A god who loves me

My life has been full of service lately, keeping me busy. More church music than I can shake a stick at. Add to that I've felt out of kilter all week since I did a bit of a complicated face plant onto my bathtub early one morning. I managed to just hit the bridge of my nose; how, I don't know. But I knocked my neck out of alignment and rattled my brain enough to not exactly be my normal self for a few days.

So really, really busy, and not feeling 100%.

This after coming off some other intense moments with my Carmelite retreat, the funeral of a community member, and other things that constitute my normal self in all her grand intensity.

Part of me being normal is that I have a constant undercurrent of thought and awareness going on, seemingly unbidden. This week I noticed many times I simply was unable to do that or "live there." That undercurrent also feeds my prayer life, even though now I realize it is certainly the function of my active soul. (It is strange but good to be able to dissect one's interior life this way. Bumps on the head do a great service.) What I've learned this week is that I have to have a prayer life that is not dependent on my ability to think straight or feel good. I have to have that space where I just put myself before God, knowing He is within me, and just be there. Maybe it isn't that this is new to me, but it has been as if I could hardly do anything else.

In the midst of that, this morning, during down time at a music practice I happened to pick up a children's book (I was in the church library) about a martyr of the early church. She was a Greek girl of the first century, born to a non-believing family. My daughter and I have been reading The Roman Mysteries, so we've gotten pretty familiar with the time period and what worship of the Greek and Roman gods felt like. The book had her praying like this: "Oh mysterious God, if there is a god who loves me, tell me. Show me who you are."

Something about this struck me right between the eyes. A god who loves me. Everything is in those words. The Greek and Roman gods were to be respected, honored, sacrificed to, shown piety, but they did not love people. They were forces, or powers, and they could grant favors or inflict punishment, but they did not form relationships. They did not love. Philosophers embraced ideas and ideals and lived by virtues. But they did not speak of being loved by a God who personally loves.

That is uniquely Christian.

And that struck me, hard. If God loves, if the One God loves me, and that love reaches me, then the only reasonable response to this love is to give my all and everything in return, to love Him in return. Love compels love in return; it is the strongest force in the universe.

A god who loves me.

A mighty rushing wind, an enormous fire, an all-consuming response. That's the only way the reality of a god who loves me can be met.

It would be so easy if I could just turn into a ball of flame. Sometimes the way that fire has to ignite is through virtues like patience, long-suffering, kindness, perseverance, faithfulness, constancy, watching, and waiting. Love actually forms these in the soul. Balls of flame sometimes do intricate little hidden works.

But the God who loves me can create in me anything and everything He desires. That's all I desire.

Because it is true. He is a God who loves me.

So, I Went on Retreat and Turned into a Baby

Last weekend I went on retreat with about 50 other Secular Carmelites in western PA, among them, eight others from my own community. In a way, I felt like I had just left that very retreat house, so strongly did last September's retreat resonate with me. That retreat was on St. Therese and her oblation to Divine Mercy. This retreat was on the weekend of Divine Mercy Sunday and was on the Little Way and the life of St. Therese in the context of St. Teresa's seven mansions. So in many ways the themes overlapped.

I wrote about my experiences of the last retreat here, here and here. My experience this time around had a different feel to it. God is always full of surprises. Lots of times I come into these things with handy spiritual road map download early on of all the choice blessings that await. I suppose I did with this one, too, except that the choice blessing awaiting me was that I was going to experience being a little baby. A little child. A child.

Uh...

Those days in my life kind of sucked. But so the early-appearing road map read.

There's one really big difference about experiencing childhood as an adult: along with the tons of grace God provides because He planned the trip, He gets to use the adult faith and reasoning He's spent all these years forming. As servants.

Then come the emotions. And I wonder why in the world I am overwhelmed by things that normally never bother me. I wonder why I am going back to crusty old thought patterns. I wonder why am I making allowances for God to be an ogre.

Why? because buried deep inside there's a lie I've hidden away out of fear that it is true. And God's mercy is a misery-detector. He is drawn to our misery, even to the point of drawing it out of us when we allow an opening and He is ready to act. Like venom from a bite.

And His way apparently is to allow these wounded feelings that are connected to the lies to get stirred up. But He doesn't forcefully or magically just start sucking the venom out. This is where the faith and the reasoning He has formed in us get to do their things.

Feelings start puking, and you can't really hold it down. Reason has to look at this and see if there is anything concrete these feelings are telling me to deal with. The purpose of that is to identify the misery, to get a handle on it.

Then faith has to do two jobs: First, take the stuff to Jesus. It's plenty easy to shut down, turn in, self-soothe, and do anything but expose it to another, namely Jesus, or a priest in confession, or to externalize it somehow.

And an equally hard step is after detailing the misery (and remember we're talking the misery feelings of baby/childhood here, so yeah, grab a firm handful o' dat), to declare the truth to oneself in faith. Such as: true, I experienced real hurt and lack, but it is true that I am loved deeply by God. We have to use our faith to declare the truth, despite what we feel.

And then we have to go to that reality that faith declares: Go into that love of God, and receive the One who waits to pour out His mercy. Tell Him all about all of the misery. Tell Him you can't solve it. Tell Him every single thing you need mercy for, which is everything. Experience Him loving you. Right there with all the need, all the hurt. Experience Him being big enough to cover all of it. And stay there.

For me at least, it isn't possible to do all this spiritual work without at least a couple sobbing break-downs. But to meet God in that place after going through the spiritual obstacle course, well, to say it's worth it is just silly. God is immensely, incredibly, life-changingly generous, and He does these things for us over, and over, and over again.

Our pains seem big, but they can actually disappear into Him, because His mercy endures forever.

Little People

I was on retreat this weekend, and the retreat master closed the last conference with this poem. It perfectly sums up how we are called to holiness, especially following the Little Way of St. Therese.

Little People
by Fr. Elijah Joseph Cirigliano

Little people don't need honors. They know they are nothing and awards can't change that.
Little people hide in Mary's mantle. They need a mom.
Little people love the Church. They trust that Christ knew what He was doing.
Little people love the Eucharist. Of course they do, IT'S JESUS!
Little people don't try to understand everything. They're OK with not knowing stuff.
Little people make lots of mistakes. Big deal, what do you expect?
Little people crush the serpent's head. Of course they do, they belong to Mary!
Little people do God's will. They'd never think to do their own.
Little people are bold. They know their Daddy is the biggest.
Little people are peaceful. They know God can handle everything.
Little people are not attached to things. Just God.
Little people don't plan anything. They like surprises.
Little people are not jealous. They don't need to be better.
Little people don't always ask "why." They simply trust.
Little people love the cross. They know it is a gift from Jesus.
Little people are joyful. They know they are loved (infinitely).
Little people love. They disappear into the Hearts of Jesus and Mary.

Easter Frustrations

Perhaps because I am perennially optimistic, I think this is a good sign. Almost everywhere I look, everything I listen to within my Catholic circles (in which I include the inclinations of my own soul) I find frustrating and frustrated cries of cluelessness, for lack of a better way to phrase it. Oh, maybe it all boils down to my having eaten too much contraband food as we celebrate Easter and so my mood is all wonky, but on the other hand, maybe there actually is something out there that is groaning. Let me try to pull out a few examples.

This matter of celebration, for example. I've read a few comments about people wanting to celebrate the whole Easter season, or wanting other people to want to celebrate the whole season, but there goes that whole frustration thing. It's either "I don't know how" or "Why doesn't anyone get it?"

To this I say: mystagogy. It's what Easter is for. Today's gospel seemed to get right to the point. When we have real conversion and because of it, experience real joy, we need to drill down through it to understand more deeply our place in the story of salvation history and the meaning of what we have received. (Hint: it isn't about possession of warm fuzzies.) We also need to listen to Acts during Easter like an apprentice watches the work of the master. From this we learn what to expect as we move out into that meaning. But the liturgical cycle is all about appreciation of what we have and preparing for what is to come. And Pentecost comes later. And yes, of course we live all of it all the time, but the "cycle" part of it means we are always moving through, moving deeper.

And all of that is an aside, a really important aside, and I should probably put it in a different blog post, but this is really about frustrations, and I'm working out my own frustrations by writing, and WHOSE BLOG IS IT, anyway.

Did I mention that too much sugar and wheat aren't always good for my physio-emotional health?

Another thing I am aware of is Christians obsessing over liturgical details in various ways. Worship is super-duper important. But if we reduce Christian worship to liturgical style and rubrics, we are in big trouble. If we lose sight of Romans 12:1 worship, offering our bodies as living sacrifices, we are in trouble. We cannot offer worship to a God who is essentially a cultural icon or ideology.

And to this I say: kerygma! I have been studying the book of Acts with my daughter and yesterday was struck hard by Peter's preaching in Acts 10. I've read it who knows how many times, but when I read it yesterday I thought to myself, if one were to ask 95% of practicing Catholics what the core of the gospel is, how many, including myself, would be at a loss for exactly what to say? Love God and love people? Jesus died for you, so be nice? Obey the Church?

I know lots of Catholics who sincerely want to "tell the good news," but if we can't figure out what that is, well, no wonder we are as frustrated as hell. Are altar girls and communion in the hand really draining the Church of power? Do we need 20 new courses in how to do everything better? Frustration.

And if I want it to really get bad, all I have to do is look in my own life. From childhood I have sensed a yearning that if I was going to be a Christian, I would not be a play-Christian or a Mickey Mouse Christian. At one point I realized that I had sat in a church for some time without living faith, and I wondered if maybe there were others like that, and I felt deeply called to love this sort of person to life. If, you know, there were one or two others. The more I grow the more I realize I have nothing to give anyone that might spiritually help them, but God does, and He can give stuff through me. In fact, that's how He gives everything, just about. So now I'm becoming a Carmelite and I learn that the way I participate in this is by praying. Recently I had to answer a question about whether I am faithfully fulfilling my 30 minutes of prayer daily. I struggled with answering this question far more than I needed to, because I realized I was addressing it subjectively, as if the question were whether I feel I am praying 30 minutes a day. On the first hand, sometimes prayer really works and time flies and it hardly feels I am doing anything, so how can I count that? On the second hand, sometimes prayer walks or plods and feels so effort-laden, and how can I count that? And on the third hand, there are plenty of times that I simply sit before God and tell Him I haven't the foggiest idea what it means to pray, so how can I know if I'm doing it or not? I have a talent for making simple things very complicated. Frustration.

But other than not stressing and over-burdening my physio-emotional self with sugar, wheat, and caffeine, I guess it boils down to setting one's foot firmly on the path of faith, on the revelation of God, on the teachings of the spiritual masters I follow, and disregarding, sometimes, what it all feels like. And all those folks out there and their feelings. I mean, yes, we all get to have our feelings, and we all have to acknowledge them, but woe to us who are led by them. They do not determine how faithful we should be, how diligent we should be, how loving we should be, or what path we should take. Perseverance means that we keep going, regardless of what is going the other way or blowing in our faces.

Sometimes, frustration really is just a cry of "God, I want you!!" If frustration becomes an acknowledgment of our need and a cry for mercy that seeks contact with the God who is mercy, then fine. With patient endurance and openness to God, there's nothing to fear in frustration.

And now I suppose I'll go dig up my garden...