Ponderings from Dear Master, Part Two

Fortunately I marked for myself the second piece that struck me as I was reading Ponderings from Dear Master, which I had intended to write about. I'm forgetful that way. In fact, one of my primary purposes for writing is to be sure that I return to things that I know I have more to glean from, like marking an unmined vein of gold. 

Here is the line, from page 15 of Susa Muto's book:

My faults were at war with God's faith in me, but God was the victor on this battlefield. His perfect virtues gained the upper hand over my imperfections.

This quote captures something simple but central to my experience. 

In January, I tried to write about the moment I had a revelation about this phrase: "[m]y faults were at war with God's faith in me." With God's faith in me.  Here's what I wrote then: 

You know that plastic thing that holds a turkey's legs together? (I had to Google it; apparently it is called a hock lock.) I feel like I had one of those taken off me. But instead of locking poultry legs, this thing held something in me to a way I -- or it -- wanted God to be, that He just isn't. A way I unconsciously was tempted to believe God is, and which subsequently kicked up a fight within me. What I could not see was it was the Holy Spirit fighting to get me out of the lock, and so I put up immense resistence. I was partnering with the wrong side of the struggle. 

My faults were at war with God's faith in me. 

Galatians chapter 3 says this:

Now before faith came, we were confined under the law, kept under restraint until faith should be revealed. So that the law was our custodian until Christ came, that we might be justified by faith. But now that faith has come, we are no longer under a custodian; for in Christ Jesus you are all sons of God, through faith. (Gal. 3:23-26, RSV-SCE)

 What Paul was saying about the point in salvation history when the Jesus entered it seems also to have application to the path of spiritual development. Maybe a better way of putting that is that we go through stages of purification of our interiority after baptism; it doesn't all happen at once. That's actually the whole basis of purgatory and of "growth" in the spiritual life. God has a schedule, and our job in partnering with Him is to continue to say yes, intelligently, to His designs for our transformation. And the "intelligently" part requires that we have accurate information about who God is and what He wants. His goal is that we become partakers in the divine nature (2 Peter 1:4). He is our loving Father (Mt. 6:9). We can need decades of meditation on these truths before they break through into our experience of them with God Himself. Or, He can communicate them to us in an instant, or by any combination of means. 

"Faith" in an incorrect understanding of God clearly is never going to be born of and fueled by the Holy Spirit. I will always be "trying to believe." Say for example that underneath my formal training in catechism, I hold a rather primal belief that God is secretly disappointed that I'm a human woman with physical senses, intellect, and desires. Say further that my religious training left me linking that which is intrinsically human with that which is intrinsically evil. What I'm left with, as an adult, then is that at best, God tolerates me, even though I'm bombarded with homilies about God's love for me. I will be "trying to behave" according to standards of a God who finds my humanity rather disgusting, all the while I'm "trying to believe" that He actually loves me. Or, maybe I will completely buy that God does hate transgressors and they deserve fierce condemnation. They'll just always be someone who's not me, because if I can prop myself up to look better than some vile sinner, that will help me "try to believe" in my faith.

The Holy Spirit will always and only lead us to embrace the truth. The more deeply we are able to tell Him, "I don't care what the truth is or what it costs; I want You" then the easier time He will have in leading us. 

False beliefs, lies about the image of God or His will for us, can in fact twine themselves so closely around good things that we cannot see them. We simply cannot save ourselves. We will have blind spots. Such a blind spot I encountered in January.

And I found that I was fighting against God's faith in me. Wow. That almost sounds audacious. I was trying to believe that needed me to be restrained, like by law, like a criminal in handcuffs, like a woman in a burqa, like the toughest Bill Gothard devotee. This was all humming at a level far below my conscious thought. But when I had the experience of going to confession, and then coming across that one line in the Catechism as directed by my penace, I encountered the living power of God. BAM! "God does not want to impose the good, but wants free beings."

In other words, faith has come. You are a son [daughter] of God by faith in Christ Jesus. To the core. Or at least to the deeper core than yesterday. 

The battle was what I was trying to do because I believed it was my Christian duty, my Christian battle even, vs what the Holy Spirit wanted for me. 

And as I intuited then, that exchange has brought tremendous peace, happiness, stability, certainty, and freedom to my heart. And has stripped away so much overgrowth of "should," or self-imposed obligation, that I didn't even realize I had. 

I remember writing to a friend in the 80s that my life on the outside always looks about the same, but inside, my life is like a three ring circus. I've realized that is because God calls me to be a contemplative, and He's been wrecking and building and renovating and designing in me for years. It is actually an exciting, adventurous life. 

Ponderings from Dear Master, Part One

 I want to draw out and mull over two points that struck me as I was reading the other day. The book involved is Dear Master: Letters on Spiritual Direction Inspired by Saint John of the Cross. It's a clunky title, and the premise of the book, objectively speaking, is a little strange to me. But I leave that aside to focus on these two bits that helped me clarify two episodes of my interior journey.

The first point is on page 4, where Susan Muto writes (in the voice of St. John of the Cross to his directee Ana Penalosa): "...let us be...like the Samaritan woman, who forgot her water jar as soon as she tasted the living waters offered to her by the Lord (Jn. 4:28)."

First, this admonition implies we have a choice to forget something. And having a choice to forget something requires the ability to distinguish between or among things. The "thing" in this passage is natural water versus the living water which Jesus gave this woman through their encounter. Ponder with me on this a moment.

The woman came to the well to get water. This was a normal, daily task, and she may not have been very mindful about what she was there to get, being in the sort of auto-pilot mode in which we frequently live. Functioning practically, but not very tuned in. Our primary energy expenditure is on some kind of survival, the endless cycle of trying to keep impending doom from overtaking life. For her it may have been social rejection, a shame and identity of worthlessness that broke her heart. She'd lost at least five lovers. This defined her life.

Jesus came to give her access to a very different interior well, one that could meet needs that screamed so loud she could not hear them, one that would redefine her life. Immersion into the very interior of God that He was coming to reveal. And he pierces from the normal daily task, into her hidden interior, finally into the mystery of Trinitarian life. All by talking with her. 

She feels the power of the mystery even from His first words. Why are you talking with me? This is so different from my normal life. This jars me out of auto-pilot and suddenly I'm aware again that I'm a person. 

A lot of things get stirred up in her: old issues she needs to understand. Hurts that are real, but at a safe distance, like the struggles between Samaria and Israel. 

Then her personal heart is pierced, and her longing for The One who will come is laid bare. And when The One is longed for, He answers immediately: I who am speaking with you, is He. 

In the gospel, she then drops her jars and runs and tells everyone. But in my experience, where this drama of encounter did not take place in a ten minute conversation, but over years, this part looked a little different. And it seems that this author implies that St. John of the Cross would say this is a real step in the spiritual journey: choosing to drop the jar, and seeing the difference between the natural and the supernatural gift from God.

Because (indulge me in some imagination here, a moment) what if the Samaritan woman had gotten confused at that point between realizing she has just met the Messiah, and instead realizing she had just met a man who finally understood her. What if she had not had this instant conversion, touching into the heart of the Trinity and finding her ultimate purpose fulfilled, and instead embraced the penultimate healing of her sad history of relating with men who either died, or left her, or repudiated her, or however it was the she had gone through her sad history that now left her devaluing herself with Lover Six who wouldn't even marry her. What if it took her a minute to stop at the way station of psychological and emotional healing, and maybe in the process even became inordinately attached to the Jesus of Her Dreams as potential Number Seven as she reveled in the purely natural gift of knowing that human being that she forgot she was, was actually created by God to be loved, not as chattel? 

The beauty of the real Scriptural episode is that the grace of God present through this conversation with Jesus was so powerful that she left completely changed. Grace can and does operate differently, as God wills it, for different purposes. This woman would not have time for years of processing; Jesus was moving in power during His ministry and He had a world-transforming Church to establish. 

And He still does, but now we live in the long haul phase, where He gives the world witnesses to  transforming interior power, like the fire in wood that St. John was so fond of talking about. 

For one who starts out deeply wounded and mired in indignity, there needs to be the step of first even being able to appreciate the natural gift, the natural state God intends for human beings. Children are not meant for abuse or neglect; adults are not meant to be slaves, handing their lives over to anxiety, job, debt, the expectations of others. Religion is not meant to be fearful or grudging or guilty submission to rules and rituals. There is a natural wholeness into which Jesus desires to bring us by freeing us from the idolatry of sin and breaking the bonds of the world over us. 

But wait, there's more!

We weren't just created to not be used and abused. Re-creation in Christ calls us to union with the Trinity, to divinization, to become glorious. The supernatural gift from God causes us to drop our natural water jars, ah, but causes us to see that there's a choice there. And at and the same time the choice is such a no-brainer that it is hardly a quandry. Because finally, love compels us. Love has pierced into our old, broken identity, healed it, and made us sons in the Son, the spouse of the Beloved. The living water springs up inside me, and I don't need to fear being without Him again.  

I guess this says to me that it is so important to know that the interior life, the life of prayer, the life of relationship with God has somewhere to go. To me, this is the vital importance of the Carmelite charism. I probably should write about that in its own post. Suffice it to say St. Teresa's seven mansions, St. John's journey up the Ascent of Mount Carmel, these tell us we don't just come to faith in Jesus and then wait to die. There's growth, there's progression, there's a journey to undertake. God has adventures waiting for us. There's somewhere to go, something to look forward to. And you aren't lost, and you aren't alone if you are somewhere along this path.

Well, point two will have to wait for another time.

Traveling Retreat

I just returned from just under a week of travel, so it's time to unpack. My suitcases were emptied yesterday, but this unpacking is for the interior experience.

This trip really wasn't supposed to be a retreat, in the sense that a retreat is a thing you go to with others who are seeking God, and you listen to conferences and process the information you hear. To be honest, several of the formal retreats I've been on in the last several years have felt more frustrating than fruitful. Like I was always waiting for something to happen, trying to engage my interiority but not finding the connecting point in my changed surroundings, or talks, etc. On this recent trip I did in fact have that occasion to go to another place interiorly as well as exteriorly. And I was able to spend most of one day at the Shrine of Mary Help of Christians, better known as Holy Hill, the Carmelite basilica and the heart of my Carmelite Province. 

I had a mixture of facing anxiety and nostalgia. And for once, these met and gave me a practical take-away. I realized that I cannot always take away my anxiety or grow away from it by myself. Really, the thought that I can or should is a cause for anxiety in and of itself. The realization that Mary is the Help of Christians, and therefore my help, too, is a relief. We disciples of the Lord are here to help each other. And Mary can steer me in such a way that suddenly the grace of the Lord is close at hand. Because she knows how to take my hand and draw me through the crowding thoughts in my mind and make it all seem easy.

I realize that God has my needs at heart, and He wants me to have His needs at heart. Anxiety clogs that with so many other things, taking up so many other jobs, pressures, concerns, frustations, imaginary scenarios, etc etc... I am faced regularly with things I can't control, and I can believe that because I am not in control, that horrible things are going to happen. Case in point: yesterday, the Mass I attended got a late start because they were waiting on a pilgrim bus at the shrine. I had picked that location because it was going to be feasible for me to reach home before the post office would close for the day, and I had books to ship. I noticed the moment I was in, and instead of frothing over with frustration, I entrusted my need to the Lord and offered the difficulty for the spiritual good of all those present. It was a little bit of a battle, but I realized that right there was The Point of why I pray for growth in virtue. It all turned out fine, and I was at the post office with time to spare. It made me see how entrusting my needs to the Lord keeps me free to focus on the needs of the people around me instead of on myself, and keeps me from adding to the misery in the world by my attitude, grumbling, harsh words, rage, etc.

God is working on freeing my heart for the bigger picture of life, too. In my parish, I am like a big fish in a very little fishbowl. The fishbowl is to a great degree being created by my own attitude, but I realize it isn't healthy for me or anyone. An attitude adjustment is in order, giving me more room to breathe, and allowing my environment also to change without internalizing some kind of threat from it all. Growth and change are both necessary and inevitable, and God is called a gardener for good reason. I'll let Him carry on with general management of my universe. 

I also spent a good chunk of one day with my Mom's cousin Jane. Jane's parents were both deaf, and she spent a good deal of her life interpreting for them whenever there was a family function, since none of the extended family learned ASL. I recognized from my youngest days that there was a totally different way of communication in her family than, say, with my grandparents, aunt and uncle, and my Mom. They were outgoing and made great efforts to communicate with everyone. Spending the afternoon with Jane and her husband this time made me realize how much they are both story-tellers. They love to share details, and love to hear details, but not in the way I have experienced with some people. They do not tell stories to wall themselves off or to cling to the chance to be heard or exit isolation. They speak to build community. I happened to see a thing on Facebook right after I spent time with them, and it hit the nail on the head. Of course I cannot find it now, but I believe it was a quote from Henri Nouwen that talked about speaking to build relationships, to form community, to welcome others. Like laying down a path from the heart and then encouraging, asking questions, showing interest, that welcomes the conversation partners to do the same. It's like verbal hospitality. Boundaries kept and respect shown, but openness that creates a place for peace, like seats around a campfire. I want to grow in doing this myself. It was lovely.

I decided I never want to live in a big city again. I also love summer nights and summer mornings, and daylight in general. Streets where I live are unbelievably narrow. When did it become socially acceptable for an employee to use the phrase "f***ing stupid" with a customer as a way of commiserating? Travel is good for the soul. Solitude is like oxygen to me. Quiet country roads are so beautiful. I treat my dead ancestors like stars in one of my favorite dramas, and it is enjoyable to me to visit where they are buried and learn details about their lives that even they themselves probably found boring. Rushing is a symptom of anxiety. 

These things and more I have thought.

And now, to live accordingly. 

PS: The photo shows an open field which used to hold the old apartment house where I lived for five years, and the building in which I worked from 1989-1990. 19th and Wisconsin, in Milwaukee.

How Deep is Your... Anxiety

So that title, you're supposed to sing it. It's a little chuckle. Oh, come on; you don't go around all day editing song lyrics to fit your circumstances? Well, you're missing out. 

Yesterday I was at my chiropractor's office for my bi-monthly adjustment, and I mentioned how the most common back soreness I develop seems to come from the way I sleep. He took this rather seriously. I described my typical sleep position, and he said it is a very common problem and is essentially the evolutionary "self- defense" posture. 

Hmm. Habitually curling up into self-defense when at my most vulnerable. Interesting exposé of a lifelong habit. 

He says this keeps my back muscles taut all night long, which they don't like, and he suggested I make a concerted effort to sleep more straight and to tell myself this before going to sleep, and throughout the night. 

So I did. 

And let me tell ya something. I had the very unusual experience of nightmares all night long where I was being hunted down to be killed. I was running through a building trying to escape and outwit the maniac. It was like my body knew I was leaving it unguarded and something in me was hitting a panic button.

It is fascinating to me how deeply the human body will hold on to things that the mind isn't even aware of. 

As I was cooking today, my mind wandered to a conversation I had with a friend, oh about 26 or 27 years ago. At one time I took her into my confidence when I was really struggling with how I was being treated by a married man where the power differential left me, well, quite vulnerable. I remembered that her response was to pray with me out loud to cast out demons. I don't, you know, fault her, though looking back I realized today that was such an inappropriate response. We were youngish GenX and obviously neither of us had any idea of how to react. But I realized that her response made me feel like I was crazy, and obviously the one with the problem in the scenario. 

It's fascinating to me how the mind will burp up things when the body makes changes.

On that note, I'm off to exercise, and I'm looking forward to trying this sleep experiment further.

Where This New Year is Leading

I started this year thinking I was going on a long spiritual quest, only to be greeted very quickly by a deeply healing and transformative grace that was down there, beyond words. The long quest had been God's; I merely positioned myself with some quietness and openness and He did the work in an instant. In a word, He gave freedom. I wrote all about this in January.

Writing is often so vital to my interior self-honesty, and to presenting the depths of my heart to God. And sometimes it flows so deeply and easily -- despite the hard work it often is -- that I can feel guilty about it. That sounds stupid, but it is true. I have a commitment as a Secular Carmelite to a certain amount of time each day spent in prayer. I often feel like my time would be best spent in writing, but I find I struggle with scrupulosity about "doing prayer right," and if it is too easy somehow I figure it must not be right. I suppose I remember times when I have written and struck those interior wells and unpleasantness (ok, trauma) arose because of it. Still, the process is not at fault. Dental drills don't cause periodontal disease; they find it. I guess that just confirms that writing is a powerful tool, and we need to be prepared -- I need to be prepared -- when wielding powerful tools. 

And on that exact note, I have been discerning the last many weeks undertaking a two year course of study in Carmelite spiritual direction. When I first saw this being offered, I was interested in a "well, probably not" kind of way. But the longer I sit with it, the more often feel a gentle desire building for it, and a sense that this really would be a fitting investment of my time, money, and effort. 

Concurrently, I have been very slowly making my way through the book The Life of Union With God by Auguste Sandreau, written in 1926 and translated from the French. I started it actually months ago, having really gotten bogged down in the early chapters. But now that I'm nearly finished, I am struck by how this historical walk through the Catholic experience of mysticism helps me make sense of my own personal formation. I had never quite understood the roles and historical fallout of Quietism, the Protestant Reformation, and Jansenism all injured an authentic understanding of Catholic mysticism. If I understand it correctly, the Quietist movement basically preached "Contemplation for all" in the sense of 'Just sit down with Jesus and He'll pour into you mysterious and miraculous graces just as you are." I can't help but feel that this was very much akin to my own experience in the Charismatic movement beginning in the late 1980s. An authentic encounter with Jesus, to be sure, but here's the kicker: no one, no one, no one ever specifically taught us about discipleship into a life of virtue. Cooperating with God was all about reading the Bible, praise and worship, and sending up your spiritual antenna to catch whatever was floating through the spiritual airwaves at the time. Virtue was just supposed to appear along the way after the altar calls, without much teaching, effort, or cultivation. I think mostly we substituted church peer culture for this lack. 

I remember an evangelization team meeting where we were going to be "discerning." We sat in silent prayer for like five minutes, and then the leader said, "Ok, what did God tell you?" A man replied, "God's telling me I need to stay home and think more about sharing the gospel with my family." (This was a verbatim exchange, which lead to the group being disbanded.)

Even though I had not been able to put words on it, I knew when I entered the Catholic Church that this life had more protection from our own human lunacy than this tacit belief that we waited on divine download (or worse yet, actually received divine download) for every decision we ever made throughout the day. There is a gross misunderstanding of the human person (not to mention the role of grace, nature, reason, and virtue) in this spiritualistic Christianity.

This is not Christian mysticism; this is not contemplation. This is NOT what union with God is all about. 

I believe that God communicates with people. St. Teresa and St. John of the Cross presumed this to be true in their teaching (despite what some Catholic squelchers have to say about it). But I also believe the phrase "God told me..." is one of the most dangerous things a Christian can utter, and it needs to be well discerned. I have personally been deeply burned by too readily believing, and also by too scrupulously "testing" these types of things. 

In the middle of this post, I related a story of how I ended up researching mysticism while in a Lutheran college. I feel like I now have enough life experience under my belt to delve back into this as a way of understanding my own experience and of making it intelligible to myself to be able to help other people not have to make some of the same mistakes I have. 

I think this is the fruit of freedom. 

Shalom, Shalom

Today was one of those rare Sundays when I had no liturgical role but to worship. Coming off of the Holy Week, Easter Week, Divine Mercy cycle I have been more than tired; I've been rather liturgically fatigued. I've been rehearsing to myself often that true prayer is not rooted in feeling but in faith. Sometimes it has seemed I've had so much less than feeling going on that I'm more at the level of consciousness. To lead music, I do normally have to tap into the foundation of sanctified autopilot I have, which I've learned to trust more than my mind. Call it liturgical instinct. But the proper balance of that seems to always have just a hint of adrenaline mixed in, not just simply turning on the machine before the opening hymn and then turning it back off again after the closing hymn, like the sound system.

Anyway, today was none of that. 

Today instead I was able to soak in the Mass (and the music) and feel life return.

The first line that snagged me was in the Psalm: 

As soon as I lie down, I fall peacefully asleep, for you alone, O Lord, bring security to my dwelling.

That line, crescendoed in the word, security, gently pierced me. And then, nicely enough, the homily basically picked up on this theme of peace, and Jesus' presence with us which makes it possible to have inner peace. And this weird reminder: how Jesus says "peace be with you," and then, as a by the way, "do you have anything to eat?" Both of these lines have always struck me as bizarre, said into the faces of apostles who were hiding and scared out of their wits and feeling very unreconciled in themselves, between themselves, and with Jesus, without a doubt. What they had just finished experiencing had pulled all their stuffing out and left them raw, vulnerable messes. 

And Jesus is hungry. At least for their fellowship.

Yeah, and this is piercing all over again.

How is Jesus' hunger resonating in me? I learned from the Carmelites some years ago that the way to go is to invite Jesus to love through me, live through me, minister through me, etc. First, because that's the Christian plan, but especially because my natural capacity -- anyone's natural capacity -- isn't the Christian plan, because it is so tiny and finite. "Christ in me, the hope of glory." 

So how about Jesus being hungry through me? 

It sends me right back to the refrain so common to me when I started grappling with becoming Catholic. What kind of God in His right mind relies so much on human beings, loves them, calls them, endures them, wants them? 

I guess it's the kind of God who is not innately like me, guarded, invulnerable, untouchable, cowardly in the face of my own desires. 

Ok, I've lost track of where I started. Shalom, shalom. The peace that Jesus gives is wholeness, entirety; it gives security to my dwelling. I don't have to guard myself. I can un-do the hypervigilance. I guess I can breathe and be brave in the face of my own desires. Selah.

The Pain in My Side

Each year during the Triduum, I lead and participate with a group of parishioners who pray the Office of Readings and Morning Prayer together. (Actually, we pray Morning Prayer together daily already, but we tend to gather a few more people during the Triduum.)

One line from the Office of Readings struck me this morning as if I'd never read it before. It is Jesus the Victor speaking to Adam whom he has gone to free from Death. He says, "My side has healed the pain in yours."

For context, there's the whole paragraph:

I slept on the cross and a sword pierced my side for you who slept in paradise and brought forth Eve from your side. My side has healed the pain in yours. My sleep will rouse you from your sleep in hell. The sword that pierced me has sheathed the sword that was turned against you.

The entire reading is of course about the Lord freeing Adam from the death brought upon him through his sin, the sin that lost innocence for the whole human race. By extension, then, of course it is about how we are all freed from bondage to sin by Christ's victory over death.

This ancient homily was written before fundamentalism got its teeth into the book of Genesis. But what struck me is that while the text talks about sin, it was not Adam who opened his own side to create Eve. It was God. God caused the pain, if you will. And then, it says, he heals it. 

But no, I don't think the healed pain that this speaks of is just that God opened Adam's side, and now He's saying, oh, my bad, let me fix you up again. The opening of Adam's side and drawing forth Eve speaks about how on a deep level, human beings are created to be interdependent on one another, needing one another, accountable to one another, and indeed responsible for one another. The pain in Adam's side was that when Eve, a separate person, but also part of himself, faced the dragon, he stood aloof, mute, passive, actionless. The ache in his side, which he passed on to his offspring, was this "Am I my [wife's] keeper?" She's bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh, but I'm totally tuned out from any sense of connection to her, or to myself that would arouse me to act when I see this assult on human dignity. "Ain't no my job."

Salvation is indeed union with God, and union with God entails communion with other human beings. In my days when I identified as a misanthrope, I really struggled to get that. It is the grace and power of God which creates both union and communion, and we are his co-operators in both. Love of God and love of neighbor are of a piece. And we will struggle with both until we accept and care for ourselves as the locus of receiving and giving of this love, and allow the pain in Christ's side to heal the pain in ours, where we mourn how our connections with others involve failure.

Listening to the Rabble

Yesterday's Scripture reading for the Office of Readings start with these words: "The foreign elements among them were so greedy for meat that even the Israelites lamented again..." (Numbers 11:4, NAB)

I checked several different translations for this verse. Several of them called the protagonist of that sentence "the rabble among them" or "the mixt multitude." The mixt multitude phrase was also used of the Egyptian or mixed race people that left Egypt with the Israelites.

This struck me and immediately got me thinking. I knew the Israelites complained a lot while wandering in the desert, but this detail had slipped my attention. Now, I'm going to go with the typological reading of the early church fathers, because clearly the key variable is not the ethnicity or foreignness of the individuals involved. The mixedness of the multitude is not about genes; it is about connection with the Lord.

It made me think  about the voices we listen to. What forms my desires and fuels my thoughts? Is it the Word of God, or is it my Facebook feed?

How about those marketing voices that tell me that at my age, my skin is wrinkly and I need their products to look young? Or that my children will be scarred if I don't protect their bodies, minds, and souls with their products, programs and remedies? Or that you can mark your calendar for the descent into anarchy if you don't elect this party and that candidate, and that since evil has already overtaken everything, your only hope is this new ideology which you must live hard and fight against all others, or die yourself. They are all marketing. Your money, your power, your allegiance, your mind -- they want them all to belong to them. Actually, they'll tell you they already have you and you simply can't escape.

"The foreign elements among them were so greedy for meat that even the Israelites lamented."

The world was so full of chaos that even the Christians were full of chaos. Because the Christians were surrounded by the complaining of the world, and let it fill them.

Daily we need to face the reality before us, our interior, our exterior reality. Psalm 145:2 needs to be our practice: "Every day I will bless you." And we bless God by placing Him first, His voice, His word, His truth, His claims over our lives. Entrusting ourselves to His care, His lordship, His way. Discipleship is a daily turning back to the Lord to know, love and serve Him and Him alone.

How can we possibly bear witness of the presence of God in our lives to the world if we are thinking just like the world and conforming ourselves to a standard devoid of God's standard?

A practical way of drawing the mind and heart back to the way of the Lord is to pray the Liturgy of the Hours. The two hinges, Morning Prayer and Evening Prayer, are the starting point for disciplining our thought input, but the other five pieces (not literally hours) spread throughout the day help pull our minds back. You might think you don't have time for it, but I'll bet that right now you find time to scroll through social media or check the news or play a game or mindlessly text someone. You can even put Laudate on your phone for free when you can't carry a book with you.

Joy Comes in the Morning

This morning as I enter into prayer, I find a strange gratitude welling up inside of me. Gratitude in general is unusual enough for me. But I review scenes of my past and find them a wellspring of gratitude that I wasn't expecting.

Let me be clear. I'm not grateful that these things happened. Bad things happen to everyone, and God is not some ogre who gets his jollies from this. 

When bad things happen, I at least (and I'm guessing this is rather true of everyone) become an expert wall builder. I don't want to feel the bad thing, so I wall it off. I snip the nerves that connect me to the experience. When you lay on your arm or leg and it goes numb, it feels heavy and useless, but it doesn't really hurt. It is after you free it that it starts to hurt. So a common and maybe subconscious reaction to emotional pain is to numb it, one way or the other. I have always done this with my mind. Some people do this with addictions. It's all the same mechanism, I think.

So part of the wonder is that all of this is now out of anesthesia. What was master is becoming servant.

I can trace through a whole list:
My father's mental illness and alcoholism, apparently in full swing already when I was born. His absence, in turn with my parents' fighting. My parents' divorce and my mother's stress and an utterly tumultuous relationship with my dad (for all of us). Feeling like a piece of furniture in a house rather than a member of a family. Gut-wrenching desperation and fear over chronic singleness, concurrent with toxic and sometimes abusive relationships with men who proverbially had red flags tattooed all over their faces. Anger and desperation over infertility. Spiritual confusion all along the way over what God's love actually is and layers upon layers of deception that I embraced. And the terror of trusting through actually being healed.

I am not grateful that a single bit of that happened. Except that last word, of course.

I am grateful to realize that God, by His Spirit, was closer to me than I to myself, through all of that. He never abandoned me. He never gave up on me. He never lost patience with me. 

Why didn't He stop it all? In answer to that, I'll invite you to watch Season 4 of The Chosen. In this world, things are unleashed. It's the way things are. Jesus did not come to stop the bad things; He came to go through them with us. He gave me the dose of grace I could handle, and infinitely more than I deserved as I consistently rejected and resisted His efforts to draw me closer sooner.

The end, the telos, of humankind is not a happy life on earth. We are made for something much more profound than that. We are made for union with God, forever in eternity, and with eternity starting now and entered into now. And as I see my past and see Jesus with me (which I absolutely, totally and completely, could never see in real time) I see the capacity I have within me now to receive the life of God into me. If I'm a thimble, God will fill me and I'll be a full thimble. If I'm a bowl, God will fill me and I'll be a full bowl. Swimming pool, crater, canyon. We don't have to make hollowing ourselves out a project; life does that. God will always, always, pour out Himself more abundantly than we can hold, because His love is always beyond our power to hold. Our work is to receive from Him and believe what He says.

And I know that whatever may come, this is the reality. I don't like pain and suffering. But I also don't have to fear it or dread it. Because God is faithful. 

Weeping may endure for a night, but joy comes in the morning. (Psalm 30:5)

Fr. John, Belonging, and Conversion

My first spiritual director, back in the early 90s in Milwaukee, was a Jesuit priest who I was very personally fond of. His was the first daily Mass I frequented, at 5:30 every afternoon after work, in the basement chapel of Gesu Church. His homilies were intelligent and helpful, and I delighted at what I suppose might have been a stereotypically "Jesuit" way of phrasing certain things, for example in his prayer intentions, so they could have a meaning to cover every angle. I wasn't fond on how he would never call God "he," though. I'll never forget the line of the Psalm which became "God Godself is in the midst of God's people." Come to think of it, I did go through a time when it drove me up a wall, and I even was ready to walk out of a Sunday Mass for which I saw he was main celebrant. But the Lord pulled me up by the scruff of my neck and I felt rebuked for allowing my prideful judgment of him. It was maybe a year later I asked him to be my spiritual director, which he did for about nine months, before I left for Japan. I missed him so mightily when I left. He was essentially the only Catholic I had any connection to at the time.

I never wanted to ask him his thoughts on theology, however. It was a time and a place where there were some wild ideas going around, and I thought it possible that he might sympathize with things I would not have known how to handle. 

The one thing he did very, very well was that he accepted me, exactly as I was. And I was a newly converted Catholic who was a big mess. I hardly remember what I talked to him about, but I know I talked a lot, and he listened a lot. He also told me some stories of his own vulnerability, like how he was terrified of flying because he had severe closterphobia. I recall one session where he actually suddenly excused himself and bolted out of the room. He had a pathway into his office in such a way that he couldn't see the door from where he sat. He explained this was due to his closterphobia also. 

He died of throat cancer at age 60, just a couple of months after my daughter was born. I felt alone in the world when I found out, even though at that point I hadn't been his parishioner for over a decade. 

So why am I thinking about Father John tonight? 

I'm thinking about the power of belonging. Belonging both to the Church and in the Church. Fr. John was Gesu's RCIA director and welcomed people into the Church from all walks of life. I remember he referred to those who came in with little religious background as having "less deformation" to work with. I was definitely the opposite (though I did not go through his RCIA). 

Are Catholics weak at welcoming people exactly as they are? Loving people where they are? What about people who are already in the pews? Do we have an ever lengthening list of behaviors that people need to conform to before they are acceptable? Do we think God treats us that way? 

Conversion is about transformation. People change people (or try to, or want to) from the outside in. God changes people from the inside out. 

We are good at saying we need constant conversion. Yes. That's why we observe Lent. But to convert, we have to stop trying to make ourselves acceptable like some kind of DIY, and trying to get others to conform to our standards. We need to seek the One who is Love and let Him embrace us as we are. All of it. As we do, He will give us His own life in return.

This video spurred my thoughts the other day: Ever Wonder Especially this line: "To belong is to be seen, to be known, to be understood, and to be accepted.... Belonging is found in God."

My Body Will Rest in Safety

I've pretty much always had a social circle of people older than I am. One such friend mentioned his uncomfortable awareness that everyone's chatter now gravitates towards aches and pains and doctor visits. It makes sense. Pain makes us vulnerable and we need to know we aren't alone with our fears of losing ourselves. 

When I briefly cared for my Mom while she was dying in hospice, I made a mental note to change my relationship with my body. I had always softly scoffed at the idea of going to the gym and doing exercises. My farmwoman epigenetics sang a distant song, to the tune that the goal was the work hard rather than sectioning off body movement away from normal daily activities. Eventually I had to admit that I was not chopping wood, plowing fields or drawing water from wells on any regular basis, and I was, in fact, a cushy modern. Through trial and error (and a lot of back pain) I figured out which kind of exercises I needed, and I've gradually worked towards actually doing them. 

Lately I've been doing a program called Hips Like Honey which focuses on strength and flexibility. It doesn't do much for cardio stamina, but even though it is rather gentle, it has really done its job. I love the feeling of waking up in the morning and doing that huge reach across to the other side of the bed to turn off my alarm, and lay down again, and not only not throw my back out, but to feel solid. 

So today I had my monthly chiropractic visit. I am still actively learning to stop tensing my body all the time, and the doc was showing me an exercise to help me out with that. The moment gave me something to ponder. Essentially he said that the tension in my sacrum comes from my back muscles trying to do the work that my core muscles are designed to handle. It's like two siblings going around together, and the loud, overbearing one is always doing all the talking, leaving the quiet, reserved one unskilled in initiating and carrying out a conversation. The overbearing one is tired and overused, and the quiet one needs focused, gentle attention. As he showed me the exercise, I realized, I don't do gentle very well. Farmwoman is out there, hoisting bales of hay overhead and throwing them. I need to find my interior delicate crystal goblet, or.... something like that. I guess when I find it I'll know what it is.

Something significant happened last month, and it is still settling in. Speaking of tension, lately I feel my mouth relaxing in just an incredibly unusual way. In my experience, I feel tension only after letting go of it, and my jaw and my teeth are apparently not clenched anymore. The other amazing thing is that as I read Scripture, or pray it, or hear it read, I feel like it is all about joy, peace, and God's incredible goodness. And safety. And rest. 

If there's a way to tie together these rambly thoughts, maybe it is this realization. Somewhere in my soul, a pre-verbal baby Marie has, for more than five decades, beheld a fear: that joy, and peace, and safety, and rest, and love, and important people, all disappear. And that little girl is powerless to stop it. Using all my might, and tensing myself silly isn't going to stop it. Like aging, like dying, it's a point of incredible vulnerability. But into that moment of vulnerability, someone has come. And He is Love. And Love is eternal. And I realized I will never lose Him. And more than that, every day I live in Him, I will never lose, either. Part of how I do that is I share my woes with others, and they share theirs with me, and the Lord is there (Mal. 3:16). We live our lives together, and even though we grow weak and die, this is where we find joy.

And in the meantime, the exercises that remind me that I'm weak -- I'll do those. Maybe I'll even become friends with gentle and vulnerable and make a soft nook for Farmwoman to rest in. 

Human Formation

I've been thinking a lot lately about human formation -- the process of becoming whole, in terms of how one relates to oneself and to other people. 

I thought about this a lot in my 20s also. Before I was Catholic, and for a time afterwards as well, I was a disciple of John and Paula Sandford, who wrote a lot about inner healing, as they called it. John had a phrase that stuck with me, (and I paraphrase, not able now to find the exact quote): One must be fully human before one can be safely spiritual. I believe that phrase covers a lot of the shipwrecking we find in the church today. It also has accounted for a lot of my own spinning of wheels at times when I thought I was making such great spiritual progress.

The fact that Jesus called me to the Catholic Church on Christmas Eve resonated like a gong through my heart for at least 20 solid years (read the story here). Christmas Eve, both theologically and socially, hits on all the points of the Incarnation. Jesus Christ took on human flesh to live a human life with human people, in order to bring us salvation. And He entered my world, my family trauma, my history of feeling barfed up into existence without dignity and purpose, to bring me salvation. Christmas encapsulates all that so well. 

What I already knew theologically in 1991: that Jesus was true God and true man, and died on the cross to take away sin, and that He pours out the Holy Spirit to empower believers -- all took on a dimension I had known how to describe, and had experienced in rudimentary ways. But I had no idea how much more was possible. Jesus set out to bridge theory and reality for me, by introducing me to His Real Presence. You could say His Real Presence was on a search and rescue mission for my real presence. For that, I needed transformation. I needed human formation.

In my early days I had a lot of hatred inside me. I identified as a misanthrope: a hater of mankind. I had no strong bonds to anyone in particular when I hit college age, and I spent three years in deep self-pity and thinking every day about ending my life. I could go on, but suffice it to say life was a mess. 

All this time I was a committed Christian. But I used to hold God in a drawer called Truth. I loved to crawl up into this drawer and nestle up with Truth and feel right. No one could hurt me if ultimately I was right and they were wrong. When I felt lonely or distressed, I crawled into this drawer and comforted myself with these thoughts. Mostly, I felt distressed when I was around other people, whether that was overpowering women with whom I never felt I could connect, or creepy men who I couldn't make go away, or people I wanted to befriend but didn't know how. My conversation skills were limited to academic ideas, and I hated "shallow talk" which was how I saw all interactions with just about everyone.

So I loved my safe Truth drawer. It was a great escape from learning to navigate reality, and to face myself. 

As I said in the beginning, human formation is about relating in a healthy way to oneself and other people, and it is necessary for a healthy spiritual life. God is an expert at meeting us where we are, taking what we present with, and filling that with His grace, ever widening our path beneath us. Always inviting us to more. The more we say yes, the more He will open up in front of us. He has met me in some very weird places. The beautiful thing to me is that He never seemed to be wringing His hands, worrying about me. 

This path of human formation has been long and arduous for me, as I suspect it is for everyone. To me, the worst scenario is not knowing there IS a path forward. The glory of God is man fully alive, said St. Irenaeus. We are fully alive when we allow the Lord to remove all the drawers and become single-hearted, and then turn that one heart totally and completely to Jesus, to love God and neighbor with His own love, and in our own gifting. 

I want to recommend a book on the topic of human formation, and I'll try to write more about it later. Fearless: Abundant Life Through Infinite Love by Margaret Vasquez. 

Snipping off the Hock Lock

Something happened this week that I can't describe. But I have a feeling I will look back on this as a deeply significant moment. 

Words escape me, so of course I come to try to write about it (lol). I think words fail me because the grace I met hit in a pre-verbal place in my soul. But I am curious, by way of pursuing integration, to see if I can in fact build a word bridge to help me grasp more of what happened (rather than obscure it with a lot of cerebralizing).

I also stop and ask myself why I write these things about my interior life. Sure, my premise for this blog is that I write to understand. Fine. I don't have to publish it all, though. (Here's a secret -- I write more than I publish.) The Constitutions of the Secular Carmelites say we are "witnesses to the experience of God." Specifically it says this:

...The Secular Carmleites are called to strive to make prayer penetrate their whole existence, in order to walk in the presence of the living God (cf. 1 Kings 18:14), through the constant exercise of faith, hope and love, in such a way that the whole of their life is a prayer, a search for union with God. The goal will be to achieve the integration of experience of God with the experience of life: to be contemplatives in prayer and the fulfillment of their own mission.

So, I don't write about my interior life, bearing witness to the experience of God, because I am a Carmelite. I'm a Carmelite because I bear witness to the experience of God. This is how I know I am in the right place in my life and in the Church. This is how I fit, how I belong. This feels quite validating.

So, what happened this week? I wish I could tell a narrative, but instead I need to do kind of what the blind man in John 9 did. ("All I know is, I was blind, and now I see.") You know that plastic thing that holds a turkey's legs together? (I had to Google it; apparently it is called a hock lock.) I feel like I had one of those taken off me. But instead of locking poultry legs, this thing held something in me to a way I -- or it -- wanted God to be, that He just isn't. A way I unconsciously was tempted to believe God is, and which subsequently kicked up a fight within me. What I could not see was it was the Holy Spirit fighting to get me out of the lock, and so I put up immense resistence. I was partnering with the wrong side of the struggle. 

At one point I went to early morning confession, not under any feeling of constraint or even the slightest angst. I had learned a lesson again recently that confession gives grace that helps, and I was looking for help. Did the confession; again, no bells or whistles. Received my penance, which was to meditatively pray one Our Father, and ask the Lord to show me which petition of it He wanted to show me something from. Again, the answer was clear, but no peals of thunder or choirs of angels singing. A bit later, I looked up the said petition in the Catechism, and, among other things, read this:

God does not want to impose the good, but wants free beings.

And I think right there, God took His cable cutter and snipped off that hock lock. 

Yeah, that pretty well sums it up.

And now I'm back to not having words, because it is just such a flood of peace. I didn't until now actually see how much drama I have carried around inside of me all my life, and occasionally sprayed others with. (Mea culpa.) I am sure this is at the heart of a lot of my habitual stress and tension, trying too hard, my proverbial driving with one foot on the gas and one foot on the brake at the same time. 

But, like a plant that rehydrates at the rate the roots can handle, I want to just be with this. I know that my "integration of the experience of God with the experience of life" is not just about me. I know this has affected my relationships, and that integration means receiving  deeply so that I may give what God has given me, just from the sheer joyful overflow of new habits. 

We are made up of so many layers and facets, and God really does want to take every one of them up into Himself and fill us with His glory. He does really want us to be resplendent with life. I used to find it a little depressing that I had so much need for healing, as if I was infinitely broken. But I think it is that God is infinite love, and He will continue to transform us and fill us more and more for as long as we live. We are made for union with God. There is literally no end to the love we can receive from Him. 

Dance, Child. Dance

One of my favorite rules I had for my kids (ok, maybe it was more my son) when they were growing up (right after, yes, you may sing about poop, but not using a hymn tune) was that they were not allowed to berate and say nasty things about themselves. It was more or less a given that they were not to be mean and rude about or to other people, but they seemed to need some help with doing this with regard to themselves. To be honest, the echo of teaching them that rule still helps me occasionally.

Like when I sit down to write this blog post. 

I can be so serious and heavy and complicated, but you know what -- that's just the reality of me facing challenges. So here, serious Marie, have some flowers. 🎕

I mentioned my winter's work of dealing with something or the other in my last post, but to that I respond with James 4:15, "If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that." Cuz' maybe the Lord just doesn't want to waste any time. In the last, oh, 48 hours I've had this image of a hose, laying calmly and quietly on the floor of a basement. If water comes steadily out of that hose, what a difference it will be for that basement.

Ok, so imagine a metaphor where a flooded basement is a greatly desired thing. Work with me, here.

God bless Margaret Vasquez. I just want to say that. And God bless God who knows how to give me exactly what I need, when I need it. 

It's not actually anything new, as in intellectually new: new ideas, insights, truth, revelation. I think it is like Psalm 1 says: "That person is like a tree planted by steams of water (ah -- see, there it is) which yields its fruit in due season."

Right now is, apparently, a due season for me. 

In Margaret's book and in her podcasts she talks about basic principles of how the Lord relates to us, of how we are called to relate to ourselves, back to God, and with others. I am chosen, known, and valued, I have boundaries and openness. I'm not going to go into all of what is going on subterraneanly for me at the moment, but this is definitely one of those moments of cohesion, or "the big click" or, -- of course! --a giant Naru Hodo. Now I get it. 

Yesterday at Mass I had handed all the broken bits that I couldn't quite make any sense of to the Lord at the consecration. This morning I took advantage of early morning confession (which was in itself a victory. I am an expert of talking myself out of going.) And back at home after Mass this morning I had the luxury of a good old fashioned dance party. Two songs. Because the most joyful answers don't always come in eloquent theological explanations the way I sometimes try to force them to come. Sometimes they just come in feeling the connection through space and time and through my whole soul and body, including whatever cells might be left of me that were still around when I was a child, to being a loved daughter of God. And God knows this daughter of His still feels joy at hearing songs I heard when I was 6 or 7. I think every joy I feel with them integrates another layer of my life's experiences. Almost like pulling more of me out of the freezer. I don't know. I'll understand it later. For now, maybe I'll dance some more. Sure glad I'm doing that hip strengthening workout!

A New (Leg of the) Journey

 New years and new things may suggest each other, but I'm not one to choose some big newness project on January 1. Gosh, even writing that feels exhausting. Life is exhausting enough normally; I don't need to resolve myself any further.

This new leg is more something I am sensing I need and agreeing to. 

I think it just follows on what the Holy Spirit nudged me with last Good Friday with this line "everybody suffers." The second biggest take-away I had after I started praying the Seven Sorrows Rosary was that the suffering we experience is not meant to be a place to camp in, but a place to pass through, on our way to the glory of God. This little revelation came to me as I was out for a walk one Spring day, and I think these little revelations are like slow-blooming flowers, and they are meant to hold my attention for a long time, because they are gonna need awhile to really sink in.

I slipped into a blog post here and there last year that I've been dealing with anxiety more frequently than ... well, more frequently than I'd like to be the case, and more frequently than I'd like to admit. And more intensely than what has been normal for me. In fact, one Spring day I had a full blown panic attack, which hasn't happened for years, and really only happened to me one other time in my life, to my recollection. In the same time period I also had two episodes of anxiety hives, which was completely new. This got my attention and both by plan and sort of by happenstance I made some health changes, including ditching my exercise plan which was itself stressful and taking up one that fit me so much better, and was more demanding in good ways. I also completely gave up drinking coffee. I can't tell you how much good that did me. Between the two of these, my cortisol belly has all but disappeared, and my clothes fit me happily again. I'm also not completely freezing and interiorly curling up into a ball all of the time, despite the fact that our furnace has been functioning questionably for a solid month.

So all these are good things. But I know they aren't all that I need to address. I don't know -- yet, completely -- what I don't know, but I recognize certain sticking points in my life that don't just come out of nowhere. 

One tell-tale thing happened New Year's Eve. I read a friend's Facebook post that was a list of "23 ways I have seen Jesus' love in 2023," with the challenge to follow suit and post your own. I tried it. I started, but I couldn't finish it. I found myself focused on, Oh, that thing -- it wasn't nearly as bad as it could have been and I was worried about this, but it turned out ok and This really sad thing we survived ... It was all so heavy. And I thought of a few uplifting things but found myself afraid to share them publicly. Now, that's kind of a new one for me. I didn't like how this whole thing felt. 

Normally I pray about stuff like this, but I've really got nothing, there. No gush of words tumbling from the heart faucet. But I've been going back to St. Ivo and thinking of the Holy Spirit as the Advocate. So, I've prayed the Veni, Sancte Spiritus. Come, Holy Spirit. 

My favorite Carmelite, Fr. Iain Matthew, OCD, mentioned in one of his talks that, when it comes to allowing God to love us, one of our biggest difficulties is that 90% of us is in the deep freeze. It's there, we have it, but we can't really access this part of ourselves. This image and phrase has been tumbling around a bit, in this process. I want to love God with more of me. I want access to more of me to love God with. He deserves it.

So, I'm praying this way, and as I'm working through my used book inventory, getting stuff listed, I come across the book More Than Words: the Freedom to Thrive after Trauma by Margaret Vasquez (who just happens to be a regular at my parish). I set it aside to read, because it look valuable -- for someone else I know and what they are going through. (heh) 

So, I read it.

We pause here for the classic peanut butter and chocolate collision meme, signifying the creation of a new wonderful reality.

So I've ordered her second book, Fearless: Abundant Life through Infinite Love, and I've begun listening to her podcast about the integration of spirituality and human formation. This is a theme that Dr. Peter Malinowski also speaks and writes on at Souls and Hearts.com that I've been loosely following for a couple of years. But I know there is something for me to address, and I'm going to guess I'm going to discover it as I kind of make this my winter's work. 

One line that struck me from one of her videos was to the effect that God has more love for me than I need to heal my trauma symptoms. 

I think new avenues of growth await me. These often involve a good deal of falling apart, but I figure I'm gonna do that, regardless; or if I don't fall apart I'll just get stony and unfeeling, and I really don't want that. I really don't. 

So, here's to the journey.