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. 

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.

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. 

Fulcrum and Lever

Currently I have the luxury of quite a bit of time which I can give to reflective writing. So I am cashing in on it. I spent the morning meditating on several things that lept out at me during this morning's Mass: a prayer and several scriptures, which then, during that meditation, all fell within an analogy which St. Therese mentions in Story of a Soul. It was actually among the very last lines that she ever wrote -- in pencil because she could no longer wield a pen. The reference is this: 

A scholar has said: "Give me a lever and a fulcrum and I will lift the world." What Archimedes was not able to obtain...the saints have obtained in all its fullness. The Almighty as given them as fulcrum: HIMSELF ALONE; as lever: PRAYER which burns with a fire of love. And it is in this way that they have lifted the world; it is in this way that the saints still militant life it, and that, until the end of time, the saints to come will lift it.  (Story of a Soul, chapter XI, 36r-36v, italics and caps in original)

This is so important to me right now that I am going to edit what I have already written elsewhere and have another go-over of it all.

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This morning I woke early with the sensible feeling of a certain kind of sweet weight to offer up to the Lord. In other words, I can receive the heaviness of late as a grace and a gift to turn into powerful prayer. It reminds me of what Therese wrote about God being the fulcrum and our prayer being the lever that can lift the world. I'm watching this video which states "without a fulcrum, a lever has nothing to support or balance it, so no work can be done." This deserves a moment of meditation. To allow God to be God is to allow Him to be that which supports my movement, my work, and our point of contact is the only thing that gives my freedom power. Otherwise, it isn't so much freedom that I have as total disconnection from reality. Within God I can rise up, within God I can bear down. Within God I have my full range of motion, my total potential, even though I might see potential beyond my potential -- if that makes sense. The oar can "see" up into the sky, where the rocket can launch, but if the oar is launched into the sky, it is not free, it is disconnected. To use a literally more human analogy, towards the end of the video there's a person lifting weights, and the question is, what part of the body is acting as the fulcrum. It seems the answer is the shoulders. And in this analogy, there is a different, less mechanical relationship between the fulcrum and the lever -- and I wonder now if this is connected to why St. Paul talks about the Body of Christ. Because as the arms rise up and the shoulder fulcrum strengthens, more potential is being created for both the arms and the shoulders. In this analogy, God's potential in us increases as we exercise that lever. He builds up strength within us. And this strength also builds grace, stamina, flexibility, beauty, potential for movement, dance, expression, inspiration, health -- everything. This really gives me an insight and a motivation for bodily movement, making it actual prayer. 

But now on to those Scriptures and phrases that popped out to me at Mass this morning. The first thing was from the collect: "Enable us, we pray, almighty God, to proclaim the power of the risen Lord, that we, who have received the pledge of his gift, may come to possess all he gives when it is fully revealed." The italicized part is what stood out to me in the moment. But as I look now at the opening phrase, I see it connected to the power to proclaim Jesus risen. It seems a bit like a wheel. We pray for the power to proclaim the power of the risen Lord so that we can move from having received a pledge to full possession of all he gives, when "it" is fully revealed. Again the fulcrum idea. The fulcrum being the center of a wheel, and the wheel turning around the fulcrum gives the movement. That's the power. We have received the power in our sacraments. That's the pledge (Eph. 1:13-14). Then comes the enabling to proclaim the risen Lord, which is the gospel preached by faith. As we speak forth in faith, we exercise our connection, we exercise our pledge, we turn that wheel around the fulcrum. And in doing that, God gives -- He gives abundantly. What He gives flows over, spilling everywhere. I have sensed this in the past. Gems and jewels way more than I am capable of carrying in my arms, dropping them left and right, but still having more than I can handle. We then pray for possessing all he gives. Not just stumbling with full arms, but making all of this mine. Taking it all in. Like Joseph in Egypt, managing, stewarding it all very well, not just so that I can be well taken care of, but so that many others will be safe and saved from famine. Then we have the full revelation. So this is an ongoing wheel turning. We travel farther and wider. The power of God will be fully revealed, and this is for the praise and glory of God. This is eternity, and this is the culmination and full purpose of our earthly lives. My earthly life. It is to be found in the praise and glory of God. This is the focus on union. It is going to look different for each person. For St. Elizabeth of the Trinity and St. Therese, this was manifested in death at an early age and terrible physical suffering, which then rocketed them into an eternity of sainthood, ministry, and intercession, personal glory of the sort that belongs to the canonized saint. This is not my path. But my path will be mine just as much as their paths were theirs. And I come to it the same way. I have received the sacraments, I proclaim faith in the risen Lord -- for me, it's what it means to believe and trust despite my human obstacles involving trauma. I receive what God pours out, and I steward it. The orientation of my life shifts away from the initial struggle to get the wheels to work together, and onto the terrain I traverse because of the movement God gives. This reminds me of the little girl I saw last night when I was out walking -- her father was helping her master riding her bike. I cheered her on every time we crossed paths. I have known certain people in my life to be my support, like training wheels are supports. We need this support from others, this witness, to get over the initial struggle of getting the wheels to work. And we need those who cheer us on when they do. And we need those who ride beside us, delighting in the mastery of movement together. Is there anything more beautiful than delighting in the unfolding of the glory of God with another person? This is the communion of saints for which we were created. 

Then from the Psalm: 93:1 "And he has made the world firm, not to be moved." Again with the fulcrum idea. This depiction of the world shows it in the image of God. God is the firm fulcrum. He does not move, but enables movement. Here the world does not move, but enables movement. Terra firma. In other words, God graces nature to reflect Himself, to be solid, trustworthy, predictable. That which enables us to have a solid foundation. We can rely on matter as it images God. In this way, reality is sacramental. He has done this. It is his gift, his reality. It is solid, stable. This is what makes sense out of things like Isaiah 54:10, that though the mountains be shaken -- this solid, trustworthy, God-imaging nature, God's covenant of love with me will never be shaken. With me, not just in general. "My love shall never fall away from you, nor my covenant of peace be shaken, says the Lord, who has mercy on you." Immovable stability is not something I have been able to presume upon psychologically. It is something I receive by faith and have come to trust in. 

Next verse was the communion antiphon, which combined Luke 24:46 and 24:26: "The Christ had to suffer and rise from the dead, and so enter into his glory, alleluia." I had been asking the Lord last night, or telling him that I was having a hard time believing that what is happening right now is for my good. This speaks into that. And it also fits with the reflection on the collect. If Christ had not died and been raised, we would still be in our tresspasses and sins (1 Cor. 15:16-17). If he had not died and risen again, we would have no faith in the risen Christ to preach. I would have nothing to say about trust and hope of moving through trauma because release from it would not be a thing. There would be no jewels and gems to gather up; it could only be imaginary effort, only psyching myself out. It is hard to wrap my brain around "the Messiah had to suffer these things." It was prophecied. It was God's plan. It was where the fulcrum located itself, and Jesus as fulcrum and lever moved the impossible thing. Maybe He could have done it differently, but He didn't, for whatever unfathomable reason, something having to do with the human design. Something having to do with Love, with the being-with in suffering that the Incarnation entails, as St. John of the Cross says in the Romances on the Incarnation. So the Christ had to do this to enter into His glory. That is the path. That was the path for Him, so that is the path for me. Or maybe it is because that is the path for me, that was the path for Him. He destroyed death by death. He opened up the path to life for us who lived in the shadow of death. He saw me in my trauma, and entered into trauma to destroy my trauma. To make that lever turn which would have been immovable otherwise. Thus the most holy thing we can do is to encourage someone to faith. To proclaim the wonderful deeds God has done and move someone else to faith so that they too pull the lever on the fulcrum presented before them, God-with-them-in-their-need.

 Two other verses came to mind as I received holy communion. First: 2 Peter 1:19 "Moreover, we possess the prophetic message that is altogether reliable. You will do well to be attentive to it, as to a lamp shining in a dark place, until day dawns and the morning star rises in your hearts" (morning star, an OT reference to the Messiah). This, I believe, was an encouragement to do exactly what I'm doing right now, to sit down and really meditate on these things that struck me. I realize that I have often let things like this slid, thinking "oh, that was nice. yep, I'm sure it's important" but not realizing how much this is exactly what I live on. What I need to survive, more than money, more than food, more than any tangible provision. More than oxytocin. I need to soak in and meditate on these truths, because this is what will give my life the solid foundation that I need and crave. And not just write about it here or think about it for an hour, but come back and review it, open it up and unpack it further. Continue to ask the Lord about it. Continue to reflect on it. And continue to even do the physical fulcrum/lever work to experience this somatically.

Second verse: 1 John 3:2, which I will expand to include verses 1 and 3: "See what love the Father has bestowed on us that we may be called the children of God. Yet so we are. The reason the world does not know us it that it did not know him. Beloved, we are God's children now; what we shall be has not yet been revealed. We do know that when it is revealed, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is. Everyone who has this hope based on him makes himself pure, as he is pure." The kernel that struck is me "what we shall be has not yet been revealed." In other words, God is in the midst of a work. He is the fulcrum, and that lever is in motion. My lever may have been both operating and screaming as of late. I can get funny ideas, like maybe the point of this is to shove my hand into the spot where the lever and fulcrum meet, because the goal is to crush myself to death. Maybe the spinning of the wheel is for me to stick my hand in there and get my fingers amputated. Maybe that's the goal here. (These would be lies, coming from one who loves to kill, steal, and destroy.) But no. What we will be, what this is all about, has not yet been revealed, and that verb tense implies that it will be. The revealing is not my work, it is something I will receive. And whatever it is, the work God is about is his fatherly love. His fatherly love is to make himself known, and as we see him and know him, we become like him. Again with the lever and fulcrum. We do our lever work, attached, properly attached to the fulcrum, and there is this strength of God Himself which is built up in us. As He gives to me, I give back to him with my movement of faith, and so He gives himself more, enabling me to give myself more. It is a beautiful progression of love, one that also recognizes and accepts both my limits and my aspirations. Love is eternal, and I can never outgive God. I am freed from the overgiving I am tempted to do when I see myself just an oar, a thing, disconnected from its mount, its fulcrum. I "give myself fully to the water" -- I drown. I "give myself fully to the wall" -- I'm never in the boat, in my potential. But when I am secure within that which holds me in existence, I am ready for developing that skill, that employment of grace and virtue that moves me along. The oar does not row itself. But the body can move itself, as it is given life from the head. 

Fulcrum and lever. It says everything I need to meditate on right now. 

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.

Learning to Pray All Over Again

The Carmelite saints and writers describe early stages of prayer in ways that always confused me. For example, Kevin Culligan writes (in his chapter in Carmelite Prayer: A Tradition for the 21st Century): 

Discursive meditation is primary sensory, involving both the external senses and the imagination and memory. One applies the senses to the object of meditation in order to be moved to an emotional response toward that object.

For example, a leader of a meditation group begins a session inviting the group to imagine that they see Jesus tied to a pillar, accepting the scourging of the Roman soldiers for love of them. Later, after a period of quiet reflection on this scene, the leader then instructs the group: "Now, allow yourselves to be moved in love to embrace Jesus by resolving to serve him more courageously in his people."

The saints took it as a given that everyone knew to pray this way, whether the focus was on the mysteries of the rosary or the stations of the cross or other Scriptural vignette moments. And from this taken-for-granted starting place, they talked about how prayer grew in other directions.

This confused me, because by the time I read this, I thought perhaps I was no longer a total newbie at prayer, and yet, because I began praying long before I became a Catholic and had now clue about rosaries or stations or these classic meditation points, I always wondered if I was just now totally lost because either I hadn't started yet, or I had started incorrectly.

Recently, though, I gained some wisdom here. I had absolutely had this foundation in prayer. I called it "praise and worship" or simply, singing hymns. I had just never really grasped what was happening for me. 

In my Lutheran college days, some of my professors took umbrage with Contemporary Christian Music where phrases were simply repeated and there was no theological depth. They were heirs of Luther's pedagogy: he firmly believed that the way to catechize the ignorant masses was through songs. This is how we came by our standard fare 15 verse theological hymns -- and the fact that we actually sang them. I don't at all deny the effectiveness of this. I often found hymns a lot more edifying, helpful, and  illuminating than sermons. 

But the repeated Scriptural phrases have their place as well, and it is to draw one into meditation, where one ruminates on the Word of God and allows it to speak to your soul. What is more, some hymns serve the same purpose as the rosary meditation. I took up one of these hymns this morning in my prayer time and it was quite an experience.

Here it is: 

My prayer experience with this today cemented something for me. This song has been floating through my memory recently. My Lutheran Sunday School was very big on having us kids sing for Sunday services a few times a year. (Have I mentioned what a big deal Lutherans make of music and singing?) This was a favorite song to have younger kids sing, perhaps in part for the cute factor for the congregation. But now that I'm pressing well past the midpoint of my 50s, as a Carmelite devotee of St. Therese to boot, this children's hymn speaks volumes to me.

Today I let it speak. Knowing that prayer needs to involve all of me, I also picked up my guitar and played as well. This is something I have done exactly twice this whole calendar year, ever since the grand music reshuffle at my parish. Prior to that, I had only one blip of personal guitar playing, while I recorded a CD in 2011. Every other time was either at Mass or in preparation for it -- at least once a week though sometimes many more, for roughly 15 years. But since age 11, I spent the equivalent of part time job hours every week writing and playing songs, pouring out my heart, praying, meditating, seeking. But I just called it music.

So, back to the hymn. Go read the words. I sang them, worked in my body and voice praying them, and repeated them until I felt the words in my current adult experience. 

For my Shepherd gently guides me/Knows my need and well provides me...
When I hunger, Jesus feeds me/Into pleasant pastures leads me
When I thirst, He bids me go/Where the quiet waters flow

And when I was done singing, I poured out my heart to the Lord, and He was right there, receiving me. Child Marie doesn't always get much airtime. But she did today, with the help of Psalm 22, childhood memories, imagination, and the fuller participation of my whole body in a way that is deeply meaningful to me. 

Carmelite prayer is not about following a formula or steps. It is about bearing witness to the reality of God as we ourselves step, as the Spirit mysteriously leads. And apparently it is something I can learn anew all the time.

Hiking, Love, and Transformation

Eight years ago, I hiked in the Tatra mountains. Come to think of it, it was exactly this time of year I was there. The scenery was beautiful, but it was an emotionally wrenching time. Also, hiking sounds glamorous but it was grueling. At one point, my then-11 year daughter asked me why in the world we were doing this. I told her that at some point in her life, someone would use the metaphor of climbing a mountain, and this would teach her what that really means.

St. John of the Cross famously uses the metaphor of climbing Mount Carmel for growth in the spiritual life. Since he traveled all over Spain by foot, even though he was no soft modern, unaccostomed to physical effort, I'm sure he fully intended the implication that the human effort part of spiritual growth isn't easy.

One thing I remember doing often on the Tatra hike was stopping for rest and looking back down the path I had just come up, and then looking ahead to how much farther to our destination. I took some photos, fully thinking that when I got back home I would appreciate their beauty. At the time I was just trying to catch my breath, wipe some of the sweat off my face, give my aching feet and legs a momentary break, not think about whether I was going to need to pee in a nearby bush nor about the painful relationship issues that were clanging around in my heart, and will myself to move forward again. 

Today I had reason to pause interiorly and look down the mountain I've been climbing spiritually. I was challenged by the reading we studied in my Carmelite community formation yesterday, where St. Therese talks about how she learned what the Lord means by His command to love one another "as I have loved you." She talked growing in specific, active acts of charity for two particular Sisters that she could not stand. 

I've read Story of a Soul now countless times, and of course the Lord's command to love is not a new thing to me. But I was both convicted by this, and led to take this particular pause on the mountain and look back down and my lived reality, in order to start back up differently.

What I saw clearly in looking back is that in my early life I developed a thick, defensive shell against the people around me. I was a well of pain, and felt I personally was the cause of every broken relationship and every moral failing around me. The defensive shell kept me from feeling my own pain and perceived failures, and kept other people at a distance so they could do me no more harm. Both the well and the shell grew with me, never quite adequate for my need. I was constanly anxious to pull myself in.

God was at work by His grace, even as I was at work strictly regulating human contact. He had a much easier time reaching directly into my soul to bring me what consolation I would allow in. Increasingly, he would use the ministrations of people, and so by the time I was an adult I had let a couple of people into my circle of trust. Mostly, these were people I did not actually interact with except by an exchange of letters or a visit every couple of years. But they were like pilot lights to me that kept me alive. That was all I allowed. Mostly I learned to endure people, or to cope until I could escape their presence and actually relax and breathe. Hah, who am I kidding. Relax? I escaped their presence and crumpled into an anxiety I never even let myself feel. 

The process of grace transforming my heart made its steady progress, despite my lack of understanding (mostly) of the problem or the cure's path.

A key moment in this hike was clearly visible today. I remembered a crisis conversation I had with my pastor and a small group of people where I had managed to create a lot of hurt. My pastor simply pointed out that God called me to love everyone equally. I felt as if he was asking me to juggle boulders, because just then my felt choice was between hating everyone and allowing God to help me authentically love one human being in my faulty way. "Loving everyone," if I was honest about it, was nice Christian gibberish to me.

He had the right answer. But it was lightyears from my experience, because I was still operating in the mode of allowing, possibly, one person at a time into my trust. Except this time, it was a real person. It reminds me of a scene from some TV show I saw ages ago where a psychopath would steal female corpses and tie them to a table in a freezing room, pretending to have dinner with them, and then he finally kidnapped a living woman he admired and tried to do the same with her. He saw this as great personal growth. He was the only one with this perspective. 😏

When I was in Poland, same trip as my Tatra hiking experience, and a few years after that difficult moment of counsel from my pastor, I had an experience of being prayed with by some Polish-speaking women. One paused as she was praying, and said to me in English, "God calls you to love everyone." The Lord had said the same thing to me in prayer a few days before. This is how patiently God works our transformation. As soon as we are ready to open our hearts for more, He's there with what we need.

And as I climbed the Tatras, I struggled with a different real-life relationship, and felt the grueling process of handing over to the Lord the hard-fought trust in my friend that I had developed, and my fear that He would leave me, that His love wasn't real, wasn't enough, that my vision of the world that caused me to build shells and stare into wells in the first place were all there was to reality. I was trying to choose this loving everyone, or as the Carmelites call it, chastity. In reality it was a beautiful moment, but it was surrender at the point of exhaustion.

And then there's today. 

I am free, now. I came back from Poland with the unshakeable confidence and knowledge that God loves me. And a lot more has happened more recently than that. Today I know that the love God pours into me is eternal and infinite, and I do not need to bind my prey. We are all made with the same design, and we even all tend to malfunction in the same ways. I am called to love everyone with the Love God pours through me. And this is tested by those who are most disagreeable to me and where my natural bend towards self-protection activates. Like St. Therese, I can choose with my will to allow the Lord to love through me. And in fact, I am called to it. 

That's the thing, today. I'm free, and I get to choose what I do with my freedom. It's not just that loving everyone is possible or that it is a good idea. I am called, daily, to make decisions to do and to choose the loving thing. It's so easy for this to get bogged down and mired in psychology and just human evaluations of what is best and reasonable. But, going before the Lord and simply suiting up for growth in virtue and acts of charity is the key. My former pastor used to always say, "At least you can pray for them." I think I always heard that as a cop out. But to sincerely pray for a person you don't like to deal with is definitely an act of charity, not an act of dismissal. And I realize I need never be afraid, because I am never on my own doing this. It is not me who loves. I know, by looking down that mountain, that I just DO NOT HAVE a natural capacity for loving people. God had to reconstruct everything in me that is involved in loving. The fact that I do love is evidence to me that God has transformed my soul.

When I got to the top of our hike in the Tatras, we weren't, of course, at the top of the world. The mountain went on to the right and to the left. In fact, it was considered just a starting point for the more strenuous hikes. What I had climbed was labeled "Family Friendly hiking," meaning even children did it. I literally saw ladies in heels doing my path. I wonder what it would feel like to go do it again. By the time we got back to our cabin that evening, I could not walk because both of my knees were like water. 

This also teaches me something about the spiritual life. The small things we do (or avoid) every day impact greatly who we become. 

Let's start today and be diligent in allowing the Lord to love us, and to love through us.

Inflating my Christmas Hope

I admit it; Christmas has been going flat for me. As a small child there was, I suppose, glitz that even I managed to be excited about, and as an older child, there was plenty to weigh down my soul with sadness, and later I brimmed with cynicism as we approached the celebration of the birth of Christ. No one could do it right enough for me.

But all of that changed for me on Christmas Eve of 1991 when I went to a Midnight Mass with a guy I was very interested in, though I managed to be even more interested in finally taking the step of personally experiencing something of Catholicism with as open a heart as I was able to muster. 

I was two years out of college. My grandmother had just died, I was emotionally paralyzed over remaining unpursued by any romantic interest, I constantly whined to God about how He didn't love me, my employment was purely survival-driven, and in many ways I was still waiting for my life to start. I plodded through life but dreamed, rather despairingly, of possibly having a future with meaning. 

It all seemed perfectly normal and relatively stable at the time, but when I look back, I realize I was in a rather dark place. 

This morning at Mass I began to recall the importance of keeping my personal journey fresh in my mind. I've written about that Mass many times in this blog; here's a link to the full story. Suffice it to say here that God stepped into my history as with a trumpet, announcing that He had come to save me -- me, not mankind. He showed up. He called to me: Here I am! This electrifying encounter shook my life for decades. 

Just like a little baby showing up in a poopy stable, He burst upon the scene and changed everything forever.

(Oh my goodness, I just realized I am coming up on this being 30 years ago! How did I suddenly get so old?)

It really was like being born again, in the sense that a brand new life started for me that night, and I also had much to grow into. When God again burst into my life within the last decade or so, which ended up with me entering the Secular Carmelites, I learned that a Christmas Eve conversion is something I had in common with St. Therese. I learned how Carmelite-y Advent is. I learned that my call is to be the intercessor that invites the same grace of conversion I have received to be present to souls who, like me, searched without hope of finding, whined after love with a cold, closed, cynical heart, and doubted the value of my own creation. And I realize how it makes me weep when I encounter souls like I was! Oh dear God, I can't stand to witness that pain! It makes me feel so helpless, so powerless, so... desperate! I could wish I had a magic wand to take away this pain, but in this moment I realize I have something that is real, and powerful: I have my own history of God's action in my life. Don't forget, Marie.

The proof of the power of the love of God is now in me. It is my life. It is in my reality. It is in my faith. 

For whoever is begotten by God conquers the world. And the victory that conquers our world is our faith. 1 John 5:4

Faith is the realization of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. Hebrews 11:1

Faith calls me, places me, into the community of believers. As a Carmelite, I know that my vocation is ecclesial; is of the Church and belongs to the Church. I also have long had the intuition that there were people of the Church praying for me -- I mean many more than the actually individuals who told me they were, or whom I experienced praying for me. Hidden people prayed for me. I know this.

And now I am one of the hidden people, and I pray for others. I have prayed for decades for the conversion of people's hearts. Some people "specialize" in praying for healing or praying long-term for those walking through difficult situations. My speciality has been to pray for the bottoms of people's hearts to open up to Love, and respond to Love's call to belong to Him. 

What I want most is to know that the people I love know and believe that God loves them, that they deeply respond to that love. This is my joy.

And I am going to keep on reminding myself that human pain is never the end of the story. Love is patient. The Lord Jesus Christ is powerful; He is present; He pursues our hearts and will never give up. Love is not desperate, nor whiny. Jesus is with us and is pursuing us for the long (or short) haul of our entire lives. His presence brings joy, life, peace, healing, truth, beauty. We have only to open to Him, and receive.

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.

Thoughts on Story of a Soul: Chapter III

I'm reserving the right to be completely random and start a series of posts in the middle of a book.

I've been through Story of a Soul several times now both before and during Carmelite formation, but this time I am actually able to glean something from it. Follow this link for my many comments previously regarding my relationship with this particular Doctor of the Church.

I think what I am learning now is to enter spiritually and theologically into the experiences she reports. I am intuiting that she chose to report the details she reports not simply because she is reminiscing, but because she understands very well the meaning of her life. She is opening the book of her life for us to read God's writing there. Never before was I able to see what I feel I can see now. It has taken me some time for my vision to adjust.

What strikes me in this chapter in overview is how she is struggling to appropriate for herself this parrhesia, the humble boldness, this confidence of being loved as herself by God. She does not know how to bear herself at school with the jealous girl (of whom she said, "She made me pay in a thousand ways for my little successes."), and she does not have the mature detachment to not become overly sad at Pauline's entrance into Carmel. The help and healing comes from the Blessed Virgin Mary when she has exhausted all of the love from her family, realizing that even though it never failed her, it is not enough and she needs divine help to satisfy her soul. And yet, she doesn't know how to handle that grace either. She wants to, or at least she does, share it with Marie and the Carmelites,  (whether she really wanted to or not) but neither comprehend it exactly as she has experienced it. (They can't. It was for her.) She has the disappointment of not finding the union of wills on earth, in the way she talks about having had with her cousin. Her will is meant for union with heaven. This seems to stress her love for her most beloved ones.

Her discussion of her fragility at school was very enlightening to me. She silently suffers the jealousy of the girl who "made her pay" for being first in the class, because, she says, she didn't know how to defend herself. She didn't "have enough virtue" to "rise above" these miseries, but -- and there is a helpful word here -- when she returned home at night her "heart expanded." I can identify strongly with young Therese, her heart shrinking in some situations and expanding in others. I thought to myself, if she lacked virtue, what virtue might that be? I thought of 1 John 2 where we read "remain in Christ so that when he returns, you will be full of confidence and not shrink back from him in shame." It seemed that the opposite of an expanding heart is a shrinking heart, and that in turn is contrasted with confidence. That was when I came upon this paragraph from the Catechism of the Catholic Church:

2778 This power of the Spirit who introduces us to the Lord's Prayer is expressed in the liturgies of East and of West by the beautiful, characteristically Christian expression: parrhesia, straightforward simplicity, filial trust, joyous assurance, humble boldness, the certainty of being loved.

This seems to summarize St. Therese's life, the Carmelite vocation, and my life, too. This is what she was made for. But at this point in her life, it was what she struggled with. She had to learn to own her own honor and glory, and to fully accept them as hers from God.

She goes on to say that she needed assurances in her family life that she was loved, or her life would have been too hard. Again, I can relate to Therese. And it is somewhat amazing that I can. That is, now I realize that I need assurances of love. I do. And I did in the past, too, without having them, and life was essentially too hard, and I became that way too. But the beautiful thing is to be able to say "I need." Sometimes for me the only way that I become able to say "I need" is to feel my lack, to feel ignored or unloved. Perhaps I need, as an exercise, to practice saying "I need" before I get to the point of feeling ignored. Perhaps it will change how I respond to other's needs.

I continue to relate when she says she didn't know how to play with other children, and she was bored by their games and dancing. She was pleased by being alone with one friend, by playing hermit, by practicing surrender of will (until she knocked over the shopkeeper's display by walking with her eyes closed).

She has a real union of love with her sister and experiences Celine's First Communion with as much joy as if it were her own. She shows zero jealousy. This is a delightful expression of selfless love.

Then there is this moment:

"In one instant, I understood what life was; until then, I had never seen it so sad; but it appeared to me in all its reality, and I saw it was nothing but a continual suffering and separation. I shed bitter tears because I did not yet understand the joy of sacrifice."

This is why she needed all of those assurances of love. It is also interesting to know that she shed tears when Pauline announced her leaving, but she shed no tears when her mother died. But this is also the moment of her realizing her personal vocation to Carmel. And this is why she says she should have not despaired so, because as of this time, she knew she too was meant for Carmel (no slow processing for her!).

And yet, after this, she falls ill. She goes to visit Pauline at Carmel with her cousins and aunt, and out of consideration for them, Pauline does not direct many words to Therese, and Therese feels herself abandoned by her. It is too much for her, and she collapses under a mysterious sickness. The assurances of love are missing, even her father's desire to distract and entertain her don't cut it. She fears she is faking her sickness. It does seem that there is something morbid going on psychologically. Therese herself at the time of writing is certain it was demonic. But somehow when she calls to Mary, instead of her sister, she is healed. It seems to me that the assurances of love that she needed and thought she could not live without had to fail her.

The bit about not wanting to talk about the grace that happened to her shows me there was a disconnect between these who were closest to her and she struggled to make the grace her own, to fully accept it as hers from God. This is the same kind of disconnect that she experienced with the kids at school. Except now it detached her from those she loved the most. Fascinating.