Sweet, Comforting, Refreshing Guest

Today's bit of the Pentecost Sequence to consider:

You of all comforters best

You the soul's most welcome guest

Sweet refreshment here below

Consolator optime

Dulcis hospes animae

Dulce refrigerium

So, we are calling the Holy Spirit: best comforter, sweet guest of the soul, sweet refresher.

What comes to mind, I think because of that word that is like "refrigerator" is how when you are kind of hot and weary from working, say, in a kitchen with little moving air, and you just don't really want to trudge much further, but there isn't any way to cool off. And then it rains. Ahhh.... so refreshing. Making you feel energized again, giving you the ability to keep on. That Presence which I cannot cause but I welcome with great joy.

I also think of how, in the spiritual life, how we can feel weary and dull because of the sameness of sin, even if we convince ourselves we only have little sins in our life. When we live according to the flesh, according to natural inclinations, we get to feel dull and heavy. The Spirit of God challenges us, shakes us up, calls us to repent, to dig deeper, to reject complacency and couch-potato-hood.

Guests have a way of doing that, don't they? We clean our house with amazing diligence when someone comes to visit. Everyone gets along well and speaks politely when a guest is here. Everyone pays a bit more attention to how they act.

The Holy Spirit reminds us that, in Christ, we do not live our lives for ourselves, and that when we do, we become sad. We are made glad by the daily dose of the cross He brings to us -- that stirring that brings us life and bends us again to truth and love. Our openness to Him teaches us to be open to all people, and especially to other believers.

Sweet Holy Spirit, come

Come, O Father of the Poor

Come, O Holy Spirit, come! And from your celestial home/Shed a ray of light divine

In these nine days before Pentecost, we pray for the the Holy Spirit to come to us. To ask intelligently, we also meditate on His person, who it actually is we invite. All of this is contained in the Veni, Sancte Spiritus, or the Pentecost Sequence, which is prayed in the Latin Catholic liturgy on the feast of Pentecost.

Today I'm thinking about this chunk: 

Come, O Father of the poor! 

Come, source of all our store!

Come, within our bosoms shine!

Veni pater pauperum

Veni dator munerum

Veni lumen cordium

My almost non-existent Latin skills and a dictionary tells me that the more literal translation into English would be "Come, father of the poor/Come, giver of gifts/Come, light of our hearts."

Speaking of the literalness of things, St. Teresa of Avila had to remind me (in her discussion of the Our Father that I recently read) of the depth of the word "father." My barren computation of this word tends to stop with the sense of "sire." A father, however, is far more than a man who contributes his seed to begin life and then absents himself. To father, as a verb, St. Teresa reminds, is to take on the responsibility for, to provide what is necessary for life, and at sacrifice.

We call on the Holy Spirit here as Father of the poor. The sense is that we seek His fatherhood for ourselves; we desire this poverty of spirit. He is indeed the one who gives life to this desire for poverty. It is His nature, and He imparts His nature to those who share His life. Spiritual poverty clings to nothing, and possesses everything. The Holy Spirit is the bond of the love of the Trinity which fills the Church and makes Her supernatural while still on earth.

And the Holy Spirit is also the provider for the poor in spirit. We have nothing of ourselves; we look to Him for everything and acknowledge every gift He sends as we employ it in living. We are to think of ourselves always as children of the Holy Spirit. That He lives within us explains who we are and how we appear to others: the light of our hearts shining in a dark place.

We pray the novena to meditate more deeply on this reality, drawing its fruit into our souls.

St. Teresa of Avila and the Problem of Nobility

In The Way of Perfection, St. Teresa of Avila addresses at length the need for her nuns to avoid all attachment to social rank and the sense of entitlement to honor and prestige that came with it. This was a very big deal to those women of that day, because thought of social position was deeply engrained in everyone's thinking. But St. Teresa understood that those devoted to Christ must not persist in being mentally formed by the world.


And at first blush, this seems completely irrelevant to me as a modern American. I don't live in a world of lords and ladies and peasants, of titled and untitled families. So the temptation is to skip over her admonition as something meant for them, not me.

Well, not quite. Human culture changes constantly, but not so human nature. We all will always have those things inherited from our generation of cultural upbringing that form the basis of our need for the "renewal of our minds."

So for me, I look at my Gen-X, divorced-family-of-an-alcoholic baggage, and see plenty that has taught me to think in worldly ways that my culture supports, but is clearly not the mind of Christ. St. Teresa of Avila, as a nun, kept a title of nobility (as was the custom) until her deeper conversion leading to the reform of the Carmelites caused her to go all counter-cultural and leave it behind. I wonder if she didn't feel it every time she signed a letter or used all the high and flowery titles in addressing others. She had to. It would have reminded her of the love of her Spouse, who called her simply to be Teresa of Jesus, and no longer Dona Teresa Sanchez Cepeda Davila y Ahumada.

It is just as dangerous to cling to the ignoble as to nobility, and perhaps easier to deceive oneself that to do so is Christian. Rather than "I deserve to be served by those of lower station," it is "If anyone is guilty of something here, it must be me." Instead of expectations of honor and consideration, it is a cringing, fawning, and servile heart. Jesus teaches one to serve, and another to receive honor because the Lord resides in the temple of one's soul. In reality, He teaches both (and far more) to all.

The key is that our being freed from worldly ways not remind us so much of those worldly ways that we get stuck in analysis. When anyone fixes his eyes on Jesus, he will see all He needs, regardless of what the need is. To be human is to be a big, gaping need for God. And blessedness is to be filled by Him who is all we need.

You shall be called by a new name,

 pronounced by the mouth of the Lord our God

Isaiah 62:2

When I Learned to Believe in a Personal God

I've often said that there is something in my Christian testimony that will offend the theology of just about everyone. Blessed, then, are those with no particular theology!

Today I wanted to share about the very first time I realized that the Christian God is a personal God who desires a personal response from each one of us.

Oddly enough, when I realized this I had already considered myself a committed Christian for almost nine years. I had indeed sensed God calling to me by the gospel, by the knowledge that Jesus Christ had died on the cross so that my sin could be paid for and I could gain access to God and to heaven through Him. I had even sensed God calling me to bring this gospel to others, and I had given the response of my heart -- a resounding "yes."

But my yes was sort of a yes to the gospel, to God's program. I spent time reading the Bible and praying as best as I could figure it out. I was Lutheran at the time, and I used the Lutheran liturgical pieces of Lauds, Matins and the suffrages. I limped through this, partly because my first response to God came at age 10, and partly because I really had no people in my life to mentor me. But limping, my hunger for God did lead me forward.

But then when I was 19 my life took a definite turn that felt like I had gotten into a roller coaster for which I'd been standing in line for years.

Though normally I never associated with anyone apart from one or two close friends and people at work, I fell in with a group of Christians whose doctrinal positions were different from mine. At the time, doctrine meant everything to me, so the fact that I maintained openness to these people felt very liberal of me, indeed.

One thing these friends had in common, I discovered, was that they were charismatic. I had had an experience that backhandedly opened me to this phenomenon at a youth gathering I attended a couple years before that presented a recording of people singing in tongues. The intention of those presenting this recording was to say "isn't this ridiculous." I didn't really know what it was, but it struck me, and I walked away that night open to the possibility that I'd just heard something that had come from God.

So when these friends got me reading the book of Acts and told me that God still intended for His Holy Spirit to operate now as it did then, I thought well, maybe they are right. In fact, the more they read the Bible, the more I became convinced they were right. I felt so progressive. One of these friends even was from my Lutheran church. She said she would pray for me to speak in tongues, and I was open. Nothing happened, but I didn't really know anything was supposed to happen.

This all happened during the summer before my Junior year of college. Late August came, and I was back in school, in a different city from where all this took place. Then just a couple weeks into the semester, one of these friends called to tell me his girlfriend had "received the baptism in the Holy Spirit."

And I was depressed.

I didn't feel proud about it, but I spent a good couple of days seriously moping that God had decided to give her some kind of gift, but not me. I was seriously dejected at this apparent act of rejection of me by God. Because that's all I could see -- if God had gifted another person it must be because he loved her and disregarded me.

Somewhere in there I think I may have resorted to prayer. And somehow it became impressed on me that there was something I was maybe missing. Maybe it was summarized in that verse from James: "Ye have not because ye ask not."

This was a whole new spiritual contortion for me. My relationship with God, up to this point, pivoted on believing true things. The Bible taught me what was true, and I believed it. I knew God gave me good things, but I took for granted that He gave stuff the way my mom did -- without my asking for it. To think that I had to believe what He said and then act in faith, asking, and believe that He would answer -- this was making my brain twist.

But somehow, I knew I had to be in pursuit.

The day after this realization, it seemed I had to be on a mission. I scrupulously finished all of my homework and then made my way to the Christian bookstore, where a book called Handbook on Holy Spirit Baptism by Don Basham literally fell off the shelf at my feet. I bought it, brought it home, and after a quick dinner I sat alone in my dorm room and read the whole thing (my roommate providentially went away that night).

At the end of the book, it explained step by step how to pray for this gift for yourself. (This is where I offend all the pentecostal/charismatics who insist this can only be ministered to you by having others lay hands on you and pray!) When I finally prayed the prayer, I felt an immediate surge go through me like a bolt of lightning, and I began to praise God in tongues. I have no idea how long I prayed like this, but it was a good long time. It was like being bathed in radiance. In fact, the next morning when I went down to breakfast in the cafeteria (wearing my best dress -- because I was so aware of the glory residing in me), one of my professors saw me and said, "My, you look... radiant this morning!" I beamed a bright smile back at him (this was 7 freaking AM!) and I'm sure he figured I was newly and profoundly in love.

Oh, but it was way better than that.

And this was all because I had realized that I had to ask God, personally, for His action in my life. And I had to believe God had willed it to be that way. This was the act of faith that activated my baptism and released tremendous graces into my experience. God was no longer a force standing behind truth; He was a person interacting with me. I had opened the box He had given me long before at my baptism. Those graces had always been mine, but I had never received them, because I had never really personally interacted with Him, expecting Him to respond.

My life has never been the same.

Just today I read this extremely helpful theological explanation of the baptism of the Holy Spirit by Fr. Cantalamessa, the preacher of the papal household. If what I've written leaves you with questions, I recommend that you give that link your attention. Realize that God wants to personally respond to your invitation to Him as well!

Stopping to Sing the Praises of St. John of the Cross

I have been making extremely slow progress through the book John of the Cross for Today: The Ascent by Susan Muto. It has nothing to do with it being a difficult book or an uninteresting book; really it has more to do with the busyness of life and the fact that I have five or six books going at any one time.

But it seems wherever I dip into this book, I find St. John (as presented by Muto) explaining my life to me. This was my experience with the book Impact of God, which I wrote about here. That book was the first inkling to me that it was time to re-investigate the Carmelite charism that had fascinated me for so long from a distance. While I have done very little reading of St. John's writings directly, that book, like this one, made so much sense out of my faith journey that it felt shocking. I've written elsewhere about how St. Teresa of Avila's writings made me feel an immediate affection for her as a mother. Well, St. John of the Cross's wisdom strikes me as a fatherly sort -- direct, no sugar coating, always with a loving sense that austerity is good for the soul, AND, giving a secure sense that even the scariest things will be all right in the end. A set of spiritual parents is a beautiful gift to me.

For example, today I was reading a section on the purification of the memory, and how an unpurified memory can destroy the virtue of hope, and how a purified memory even of painful events can "foster supernatural remembrance." I have experienced these things, although I was tempted to see the process not as a purification of my memory, but perhaps as evidence as something wrong with me. There is just so much wisdom in understanding the need to step out of the addictive cycle of what the emotions stir up, to let it be "silenced by hope," and to stand in that place where all the expectation is in God. Dr. Muto gives the example of thinking of the death of one's child: at one point, the anguished memories need to be relinquished and God's love, goodness and mercy remembered and embraced and rested in. My solution to this kind of problem has always been to dump out the cup in which I find the stirred-up emotions, or to try to pretend they don't exist or never got stirred in the first place, instead of acknowledging the reality and letting hope be stronger.

So the fact that what this little Spanish priest wrote centuries ago can make sense of these nuances of my soul that I could hardly put words to is amazing to me.

Another example of life-saving advice from St. John hinges on the apophatic nature of God, when to stop the mind from working things over. This reminds me that the Carmelite charism is Eastern in origin and nature. And coming upon this truth is sometimes such a relief that it moves me to tears.

I have miles to go before I even read all the works of St. John of the Cross, let alone know anything about them or live them. But everything I read of him only makes me hungry to read more.

A Labor of Love

Recently some friends of my family were hit with a need that required a lot of physical labor to be done in a short time. So they and my kids and I and some other friends got together over the course of a couple days and did a bang up job of it. And in the midst of all this work, someone described what we were doing as "a labor of love."

I mulled that over for several days. First I realized simply how true it was. It is hard to capture my surprise at this realization, but it seems akin to how shocking it was to me that after being pregnant for nine months, a baby emerged from my body -- and she actually looked like a human being. It's a real, tangible proof of an actual miracle that a has brewed for such a long time. Any time I see love expressed through me, I know it is a miracle.

Another thought arose as the Lord and I looked at this. I began to wonder, what if everything I did were a labor of love? What if I were conscious, always, of undertaking actions to express the love resident in my life? What if I simply thought about loving God with everything?

This scrapes up against something I read recently from St. Therese that keeps impacting me more and more. Basically she was differentiating between love and joy. She says that joy is what is promised us on the other side of the cross, or in the next life. But this life is for love. I'm sure I'm not doing that justice, and of course right now I can't quote it. But what struck me so profoundly is how it seems I've always mistakenly believed that love actually is joy. That if I "love" someone, it means I am feeling joy. And if there's no feeling of joy? Where can love be? But on the cross, Jesus was certainly showing the depths of His love. He didn't do it for the "joy of the moment," but for the joy that lay ahead of him. Later. There is a definite connection, but, timing.

Mothers should get this pretty well. Loving our children often means needing to correct them or train them in the midst of them complaining against us. Family life often means serving when we don't feel like it. "Give until it hurts," Mother Teresa famously said. That's love. It's common to psychologize away this reality until we've convinced ourselves that it is healthy to be selfish and seek comfort at any price, or for others to treat us as means to their selfish kingdom of comfort.

So what if everything I did were for me a labor of love? I think I would have a tremendous command of freedom and self-donation.

Another day went by with me and the Lord looking at this together. Another thought came to mind: So, what do you suppose it is that stands in the way of everything being about love of God? Ew. The answer arose with the question: idolatry. Clinging to not-God and expecting it to fill you up, even without realizing it. (You see, God's first step in healing anything is revealing it to you.)

In reality, I'm just like my children when they complain against my training because they can't see the wisdom of it or just ignore me because of how much they like what they are doing. I get the feeling that I ignore God's directives sometimes because what I'm doing is old, familiar, and known. It seems comfortable, even though it really isn't. Sometimes, in fact, I desperately want out of the old way, but it would require me to take a step (and perhaps another, and another) into hard work that will take time and effort, and put me at risk of .... discomfort! But wait, I'm already in discomfort. Doesn't wisdom tell us to take God's version of discomfort over our own? You know, maybe God's leads somewhere, like to fulfillment, instead of smack into our pit of desire where we can dump every finite thing imaginable and still have nothing but an empty pit.

After step one (God revealing the problem), we have step two: I hand the problem over to God. And I keep doing that and keep doing that, asking for His grace, His wisdom, His direction, His consolation. And He gives it. Thanks be to God. And on we go.

Living in God's love is what we have been designed for. Another name for that is heaven. We can begin to live in heaven here, when we repudiate all that is not God and embrace every person and all of creation with love because God lives in and through us. We will have joy on this earth, but it will be a joy that shines through suffering. And that, I think, is the contagion that causes faith in Christ to spread like wildfire.

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.

When Confirmation Received Me

I was received into the Catholic Church and confirmed when I was 25 years old. Did infant baptism as a Lutheran, and spent five highly formative years in a charismatic fellowship right before crossing the Tiber. My pentecostal friends found it weird that I thought I needed a Catholic sacrament to make the Holy Spirit real in my life.

The weird thing I discovered was what I actually needed to make the sacrament of Confirmation come alive in my life.

My RCIA was, in a word, lame. It was taught as a class and really didn't meet any of my needs or even allow me to discover what my needs were. I was thrilled to become a Catholic, but RCIA was to me mostly a season to be endured.

However, a long time before I got that far, I made an inspired commitment to go on pilgrimage to the Holy Land. It was something God stirred up in my heart, I promised Him I would do it "someday," and then the opportunity to do it opened up when I heard John Michael Talbot speak of a group he would lead there. I'm not even sure I knew I would become Catholic when I made the decision to go. But the trip ended up being my "Catholic honeymoon," taking place roughly two weeks after I entered the Church.

Our pilgrimage group met in New York and we bonded rather quickly. My spot in our tour bus was right behind John Michael, and he and the others got to know me as "the brand new Catholic." This was my very first experience of spending any kind of extended time with Catholics with any degree of spiritual exchange. All I had known before this was my own personal prayer, sporadic discussions of theological topics with one or two Catholic friends, and my lame RCIA.

After a few days, these pilgrimage Catholics were freaking me out. I came from a land where everything spiritual was invisible. I was surrounded by people with medals and beads who thought sacramentally about blessings and places and objects and prayers in common. My roommate loved Mary to an extent that made me panic, speaking of her like the Virgin was a part of her life. John Michael gave a talk about the sacramentality of geography, and of seeing the actual places Jesus walked. People couldn't wait to touch things in all the holy places. And I could not take it in at all. My heart and brain were on full tilt.

One night we prayed in the Church of the Garden of Gethsemane. I felt so lonely and frightened that Catholicism -- or at least life among Catholics -- was a terrible mistake. I believed the Church belonged to Jesus and somewhere was hiding rich mystical treasure, but I felt like I was stuck in a dead church where people were caught up in a bunch of stupid, meaningless trappings.

As we left the church that night, our priest companion said to us, "Be sure to come up here and touch the rock before you go" (supposedly the rock where Jesus had prayed). That was the last straw for me. Interiorly I screamed, "Lord, I don't want to touch some stupid, dead rock. I want to touch you!"

The next morning as I trudged to the next holy site from our hotel I prayed a good "agnostic's prayer" about all this. I told God I didn't believe anything about holy places and things having special graces, but if He wanted to prove me wrong, He could go ahead and do it.

Our Mass that day was in the Church of the Tomb of Lazarus, and we used the readings and Mass proper to that place. With the readings I began tearing up, and as the Eucharistic prayer began I was weeping, practically wailing. I had no idea what has happening to me (as everyone around me showered me with tissues), but I remember barely being able to bring myself into the communion procession, so tiny did I feel, so peeled to the core. The words roared through my spirit "He that believes in me, though he were dead, YET SHALL HE LIVE." The Lord was telling me He knew all about my deadness and all about everyone else's deadness, but that He had brought me into the Church and commissioned me that His life would go forth both in me and through me. My mission was clear. Be alive. Bring God's life everywhere I would be sent.

John Michael spoke during the communion meditation about how even though we can come into the Church and receive the sacraments at one point, sometimes it is at another point that the Church and the sacraments "come into" us. I probably didn't realize at the time he was talking to me. And I didn't really realize that my Confirmation, my commissioning by God, was exploding into activation at that moment.

And after I cleared the snot out of me after Mass I sat down to collect myself. I felt the Lord ask me, "Um, Marie, by the way.... where are you?" And then I realized. "Oh. The church of the Tomb of Lazarus. Ok, Lord," I admitted, "I guess holy places do have special graces."

And all of this I was able to realize not only because I was in the Holy Land, but because I was experiencing being with Catholics in a sharing-life, community way. When I was without a lived experience of faith with others, I spared myself a lot of pain, but I also "spared" myself the glory of God revealed. That community experience was as temporary as it was real, but it awakened a hunger and a seeking that has only intensified over the last 21 years.

Let us be brave to face the pain and the glory, and not allow ourselves to be satisfied with our utter dissatisfaction.

Handing Over That Friendship

A faithful friend is a sturdy shelter; / he who finds one finds a treasure. / A faithful friend is beyond price, no sum can balance his worth. / A faithful friend is a life-saving remedy, such as he who fears God finds; / for he who fears God behaves accordingly, / and his friend will be like himself.
(Sirach 6:14-17)

Two years ago, liturgically speaking, I handed over my life in a way I did not and could not have comprehended at the time. I acted in obedience to what I discerned was a prompting of the Holy Spirit -- an important one -- and it has been one crazy ride.

Mostly the crazy has subsided. But when I mash that with the Scripture above, well, I recognize important things.

It is true that a faithful friend is a life-saving remedy. It is also true that friendship gone wonky is probably the most Good Friday-esque thing I know. There are many, many things about which I have sort of a natural detachment. I just can't get too bothered by certain things at all. But I have rich potential for bother when it comes to relationships with people. I think that is why God has taught me, has been trying to teach me for decades, that I need to see all people in my life as coming from Him and all relationships belonging to Him. Not to me.

The treasure of friendship I can embrace, but I acknowledge that it comes from God. He proves Himself faithful, though, because never ever has He left me high and dry. He knows exactly which people to introduce into my life. And yet, at the same time, I have to acknowledge that the very, very real relationship that God wants as my top priority is the one I have with Him. That really is the only way anything works smoothly with other people. Well, perhaps that is a deceptive statement. Sometimes for things to go right with others there needs to be a degree of bumpiness. It is needed to the degree that sin and self clog the way and need to be purged. I had so much junk that had to go, in reference to two years ago. We all do, and we seem to grow new crops of it all the time. Sometimes the desire to "keep peace" and to ignore our junk and that of others is exactly what destroys holiness in relationships.

For me to trust God with this handing over of myself to Him, which involved an irrevocable change in a friendship I treasured, has also irrevocably changed my life and my relationship with God. I would be a blind fool to not realize it has been a change for the better, precisely because it has been so Good Friday-esque. The power of the resurrection already percolates, and I believe God intends more than just my interior life to be affected as a result. All I know for sure is I can never accurately anticipate what God decides to do.

But I don't have to have anything figured out ahead of time. I just need to be ready with my Yes when He beckons.

Protestant vs Catholic Good Fridays

For many years, Good Friday was a day of vague confusion for me. As a child and as a Lutheran (the two coincided for me) I felt that it was to be a day of sadness. I was supposed to be sad, think of my sins and how they made Jesus suffer, think of Jesus taking my place in being condemned and rejected even by the Father, see the black liturgical altar drapings at the church service, and watch the movies of Jesus' crucifixion that used to be on TV in those days.

Then I spent a few Good Fridays in the pentecostal world. I remember one service in particular that was like a giant party. Any hint of being sad or somber was pretty much rejected as an expression of not knowing Jesus. It was all rejoicing that Jesus was crucified. (In the fellowship I belonged to, as I recall we didn't observe Good Friday in any particular way at all.)

And then I entered the Catholic world. And for the first time, Good Friday was about fasting. And there was a long, somber service where we all venerated a cross -- one of those uncomfortable, unscripted Catholic moments where we were supposed to freestyle in public. And since I never really had anyone explain to me what was supposed to be going on interiorly during all this, I simply had to pull stuff out of my hodgepodge of past experience. But generally I was so hungry by the evening of Good Friday that the only thought I was capable of was whether Jesus felt as completely incoherent when he was being led to crucifixion as I did from eating nothing all day. So I figured that Good Friday, for Catholics, was about experiencing Jesus' suffering with Him.

What gave Good Friday its vague confusing sense was having deeply conflicting theological ideas rumbling around my head. Yes, it is true that Jesus took our sins to the cross and paid the price for them. No, it is not true that He became so repulsive to the Father as sin that in His wrath the Father turned away from Him. (How do you really get the Trinity to rip apart just for that moment?!) Is the cross primarily a court that changes our legal status with God? Is righteousness imputed to us, Jesus' holiness substituted for our sin? (No.) Or is the cross the mystery of the revelation of God's self-giving love? Did God plan from all eternity to show His love by the second person of the Trinity taking on human flesh and then demonstrating the depth of love that God is from all eternity? Is it that action of God made man that pays in our own flesh the price we could never pay to gain access to union with God by opening up the life of the Holy Spirit to us -- the bond of love? Yes, yes, and yes! Suffering does not save the world. Love saves the world. The reality of love is that, because of sin, it causes suffering.

So, sure, we can rejoice in Jesus' death, but it isn't a fitting nor a human response to just party at the thought of suffering love, even a suffering love that bought us so great a victory. Because the cross isn't just a past legal event that gets us free admission to heaven. It is an invitation to enter the same self-giving love that Jesus demonstrates. It is the meaning of our suffering, of our lives. It is a moment to glory in the faith, the hope and the love which are given those who have put on Christ. Faith and hope are things we need in a world that isn't heaven yet. We still have to pick up our crosses and follow Jesus. And the love is the glue. We see Jesus' tremendous love poured out, and this not only fills us and empowers us, but overflows through us. But the sufferings overflow to us, too. It isn't Christian to deny them or try to escape them. It is Christian to have hope that a far exceeding glory is being worked in us. Jesus Himself -- His life -- is being formed in us and lives through us.

So it behooves us to look closely at His passion with more awe than sadness, and with more courage than celebration. Yes, it was the price of our ransom. But it is also the life we live.

Looking Upon the Pierced One

I have found that the most fitting way for me to do an examination of conscience is to look at or picture in my mind a crucifix.

Except this isn't about my regular way of looking at things. For example, it wasn't like the time I thought our shovel was stolen from our yard even though I'd walked passed it about six times every day for three months. It no doubt entered my field of vision all those times, but I didn't really pay it any heed or care that it was there. It wasn't until I realized I needed it that I noticed it wasn't in the places I was looking.

This looking at Jesus pierced is an intense kind of looking that isn't as much about what I see with my physical eye or my mind's eye as about what I feel and experience. And decide.

Read the rest here:
http://www.encounter-steubenville.com/journal/2014/4/12/looking-upon-the-pierced-one

Relationship With... Whom?

Last week I was in a setting where I was listening to a person, though we were not exactly in a conversation. And this person to whom I was listening began to speak of "one's relationship with God." As I listened, I suddenly became aware that this person wasn't speaking of a relationship with God at all, but rather of a relationship with one's interiority.

The tip-off was how the whole content of this relationship was things like frustration over failures to achieve self-improvement goals and disappointment that overcoming sin wasn't easier to accomplish.

I was a little bit stunned putting this 2+2 together, but just as quickly it became a naru hodo moment where I understood why when I have heard this person talk about God in the past, it seemed something big was missing.

Like an experience of a personal God.

Oh, I can't say of course that this person hasn't experienced God in a real way; in fact I would guess that quite the opposite is true. However, it seems entirely possible that one can experience something without thinking about it sufficiently to be able to articulate it, or to understand that crucial value of experience. And perhaps one has had a long and deep formation in ways that have served to reinforce this idea that since prayer is interior, therefore anything that happens interiorly is equivalent to meeting God.

But a relationship with God, like a relationship with a human person, is going to involve interaction with Him in ways that simply are not part of me, myself & I. God is Other, and He comes to me, revealing to me myself and all things, but first and foremost, Himself.

And this made me wonder.... How many other religious people of Christian background misunderstand this basic Christian truth when they hear or use the phrase "relationship with God"?

The Lent that Would Not End

If you have kids, you might have had the, uh, pleasure of learning this song:



(If you really want punishment, you can go here and listen to it for 10 hours straight!)

Well, a few years ago I had a Lent that remind me of this song.

"This is the Lent that does not end/ It just goes on and on my friend
Some people/Started praying it not knowing what it was
And they'll continue praying it forever just because...."

In fact, the whole year felt like a Lent, and then it was followed up by another Lent and almost another whole year of a similar feeling. Just back up a couple years' worth of posts and you'll get the feeling of it.

I look back now and I see it has been a time of intense purification. When I started I had a true but purely theoretical understanding of what needed to be purified in me. I had no idea what the process I knew I was headed for felt like, and I didn't really understand in any experiential way God's purposes in bringing me through it. As Soren Kierkkegard famously said, life can only be understood backwards but has to be lived forwards. So I was left in a place for a long time where I was devoid of understanding. That is an extremely difficult place for me to be. I thrive on being able to understand and figure stuff out.

I announced to myself and others a few times during this process that everything was "all done." And I was wrong each time. So I am not now saying that all of that is done, and I know for a fact it is not. When I touch that spot in me that knows that, I still experience the struggle and the desire for complete resolution. There is a very real possibility that it will not be in this life. And that's ok.

What I have gained and learned in this time is all the gift of God. He knows how much I have fought against and resisted Him every step along the way of His trying to bless me. He knows how tenderly and respectfully and gently He prepared me for very difficult moments.

I realize that while God is deeply concerned with the healing of our souls and the wholeness of our personhood, He has a purpose that is higher than all that. He doesn't heal us just so that we can live peaceful, happy lives on this earth for the rest of our years. He heals us so that we are whole, so that we possess ourselves, and so that in possessing ourselves we can make of ourselves an oblation to Him. With St. Teresa of Avila we can then say, "I am yours; I was born for you. What is your will for me?"  There is absolutely nothing this world can offer that is worth exchanging for the delight of being the Lord's in this way.

Humiliation, anguish of heart, the pressing down of the cross, experiences of rejection, of relationship being repudiated, calumny, conflict.... This is the way the Lover brings His beloved deeper into intimacy with Him. This was His experience. To have it offered to any soul is like a golden crown being extended. How often we go chasing after our favorite pretty trinket instead of bowing to receive the great honor of such a crown.

God's ways simply are amazing. Recently I was looking at a sculpture I own, of Jesus embracing His cross on the via dolorosa. It occurred to me that I was, quite literally, Jesus' cross. My sin caused His suffering, caused His cross, and His embrace of His cross was His embrace of me. His embrace of His cross bore the fruit of the Eucharist, which now brings healing to the entire universe and transforms me into Him, makes us one. And yet still today, that Eucharist, that grace, that healing, that transformation, that union, can be rejected by me and by anyone. But Jesus loved anyway. That love is my salvation.

And He calls me to live His very life, in imitation, in union.

Let us praise God now and forever. He alone is worthy of our worship. To Him be glory forever.

When Understanding is Folly

For a long time I've had the phrase "I write, therefore I understand" in the header of this blog. The title is all about that because naru hodo is like "oh, now I get it" in Japanese.

But I've learned that there is something more important than that. In fact, I can think of at least three things that are more important to have than understanding.

Faith. The only way that we can really function in this world that we did not create as persons who have not created ourselves is to acknowledge that we came from somewhere else. Faith is completely reasonable, although it does take us beyond what reason can deduce. And faith is really the only thing that gives me solid grounding under my feet, the only thing that can assure me of things I can't see. Faith in God is a supernatural gift that is available to every human being. When that supernatural gift functions in our lives it often requires one to do things that are reasonable, and yet beyond our understanding. So understanding bows before faith.

Hope.  God relates to us. He is relational, or rather we are relational and can begin to grasp what that means because He is relational and we are made in His image. Relationships are opened out beyond this moment. We don't know the what, but in knowing the who, or better, being in relationship with the who, we also have solid footing. We cannot understand things that haven't even come to be yet. But we can be in peace when the who is free to take us anywhere. So understanding bows before hope.

Love.  This is what God is. This is what comes to live in the heart of a human who is covenanted with God by baptism. This is the Holy Spirit alive and at work within us and through us. This is also the purifying fire of God. And this hurts -- like the dickens -- to the degree that we are open to God and yet embracing attachments that are not God. That hurt just flat out squashes understanding to bewildered smithereens sometimes. So understanding bows before love.

It is fine and good to seek understanding. But it is not fine and good to seek one's security in it. It is good, right and necessary to be at peace without understanding at times, especially when one is seeking answers that are personal and not in reference to specifically revealed truths, like the morality of ending life, or other questions that can be presented in catechism format.

When understanding it not available to rest in, one must realize the call is to rest in God Himself. God deeply respects our minds (He created them, after all!). He will give us to understand what we truly need. But the beauty of the understanding He gives is that it is the fruit of receiving His love into our hearts and allowing His love to shape us. Love gives understanding on that personal level. So without embracing God, without embracing love (with faith and hope -- they travel together), we never really reach the potential we could in human understanding.

"I Have Come not to Abolish but to Fulfill"

"Do not think that I have come to abolish the law and the prophets. I have come, not to abolish them, but to fulfill them." (Mt. 5:17, NAB)

This is the first line of today's gospel reading.

Jesus wants us to think about him correctly. He wants us not to misunderstand His intentions, and mostly I think He doesn't want us meditating on ourselves, imagining God in our own image, but leaving the realm of our thoughts and entering into His.

And so He tells us not to think He's come to abolish the law and the prophets. Scripture is full of admonitions not to add to or subtract from God's word, specifically the directives He gives, and the prophetic messages He gives. He wants them just the way He gives them.

And yet... He gives them in such a way that they have an aspect of "emptiness" to them -- of lack of fulfillment. This is on purpose. The law, the prophetic messages, are given in such a way that they cause us to look deeper, to look beyond, to look for what they really hold. They are designed to cause even a certain dissatisfaction. It is when we want mastery over the mystery of God that we add our own embellishments or take away the more onerous or confusing bits from the law and prophets. But then we've made God over into our image, and made Him more manageable and palatable, suiting our current whim.

Christ is the fulfillment. What is more, Ephesians 1:23 tells us that the Christ is the head of the church, which is His body, the fullness of Him who fills everything in every way. Christ comes not only to personally keep the law and be the promised Messiah the prophets foretold. He comes to form the perfected people that the old covenant was never able to produce. This must be why He goes on (after the verse I quoted above) to talk about those who will be called greatest and least in the kingdom of God.

Still now, in the new covenant, we know in part and we prophesy in part. We too have that which causes a yearning in our souls. This also is by God's design, to draw us more deeply into the experience of His life, and to direct our gaze heavenward.