhanded way, precisely because we are not all the same. Yet, we all need each other. I need them; they need me.

I have a desire to discuss these things with some of my Carmelite community members who have spent long years in the charismatic renewal. (Fr. Matthias, however, made the point-well-taken that he does not like to associate himself with the term "charismatic," due to all the baggage is has accumulated over the years, and because he prefers to think not of a group but of the reality of God. This I applaud and I feel the same.) I will never forget that one of my first exposures to Catholicism was at the Carmelite parish in West Milwaukee where for some reason I stumbled into some discussion. I asked the priest something about the charismatic movement, and he responded with something like, "That's very nice for beginners in the spiritual life. If you want something more substantive, check out Carmel." I was so, so, so offended and thought he was incredibly arrogant, which I'm sure was simply me looking into the mirror.

But, I guess the point I'm getting to is that God does many good things, and He uses all His people, but not in the same ways. I am responsible for living what He has given me.

And I guess that's why I need to write about what happened at Mass this morning, next.

God is the Redeemer, Even of Scary Childhood Art

The Lord has been doing some major excavations in me during Lent. And I realize it has been awhile since I have freely written about this type of thing. I've never regretted being raw before, so why should I stop now.

Today at Mass, I handed over to the Lord for His redemption a piece of artwork I created when I was 6 years old. It feels like lifting up an old concrete slab, complete with the escaping swarm of creepy-crawlies. But life will grow there, now.

I remember this piece of artwork not because I still have it, but because I looked at it regularly into my teenage years. And I suppose because I saw frequently and because of what I will now describe, it burned its way into my memory.

Supposedly, a drawing by a typical 6 year old looks something like this:

It looks a little too neat for me, but then again I have never claimed to have any artistic talent.

The picture I drew, however, was actually frightening. It showed a child holding balloons, a house, a sun, and a grassy lawn. But everything was drawn with jagged edges -- the grass, the body, the feet, the balloons. The colors were dark: black, purple, red, dark green, with splashes of orange and yellow buried underneath. And the most striking thing was that every image -- the child, the house, the balloons -- were all divided down the middle with a jagged, black line. The child looked a lot more like a monster.

That was my view of myself and my world in the year my parents were divorced. The reason I saw this picture so frequently was that my dad had it hanging on the wall of his house. But how it got there is what I have been thinking about afresh recently.

I remember bringing it home from school and showing it to my mom. "You show that to your father. He should have that. You give that to him," she told me.

It hasn't been until now, when I am older than my mom was then, that I have thought about what was in her statement that resulted in me remembering this picture. Anyone who looked at this picture could realize there was something wrong with the child who drew it. And I can see now that she felt that whatever was wrong with me was to be blamed on my father. And by giving him the picture, she hoped he would wake up and take responsibility for me emotionally, or at least feel the weight of this scary thing coming out of the mind of a little girl.

My father was a man with many issues of his own. Her hopes did not come to fruition. That I have known, and I long ago addressed it.

What I have not fully seen until now was the depth of my emotional need at that age (and beyond), and the simple fact that it was not met by anyone. My mother saw something was wrong, and simply did not address it beyond trying to pass it off onto my father. Later, there wasn't even that attempt. I very quickly learned to stop making my needs known to anyone.

All my life I have struggled with whether it is right to say things that sound accusatory about my own family. But I realize that stating objective facts about what happened is simply facing truth. Facing truth is always a good thing, and I can leave intentions and motives aside, as they are not mine to judge or to fear.

I've also learned that a name has been given to this lack of parental emotional response: Childhood Emotional Neglect. And there are a whole slew of emotional attunement issues related to this missing piece. For years I've worked on addressing many of them, including the difficulty I have getting angry, and taking my own feelings seriously.

A while back, I had a friend in her 80s confide to me that God was healing her of issues with her childhood, so I guess I'll just accept that life is always this way.Whether we seek truth and healing, or we hide in the dark, something won't feel good. I would rather cry over an old pain and receive healing than live adult life numb to others and my surroundings.

It takes courage to seek healing. But God really does heal. Seeking wholeness is worth facing the pain involved.

Time to Stop Being a Baby

I don't generally make big penitential plans for myself during Lent. It seems the Lord likes to introduce His own program for me, and for my part I try to enter that. Right now it seems a big theme is to examine why I interact with people the way I do. This post is not a report; it is a dive. I'm going to dive into it and see where I end up.

Recently I heard a news report about the rising percentage of kids who show up in college and have significant difficulty dealing with stresses. Everything just seems to be "too much" and they don't have the coping skills to handle things and they come unglued.

Since my son has entered high school, I have thought to myself repeatedly how stress and anxiety became my motivators. When I didn't understand Algebra-Trig, it actually kept me awake at night with worry. I remember getting tears in my eyes with anxiety over my first physics test. It was enough to energize me to struggle and try hard, and it also taught me the joy of doing classwork that came easy to me and allowed me to express myself, like literature and writing. Anxiety would push me over the hump of Impossible to at least fall on my face on the other side.

Academic work was not the origin of my anxiety. I was a good student and for the most part got good grades without putting in much effort (which is a seperate problem). My anxiety was more a response to my sense that my world had gotten ripped to shreds through my parents' divorce and the alcoholism and mental illness in my family. Talking these things through was not yet fashionable when I was young, so in a terrible anti-Marian sense I kept all these sadnesses and pondered them in my heart. And I quickly learned that one of the less destructive ways I could deal with anxiety was to go about trying to solve all the problems I saw, especially the ones that weren't mine. I would take on more and more responsibility for things as a way of keeping chaos at bay.

This made me popular with employers, because when I finished my work, I would go looking for other unfinished work to help with. I would use spare time brainstorming contributions to others' projects. As a child, I would clean the house instead of worrying that the visitor my mom was expecting would have to see it as it was. When I wasn't sure she would be home on time to take me to my school concert, I would throw myself into a flurry of activity to make the time go faster.

(The interesting thing is that even though doctors pointed out to me that I was extremely tense and didn't seem to know what "relax this muscle" meant, it wasn't until I started cantoring for Masses that I realized I had any issues with anxiety. That's how natural it was to me.)

So, back to the kids in schools. Lots of them have Gen X parents. Lots of Gen Xers have stories like mine: lives ripped apart, coping skills often had to be on steroids. What is the natural expression of "love" in this environment? Here, let me do that for you. I'll take care of it.

Guilt says that kind of stuff. One feels at fault, so one tries to make amends -- for everything. And the offspring of such over-carers remain infantile, unable to cope with stressors.

Recently I found myself with a pain I didn't expect. I've been struggling with one of my kid's morning rising patterns, but have set a deadline by which time a goal has to be reached for a desired outcome to be possible for him. And to work towards it, I recently announced I would only issue at maximum one wake up call to him, and then if he was late to his classes, it would be on his head. My first day of working with this, I suddenly saw that even though I hate repeatedly nagging him, pledging to stop filled me with great anxiety. Somehow, my personal sense of safety and peace was shaken when I just left his responsibility to him and let him bear the weight of it.

But you know what? He did it. I had to sweat for awhile, but he hasn't been late yet. Oh, it's only been two days, but, you know...

Facing this in myself does not make me happy, that's for sure.

I've been thinking about all the references all over Paul's letters where he talks about Christians' need to grow up, to stop being mere babies, to go on to maturity. And for me, yeah, I'm down with that. I want to be super-Christian. Sure. But I realize that no one is ever super-Christian off in their own private world. Not even a hermit. By penance and by teaching and by interacting with people, Christians are to exhort others to grow up and stop being babies. And you know what? That provokes tantrums and hurt and accusations and bad feelings, and just a whole lot of loud complaints that growing up just is too much to ask. Provoking that is about as much fun as a room of noisy, crying toddlers. The good thing about toddlers is that you know in 20 years they'll be chronological adults. We have no such guarantee about Christians.

Love does not mean swallowing up all hurt so that other people can be indulged. I could swallow until I burst and it would never please or satisfy another person, and I'm left with an aching, hurting belly. Love means speaking the truth and letting Jesus fill both of us, even if it hurts both of us.

Well, I guess all that Scripture is the next thing I need to dive into.

An INTP Contemplates a Social Invitation

This morning I received an invitation from a friend to a get-together. The invitation was extended to a group of women who make up pretty much the closest friends I have. We would pray, we would eat, we would chat and spend a few hours soaking up each others' friendship to heal our souls.

I read it and I felt the cold chill go down my back. My muscles tensed. I breathed deeply.

I was just about to email the friend back with a question, not exactly a commitment, but trying to work my way there, when I read it again. Carpooling strongly suggested? Escape routes blocked! I put my phone down. Ok. Calm down. You can do this.

Had to stop for a moment of self-awareness. It helps me to step back and look at personal situations objectively. I imagined myself explaining what I felt at the moment to someone else. I imagined what contrast I could paint to put someone into my shoes.

Suppose I orchestrated an event that would foster bonds of friendship, something that would bring a deep sense of value and meaning to me and help me look at those other women as comrades-in-arms. What would it look like?

Marie invites you to a prayer solidarity gathering. We will gather from 2-4 am in the garden beside the Cathedral downtown. We will kneel on the ground outside, mostly in silence, with the exception of perhaps chanting a psalm or two together. We will pray silently for each other's needs, but especially in reparation for sins committed in the downtown at night and for the conversion of the town.

As I ran that over in my head, my first thought was "They would think I was being sarcastic." But I knew I wasn't. I imagined what words would spring forth from people to describe such a thing.

Dangerous. Difficult. Painful. Brave. Sacrificial. Unreasonable. (unvoiced: Weird)

So I kind of smiled inside. Yes, Imaginary Voice of my friend. You understand. You understand what it feels like for me to go to a women's chitchat lunch.

But no, I thought, I couldn't really take myself seriously, so why should anyone else, unless I was really prepared to do such a thing. I mulled this over in my head awhile.

And then it struck me. I already do this. Except I don't pray outside at the Cathedral. (Yet. I like this idea.) I pray in a Eucharistic chapel once a week at 2am. And it is only for an hour, an hour that always seems to go by way too fast. And it dawned on me that I could invite people to join me, and we could indeed work on growing this type of bond as we intercede for mutual needs and for conversion.

This would totally work for me as "friendship that heals the soul." To me, bonds really form through sacrifice, and good bonds form through mutual sacrifice. Ironically, it doesn't feel like quite as much of a sacrifice to pray in the middle of the night as it does to do the chitchat thing, and this probably has something to do with why I have a sense of a bond with some of these women in the first place, regardless of whether it is reciprocated, because it costs me something to "chat".

But there's something about that sacrifice. It needs to be an act freely chosen and carried out, not just an act I survive because I can't avoid it. That doesn't build up love. And sometimes I treat social settings like things I survive, because it feels like I imagine people would feel about kneeling outside in the middle of the night in silence. I can easily think of 300 things I'd rather do!

An act of love really has to come from inside me. There's no use any of us pretending, and there's no use any of us being afraid to love in the ways peculiar to us.

So, maybe I will go to the chatfest. (I haven't firmly decided yet.) After all, I can study how it all works. But maybe I will invite them to join my holy hour once a month, too. And who knows; someone might even seriously think about it.

The Mercy of God

Today God calls me back again to a message He has been repeating to me in the last few months in particular: Mercy.

I love this image of Jesus Christ, King of Mercy. He is flanked by angels who both adore His mercy and who are ready to do His bidding to mediate this mercy to His children, for whom it is intended.

Today I am reminded that I am dependent on God's mercy, and that mercy is the currency I must use in all of my interactions with other people, even in my thoughts of them.

Several weeks ago I wrote about my annual retreat, and in particular one oft-repeated quote from Pope Francis about how God does not meet us in the center of our certainties, but on our peripheries, on the fringes, in our sins, in our places of vulnerability. I remember the first time I heard a preacher say that God created us with strengths and weaknesses, on purpose. I was a little appalled. Weakness sounded too much like sin to me, and I couldn't grasp God making us with weaknesses on purpose. But that was largely because I could not bear to face my own weaknesses, because I felt like I was the only defense I had. If I admitted weakness, I may as well just lay down and die.

I missed the fact that God has indeed created us as communitarian souls. God created me with a weakness because He created you with a related strength (and vice versa) and He means for us to serve one another. This is the new order of the kingdom of God.

When I am looking down my nose at someone, or when I cannot see past an arrogance that flommoxes me or some other injustice perpetuated, I forget that the basic definition of a person is a walking, aching need. We are all gaping needs for God's mercy. Yes, some of us put a lot of energy into self- and other-deception to say "I don't need love and mercy, thank you very much." No one likes to poke around in things that are uncomfortable. (I take that back. I actually do.) And it is tempting sometimes to use mercy like a club: I can see that you are an arrogant son-of-a-bitch and you have a lot of hurt in your soul, so you really need mercy, you lousy excuse for a human being. But somewhere around this moment, that parable about the unmerciful servant clears its throat and reminds me that I only know how to give mercy by receiving mercy. And if I'm not receiving mercy, I'm out of the flow of God's life. Some individuals, shall we say, have a capacity for deepening our need for mercy by making us confront ugly tendencies in our hearts. Thanks be to God for those called to be our irritants.

And thanks be to God for His unfathomable mercy.

A Sigh, A Complaint

I want to complain a little bit. I'm not very good at that, so we'll see how it goes.

Way back long ago when I first discovered how hard it was for me to talk, I blamed it on the fact that all I knew how to do, all I wanted to do, was to reach down into other people's guts, and basically no one appreciated that.

It's amazing how accurate that still strikes me today, even though I've gone through layers of dismantling the untruths in that. I struggled to talk because of other reasons too: and the two biggest were my pride and the degree to which I suppressed my emotions. There's probably no separating those two things, at least not for me.

As I look back through mental snapshots of my spiritual formation, I see things like learning to chit chat, realizing the value of a trip to the mall or a museum for the sake of passing time among people, the joy of understanding movie references, and other little signs of love I picked up from being part of the human race. Silent retreats and the profundity of discovering prayer? Yeah, sure, but that's the easy stuff. To really open my heart to people in a group of people: that stuff was downright miraculous, transformative and healing.

Ok, wait. I'm supposed to be complaining.

I'm still the person who really only feels designed to reach down into people's guts and pull up. Maybe the way I want to complain is to God for designing me this way. I get myself into this wanting-to-complain spot not infrequently. First of all, if I do something, I want to be good at it. But I've learned this is not a something that I get to direct, or a talent I can choose to hone. Other people's guts, after all, are holy ground. One may not go there by the force of one's own will. There's obviously quite a bit about this I don't get yet.

However, secondly, I do sometimes find that I am in the midst of someone's guts when I didn't realize I had gotten there. And I have learned that it is really, really hard for people to respond to this sort of thing without a strong emotion. People's strong emotions tend to freak me out, mostly because I'm always so surprised and bewildered by the experience. I'm learning I have this ability to make people really upset. It's not even, I think, so much that *I* upset them as they are upset by what is getting pulled out of them. Subsequently, people seem to get to feeling either angry, guilty, impotent, or (perhaps scariest of all) deeply moved, all of which does not make people rush to embrace me and cry: "Please! Pull more of my guts out cuz I love feeling all of this confusing inner turmoil!"

But you know what? I'm just a normal person, and I'd love to have normal friendships that go beyond stupid fluff, though I respect the value of stupid fluff. I mean, like everyone, I just want to be natural and at ease and be so with others where that works.

Just got a teeny, tiny hint of despair wafting up in that department. Hope is wearing thin.

But here are a few things I'm learning: God is calling me to a prophetic life. It's the normal call of a Christian, but there's something else there, too. That explains why God has been after my mouth since my young adulthood. Also, God is calling me to live in faith. This faith is not the intellectual thing about a list beliefs. This is about seeing and speaking forth that which is not yet seen with physical eyes. This has a lot to do with invisible realities.

A little aside on this point: This morning as I was praying I was presenting some stuff to God, some struggles, and admitting that I couldn't tell what the source of the struggle was. I laid out the options I could think of. I prayed on, and it came to my mind that I recently had a very small business interaction with someone I discovered was quite involved in the occult. This was via computer, and in this business I have an avatar of Pope Francis for my account. The way it occurred to me was this: I say little prayers of blessing on people randomly throughout my day, true. Well, people who are dedicated to evil are going to do the same, especially when they see the Pope smiling at them. So I prayed against any hexes or curses that may have come my way, and suddenly the struggle I had presented to God became so easy to understand, and was wiped away as easily as dust.

Inside, this kind of thing gives me a sense of understanding and confidence. Socially, it is just one more thing I scratch off my list of casual conversation over non-existent tea with my non-existent friends.

So I blog instead, since writing is what I have always done.

C'est la vie.

I know I am not stuck in a bleak spot. I know I am before, in time, something good and significant. I know these things by faith. I just don't really know how to like being here. (There, I think that sounds like a complaint, now. And now I will tell myself to buck up, because being able to like things is not all that important.)

A Pissed Off, Cranky Post (which makes me feel better)

I am cranky. I feel like I need to shoot from the hip just now, verbally, if nothing else to just try to loosen my crankihood out.

Honestly, sometimes understanding things is worse than not understanding things. I mean, I have a certain comfort level with the anguish of wondering. That's weird in and of itself. But there are times, like I feel right now, where it is the things I understand that make life less pleasant.

I'm feeling a very high level of frustration with my way of social interaction. I feel like God is bound and determined to sequester me in certain ways. Lately, about the only time I feel deeply and profoundly accompanied is when I am immersed in reading the lives or works of the Carmelite saints. I feel more certain of my Carmelite vocation than I am of my name or my desire for my next breath. But when it comes to dealing with flesh and blood human beings, it seems the more I try to put myself into it, the more I feel myself cocooning. Reflexively. Then there are the people who seem to be to my life like a stick in my eye. Then, I see people turning to me for a comfort, a refuge, and I clunkily am about as comforting and refuge-like as a chain link fence. I am so bad at faking "consoling."

Faking is not something I want to get good at. But it seems clear to me that I must exude something like porcupine bristles to people. Maybe it is just my perception, but I feel like I propel people away from me.

Humor and happiness attract people, and you know what, I usually am filled with these, visibly. I don't feel particularly depressed or upset or angry. I just feel.... sequestered. It seems my efforts at moving towards people just don't work, and haven't worked. I know that I am called to pray. I'm still in the midst of that novena that I started January 1. I have to say, if there is anything that makes me mad right now, it is praying for that person. Maybe that is the source of all my upset. I am now in the stage of thanking God for all the graces He has poured out -- and I know they are many -- but man, I have just never felt so upset about praying for someone. This someone doesn't know it, of course.

Just yesterday, and the day before as well, I was at meetings where I heard Dr. Mary Healy talk about the coming "tsunami of the Spirit" in the Church, and about her experiences of miracles of healing, as well as a prophetic convocation she attended where leaders in the Catholic charismatic renewal came together simply to listen to God speak to them. Again and again as she spoke I knew God was giving me nods of confirmation about things I've been hearing and experiencing over the last couple years. This novena prayer is not disconnected from all that. On the one hand, I've heard "it is coming" (in reference to some move of God) all my adult life as a charismatic. On the other hand, I do get the feeling this is different, because God has found ways to hook my own personal life into this "it". I think my problem is that I am lousy at waiting for God.

Just remembering now something that happened this morning. My son and daughter were getting ready for Mass, and on my instruction one was in the shower while the other was taking a bath. Well, drawing two things of water at once caused a bad situation for my son in the shower. And, since I have trained him well in how to completely freak out and be intolerant of momentary discomfort, he was screaming at the top of his lungs for us to turn the water off. Repeatedly. To be heard clearly up two flights of stairs. I saw myself in his reaction, and realized that when I encounter something that could be handled by some patient endurance of unpleasantness, I tend to respond with pouring out all my energy, and then when that doesn't work, I pour out even more, and then even more until I am completely and totally exhausted, drained, and hurting.

Maybe this is what I am doing. I am facing something that does cause me significant discomfort. I have every reason to believe that God will change it, and I know the only thing I can do is pray. So maybe instead of pray AND drain myself AND exhaust and hurt myself, I can pray and ask God to heal me and to give me joy or at least diverting occupation while I wait for Him to do what only He can do.

Sometimes it's just a pisser to not be the one in control, to not be able to make people respond to me in what seems like nice ways. To not be able to surround myself with the friendship I need but don't even know what it looks like.