An INTP Contemplates a Social Invitation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It Takes All Kinds

This morning as I was driving home from Mass I was musing on this thought: I wonder how many of life's difficulties, big or small, are created when we presume that other people have the same perspectives we do.

I had been chatting with a friend about an idea. He is practical and his first thoughts are about how difficult things are and everything that could go wrong. I am ambitious and willing to work extremely hard to make things go well. It's not that one of us is right and the other is wrong. He presumes no one will pitch in and he will be stuck with lots of work. I presume everyone will pitch in, and by now I should realize that not everyone is as die-hard as I am. But I've seen things that he thought were impossible yield good results because people did actually come together and pull it off. And yes, some people just really enjoy doing difficult things! And some don't!


So I'm back at that pesky reality again in this post about how God has created so many different types of people with varying temperaments, gifts, strengths, and weaknesses. I used to really think I was just extremely defective, instead of simply different from others. (Oh, I'm defective, too, but not in the way I was thinking.) It is very, very good that my friend has the ability to make practical plans, and it is good that I want to pour my heart into a giant challenge, and we both need lots of other types to provide several other perspectives to really do something good to build up the kingdom of God. And that's what it takes -- each person offering who they are with humility, being no more and no less than who God has gifted them to be. If we really believe that God builds us living stones into a dwelling place for His Spirit, then we have to be willing to say "here's what I've got, now you show me what you've got, and you, and you, and you" and then, through us together, God does what only He can. Pride probably hides things as much as it boasts about things. Both are means of trying to stand aloof and keeping oneself untouched.

It has always impressed me that one of the first thing an authentic conversion produces is movement towards other people. Jesus calls Matthew to follow Him, then Jesus follows Matthew back to his own house and his own people. Jesus explains our judgment will be based on how we treat "the least of these, his brothers." Even a cloistered monastic who seems far removed from everyone is in reality praying and wrestling for the salvation of all and is in close union with the suffering of the world, because Jesus is.

If we were all the same, how could we love without simply loving only what we find in our selves? Perhaps humanity requires diversity simply because we require the exercise of humility and charity for salvation.

Yes, We Use This for Family Prayer Time

I wonder if we might be the only household anywhere who currently uses the combination we are using for our family prayer time.

Currently, we read the daily reading from this, along with a decade of the rosary:

We've used quite a variety of things through the years, but a few months ago I decided on Oswald Chambers' My Utmost for His Highest. While we haven't read every entry of the year yet, everything we have read is entirely compatible with Catholic faith. In fact, it does a very good job of emphasizing the life of discipleship that, while thoroughly Catholic, tends to be overlooked or gets all the teeth pulled out of it by the average Catholic devotional writer. It is somewhat frustrating to me that the depth of challenge most Catholic devotional materials get is "maybe you could try to think about God a little today." And as much as I love and live by the liturgical year, there is also something refreshing to me to have a devotional that addresses perennial spiritual needs of Christian disciples, so that it has more of a spiritual reading flavor than liturgical. 

Those Parents Who Brought Their Toddlers to Confession Today

I didn't know them, but then again even if they weren't visitors from another parish I am a little bit out of the parents-of-toddlers loop. We parked at about the same time, and right away I realized I needn't rush to beat them into the confession line, since they were going to be unpacking out of the car for awhile. Dad came inside the church by himself, but several minutes later it seems the fascination of everything outside, in the bathroom, and in the narthex had worn off, because eventually one little boy face poked through the door. He saw the holy water font and dove for it like a winning layup. I broke into a laughing smile. He was obviously excited about holy water.

Eventually he came running past me straight into the arms of his Dad, and then I saw a woman enter with a slightly older boy in tow, and she was mouthing "Sorry" to him.

What ensued included those very whispered verbal tours of all the beautiful things in the church that most Catholic parents have probably done. I overheard one bit about the Divine Mercy picture. Dad and Mom were explaining bits of how everything reminds us of how God loves us. Little boy #1 was asking insightful questions about why the picture had light in certain places. (Specifically, he meant around Jesus' head and his hand extended in blessing. But He asked not, "why is it painted gold there" but "why is there light coming from it." This boy saw it the way it was intended to be seen.)

Moments later little boy #1 and little boy #2 were sent a few feet away, a specific place for children in the church, still within eyeshot (Though not my eyeshot. I was taking it all in by hearing.) Within moments, there was a bump on the arm of Littler Boy. Weeping ensued, which seemed to trigger some type of innate memory of all suffering and woe that has occurred since the dawn of time, and it was all mourned once again. Both parents went to give comfort, to console, to quiet.

And I understand why they did that, of course. Just like I understand why they whispered their lessons about the sacramental items around the church. It is part being good parents, and it is part their cortisol levels going through the roof as they worry about What Others Will Think. In fact, I could feel their cortisol levels rise.

But it ministered to me to simply hear a child honestly wail over his bumped arm. Healthy children don't hide when they are hurt. They cry, let it out, and then it conjures up My, I'm actually a bit hungry, and tired, and frustrated too. And I was there at confession because I was going to tell Jesus where I hurt, too. I really needed to unload it all on Him, at least as much as I could identify. It was good to have company and have someone show me how to just naturally let it out. And to find solace in Mother Church and Jesus.

And then, as Mom escorted the boys back out to the narthex again until her turn came, I overheard the Older Boy commenting that he had actually bumped his head, too. He was not going to let Little Brother be the one getting all the consolation. He wanted in on it, too. See, even for him, one vulnerable expression of pain triggered his own needs to the surface, too.

So, dear parents that I don't know, thanks for bringing those two boys to confession today. They were anointed for ministry at their baptism, and don't you doubt for a minute that they are living it out. Thanks for teaching them, for making them aware of Beauty in the church. Please keep doing it, and always teach them beyond what you think their years can hold, because that's where kids typically are, anyway.

And I hope your cortisol levels are ok.

Steppin' out of the Ghetto

Just recently I had one of those interesting experiences that made me realize how much time I spend in the "Catholic ghetto." I met someone whose family had experienced something difficult, and I said, sincerely but without a bunch of self-conscious thought, "I am praying for your family."

Now, I don't personally know the person I said this to at all, but his response to me was interesting. Subtly, he communicated I don't need you to pray for me. Somehow, it was simply an uncomfortable thought to him, or so it seemed. And stood in contrast to me to how this exchange usually goes among Christians, whether any of the words are genuinely meant, or not:

I'm praying for you.

Oh, thank you so much.

Somehow, instead of this ritual exchange, there registered some sort of sense that I was telling this person he was a mess, and seriously in need of help.

Come to think of it, I once heard a similar conversation between a religious order priest and a man I knew actually had some significant issues and who was not practicing his faith in the slightest. In that case, the mere fact that this man was talking to the priest made him assert how righteous he was and how untroubled his life.

So really, in both cases, it probably was a case of the person feeling subconsciously very aware of his misery, but feeling the need to duck behind something quickly to avoid it.

And now it occurs to me that this response to "I'm praying for your family" might have been the most genuine thing I experienced that whole day.

Stuff and Bother

So it seems the Lord wants to make sure I don't get too full of myself by having two delightful days in a row. Or, perhaps I could just say that some days are good and feel good, and some days have good stuff in them which is made evident in contrast of bad feelings.

Right now what is on my mind is possessions and possessiveness. (Ooh! a word with three double-s sets. Can you tell I've gone back to drinking coffee?)

Two observations: many years ago when I was married without kids, there was a priest I knew who was starting his own branch of the Carmelite order. (He's another story, which this is not about. Ditto coffee.) But here's the thing: every time I would walk into my basement, I would have this thought that was connected to him, the gospel, and my need to divest myself of "stuff." To get rid of things, and to not accumulate more. And that was, as I said, before kids.

Except in those days, I responded to my thoughts with a sort of "yeah...." apathy engendered by it being an unlived, unshared ideal. A private thought in my private brain. And so I never really did much about it.

As years have passed, I realize that this was a little nudge from heaven. And I realize I have to nurture nudges from heaven by talking about them with others. And acting on them.

Which leads me to my second observation: I've witnessed in my own life and in the lives of others that when moments of trial clear and we have come through them, there is a natural tendency to declutter our space. Suddenly, stuff looks stifling and we realize someone else might need the things we have.

I love simplicity, but I live with stuff. Stuff is somewhat inevitable with growing kids with changing needs and interests. But it does frustrate me to have to maintain stuff, especially stuff that's not of my choosing. It's hard enough for me to maintain the stuff that is of my choosing.

And of course, the chaos of stuff reminds me of deeper issues of possessiveness, of keeping, of needing, of wanting, that rub me raw in all the ways that remind me that to be human is to be a walking, gaping, aching need. Contingent being and all that.

Which is fine.

It just feels, you know, meh. Muddling through life. Some days we gracefully leap through life like a ballerina. Some days we blob with one sock falling down and our pants feeling too tight. But both are a type of forward motion. So, it's fine.

Loving Intercession

I had such a delightful day today. I spent several hours interceding for people I barely know as they attended a retreat. There are plenty of times when I get impatient after praying quietly for 10 or 15 minutes, but those hours today flew past. And I was left with such an incredible peace, gentleness and eagerness for the rest of my normal routine that it was evident that God's gift was simply at work here.

This wasn't the first I had prayed for this crowd; I've been praying, first vaguely and then specifically, and then with great intention for them over the last several months. But I've discovered something again, experientially. Prayer engenders love, just as love engenders prayer. One can choose to pray just as one can choose to love, but it takes time for it to really catch on and grow (or, it takes time to get all the personal possessiveness to die away and the real love to come forth). I can see now that when I sensed God summoning me to pray for this group, He was really inviting me to love them. There's growth involved in that equation, and I've seen it happen already. Loving anyone causes our hearts to open, to be challenged, to change. There's an open-ended dynamic and we can't forsee where it will take us. For love to stay alive, we have to keep living with that open-ended dynamic. It's an adventure.

And that's exactly why prayer is an adventure. It is not only love for the person or the group, it is experiencing God's love for the person or the group. It is responding to God's wishes for the person or the group, as it involves me. It is receiving God's gifts that He wants to share with them, or recognizing the gifts He has already given that are meant not for me to horde, but for me to share. Or begging for the gifts which it is evident they need but are being horded by others or need to be developed. It is worship of God: offering of self, whole and complete, which also involves the good of my neighbor.

Yeah, this stuff is so much fun.

Some People Mystify Me

There is much that surprises me about people, always. It is fascinating to me that God makes people with such variety, but frankly there's a big chunk of this variety I don't like much. Oh, I don't think God is really responsible for the bits I don't like; we have a way of mucking up who we are. But there are templates that still mystify me.

One such type of person is the one who truly believe s/he understands my thoughts, ideas, words, and intentions better than I do. I've known a couple of these people, and trying to communicate with them is maddening. If I say "The sky is blue," I might be told that I really mean the rabbit is brown. What can I really do in such an exchange but close my mouth and walk away. It is as if the other person wants to have a conversion with him/herself with another person as an observer.

I am also intrigued by the type of person who constantly tries to get things to be to their own advantage. And yes, this is intriguing to me, not maddening. Depending upon the age of the person, it seems there is something juvenile and selfish in this, and yet there is a "skill" here that stands in stark contrast to my own natural bent, which is to disregard my advantage or even not recognize it. I'm getting better at identifying what I actually need or want in a situation, which is good. But when I see someone truly wheedling their way through life, it is somewhat amazing to me. I would never survive as a street rat.

Everyone has their strengths, and I realize mine are somewhat unique. It is hard to have unique strengths, especially without a good understanding of how "normal" people operate. I have had a tendency to assume that others are motivated as I am (and have painfully learned otherwise) and also have gotten very frustrated when I meet people with weaknesses where I have strengths, because it just doesn't seem so hard for them to simply stop being so silly. I'm sure I appear similarly doltish to them. Sometimes I'm not sure my strengths are apparent at all, or if I just seem generally doltish. (I admit there are some people who appear generally doltish to me!)

Mostly I am glad that I am not the sort to give much concern at all to what other people think about me. Occasionally, I do need to purposely spend some energy thinking about what makes other people tick, especially if I'm struggling to get on with them. I believe in letting other people be other people without worrying about them or judging them. But then there are those mysteries, and I am forced to ponder them.

The Mercy of God

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

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

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

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

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

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

And thanks be to God for His unfathomable mercy.

Blog Evolution

There's nothing like a commitment to daily blogging to reveal that most of the time I desire to say nothing. Or that I feel like anything I have in me to say is either too grumpy, too boring, or too depressing to put into print.

There's a columnist that writes for our local newspaper who, it is evident to me, struggles with this same thing. And yet, because she is paid to fill a space each Sunday, she picks some minute detail of her week that can be publicly consumed and writes several hundred words about it. I read it every week I get my hands on the paper, just sorta to see if she's pulled it off.

I started this blog eight years ago, before there was Facebook (for me, at least). I had small children, and I really needed to sit up late at night sometimes and work out thoughts that didn't involve Barney, nursing, or race cars.

It was stiff and clunky at first. My first major direction was unschooling. I was learning how to let go of being a control freak parent who felt the need to micromanage. Then I started to be involved in Communion and Liberation, and I wrote a lot about that as I struggled to learn the complex intellectual language of Giussani. And in the middle of that, unbeknownst to me, I began chronicling a spiritual path that led me to where I am now, having entered formation as a Secular Carmelite. I've learned along the way, both by life and by writing, to find my own voice and my own silence.

This blog has been a place of solace for me, and also an experience of extreme vulnerability, especially when I developed regular readers that I wasn't expecting.

I have been told that I should write on spirituality, to help other people understand how God calls to them and work in their lives. It didn't really dawn on me in those moments to mention that I do actually do that. I know that writing is a form of prayer for me, and there are times when I go back and read things I've written myself and find God speaking to me something I'd forgotten or lost sight of. I also know that very few people actually read my blog. And that's ok. Really, sometimes it frustrates me that my brilliance is not noticed, but then I get over it. And sometimes I go back after a year or two and read what I thought was brilliant and realize it is so dense that no one could hardly follow my thought through to the end.

But writing is for me. And if I don't hit "publish," the vulnerability aspect of it is diminished, and then it isn't writing in the same way.

I just wish I had had the internet and a blog when I was a teen and a 20something. I think my life would have been much, much better.

Corns and Band-Aids

I'm going to intentionally foster a little creativity here, and go for National Blog Post Writing Month. My random topic for the evening is band-aids.

This reminds me of a childhood experience with corns. I mean, like the kind that grow on your feet. When I was perhaps 9 or 10 it seems I had these quite often.

I have this memory of being at my grandmother's house during the summer (where I would stay for a week at a time a few times), and being concerned about these corns on my feet. It wasn't that I thought they looked bad or that I was particularly worried about them; I just knew that they were abnormal growths that weren't supposed to be there. So I took a large nail clipper and began hacking away at the dead skin, and taking a tweezer and yanking out whatever that is in the core of it that isn't supposed to be there. And then I would take rubbing alcohol, which I seemed to think was the savior, making all things right and good, and blotted my skin-made-raw with it to kill off whatever contaminants were there or that I was introducing with the use of this rather crude form of surgery.

And while I did that, I composed a little song, which has stuck in my head to this day. It went like this: "What hurts often benefits/You've heard it said before and now you know/it's true"

See, I've never really believed in treating any problem with a band-aid. I've never believed in covering things up, sweeping them under the rug, ignoring it and hoping it goes away. For better or for worse, I've always believed in diving in for the root and digging until I get to the bottom.

It has served me well, mostly, inside of myself. It hasn't always served me as well in relationship to other people, because (I realize now) many people really are fond of covering things up. The happy balance is that I've learned that my own growth and change can't come about by sheer willpower; they need to happen in their own time. And in the case of other people, I cannot step in and move their wills. I must accept the reality another presents me with. Coming on like a bulldozer to force change in anyone or any situation is just as misguided as trying to heal cancer with a band-aid.

What Prayer Isn't About

Ask ten different people; get ten different answers. Actually, it wouldn't even require that. All I would need is to dip into ten different points in my own history. I could easily find moments where I found prayer to be boring, emotional, introspection, rote, liturgical, charismatic, frightening, healing, painful, anger-inducing, and on and on. And then there are all of those formal definitions, like prayer is raising the mind to God, or ACTS (adoration, contrition, thanksgiving, supplication), or claiming God's promises, or meditating on Scripture. The intellectual mind likes a nice default definition so that it feels like it knows something.

But what is prayer about? Prayer is basically the Carmelite charism. Pope Benedict XVI put it very simply: "Carmel teaches the Church how to pray." It sure has been teaching me. The Lord has been gently correcting me on what prayer isn't about.

Maybe, faithful Christian, you've had this kind of experience: You pray earnestly for something and you actually have felt the Holy Spirit nudging you to pray in a certain way or for a certain concern. Maybe that nudge has been long and even strong. So you pray. You pray, and pray some more.

Now, what do you really want as a result?

You want to see your prayers answered. You want to see God come through and deal with it. Right?

Here's one thing I've learned: That isn't necessarily what God wants.

Oh, but the prayer of a righteous man availeth much, and we are agreeing with God's will to be done, and no man can stand against what God has ordained, and ...

And God actually wants your heart.

He's not really into you getting a happy little sense of control by your prayers, like you are the lynch-pin that makes things happen. Like without you, He can't do a thing. And why are you wringing your hands as if you can explain to God why it is so important that He do what you are asking? Do you think He only started caring about it since you prayed?

It is true: we are called to partnership with God, and He does ask us to ask that His will be done. But His will is primarily that He is Lord, fully and completely. More than anything, He wants us, in our totality. Surrendered, available, desiring nothing else but Him. Not His blessings, not proof of His power or ours, not answers, only our Ultimate Good. 

God wants our union with Him, and then He will orchestrate our lives and circumstances so that His kingdom is extended through us. He wants each of His children to become the answer to the prayers of the humble who cry out to Him in their need.

And part of our transformation comes via constantly sharing our heart with Him, emptying out before Him all of our thoughts, loves, concerns, problems, and feelings, worries for others. We pour it all out, and we behold Him who poured out everything for us. Do we want Him who fills us? Or does it take something else?

And when we come to that moment where we simply love God, our hearts overflow over all the needs and loves and people, and God's mercy that is enveloping us embraces all these, and we extend that fountain of mercy to the whole world. Not by might, and not by power (or willing it, or getting the right prayer formula, or length of time or number of words), but by the power of the Holy Spirit operating through us. So it is Jesus, really, praying through us, loving through us, ministering through us, extending His life, His love, His kingdom, His healing to the world.

God the Servant

Jesus said to his disciples:
“Gird your loins and light your lamps
and be like servants who await their master’s return from a wedding,
ready to open immediately when he comes and knocks.
Blessed are those servants
whom the master finds vigilant on his arrival.
Amen, I say to you, he will gird himself,
have them recline at table, and proceed to wait on them.
And should he come in the second or third watch
and find them prepared in this way,
blessed are those servants.”  Luke 12:35-38

Maybe it is because I've been doing a lot of reading about the early Roman Empire lately, but one word from this passage struck me today: servant. Jesus was appealing to his followers to learn to emulate those of the lowest class. I find this striking because of what it says about Jesus' attention versus the typical attention focus.

Those who want to become somebody typically look to those they consider to be somebody. We look to the powerful, the influential, those with money, those with what we want. And then either we hate them, or we get in camps behind them, or beat ourselves up over how we aren't them, or we try to figure out how to be them. But however we respond, our attention is focused.

Jesus' attention is focused on the most lowly. He shows his disciples his own pursuit, and so reveals something terribly profound about God.

Jesus tells us to wait with vigilance for the presence of the Master. We have been charged with a responsibility to carry out what the Master desires. We know what He desires both because He tells us but even more so simply because of living with Him.

But while his listeners are still trying to digest the directive to set aside their pride and become lowly in their own eyes, Jesus says something that surely would have made their heads spin: the Master Himself will become their servant! This is life in union with God! Just when we thought we have given everything and have laid our lives out as an offering, the Master comes with mercy that meets our needs, fills us, and humbles us even further, inflaming our hearts with love for Him and spurring us on to long for some opportunity for service.

The longer and the more sacrificial the wait, the deeper the blessing.

Our Father wants nothing to interrupt the flow of His giving to us and our giving back to Him. That is life with God.

A Feast Day Gift (Or, When Things Make Sense)

Today is the feast of St. Teresa of Avila, reformer of the Carmelites, my spiritual mother, mi Madre. I use that term with deep affection and a tremendous conviction which is far beyond my ability to simply drum up from myself. I have been called. Though I am still four years away from my definitive profession, there is probably nothing of which I am more sure than this: I am called to be a daughter of St. Teresa.

Several days ago I met some Carmelite nuns who happened to give me a prayer card with the official prayer of the Centenary (we are celebrating St. Teresa's 500th birthday beginning today and for a year). I had read the prayer several times before today, but in typical feast day fashion I read it today and it blew me away. Here is the text:

Saint Teresa of Jesus, holy mother,
wholehearted servant of love,
teach us to walk with determined fidelity
along the path of interior prayer,
attentive to the presence
of the Blessed Trinity,
God dwelling deep within us.
At the school of Mary our Mother
strengthen within us these foundations:
a genuine humility,
a heart free from attachment,
and an unconditional love for others.
Share with us your intense
apostolic love for the Church.
May Jesus be our joy,
our hope and our energy,
an unquenchable fountain
and our most intimate Friend.
Bless our Carmelite family.
Teach us to make your prayer our own:
"I am yours, I was born for you.
What is your will for me?"
Amen.

God weaves the weird bits of our lives into a tapestry that eventually makes sense. And this morning after Mass was one of those breath-catching and tear-spilling moments when I saw, instead of the random chaos of threads, God's weaving work.



Here's what I see now, clearly.

God has been calling me to Carmel since I was a Protestant. That I know, and I've written about that stuff here. And even in that post I had a strongly inkling about the rest of what I'll write now.

A few years ago I went through a horrendously difficult spiritual season, that followed directly after a gloriously powerful spiritual season. Both stemmed from a relationship that had no real reason (other than God's design) not to be average and mundane. But instead of mundane, it was mystical. No, actually, it was both. At the same time. God did lots of unusual things in conjunction with this person, through him, but completely without his knowledge. I knew all along it was God who was communicating with me, acting in me. These seasons have occurred to me in the past in smaller or greater degrees, but they hadn't for about 20 years at that time. I rather thought I'd outgrown that sort of thing.

The Lord even told me towards the beginning of all this that this man was like St. John the Baptist for me. I remember saying, "Gee, Lord, I hope he's not going to die in three years." Well, he did not die, but after three years there was a sudden death-knell to the glory of what had been our friendship. And one of the final kicks in my gut came on the Feast of the Beheading of John the Baptist. Nice touch, Lord.

And what set the death-knell in process was also a mystical thing, an action God required of me. It was a firm call, with a set time. It left me wide-open vulnerable to far more than I realized at the time, even though I had no goal other than obedience. I knew God was launching me forth, but I had no idea where -- I didn't even think about that sort of thing.

The image that time evokes is St. Bernadette hearing the Blessed Mother say to her, "Drink from the spring, wash in the spring" when there wasn't any spring. The Song of Bernadette depicts her scratching in the dirt, wiping mud on her face and eating weeds. People carried her off presuming her to be crazy. And then the water flowed, and the healings started.

What happened as the upshot of that obedience I carried out, that wiping of mud all over my face, was the most spiritually painful thing I have ever endured. It was a solid 18 months, with several extra bonus periods dribbling over, of soul-searing pain. I've used this analogy before, but it was like God spent those first three years gently caressing my head, and gathering back all of my (very long and thick) hair into His hands. But then in one movement, He cut it off. I had to decide who that was with His hands in my hair: were we like St. Francis and St. Claire -- was God responding to my loving entreaties to belong entirely to Him? Or was it like the WWII movie I once saw -- where I was a Jewess and God a Nazi barber, shearing away my hair and my dignity. What pained me the most was that in the deepest part of my feeling, I wasn't sure.

But.

Here's what I know now.

During this long searing process, I gained three things, had three new foundations laid in me (check out that prayer again):

Humility. Oy vey. Pride and self-righteousness underwent mass destruction. God wanted me to see clearly everything I'm made of, the good, the bad and the ugly. And the beautiful.

A heart free from attachment: Oy vey again. Yes, I became very attached to this man, like a little child gets attached to, say, a puppy that it loves dearly but also relies on for comfort. God gives us comfort to heal our wounds, but He also knows that if we rely too long on comfort, we stay childish when we should be growing strong. To everything there is a season. And to really learn detachment, we have to really experience an attachment that can safely be broken.

An unconditional love for others: Oy, oy, oy vey. You see, after things blew apart and St. John got his head lopped off, there were many, many facets of what happened that angered me deeply. But God would not let me turn to bitterness and hatred. In fact, He insisted that I use this as a means to learn to keep loving, sans the good feelings. In fact, I tried refusing to love this man, and I found I could not love anyone. The Lord showed me that if I want to to try loving the way He loves, it's going to hurt. But it frees.

This season of my life hurt so badly primarily because love, detachment, and humility were so terribly foreign to me. I felt like I was dying. And in fact, I was. I was dying to myself.

And I was having the stage set for my being called to Carmel. It was a huge gift. It was a mystical gift and an intense trial of faith. And today mi Madre sat me down to show me how it makes sense.

Oh, and there's one more thing. A month ago, on retreat, the Lord gave me this one phrase that captured what had remained ineffable to me for years, this thing I knew and longed for: Apostolic Love. And there it is in that prayer: "Share with us your intense apostolic love for the Church." Of course St. Teresa had apostolic love: she went all over Spain making new foundations of the new reform of the Carmelites. She was entirely fueled by love and she worked as hard as she prayed.

I'm nothing original. I'm just called to be a daughter of St. Teresa. It all makes sense. Ha!

Why Praise Music Fails

It's been almost two months since I went on this walking pilgrimage, but today a certain facet of it is standing out to me in big relief: praise music.

Music has always been a very big deal to me, and I lived through 80s charismatic praise music (at least in the tail end of that decade), and because I became a Catholic in the early 90s, I also got to experience some of the 60s/70s praise music. (Some of you will realize what I mean.)  I experienced genuine healing through very good worship leaders in various stages of my life.

But I also experienced this:



When we stick with any format simply because it is what we know, there is the danger of having no idea at all why we are doing it or even what we are doing.All of a sudden, our experience is empty.

When I was on that walking pilgrimage, I discovered a truth about praising God. Simply put, the time to praise God is when complaining comes more naturally. The moment to praise God is when we are feeling the cross we carry get heavier. That is the time to look at your brothers and sisters and point them towards God's mercy and goodness, and simply proclaim that He is worthy of our lives, our praise, our cross-carrying. That is the moment to proclaim my choice to serve God who is all good and worthy of my love.

Praise expands that love in my own heart. Praise edifies those who hear. Praise lifts us up from the difficulties we are all simultaneously acknowledging, but looking beyond. Praise is not denial of our human experience (like my friends who would not "confess" they had a cold, but simply that cold symptoms were manifesting). Praise is instead acknowledging the greater truth of God and His kingdom.

Praise is the way to embrace the cross.

To embrace the cross in community requires everyone being in tune with and on the level about the crosses they face.

And frankly I think that is why praise music is such an empty fail in many communal settings. We don't typically have any impetus gathering us this way, and we all try to hide our sufferings from ourselves and from one another.

The joy exhibited in this communal praise is, however, I believe, precisely the joy Pope Francis continually calls Christians to exhibit.



This is from the English group in 2009, not this year, but it gives a sense of what I mean. Note this is not about musical quality!