Words, and Hearts, and Saints

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

An Unsuspecting Turn Towards Poetry

This morning I was looking in my Liturgy of the Hours book for a Marian hymn and randomly opened to a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins called "My Own Heart Let Me More Have Pity On." 

I was what I suppose you would call dumbfounded by this poem. So many thoughts crowding in, like children eager to see the cool thing and ask a hundred questions about it. 

I've been on a journey lately that has taken a decided turn towards lessons of self-compassion. When these lessons started, I was suspicious of the Holy Spirit. Self-compassion just didn't fit the schema I had unwittingly marinated in for so long. Finding this in my breviary (ok, yes, the same book that also contains Morning Has Broken, which makes me roll my eyes, which possibly also is a fault) made me realize that perhaps I am not the only one that the Holy Spirit has taken through this course. And perhaps, just perhaps, I ought to acknowledge that this has been a holy journey, and treat it accordingly.

That was the first thought.

I thought of how many priests I've heard quote Hopkins in homilies over the years, especially at my first parish, Gesu. Come to think of it, I was suspicious then, too.

Charitable. That word just tumbles out like its own sermon. One does not argue with a call to be charitable. Not even with oneself. 

I thought of how in the Psalms the author is often talking to his own soul just like Hopkins does here. "Let be!" Today this struck me gently, almost playfully, but I know there are other days when I have to say it more sternly.

This line made so much hope rise up in me: "let joy size At God knows when to God knows what." It's like peeling back the normal sarcasm or jadedness to hear the actual truth underneath. Because God does know when and God does know what, and I can trust Him with that.

And then the crescendo for me: "whose smile 's not wrung" -- isn't that just the longing of every human heart. A genuine smile, directed at me. Not forced or contrived or uncomfortable or awkward or apologetic or announcing departure. But a smile that stays and gazes. At me.

I love how Hopkins makes up words. His soul is saying something and to come close he has to jumble through his verbal workshop and jimmy something together. Hah! I guess you normally jimmy something apart, but you get the idea.

Then the last kicker. I read the poem and I had tears in my eyes thinking about how I used to love poetry. I used to love literature. Back in college, studying English, really losing myself in authors and finding myself in the emotion of it all. And I thought, where did she go? It was before I joined the charismatic fellowship and significantly before I became Catholic. I wasn't consumed in how a certain practice of Christianity had to define how I related to others in this world, I, a young adult who was so incredibly unsure of so much, and wanted doctrine to be a fortress that protected me because I wasn't sure how to be a person and doctrine was the only thing that had ever presented itself as absolute. I thought about how many layers of skin I've shed since then, about how my conversion to Catholicism happened on the Feast of the Nativity, the celebration of the Incarnation, when God became Man to teach man to become God. And when mystic lovers like John of the Cross try to speak about the soul and God, they have to resort to poetry, because mere words can't do it. 

It's like I became reacquainted with a certain part of My Own Heart, of which perhaps I should say Let Me More Have Pity On. Perhaps I have squashed too much down too hard because I thought what God wanted was a certain brand of religiosity, like forcing myself into a pizzelle press, instead of being

what was that word?

Charitable.

Be Holy

Yesterday's Mass reading from 1 Peter concluded with the line: "Be holy, for I (God) am holy."

What I heard in that is not an invitation to fruitless and impossible striving after perfection issued by a God who isn't satisfied with us and wants us to do better. Or the echoing of an arrogant mind that makes projects of self-improvement, calling it "pursuit of holiness." Or some confused and shame-infused realization that I should be better, and I'll have to try, now that it's Lent.

What I heard is God at creation. He has an intent in His heart, and he makes it reality by speaking it forth: Let there be light, and there was light.

What I heard is Jesus with the leper who has approached Him in faith: I do will it; be made clean. 

What I heard is Ananias, sent on a mission of healing to Saul who is in the midst of the conversion of his life: Brother Saul, receive your sight.

Faith, hope, charity. Hmm, do they fit? Creation itself receives its substance from God. The leper cupped his heart upward to Jesus to receive from Him, requesting with hope of receiving. Ananias went to Saul animated not by his own understanding, feeling, motivation or decision, but by the word and call that Ananias was able to receive because he was in a communion of love with God. That love brought Saul healing.

There's definitely human agency involved with the command of God Peter records, but it isn't a case where God makes his expectation known and the human then consults his merely human efforts and fulfills God's demand. Rather, this command of God calls forth what it commands. As St. Teresa of Jesus explains (in Chapter 25 of her Life, as well as other places), "When the Lord speaks, the words are accompanied by effects," and "he appears to wish (the soul) to realize His power and the efficacy of his words."

So hearing this Scripture proclaimed, "Be holy, for I am holy," I hear it as a command to receive from God. Receive this grace, be open to what He is doing, allow it free course, and cooperate with what it is pursuing within me. Wisdom! Be attentive! God is inviting you to an encounter with Him. 

To Teresa, prayer is an intimate sharing between friends. "It means taking time frequently to be alone with the One whom we know loves us." So the command to be holy is one to be received in this context of being wholly, intimately, and personally loved. It is a willingness to have called forth from us that which makes greater potential for this way of love. To be holy, we have to go to what is intimate to us interiorly, what makes for our integration, what involves our whole person. 

For me, writing is an integrating, personal, and intimate experience. So I shall write this Lent, to stand under this word: Be holy. There's usually some poking at fears, pain, shame, etc involved with receiving grace and allowing it free course, not to mention human stupidity and whatnot. That's all fine. I'm not going to try to produce but to respond. So, here we go.

The Carmelite Charism

Last weekend I experienced the 2017 OCDS Congress in San Antonio. In many ways, it was a very ordinary event, but I'm also aware that God has spoken to new word to me. I mean, it isn't a new word. But as it was spoken, I became new. It was a moment when there was a loud "CLICK" in my spirit, and I became more whole. It's really hard to put into words, because it certainly isn't that suddenly a) I understand all things or b) I feel great as a result, so the delight I feel isn't an intellectual or an emotional rush. It is a spiritual delight, but a sobering one.

I found that the hub of this word spoken to me came in one particular presentation, by Dr. Jeanne Kamat, on the Carmelite charism. It wasn't so much that it was new information, but more like an impartation, when something is bestowed on one. I do have the text from which she spoke, and I have the audio of the actual presentation, but the Spirit is not going to be exactly in either of these. 

She began by saying that "the Carmelite charism is to pray and to create in the world the inner peace that arises from affirmation." She emphasized that we do this by affirming the life of the other person, regardless of how we see their faults, crimes, etc. We see the goodness of the person with the eyes of heaven. And, that to be such a witness of God's affirmation of the life of each person, we must know and affirm the goodness of our own selves (self-knowledge), and to know what we most deeply and truly believe. 

She went on to deal with the second creation account in Genesis as a basis for man's original relation with God, with himself, and with others, and then explored Wisdom literature and the prophets, highlighting that to be made in the image of God is not merely to be created as a relational being, but that we are indeed created out of Wisdom. 

Jewish understanding of the Old Testament Scriptures colored everything she said. I have yet to even completely take in the second half of the talk, but by the time she talked about Jesus fulfilling it all by actually imparting the Holy Spirit and being Himself our rest and making us a new creation that then enables His life to be present in the world through us... I felt like I was swooning under the presence of a Beauty unfathomable. 

If at the end I felt I was dripping exclamation marks from my pores, to be honest at the beginning I may have shed a few question marks. Her words about the place of affirming the life of God within dug into the inner recesses of my soul that had been formed by the doctrine of Total Depravity. Really? Isn't there something about humanity that is evil in essense? Scripture is pretty clear that there is an original condition of man which is not evil, is not divine, but does indeed come forth in beauty from the hand of God. 

Sin obfuscates. Sin renders us incapable of knowing God, of knowing who we are, of knowing what is right, of seeing according to Wisdom. Sin brings confusion and activates our passions to dig deeper away from the presence of God, and into deeper alienation from ourselves and from others. 

But Jesus comes to give life. His first affirmation of us is the Incarnation. As Dr. Kamat put it, what a impoverishment of the Incarnation if we see it only about God's plan to deal with sin, and not as the ultimate expression of loving desire for communion with us. The Incarnation as an act of God's desire for communion could be the theme song of my conversion to the Catholic Church. It has been a jaw-dropping meditation for me for 25 years. 

I was also able to see the occasions in my life when the power of affirmation healed me and changed the course of my life. This is a double-whammy because not only did the affirmation heal me, but it simultaneously taught me who I am and how God made me: to go and do the same. 

Words hold the power of life and the power of death (Prov. 18:21). We will be held accountable for every idle word (Mt. 12:36). We are commanded to speak only what will build others up according to their needs (Eph. 4:29). These are amazing Scriptures, and they point to our need, not to become self-obsessive, but to allow "the word of Christ to dwell" in us richly and to be transformed by his glory and the renewal of our minds.

Two years ago I was powerfully struck by a talk at the Milwaukee Congress by Fr. Marc Foley, OCD, which was about the words we speak and the silences we keep. This talk goes one step deeper, because this is about what goes on in the silence, when we rest our heads on the heart of Jesus and receive His breath, which then forms the words and silences with which we interact with the world. 

"When you rest your heart on Christ, He reveals the Father. He puts in love, wisdom, etc., according to your nature. It will permeate your being. You become capable. You are transformed. You don't have to know it." This ministry of affirmation arises mostly without our being aware of any divine transaction, but it is sharing the love, the affirmation, the redemption, the wholeness we have been given.

This is true. This is how it works. In this is my vocation. This is how I bear witness to God in the world.

I have been crucified with Christ; The life I live now, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. (Galatians 2:19-20)

What Lectors Might Learn from Good Storytellers

In combing through a stack of books today, I happened to come across these paragraphs in an essay on attributes needed by a good storyteller. Immediately I thought one could change the word "storyteller" to "lector," as in one who reads the Scriptures in church, with great benefit. I enjoy lectoring almost as much as I enjoy cantoring (to sing the Psalms in church), and I have been told I do it well. I completely attribute that to reading aloud to my children for hours on end over the last 13 years.

The text from which I quote is the 1947 edition of Children and Books by May Hill Arbuthnot, pages 242-243. I will edit out some sections that do not carry over to my purpose.

***

The successful [lector] must have two types of equipment for his art. First, he must possess those outward and visible evidences of fitness for the task -- good voice, clear diction, adequate vocabulary, and pleasant appearance. Second, he must achieve a certain elusive inner and spiritual grace made up of complete sincerity, delight in his [text], self-forgetfulness, and a respect for his audience and for his... art. The first equipment can be attained through patient practice. the second must grow from living and from loving both [Scripture] and people.

An agreeable voice and clear, pure diction are perhaps the first requisites for the [lector] to consider. Needless to say, there should not be a special voice reserved for [lectoring]... You should take stock of your own vocal equipment. Ask others to evaluate your voice honestly. Record it if possible, so that you can listen to it yourself. If your voice is nasal, harsh, or monotonous, try to improve it for everyday use to the point where it is agreeable and lovely for special use. Women tend to pitch their voices higher and shriller than they should. Try  your speaking voice at the piano and see where it falls in relation to middle C. Most of us can profitably pitch our everyday speaking voices a key or so lower than we have been doing, and both we and [those who hear us] will be more peaceful as a result. Go to the theater or turn on the radio, and deliberately listen to and compare voices. Be critical of oversweet voices of some radio personalities, both male and female. Try to discover the voices of Katharine Cornell, Helen Hayes, Ethel Barrymore, Lionel Barrymore, Maurice Evans, and Paul Robeson so moving and satisfying. Put on Lynn Fotanne's recording of "The White Cliffs of Dover" and notice the range and variety in that high, sweet voice. Lessons with an expert in voice placement and production will help you, but by cultivating a listening ear you can do much for yourself.

A good voice is invariably supported by deep and controlled breathing. Breath must come from down in the diaphragm, not from the upper chest. Read aloud sustained passages from the Psalms or from Shakespeare. Put on Maurice Evans' recording of the lines from Richard II and read them with him.You can then tell when you run out of breath and he does not. Breathe deeper, and not only will you be able to sustain those long sonorous passages, but your voice will grow in richness and resonance. Shallow breathing makes thin, tired voices, which are apt to become shrill and sharp. Deep controlled breathing gives to the voice both a sense of support and increased range and color.

When you read Shakespeare's Sonnet XXIX and phrase it correctly without running out of breath, then you have good breath control, which will make your voice grow in depth and power as you use it. Notice that this sonnet has only the final period and only two semicolons to break the sequential phrases. Try lines 2, 3, and 4 on one breath, and, of course, lines 11 and 12.

When, in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes,
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,
And look upon myself, and curse my fate,
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featur'd like him, like him with friends possess'd,
Desiring this man's art and that man's scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least;
Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,
Haply I think on thee, and then my state,
Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven's gate;
For thy sweet love remember'd such wealth brings
That then I scorn to change my state with kings. 

Now, after having huffed and puffed self-consciously as you worked for breath control, read the sonnet for enjoyment.

 Clear articulation of words is as essential as an agreeable voice. Of course, nothing is worse than an artificial, overprecise enunciation, except perhaps an attempt to imitate the speech of another district that is quite foreign to us. If we are New England, Southern, Midwestern, or Western, let's not try for Oxford English or any other accent unnatural to us. Instead, let's eradicate the impurities of our own particular region (every region has them), and try to speak the purest, most vigorous pattern of English that obtains in our section of the country. [Lectoring] is ruined if it sounds artificial or pretentious....

***

Even though little else carries directly over, I love how these thoughts of the section called "Living the Story" fit nicely:

 

"Of course, if you have not the emotional capacity to be deeply moved by these stories, then do not try to tell them, for there must be warmth and a loving appreciation for every word of a story if it is to reach an audience...

"To love a story in this way means that the teller has not only learned the story mechanically and lived with it for some time but  has learned it with her heart, brooding over it and fussing with the phraseology until words and voice convey precisely what she feels. She does not rattle through it merely to get the words but re-creates it imaginatively. She tells it slowly and thoughtfully to the darkness after she has gone to bed or she thinks it through, scene by scene, on the streetcar until finally it is her story. Such solitary telling is a process of disciplining herself until she can give an honest interpretation of the way the story makes her feel."

It's called prayer, of course. Meditation and rumination on Scripture in general is necessary so that when we proclaim it, we are proclaiming it as ours -- my own, and our shared experience and record of God's revelation. This type of proclamation draws the hearers in to claim the Word for themselves.

The Words we Speak, and the Silences We Keep

Over the last four days, I participated in the 2015 OCDS Congress in Milwaukee. I took copious notes, but now is the moment where I go back over them to see if I can translate them into consumable language so that others can catch at least the gist of the talks that I did, if not the actual intent of the speaker.

The talk that hit me the hardest was by Fr. Marc Foley, O.C.D., so I'm going to start there with transcription. The title he was given was:

Mary and Martha

Carmel: Contemplative and Apostolic

Personal Transformation and Society Change

 but he kind of ditched that and went for a laser-focus instead on the apostolic weight of the words we speak and the silences we keep.

The following is what I captured:

Mary is a symbol of attentive listening. The inflow of God into the soul instructs us in the perfection of love. Peaceful attentiveness to God is contemplation.

St. Therese said that Jesus teaches without words, and that we have no absolute need of teachers and books.

The most important place of this attentive listening is not even so much in our set times of prayer as during our daily occupations.

We have two forms of choice: the words we speak, and the silences we keep. These are deeply significant in our response to God. Essentially all of life can be understood within these two choices. Listening to God's voice and speaking forth what we hear is the core of the apostolic intention.

We tend to think of apostolic activity as answering the question "What do you do?" Do you do parish work? Do you work in a soup kitchen? Do you protest injustice? If you are called to do these, by all means, do them. But the most apostolic of actions is what we hear God instructing us to say. When there is congruence between what we hear God instructing us in and what we do, then Mary and Martha are working together.

When our speech is rooted in the indwelling presence of God, then the Word becomes flesh.

Contemplation and apostolic action in St. Teresa's focal gospel, the first gospel choice for her feast day, the woman at the well: "Spring of water gushing up to eternal life." There are two words here in the Greek. The "well" is man-made. "Spring" is underground, and natural. In the optional gospel, we have Jesus saying, "I am not the source of my words." And this raises in us the question, What is the source of my words? Is it the cistern of my ego, or the wellspring of God's Spirit?

D. W. Winnicott, a psychotherapist, stated that he knew freedom when he no longer had the need to be clever for his clients. This is freedom from self-absorption. No longer needing that psychologically astute response was freedom.

St. Teresa writes in her Meditations on the Song of Songs that "Martha and Mary never fail to work together in a soul in the state of union. When the soul is working interiorly, active work arises that is like lovely and fragrant flowers, spreading from the tree of God's love. No self-interest. Fragrance for the benefit of many, lasts, and has great effect.

When the soul is working interiorly, there is a congruence between what we hear and what we say.

As St. Therese lay dying, a door and a window had been left open in her room, creating a draft. Mother Gonzaga came in and insisted she tell her who did this. Therese knew it had been the infirmarian. And as she was speaking to tell Mother, she said it came to her mind a more charitable way to tell the truth she knew. She followed that way and was rewarded with great peace. Is anything more important, more apostolic, than following such inspirations?

St. John of the Cross teaches that the first movements toward sin and the first movements of inspirations come to the conscious mind, and so we must be alert to them with vigilance as we stand at that threshhold. What will be born into this world?

What is the heart of Carmel? Inner language and outer speech. And yes, it is hard to speak. It is hard to be silent. Our pride, envy, anger, etc want to rise. But this is where detachment and purification comes in.

Writing in a spiritual discipline (it is the speaker's gift, and also something that has made him realize his egotism). It is all a practice of detachment, allowing God to edit our speech. It is necessary for spiritual growth and for fruitfulness.

St. Teresa's words again: If words arise from the deep spiritual root, fragrance spreads, lasts, and has effect. We all ask this question, especially as we get older: Will my life have mattered?

In Night Prayer, we ask that our work may bear fruit for eternal life. This is what we mean.

St. John of the Cross says that for a preacher to benefit people (and, more broadly, one who speaks), it is a spiritual practice and not a vocal one. And it comes in conflict with our fears, with our desires to manipulate, please, or flatter others. We may preach with the intention for spiritual benefit for others, but still have no detachment from pleasing people. And this need to please or flatter can influence what we say and don't say. The need to flatter gives people power over us. When we have detachment, we don't need them.

Silence and its impact on spiritual growth and fruitfulness. Chapter 15 of the Way of Perfection

Being silent in the face of criticism, but with discretion, in the bounds of common sense (would my silence cause anger, guilt, scandal? then don't be silent).

No desire to be held in esteem. Release from fear of what people think of us. Time will be witness of the benefit you see of this silence in yourself. Come to the point where you don't care if people say good things or evil about you. Hear people's talk as if it is another person's affair (with that much detachment). Be present to what is said, but no enmeshed in the emotions. Then you can respond, and then you have PEACE.

From the Councils of St. John of the Cross:  You will be chiseled by people's words, deeds, or temperament. You ought to suffer the mortifications with patience being silent for the love of God.

Essentially, don't over react.

If I don't practice being patient, what will happen? St. John says, profoundly, "They do not get along well with others!" This is huge. People are our world. We become nuclear reactors. People won't want to deal with us. Patience, on the other hand, brings us peace and connects us to others.

Romans 12: "Do not repay evil for evil. Do not avenge yourself but leave room for the wrath of God. Feed and give drink to your enemies, and in so doing heap burning coals on their head." What is this leaving room for the wrath of God? You give opportunity, create enough psychic space for the person to hear their own words. Don't fire back. Allow their own words to echo in their own mind. When they hear what they've said, a work of grace can happen, a moment of revelation.

The silence of pure innocence persuades when words fail.

Words are the most powerful things we possess. God creates by words, and when we speak, there are consequences. Words of kindness heal, and words of hate and evil wound.

St. Edith Stein says (in Vol 5 Essays on Women, The Problem of Women's Education, pp. 231-232). When one has grasped the importance of speech, it brings a responsibility upon oneself. Words reveal the soul. It's inner activity is revealed. Thoughtless speech reveals superficial dealings. Speech has repercussions on others souls: they can guide, or leave injury, cause retreat, or leave a deadly mark.

Milton attempted to show what the world would have been like in the world before sin. He states that paradise is where all language is pure and innocent.

What would the world be if all speech was pure, if all speech and silence came from the tree of God's love?

Spiritual Violence and Ferocious Love

At my last Carmelite formation small group meeting, I talked through a topic that has played a pretty big role in my spiritual development for my whole life: this notion of spiritual violence. Included in this notion are many questions, such as, how harsh should be we with ourselves? How far should self-denial go? How do we go about it? How do I understand God in terms of His harshness with us? What does "take up your cross and follow me" imply?

People tend to see Carmelites, and especially St. John of the Cross, as bastions of austerity. And it is true, right, fitting, and proper to associate austerity with this spirituality. But austerity is easily misunderstood and made horrific without a correspondingly deep grasp of the intensity of love that is the ground from which this austerity springs.

I decided there's a word I like for love's characteristic: ferocious. God's love is ferocious. And yes, I realize the definition of ferocious is basically violent. But there is also a connotation of strength, intensity, fierceness, a raging love that stops at nothing. It is complete, all-consuming, driving, penetrating, wanting everything. There is energy. And yet, it is love, so it does not violate or destroy, nor is there any lack of order or spinning out of control, like some kind of a rampaging mob. This word gives me a handle on all that.

Twenty years ago, if you had asked me about the intensity of God's love for me and how this relates to His call to leave everything and take up my cross, to lose my life for His sake, I would have told you in some formulaic way how God's intense love calls me to self-denial. I believed the theory that God was worthy and that I had to pray for the grace to be willing to leave aside what was dear to me and put God first. And my words and my demeanor in that conversation would have betrayed my anxiety about it.

Like many of my generation (and doesn't every generation have something like this?), I have struggled with disrupted attachments. As a child of divorce, a child of an alcoholic, and a child in a family with mental illness, comfortable, reliable, and trustworthy relationships were simply not part of my life's foundation. As a result, I have come towards healthy attachments by way of some fairly intense interior problems of over-attachment. And I have come towards holy detachment by way of experiences that have felt like death, and have put me face to face with the terrors I had tried to avoid through over-attachments in the first place. I was not free to give up everything because I hadn't strongly experienced receiving. I was locked into a fearful survival mode.

But along the way of the three ring circus of my interior life, I have tried to figure out what a holy normal really is. When I was in my early 20s and under the influence of a certain teacher, I decided that the music I loved was worldly and I had to abandon it. I took a record collection that held powerfully positive emotional associations for me, put it in a dumpster, and walked away. I did it solely because I felt I had to take a violent stand against myself. It hurt, and I thought hurting myself this way would please God.

If I give away everything I own, and if I hand my body over so that I may boast but do not have love, I gain nothing. 1 Corinthians 13:3

 Close relationships for me have often been fraught with issues of control, feelings of desperation, and all sorts of powerful yuck. It has been very hard for me to discern the difference between healthy closeness and a closeness for which I was paying with my dignity. It wasn't until I started having experiences of people showing they could get upset on my behalf (not at me, but for me, because they wanted to protect what they valued in me) that I began to realize there actually was a value in me worth protecting. It often made me laugh with a spontaneous and surprising joy, which struck me as strange because generally the other person was being dead serious and stern. (Come to think of it, sometimes it irked the other person, too.)




Sin violates personal dignity. We are made for holy union with God, but every time we sin, we turn away from love. When we are sinned against, we are hurt and we run the risk of enshrining that hurt in bitterness. God longs for us to repent, to live with Him and to be pure not because He's obsessed with behavioral standards but because He is ferocious love. It is amazing to think of a God with desire for a creature. Why? How? How can it be?

God sees us as we are and knows that because we are fallen we need ever deepening grace and we cannot bear the full brunt of His intense love straight on, without dying. So gently, and according to our nature, He patiently heals us, walks with us, forms us. He frees us to open ourselves, and to choose Him. He frees us to love Him in return. We cannot give Him anything that He does not give us first, and that is true of love more than anything. We love because He first loved us.

And according to our capacity and our desire, God knows how and when to touch us with more love than we can hold, the love that brings us to our knees, to fall on our faces, to cry out, our supposed breaking point far behind. Those moments reveal God to our souls. They reveal our sin to our souls. They reveal truth. Reality is clear and everything pales in comparison to this Love. Nothing temporal is worth clinging to in light of eternal, ferocious love.

And in that moment, those austere calls (taking up one's cross, denying oneself, and renouncing things) show their true characteristic: they are the invitation of Love. Love draws out love in return. And only love can generate and sustain a life of this kind of response.

God does not respond to my offerings; I respond to His invitation. My efforts -- to sufficiently injure myself, to work for His approval, to try hard enough, to be good enough, or to do anything -- do not draw down His invitation or His initiative toward me.

God calls. He is calling. With ferocious heart and gentle, intimate whisper, God calls. He invites. I love you. Come to Me.

Our response? Yes, Lord. I am here. Love me. 

Hope, Heaven, "Epiphanic Pointers"

I value words highly. I especially value words that are able to convey something that is deeply meaningful to me. Sometimes I'm not able to pull it off myself, but I find someone else who has. That's when I post quotes.

"Hope is the virtue that prevents us from setting our hearts on this world as the final aim of living. Knowing how much more awaits us in the life to come, we shed all clothing that would kill or erode this hope. Thus we learn the greatest lesson of Christian commitment: how to live in this world in service to God while at the same time rising above the things of the world (cf. John 15:19). I mean things insofar as they are seen as merely worldly rather than as epiphanic pointers to the Most High. We thus comprehend what it means from experience what it means to care for the persons, situations, and things entrusted to us by God without tarnishing our green veneer of hope for the home He has prepared for us from the beginning."

Susan Muto, St. John of the Cross for Today: The Dark Night, p. 277, emphasis mine.

 I have waited years to come upon this phrase: epiphanic pointers. Yes. 

Habitual Desperation

Michael W. Smith's song Breathe was somewhat popular as a worship song in circles I moved in a few years ago. In the chorus the soul sings to God, "And I...I'm desperate for you./And I.. I'm lost without you"

I won't even go into how after hearing this song once or twice in my life, I find it boring and incapable of carrying my prayer. There's something deeper that bothers me about it, something that probably did at one point stir me up enough to sing it as a worship song with some feeling.
It is very true that the soul is lost without God. It is also a common experience to feel lost when we don't feel God.

But a good worship song really should not have us rehearsing thoughts that don't build virtues. And while we need to initially identify our desperate need for God, we need to build up our faith in God's reality and presence and our hope for His action in our world, not our own experience of a need.

I've noticed this tendency within myself. I can think of my desire for God, my longing for God, my longing for God's action, my longing to see His kingdom come and His will be done, and I can find myself in this mode: "I------ I'm desperate for you......" It's all about my tremendous feeling of need. Now, I'm not anti-emotion (although I do favor rational thinking). Emotions are good, and our sense of need for God is very good. But it's not all about me. At some point I really need to move off my experience of my desire and look at the God who has inspired that desire. We don't really take our desires seriously if we do not recognize that the God who puts them there is present to fulfill them. Oh, it won't be instantaneously, and it probably won't even a be painless and wonderful process. But we long for God because He causes that. And if we don't shut up about our desires, and turn to look upon the God we desire so He can fill us, all we are really doing is wallowing in a sensual, emotional experience. And we run the risk of walling God off in the very process of singing about our desperation for Him.

We're talking fine lines here.  And I think this is one of the limitations of modern "worship music." I firmly believe that worship is meant to form us. This is why parish music directors need to have a pastoral sense and an evangelizing sense along with musical capacity and basic awareness of who it is s/he is serving. Good worship music allows a congregation to reach out to God and to experience Him drawing them to Himself. There needs to be that exchange, facilitated at least. And if we spend 10-15 minutes simply meditating on our own habit of feeling desperate without ever looking up to see the God who fulfills our need, we are becoming deformed, not formed.


May 12, 2014

A post-script:
St. John of the Cross writes in the Ascent of Mount Carmel: "Though the intention of these persons is directed to God, the effect they receive is recreation of the senses, from which they obtain weakness and imperfection more than the quickening of their will and its surrender to God." (III, 24 [4])

This seems straight to the point I was trying to make about how worship music sometimes runs the risk of being "recreation of the senses," but it also reminds me to bring out my main point in this that I realized what I had written earlier really failed to do. I do not mean by "recreation" in this case the enjoyment of the melody of this particular song (or of any). What I means is the perverted pleasure one can feel in the comfort of being stuck in desperation. I'm sure someone has a word for this. Maybe if I keep reading St. John I'll find his. But it has to do with coming to a certain spiritual plateau that one recognizes as such -- a leveling off place in traveling where there is still higher ground somewhere -- but getting content to stay right there and simply keep asking for help that one no longer believes is really forth-coming. 

To keep with this recreation, the will is weakened -- the will to look for a way out of that plateau.

I know it is not our wills that make things happen, apart from the grace of God working on and through that will. And yet there is that moment I've experienced many times -- maybe it is exactly the grace of God activating my will -- where suddenly I *really* want something, and the skids are greased and what has remained immobile moves.

Like a Fire In My Soul

There have been many times I've come to my blog wishing I could effectively scream with a keyboard or maybe write in tongues so that I could get something from the inside of me to the outside of me.

I'm not even sure what it would accomplish, or what I even want when I say that.

I say that I write so that I can understand. I think I also write to find some relief from what I hold inside.

Well, I've decided some things lately. For good or for ill, this is the way it goes:

I really don't care how I compare to other people. I've been reminded of late, verbally, that I'm not like other people. In the past, I've usually greeted that with a half of a smile and a thank you, but in this context it was clear that I was supposed to apologize for that. But you know what? I'm not going to. I may irritate you, I may challenge you, I may make you feel uncomfortable by not being like everyone else. That is your problem, not mine.

I don't believe in the word awkward. I was at a prayer meeting last night with a bunch of young people, and they talked about the viral picture of the Pope hugging the man with neurofibromatosis. They talked about how this would make them feel awkward, like they don't know what to do with themselves, and for that reason, they would shy away from someone with some deformity. And I kept thinking of a woman I used to work with who had NF. I'm sure she had her challenges, but to me she was another co-worker. When I think of feeling awkward, I think of a general life condition I faced for decades, and one which I  have exercised myself against adamantly for decades. I just don't believe in awkward. The feeling of being awkward is a call to conversion, and I say embrace it.

I confess that sometimes I don't know how to look at humanity without falling into despair. I know that there is another way, because God looks at us in all His perfection, and He does not despair. He looks at our poor, pitiful, wretched, blind and lame state and is filled with merciful love towards us. His heart must break sometimes with the desire for us to turn our stubborn wills and just open to Him a crack. Maybe I opt for despair because the option of aching with that much love just seems unbearable. Or maybe I just haven't found the way to splay my heart so that His love can love in me like that. I don't find it natively resident in me.

Spiritual battle is real. That I didn't decide, I realize it. Battle means there is something of value whose control is being determined. And it probably means a whole bunch of other things, too. I'm an intercessor, so I know it goes beyond my little world. And that goes with....

We can be connected with heaven now. In fact, it makes things make more sense. I first was wooed into being able to think this way through reading the writings of Anne, a Lay Apostle. And it makes so much sense. We say that eternity is what matters, and our life here is preparation for it, and that we work and pray for the salvation of eternal souls. But so often those words ring like meaningless religious platitudes. However, they are the deepest truths. And I think they are where I got my first two statements. When we are thinking in terms of eternity, who cares about comparisons, social niceties, and being cool?

I told someone recently that although I look like a quiet person, I am actually a volcano. But it is not anger that churns within me. I think it is words. In my younger days I prayed for years and years that my words would have the power to heal people. I don't know that lava is a healing force, but I keep experiencing results my words that show me there is a power there. It is actually not the delight I imagined, but rather scary. "The tongue has the power of life and death" (Prov. 18:21). Pray for me that I (and my tongue, and my words, and my voice, and my keyboard) may be all God's.

Just Shoot Me

I have learned so much in the last week that, once again, I am just about ready to pop.

Back in my 20s I went through several years where every day seemed the same. I was piddling along, feeling alone and miserable most of the time, amusing myself as I knew how, and pretty much waiting for it all to change. Occasionally I would become vaguely aware that I might just be wasting some time.

How loudly can I say duh?

I used to love to do things like scrape the paint off my woodwork or clean little detaily things in my apartment and just think and muse and wonder and wish.

And I spent a lot of time with a very macabre image: Marie going through a meat grinder.

Yeah, seriously.

I can look back and see it as a way I was crying out for God's mercy on my messed-up-edness. I would think of everything that was wrong with me or hard for me or hopeless and unconquerable, and I would mentally send myself through the meat grinder. I somehow vaguely hoped that I would come out purer. That somehow that I wanted to be purged of all those things, and some day break free.

As I came to know Christ in a new way in becoming Catholic, I stopped thinking about that just like that. I realized that God was indeed purging me. Maybe I started having enough real life struggle that I didn't have to imagine it so much any more. My cry for being purged started happening in reality.

Which isn't much fun either, but it is emotionally much healthier than constantly feeling one should be crushed.

But occasionally, over the years, I would feel a stab of deep remorse, of meeting something in myself that I desperately want changed but have no power to change. And what would slip either out of my thoughts or out of my mouth would be this weird prayer:  Lord, just shoot me.

It's that flash of shame, that flash of realizing how deeply hopeless I am apart from the Lord.

But it can also be a sense of harshness on myself, a lack of mercy, which is not right. I certainly cannot have any real mercy or understanding for any other person if I do not fully receive God's mercy for myself, and refrain from even a reflexive beating up on myself.

Sometime over the last week, when once again my soul was found raw and open, I suddenly had these words slip out of my internal prayer: Lord, just shoot me.

For a split second, I thought, oh, no Lord. I can't go back there.

But suddenly I had an image come to mind, and a Scripture:

Before birth the LORD called me,

from my mother’s womb he gave me my name.

He made my mouth like a sharp-edged sword,

concealed me, shielded by his hand.

He made me a sharpened arrow,

in his quiver he hid me.

(Isaiah 49:1-2)

And then I said it again.

Lord, just shoot me.

And the rest of what I learned this week, well, I'll have to process that another time.

Words out of Silence

This morning I had an interesting experience. It is the feast of St. Teresa of Avila, so some of the local Carmelite community met for Mass and a little reception later. There weren't that many of us, and after even a few of the few had to leave, the other few stayed to chat about our lives.

And I faced this scenario that seems to constantly repeat throughout my life.

One woman talked about how at the current stage in life, the Lord is showing her to retreat from a lot of activity and learn to be really, completely quiet inside. Others seemed to nod in sympathy.

And I felt like a salmon swimming upstream.

Silence has been co-natural to me my whole life to the point where it sometimes is my vice. I wrote about this in this post. There is a difference between being externally quiet and having interior silence, and I get that. However, interior silence has come really relatively easily for me because of my externally quiet nature. I'm not a woman who is at all likely to over-extend herself in care giving, or one to whom people flock to get their needs cared for. I don't get emotionally drawn into worrying over how people are faring. At almost any point, I tend to have a very good feel for where I am "at" interiorly (even if I don't understand why I'm there). I spend lots of time, and have for my whole life, in the cavernous regions of my soul, to the point that sometimes I haven't known how to interact socially. I've intuited that I couldn't just pull people in to one of the only things I felt personally well-versed at discussing -- interior life.

I shouldn't be bothered by this because it is simply who I am. And yet frankly sometimes it makes me feel abnormal as a woman.

What today's experience highlighted for me, however, is how God has led me since I was in my young 20s, and that is the fact that He wants my mouth. I have known that for years, and it has been a struggle. My mouth is symbolic, really, of my self-expression. I wonder why He hasn't put it to me that He wants my fingers, because I tend to write more than speak. But then again I needn't wonder that, because my mouth is what makes me feel my vulnerability more.

I knew a woman once who taught me that some people are made to feel extremely vulnerable when they are silent. We were in Japan, and she said she tried to make a one-day silent retreat, and after a few hours of the morning went by she had to walk down to the shopping district and meet someone, anyone, and talk. (I do know the feeling, although it literally took me 2.5 years of living alone in Japan before I started doing that sort of thing. And it lasted only a few weeks until I then left.) It is very difficult for me to grasp that some people are afraid of meeting themselves in silence, as, I suppose it might be hard for others to understand what have been my phobias.

But I get this sense that God's desire is for me to bring forth from my silence words that help bring others to silence. And I get this sense that this entails being able to face scary things with people. That means I probably need to learn a little sensitivity to people's fear of that intimate place of silence, of solitude, of the nakedness that leaves nothing to hide behind.

My song writing mentor friend said to me last year something about how every artist yearns to get to this place of soul-nakedness, to be able to really pour out his heart. I feel like that's what I've practiced in writing since I was 10 years old. And, yeah, I think the difficulty I have face all my life is figuring out how to insert myself in "normal society" when this is my bent. Without pretending to be someone else, without fear of being taken advantage of, and without fear of others' fear.


Maybe this is it. Maybe this is what I need to learn right now.

Dear Homilist

Dear Homilist,

I want you to tell me about Reality. Look into those readings and bring out for me what is most real, what connects these deepest realities to my life, or what can if I am open to it.

Colossians 2:17:  "Reality is found in Christ." By "that which is most real" I do not mean the concrete. I see these concrete realities. I live surrounded by them all the time. These are signs of things. They did not make themselves; they do not give themselves meaning. Ultimately, God is the Creator, and even though human beings do produce new things they themselves do not make themselves nor give themselves meaning. Reality is what comes from God alone and draws to God alone.

"Greater love has no man than this: that he lay down his life for his friends." Yes, a firefighter does this by running into a burning building to rescue a person and therefore we should pray for these heroes and be grateful for them. But the heart of the gospel is not to just admire some other schmuck somewhere who is actually doing what Jesus asked because, heck, I sure could never do that.

Dear Homilist, please teach me how to be "the firefighter" in reality. Teach me about prayer and fasting, teach me about witnessing to the work of God in my life, laying out for public consumption all that God has poured into me. Teach me how my spiritual offerings, in union with the grace of the Holy Spirit, pour out that love of which there is none greater -- the very love of God received by me and given again. That's what truly saves lives.

We have a mission. Jesus told us to make disciples and preach the gospel to every creature. I can't do that unless I learn about Reality, which is God's immense love poured out for me and through me for the salvation of souls. Dear Homilist, please take the mission seriously. It's your job to give us the equipment to save souls by handing on the Word of God, illuminated by the Paschal Mystery. The Word needs to go into your burning brazier of love, your heart, and be ministered unto our hearts like a lit coal touching other coals. Please, please, don't tell us to be nice. I can read a fortune cookie and get that. Stoke the fire of love in us, with all the sacrifice and risk and intentionality and selflessness and ardor (and everything else) that entails for our part.

We can all get caught up looking at mere shadows. Keep your eyes on Reality, and point us there.

Outspoken

Been thinking lately about why I write. This blog has undergone several shifts in focus since I started it almost five years ago. Heck, I've undergone several shifts during that time! I'm not really sure if I have "regular" readers anymore. And I certainly haven't been that regular with writing, myself. No complaints on either account, though. Life ebbs and flows and it is all good.

Writing has always been necessary for me on one level. That is to say, there have been many times when I've needed to express something but could not speak it. Writing therefore is more natural to me than speaking. It gives me time to decide what I want to say, and to "unsay" it if necessary.

Really, I think what has been on my mind is this: On the short list of meaningful things that God has spoken to my heart was something back about 20 years ago now, give or take. These were the words: "I have called you to be an outspoken person." That was about as bizarre as Jesus saying to the dead girl, "Little girl I say to you, arise!" At the time this happened, I had a hard enough time saying anything to anyone, let alone being outspoken, frank, blunt about anything. And yet, there it was. Bizarre.

As I look back I see that God has had a process going. What does it all take within a person to be outspoken? I can only answer for myself. As a very intuitive person, I often can "see" or sense things in a sort of entirety without being able to put a whit of it into words. Words, in that case, become like a second language that I have to learn first. So, part of being outspoken means to spend a long time in meditation, in soaking, in marinating in something. I have the words when the thing itself has sunk into me and arises as if of its own accord. And I think bluntness comes from experience of a thing to such a degree that I could not deny it without betraying my soul. I am by nature pretty flexible and open-ended, but if I have, for example, suffered from listening to a certain song too many times I will tell you bluntly I can't stand it. Or if I've suffered interiorly over someone I can tell them bluntly that I love them. Does bluntness always come from a passionate experience of the soul? Isn't one of the greatest maladies of our time this tendency to keep our lives neutral, numb to passionate feelings of joy or pain, free from the suffering that passion produces? Of fear of those intense sort of experiences?

This is all on my mind lately because more and more I feel myself being drawn to actually be outspoken. I spent decades of my life hearing the internal tape say "shut up and go away." That tape has been dismantled, but from habit there are times when I think "should I say something, really?" and always this echo comes back to my heart "I've called you to be an outspoken person," and so more often than not I tend to speak up. Now, I know there is a time to speak and a time for silences. No one enjoys a pontificater, or a know-it-all, or a self-centered blabber. Least of all myself. Dead horses need not be beaten. That's not the type of speaking out I'm talking about. And to be honest, right now some of the "speaking" I'm speaking about is writing. But it is also spilling over in my life to those I communicate with mostly by talking. I have to sort of look and marvel at this, because I know myself and my history, and I have to see this as a development in grace. Like all development in grace, every new step is like the very first one, just at the starting gate. And the grace is there to serve God's grander designs and purposes. Don't claim to have all that figured out. But, there's something going on here that is a new thing.

My Visit to Rich Mullins' Gravesite

Last week, on our way home from Wisconsin, we stopped into the cemetery in the tiny town of Hollansburg, Ohio so that I could pay my respects at the grave of musician Rich Mullins. Hollansburg is just a couple of miles over the western border with Indiana, which is the area where he grew up.

Take a look at this picture:

I took this perspective of his family grave plot to try to give the feeling of how we were in the middle of flat corn country. Just to the other side of the cemetery road there were kids playing in their back yard swimming pool. I walked the whole four or five block length of town to capture another picture that, while not typical of what the town looked like, felt typical of the sort of beauty... yes, beauty... of the area.

I couldn't help but think of one of Rich's songs when I was here that he wrote about his parents. It goes "Never picture perfect/just a plain man and his wife/who somehow knew the value of hard work, good love and real life." I could feel here what he expresses in this song, that through his very human and imperfect family, his faith and love grew wings.

While listening to his music, in my head while I was there and on recordings since returning home, I have been struck by how deeply Rich experienced a sort of natural sense of the sacramental, of the incarnational. He looked at nature and knew it was evidence of God's powerful love for his life. He observed human interaction and saw how it both witnessed to the majesty of God and the travesty of sin. He got it, intuitively, it seems. It is no wonder that he was attracted to the sacramental life of the Church, even while it was hard for him to embrace the institutionalism.

Sometimes words just fail me. His music just makes my heart ache and throb with the beauty of God manifested in what He has created. To capture that in beautiful melodies and poetic lyrics and that beautiful hammered dulcimer is such a gift to us all.

Requiescat in Pace, Rich.

In Which She Goes on a Rant about Language

Here's a random rant that has not been precipitated by anything in particular today but reverberating thoughts (and perhaps a few reverberating hormone chemicals).

I don't mind what language people speak. Speak English, speak Spanish, speak Danish or Hindi. I don't care. But please, oh please, talk like a human being.

I have friends who are poetic. I have friends who are funny. I have friends who are blunt and who have dry humor. Well, maybe I can't think of a dry humor friend right now, but I have dry humor and that counts. These are all ways people talk like human beings, and human beings are all different.

It creeps me out to no end when people talk using someone else's stilted lingo. I can't stand it when people want to get all "professional" sounding, using jargon their listeners don't. There's this sense of "high and mighty" that comes wafting down when people are afraid to simply talk using normal language.

Oh, I'm really only griping about myself, of course. This used to be me through and through. Doesn't mean it still doesn't grate on me. I suppose getting really infuriated about something is the only way one ever drop kicks junk out of one's life.

A lot of times when people cling to weird talk (religious people do this all the time, and it makes me cringe the worst! No, really, it makes me want to vomit.) it seems that the key is the person has not learned how to integrate what they profess with who they really are. Ok, it's a process. I understand. You're allowed. But the worst thing is that when people are trying to give answers to the world, but they can't talk from the heart. I want to just say, SHUT UP then! You know what? I don't want a bunch of pre-packaged answers. Show me your heart, and I will be very interested. I promise. I like hearts. I hate pre-packaged stuff though.Get down here on level ground with the rest of us schlunks and talk from your heart.

There. End of rant.

And With Your Spirit

Soon and very soon, Latin rite Catholic liturgy, prayed in English, will sound a bit different than it does right now. After several years of apparently necessary fuss and bother, a translation is coming down the pike that is more faithful to the normative Latin and less concerned with the flair of the particular incarnation of English most in use around the world. Being not only a lover of the Church and her liturgy, but a lover of words as well, I am very excited by this development. The translation, of course, is already set, but liturgical composers on the one hand and catechists on the other need to get their proverbial ducks in a row and then put them on parade effectively before the laity so that these changes don't hit us too much like rumble strips.

Then again, I've always found rumble strips sort of fun. Driving along the turnpike, hour after hour of highway, and suddenly you hit GADAGADAGADAGADA, and you wake up before you slam into the cars stopped at the toll booth, in case you missed all of the signs in the preceding ten miles indicating their impending presence.

Yesterday in the mail we got from our parish a nifty little pamphlet that like one of those signs. It outlined exactly which phrases in the liturgy which are prayed by the congregation will be changed. This isn't the first time I've read about these changes. And still, I was especially struck this time by the change most frequently repeated: Our response to the priest stating "The Lord be with you" changes from "And also with you" (which is my standard dry-humor response to church friends who wish me a good day or whatever, which I suppose will now sound "so early 21st century") to "and with your spirit. Oooh, thought I. I like that.

And with your spirit. I grew up saying that, or rather singing that, in the WELS Lutheran liturgy. And of course older Catholics grew up saying it in Latin. I don't know about anyone else, but for the most part I didn't really think about why we said "and with your spirit." I probably did simply presume this was a stilted churchy way of saying "and also with you," and so I probably would have been very sympathetic to those who wanted to get rid of Churchese and talk like normal folk. For the most part, I'm for that. However, the normative Latin specifies we are asking the Lord to be with the priest's spirit, so let's talk the way Mama teaches us.

Now, in the years since I've stopped singing "and with your spirit" I've learned about the tri-partite nature of man, as St. Paul describes it, of body, soul and spirit. There was a lot of talk about this in the charismatic fellowship that was my worship home for the five years before I became a Catholic. And recently, the Lord has brought this front-and-center to my attention again through the teachings of John Michael Talbot. He uses this body, soul, and spirit language from St. Paul (and modern charismatics) in a way that enables me to bridge the lingo gap very easily into the ancient monastic wisdom which he unpacks for us moderns and our spiritual formation.

Scripture speaks of the spirit and the flesh, or soul and spirit in many places. My own conjecture about why this language is not much understood and not much used is that it can only be used with meaning when discussing experience, precisely, spiritual experience of conversion, of change. Homilies often focus on  concrete things we can do, instead of the internal factors of how we respond to the Spirit of God, or what happens to us when we do. Perhaps this is more appropriate, or it is thought to be more appropriate, to spiritual direction than to homilies. Conversion is an individual matter, and yet it is to be the collective experience to which we can all relate. Really, I think this is the crux of the problem. Even when conversion is our collective experience, we don't seem to have the language to employ to talk about it. And what we can't discuss tends to drop away from our collective spiritual experience. That's just my conjecture on our modern Catholic Catch-22.

The liturgy, of course, is a key spiritual experience in the life of a Catholic Christian. So it seems very fitting to keep this word "spirit" constantly reverberating in our ears, bringing us back to clue in to the existence of something important. We can start by asking What's a spirit? And how does it differ from plain "me," or my soul?

John Michael Talbot has an audio teaching touching on this point which you can find on this site. Look for the cell group teaching dated July 13. He also talks about it in his book The Joy of Music Ministry in this way:

Using the anthropology of St. Paul, we can define the human being as having a spirit, soul, and body. Due to our current condition we usually think of these things the other way around, or body, soul, spirit. Body is our senses and emotions. Soul is the spiritual mind, or the ability to be cognitively aware of reality. Body and soul are the house of the spirit and are rightly engaged in the things of space and time. Spirit is the deepest reality of our being. It is pure spiritual intuition that is beyond senses, emotions, or thoughts, but builds on, complements, and completes them all. In union with God's Spirit, our spirit has a wonderful and unique capacity for eternity and infinity. It is present in eternity now and does all things even while body and soul are engaged in the matters of space and time.(p. 16)

But then, there's this matter of the fall into sin, in which we all participate!

It starts in the way we function with the basic body, soul and spirit "stuff" of which we are made. When the senses of the body lead the way, we become primarily concerned with sense gratification. Rather than being positively incarnational, we become "sensual" or "carnal." ... When we don't get what we want, we become angry and upset. When the emotions become clouded, the thoughts become conflicted, unfocused, and confused. The spirit gets totally ignored and covered up in this chaotic cacophony of discord. It is as if the spirit is asleep, or even dead....The spirit has to be awakened. (p. 19)

After conversion to Christ, it is in the Church that we come to see how He heals and transforms us:

It is here that the authenticity of our own reordering according to His teaching is really tested. If we let the Lord turn us right side up again, from body and soul with a sleeping spirit, to spirit, soul, and body, then we find a common union with all people and all creation by the very fact of this reorientation of living. When the spirit is really first in our lives, then we intuitively see and are united with this essence in all creation, animate and inanimate...From this position of awakening and rebirth we begin to unite with others in their own potential for this reality whether they actually see it or not!...This takes great faith and patience, but it can be done. We actually call forth the hidden Spirit of Jesus in others when we act as Jesus would with them. This helps to spread the Music of God through Christ. This sings the Divine Song. (p. 33-34)

So, yes, I'm rather excited about our having the word "spirit" on our lips more often so that we can be moved closer to contemplation of the realities of the design and function of the human spirit. And that's just one tiny aspect of the coming changes.

Something in me really loves rumble strips.

What Does "Poverty" Mean?

One of the things I love about social media like blogs and Facebook is coming across quotations that friends (or strangers) share. I come across several that I like, and every once in a while I come across a treasure that really lends itself to contemplation or further reading.

I came across one such quotation last week, from Lewis Mumford, a 20th century thinker of whom I'd never heard before:

A day spent without the sight or sound of beauty, the contemplation of mystery, or the search of truth or perfection is a poverty-stricken day; and a succession of such days is fatal to human life.

I think this quote struck me for several reasons, but where I plunge my thought most deeply in this short sentence is into the phrase "poverty-stricken day."

Poverty.

I have thought about that word often, but never did so much before encountering the Catholic Church. It was something I noticed quickly when I started attending Mass in Milwaukee; there was much more use of this word poverty than in the churches I had belonged to previously. Regardless of how it was used, I had a hard time getting comfortable with the word, with figuring out how to incorporate this word into my new Catholic vocabulary. I got that there was a spiritual dimension to poverty. But mostly I observed middle class suburbanites talking about the terrible plight of other people -- those in poverty. Something in the equation seemed off. At the time, I was living in what a co-worker had described (with some shock when we had discussed my plans to move there) as poverty-level housing. And I guess it was. But I could afford it, and I loved it there. I've never cared what things look like.

In fact, my whole relationship to economic prosperity has always been rather indifferent. With the possible exception of my time in Japan, where I earned far more money than I was expecting to (I went with the understanding that I was a volunteer receiving room and board), I've never lived with lots of means. But I have felt oftentimes like a material glutton, that I have much more than I need. I spent a short time doing mission work in Jamaica in my young 20s and witnessed families who lived in tin shacks the size of a closet and who drew water whenever the pump happened to be working that week. It was laughable for me to think of my "poverty-level housing" as any sort of deprivation after that.


Again this idea of poverty comes to mind these days because we've been living without my husband having a job for a couple of months. Lots of families are in this boat right now. It has been useful for me to shift out what truly we need and what we do not. I have struggled in the past with simply shifting into a "get tough" mode where I refuse to need anything. This is a self-martyrdom problem where I think I will make everything better my killing myself off. I see that this stance does not demonstrate trust in God nor respect for His love for me.

So, what of this thing of poverty? Mumford strikes it on the head. Poverty consists in being deprived of the sight or sound of beauty. Poverty consists in forsaking the contemplation of mystery. Poverty consists in giving up the search for truth and perfection. Beauty, Goodness, Truth. The Catholic Catechism states: "God created the world to show forth and communicate his glory. That his creatures should share in his truth, goodness and beauty - this is the glory for which God created them" (CCC 319). Sharing in the glory of God is all the riches the soul actually needs and desires. A life spent in this pursuit is rich, it is pleasing, it is life-giving. If we lack these things, as Mumford points out, especially chronically, we risk a fatality, the demise of our humanity, our souls.

The deceiver of our souls would convince us that Beauty is ugly, or meaningless, or superfluous -- to be sacrificed. He would convince us that there is no Goodness, there is only expedience, there is only what makes the opportunity before worth grabbing, despite what it means for my own soul or for another. He would convince us that the only Truth is what brings me momentary satisfaction. Got my goodie, gonna get my next goodie; there ain't no more to it than that.

It truly doesn't matter whether we have lots of money or little; either way we can live in poverty. Ironically I think it can be dreadfully hard to alert those in affluent poverty to the state of their souls. It sounds like a bunch of hippie nonsense to tell people their souls are dead. So maybe that's not the approach. Perhaps the approach is to pray folks into a wrestling match. Truth? Beauty? Goodness? Does it matter which facet grabs us, which of our lacks, which of our longings stabs out of our hearts and refuses to shut up? God knows the embrace each of our souls most needs today. Let us pray for each other that we will not shout down God's approach, not drown it, not turn Him aside, not try to stay "comfortable". Not try to stay in poverty. Allow Him who became poor for our sakes to make us rich.

Finding My Words

This morning I was doing a bunch of little writing tasks, one of which was to send an email to a friend. I knew basically what I wanted to say, but there was a certain phrase I wanted to get just right. As I have done on many occasions (especially in the days when I wrote letters for a living) I prayed for words. I started out praying for "the right words," but then caught something in the nuance of my heart, having to do with what I blogged about yesterday, and I changed the request. I prayed instead for my words, the words that really get to the point in my heart. And they came.

This reminded me of an experience I had early in my journey into the Catholic Church. I don't remember exactly when it occurred, but the setting was in that basement chapel of Gesu parish where I attended daily Mass from 1992-1994. I knelt at the pew before Mass began, and the Lord spoke to me. He asked me a question: "Marie, why are you here?" I was kind of flustered, and stammered around for a factual answer. "Well, uh, I'm here because I going to worship you at this Mass..." This kind of response is pretty typical of how I respond to everyone, because communication verbally usually catches me off guard. Somehow I don't have an expectation of communication, so I usually feel unprepared. Habit, I guess.

The Lord asked again, "Marie, why are you here?" This time, I got all religious on God, sort of fawning on Him, hoping that if I bent low enough, that would somehow substitute for really answering Him. "Oh Lord," I said, "I can't really know why I'm here. But you know everything, and you know why I'm here." I had an immediate sense that this made the Lord want to puke. Like an "oh, stop it, would you?" kind of sense. I realized this morning I do this a lot, too. I don't like to admit it, and I probably don't look like I do this, but internally I fawn on people a lot. It has got to stop. Fortunately it is starting to make me want to puke, too.

He asked me a third time. "Marie, why are you here?" It was then that I realized, because I felt it become possible, that the answer had to rise out of the depths of my spirit, the depths of me. "I'm here because this is my home," I said. And as I said it, I learned it. Ah. So that's it. Not unlike the words I wrote in that email today.

Somehow, this is what the Lord is teaching me again today.

Christian Reality

It's all making more sense, now.

I am really grateful to Fr. Giussani and for the books we are reading in School of Community, which are the fruit of, yes, his theological study, but even more so his life and his relationship with Christ. What I have found in the last couple of years of my familiarity with the movement Communion and Liberation is that I find words to express experiences and desires of mine that had seemed ineffable before. And for someone to give me words that unlock my heart is one of the most beautiful things I can imagine.

One of the big things he insists on is how there is only one way to become a Christian, and it is the same way that Peter and Andrew and James and John became Christians -- by encountering Christ. They encountered the Jesus of history, the Son of God in the flesh, and we do, too. Only because Jesus has ascended into heaven and sent the Holy Spirit, the Paraclete, to be with us, we meet Him in His Body, the Church. But we really do meet Him. In the Church, in the Sacraments, in the unity of those who follow, led by the Bishops, we really do encounter Christ. And when we encounter Him, we are amazed, we wonder, we are drawn, we are attracted. We are called. And we must engage ourselves; we must follow.

I read an interesting post last night touching on a discussion of St. Thomas Aquinas' about faith. As I followed the link in the post to the actual quotation from the Summa, I noted that he spoke of faith as a perfection of the intellect. Or, as Giussani would say, faith is a method of knowing. I've probably read this sort of thing from Aquinas many times in the course of my grad school ponderings, but it took Giussani to put some flesh on this truth and make it useful to me.

But, more than a new way of understanding theological concepts, Fr. Giussani has helped me experience reality differently. I feel like I've told this story of my joining my parish choir about 500 times now, but perhaps that only comes from my thinking about it so much. Anyway, that story starts here. I think right now, the way I experience the choir is as a community, a microcosm of the Church. We gather with a purpose, with a real belonging to each other for this purpose of leading in worship. As the story of my welcome shows, it is a community open to others. There is freedom, there's not a heck of a lot of pretense, and a Pharisee-type will be seriously challenged. This experience really changes the way I experience the liturgy. The other day there was the reading from Acts where Paul was bidding farewell to one of the churches as he was to sail off towards Rome, and he talked about having exhorted them with tears, and they were mostly grieved by his saying none of them would ever see him again. And I understood how a congregation could experience that grief about their priest/Bishop. It is the normal, human reaction to living in Christian community with someone who has opened his life so that others could live. The hymns we sing make sense, like about us "becoming bread and wine" for each other. (See, in the past I would have just sort of rolled my eyes, wondering what kind of theological aberrations were cloaked in this kind of talk.) The experience of worshipping God, of saying "God, I give you my life, I offer my life, I open my life to anyone, to anything that comes from your hand" is made possible by this kind of experience of the Church. And I even see why we bother to belong to parishes in the first place. It isn't just enough that we get to Mass somewhere, so we can check our obligation off our to-do list. It is part and parcel of being a Christian to belong to other people in some kind of meaningful way. Maybe not to all in the same way, and so it is fitting that within parishes there are other small groups. Fr. Mike had completely the right idea with promoting the various households on the campus of Franciscan University, because this is something we need to mature as -- and to become -- Christians.

It's happened to me, maybe it has happened to you, too. I go to a Mass that is not a typical setting for me, either visiting somewhere, or some unusual circumstance, and it is harder than usual to enter into the worship. It takes maybe more mental effort. I think these moments call us to recognize our belonging and to stretch it, to become so conscious of it in an awkward sort of sense of uncomfortability, that we grow. The image I'm thinking of is a volunteer plant, one that seems to grow up out of nowhere. We need to bring how we have been nourished by Christ in another setting, another community, and share that experience in the midst of people with whom we've not had that experience before. Hopefully, the reception is warm and the recognition of the one life we live in Christ is immediate. If not, I guess we beg and Christ answers with His presence. This is called being missionary; this is called being Christian. There just is nothing else.