They Neither Marry Nor Are Given in Marriage; They Can No Longer Die

"The children of this age marry and remarry;

but those who are deemed worthy to attain to the coming age

and to the resurrection of the dead

neither marry nor are given in marriage.

They can no longer die..." (Lk 20:34-36)

This portion of the gospel read at today's liturgies has struck me in recent years as rarely getting the attention it deserves. Now, it is true that it doesn't quite fit in the larger theme of the other Scripture readings of the day. This is all the more reason to just give it a moment's focus.

I am reminded of the story of this town in Croatia which has become famous in the last few years. There have been no divorces in this town at all. Zero. It is attributed to the custom of putting the crucifix front and center in the wedding ceremony. 

And I believe this is what Jesus is alluding to when he talks about marriage and the resurrection. The question put to him (by people who didn't believe there was a resurrection) was, if seven brothers married one woman, whose wife would she be at the resurrection? Jesus points out that people who live "in this age" marry, but at the resurrection of the dead, people don't marry, because they can no longer die.

Ok, this translation doesn't include the word "because." To me, there is a logical connection here. Why do we marry? Is it to find happiness? To get love? According to Jesus, we marry in order to die. 

According to the Croatian marriage custom, marriage is about embracing the cross of Christ, about surrendering ourselves, about total self-gift, about love.  Marriage is about love. Love is about death. Marriage has a purpose that is only for this life, and that is the death and results in self-gift. Once we are in the beatific vision, we no longer live marriage, because we are in the state for which we have invested our life and our love during "this age."

When you love someone with all the human dynamics of passion, you will go to great lengths for that person. Christian marriage means those dynamics are oriented to self-sacrifice and self-giving for conformity to the cross of Jesus and for the highest good of the beloved, which is his/her conformity to the cross of Jesus. For the Christian, there is no other ultimate purpose for marriage.

When you choose a spouse, you choose the one best able to help you give everything. If you've ever been in any scenario where your "everything" is being called out, you realize that without a firm commitment and the foreknowledge that you are going to hate it at least a good chunk of the time, you are going to be in a mess.

Complete Joy

Without necessarily noticing how or when it happened, I realized I have felt spiritually stuck. The prayer not taking off kind of stuck. And I noticed this in the retrospect of getting unstuck.

What has unstuck me is literally being surprised by joy, to steal a C. S. Lewis phrase. This theme of joy has been standing out to me in Scripture, but it has been that sort of moment where you read a passage of Scripture you have read for 40 years, but suddenly it opens up for you in a completely unheard of way.

That's how joy has struck me.

I'm not sure I have ever previously meditated on what joy is. I have tended to passively regard it as either something I experience, or I don't. Or, actively I have regarded it as a choice: I will choose to rejoice and be glad. Gritting my teeth, telling God I'm glad for xyz. I've probably gotten that mixed in with "In everything give thanks, for this is the will of God for you in Christ Jesus." Or as they say in Fiddler on the Roof: God would like us to be joyful/ even when our hearts lie panting on the floor/How much more can we be joyful/ when there's really something to be joyful for?

What is this joy thing?

What is striking me right now is that joy comes from the union of my will with God's will. God's will for me is extreme love and goodness, overflowing and filling me. But this is not prosperity gospel nonsense, because God's will is also that I be conformed to Jesus, and Jesus suffered and died and redeemed the world. God's love overflowing through me occasionally results in my sorrow. That famous one-liner from my late spiritual director: Jesus gave Mary pain. Love is powerful redemptive stuff, and it is possible to love until it hurts. Think of the stories of the martyrs like Perpetua and Felicity and their companions. They were literally so full of joy that they did not immediately feel the wild animals ripping their flesh in the coliseum.

Joy is an ecstatic experience: it takes us out of ourselves. The union of my will with God's takes me out of myself and unites me to God. It fills me with the power, the ability to do things, and the fuel is love, ecstatic love.

In order to experience joy, I need to have my will both strengthened and purified. I need to have a strong faith to believe in God's goodness and in His love for me. I need to be purified and humbled through the experience of receiving his love. I need to have all the passageways of my soul opened up and flowing. I need detachment. I need submission and obedience. I need good reason. I need to examine my life, know what my duty is, and give my full yes.

And then ask, ask, ask for his joy to fill me.

I read John 15 about the vine and the branches this morning as if I'd never seen it before. It struck me, when Jesus says: "I am the vine, and my father is the vine dresser. He takes away every branch in me that does not bear fruit, and every one that does, he prunes so that it bears more fruit," that he is telling us something about his interior life. It also struck me that he is telling us something about our interior lives as well. We are branches in him, but our lives also have branches from us, and, just like I wrote above, all the passageways of our souls need to stay opened up and flowing. There will be nothing to flow if we do not stay connected to Jesus, and through Him to the Father. We do not have life in ourselves apart from his life in us.

He tells us all of this and then says (v. 11) "I have told you all this so that my joy may be in you and your joy may be complete." He doesn't say I'm telling you this so you can feel really happy, and then embroider this on a throw pillow. He is talking about union with God, remaining in Him, living His life, bearing His fruit, being of one mind and one will with God. Complete joy. He says all this immediately before his passion and crucifixion. "For the joy set before him, he endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God" (Heb. 12:2).

So joy is not something I try to feel, or feel by choosing, or just sit around and pine after like an impossible dream. It is a reality I step into, acknowledge, welcome, live in. "Lord, when your glory appears, my joy will be full." So says the psalm antiphon I have sung over and over again. The glory of God is man fully alive. Union of God is the ultimate aim of human life on earth. It is the what opens out into the beatific vision. It is joy. Pain, suffering, and human life are in no way incompatible with joy, but life without joy grinds down to fleshly willpower or tired indifference. To be vigilant for the presence of joy is also to be vigilant after union with the Beloved.

Trying Again

Obviously I didn't move very far in getting back to writing, as I said I intended to back in June. But I do occasionally get around to reading. Lots of things I wrote in past years stick vividly in my mind (as do the experiences that occasioned them). It is a concrete reminder of what has happened, interiorly. More often than not I am stunned as I go back in my emotional and spiritual memory to recognize and really face how much I have changed in the last few years. 

But for some reason, writing is off-putting to me now. It isn't only that I made myself so rawly vulnerable in the past that I basically had to heal from it. I may have a teensy weensy bit of PTSD when it comes to writing. 

It also seems to me that if I cannot write, or do not write, there is some fear at work, some hiding at work, and I don't think that's so good. 

Life is at a different speed, that's for sure. Not only am I constantly busy, but I am finding myself staying busy as a shield. One difference in my life is I have a lot more people who are asking for my attention, for my service, for my help, for my input, for my time, for my energy. To be honest, I used to feed myself on those kinds of requests. I took this kind of busy-ness for being loved and valued. Well, that's a good way to just get used, because I was always ready to say yes and give more, because once you start to try to fill the need for love in your heart with activity, you can never stop. But these days, it isn't like that. I am surrounded by people with need of one kind or another, and I'm the go-to person to help, to do. There are times when all these different people in my life -- who don't know about each other -- are all coming at me at the same time wanting me to do something for them, needing my help. I don't get warm fuzzies from helping. Sometimes I want to spend the entire day quiet and alone -- and goodness knows when the last time was that I did that. But I recognize that the needs are real and I'm available. I recognize the call to serve, to give, to care, to love -- but it is by no means an emotional warm fuzzy thing. Most of the time it is very not that.

And here's the thing. So, I have a new spiritual director these days. I had another for a few months and, well, we won't even get into that. But this new director has an approach focused on plopping me into Scripture and dealing with what happens there. And guess what I end up facing again. I have to go back to what God has given me, in all those years of transformation when I wrote a lot. I have to, with this kind of seasoned approach, go back, look at it all, own it, re-own it, bask in it, with the consciousness that is more mature than the WOW of the first experience. To fully acknowledge what God has given. And to drink from THAT well. Go straight to Him and drink there, from the anamnesis, so to speak. 

So I groan a bit. Anamnesis is the memorial offering, the thanksgiving offering, but it is also the reminiscence. The true thing is, when I think back on the beauty of what God has done, I cry, and I'm stirred. But it is also a battle, frankly. The part I see right now is that it is a battle because I am faced with more choices. I'm faced with rejecting the Pharisiacal heart that holds my own standards up as That Which Must Be Met. Do I want to feel good about myself, or do I want to be whole and holy. That's what it boils down to, sometimes. 

I think of St. Teresa whose feast it is today. She wrote a commentary on the Song of Songs when it was considered a tad scandalous for a woman to do that. But I guess she felt the Spirit of God tell her to write. And now she's a Doctor of the Church. I also thing of St. Catherine of Siena, trotting off to advise the Pope. I'm sure there was someone who told her (if not her own interior voice, at times) that this was not the place of a Dominican teriary, and a woman at that. But how does being whom God created us to be set the world on fire if there is no death to self in the process? Sometimes the hardest way to die to self is to feel unrighteous in what God calls us to do. Been at this location, performed that task. Back here again.

There are other reasons I groan. I kinda know some of them. Physically I've been exercising a losing weight and restarting my metabolism, which is like my body getting younger by a few years, which is all great, but it also sets me back into some anxiety issues I had those few years ago. Working with that. I'm feeling pretty powerless in several relationships these days. I guess I'm not working with that because frankly I don't know how. So I give them every day to Jesus, which is more than I can say I've done in years past. And there's a layer I'm not sure of. I've always thought I was sure of everything, especially about the inside of me. I hope its progress that mostly I feel like a shoulder shrug. Meanwhile, I keep answering the immediate requests of people for my energy. 

I guess I groan because I feel a shift on the horizon. That's nebulous. Maybe it is wishful thinking. Probably not, because there is always a shift on the horizon; my life is constantly changing. I'm learning to partner with the Lord. 

Pray for me, neh?

Singing, Vulnerability, and Conversion

So, I mentioned in my catch-up post that I'm involved in ChristLife. I've been in several different roles, including administration, music ministry, and prayer teams, and I've also visited a few different parishes that have been running the program. I always have my antennae up and I'm running a future-looking analysis app in the background of all of these experiences.

Music is a hot topic in post-course evaluation discussions. And as a music minister my antennae twitch vibrantly when the topic comes up anywhere. At least in my community, nothing sparks intensity of opinion quite like the type of music used to lead people in worship and the way in which that music is executed.

But the ping pong match of "freedom in the Spirit" vs "comfort of tradition" and all the ways in which one can imperceptibly move into the other is predictable and boring after hearing out the personal views of particular individuals. A more fundamental question emerges from the strongly held stances.

Why do Christians sing? What does it have to do with being human? What does it have to do with prayer, and does anything about it lend itself to the life of conversion? And specifically how can singing together help propel our parish's ChristLife to its intended goal?

Why do Christians sing?

Ok, Scripture. Just in the book of Psalms we are enjoined to sing to God a bazillion times. We've been doing it forever, and our Jewish forefathers in faith have been doing it forever. So it isn't something that those who are raised in the church even think about, because it is so much a part of us. When I lived in Japan, though, it was pointed out to me, "Christianity is the religion where people sing together." Of all of the things that characterize religions, it never dawned on me that this would be striking for someone to whom Christianity was completely foreign. "They sing together." Japanese people sing together. We even use a Japanese word for one way to do that: karaoke. They have corporate songs and school songs, but not really any religious songs.

Being corporate

And Japanese singing tells us something about how music functions for human beings. Singing together requires an experience of corporateness. Many parts make up one body, one song-singing mass. We think or read the same words, the same timing, the same feeling, and we express these together. We speak one thing as one group.

Bump that up to the liturgical responses of Mass, or a Scriptural song where we are acclaiming God's word back to Him. Here, we are focus our words, our minds, our voices on the action of God or on the thoughts of God, and together with Him, we sing the words. We are corporate, with God. Singing, in this way, is one of the clearest human manifestations of being Church.

But at what cost?

There is something very vulnerable about being Church like this. This is not an accident. In order to actually sing, you have to let your voice be heard. But it's not your normal, daily voice. It's not your business voice. It's not your negotiating voice. For most of us, it isn't our most trained voice, the one we feel in control of. Singing denotes a revealing of a secret voice, one for sacred or intimate use. Scientists tell us that singing releases endorphins and bonds us to those we sing with. Human beings are designed to grow and thrive through this experience of giving into the vulnerability of singing together.

It sounds beautiful and poetic, and those of us who love music can be cheerleaders for this point. But those who have any experience of performing music for others will tell you there is a side to this beautiful and poetic experience that is terrifying. If you are performing a new piece or in a new context or it is especially important to you for whatever reason to do a certain thing very well, the adrenaline flows. You get nervous. Fight or flight instincts activate. Alertness levels peak. Doing this in community is actually part of what bonds people as they sing or perform.

So what about prayer?

Not everyone loves to sing. Singing in any context, let alone public performance, can evoke anxiety for some people, and therefore some simply don't sing, perhaps claiming that they actually cannot. I wonder how many of these would also feel they cannot pray. That they do not know how to make their voice or their heart heard to God. The hint I'd like to give them is that singing, in one way of understanding it, is unavoidably essential to prayer.

Oh, you can say prayers, recite them. You can pray silently. I do both of these every day. But in reality if the heart does not sing, the prayer does not rise.

And specifically, ChristLife

Let's look at a specific ChristLife context now. The fourth talk in Following Christ is all about forgiving those who have wronged us. The concept of forgiving someone is beautiful and poetic. Right? We are inspired by stories of people who do it. But the act of forgiving can be terrifying. It requires our energy, our focus. The experience is likely to dredge up what happened and lots of feelings. It takes courage to forgive.

And as we venture out into this fray of Following Christ session four, we sing a few songs. Why? Why throw songs in here, or in any Mass or any Christian context? It is not filler, it is not entertainment, it is not custom, it is no mere artistic segue. We sing to acknowledge our vulnerability before the God who made us, but loves us. We acknowledge that as God, he has every right to direct our lives. We acknowledge that we need and desire His grace. 

So what is this worship music for?

We sing to open our hearts, to be real, to assent to our vulnerability, and to declare truth.  I do not sing just for myself, but in singing for myself I am simultaneously singing to support the one next to me with the same truth. We sing to belong to each other.

To worship God is to lay our lives and hearts bare before the Lord, to allow His loving gaze to fall upon us, and to respond to His creative gaze with the love His Holy Spirit births into our hearts as we are there. And that's true whether we are singing, speaking, silent, acting, or crying: it is all a song. To worship God is an experience of emotion, but not only emotion. It is an experience of will, but not only will. It is a personal and private experience, and yet it is not only personal and private. Worship is to be the place of corporate authenticity of our deepest hearts, before God. Worship, expressed in song, is a place of faith and vulnerability. I believe this is the essense of the "new territory" that my community is learning to experience through ChristLife. And to navigate it well, it helps to state it explicitly.

Checking in

No, I haven't forgotten I have a blog. Let's just say I've been in a long marinating process!

My life has taken on so many new facets since I was last writing regularly.

For example, there's ChristLife. I have been on my parish's ChristLife team for two years; we just completed our second full round of the three modules: Discovering Christ, Following Christ, and Sharing Christ, which are designed to take a curious person through steps of hearing the gospel of Jesus Christ as a personal summons to a new life, to make a decision of faith, to grow in discipleship practices, and to learn how to tell someone else what the gospel proposition is.

I have also taken on the presidency of my Secular Carmelite community, taking over mid-term because of health challenges of the previous president. And that I was able to do (legally) because of making my Definitive Profession last October.

My mother passed away at the beginning of February. Her health took a serious downward turn just a few days before Christmas, and January was spent with my siblings and I -- mostly my brother and sister-in-law -- on near constant vigil with her. We didn't have her memorial service until March, which felt abnormal to me. So that piece of the year had that music playing in the background. I still have boxes of her personal belongings plopped in the dining room and living room, where I put them upon bringing them home.

In the last two years I have been thrust into the forefront of trying to keep a refugee family in Nigeria cared for. It's strange how it happened, and it's not that I do so much financially, but I have learned to beg in good mendicant fashion. I also realize I have a front row seat to see two incredible women of faith -- the refugee woman and her sister who lives locally -- pray literally for their every need, and to see God provide it, though not without significant stresses along the way.

I have two teenagers now: one just finishing and one just starting high school. Our family plods along with its own unique joys and dysfunctions.

I have somehow become a leader in all arenas of my life. To be honest, I hardly recognize my present self and my 10- 15- or 20-year-ago self. Sometimes, even my 3-year-ago self. This is a work of grace, and like all works of grace it is good but mysterious and just a tad strange.

And there's music, choirs, and public liturgy of the hours; there's Rosary Congresses and Sonshine Bible Club, and all the people in my life, suddenly, everywhere, where'd they come from, and the revitalization of Steubenville, there's the stress of the Catholic hierarchy debacle, there's the joy of genealogy, the need to exercize, the reality of aging and the need to balance all things with good humor.

So, yeah. I doubt I have any regular readers anymore, but if you are one of those who wondered if this blog was defunct, I have planned dozens of posts in my passing thoughts but, alas, have not been taking the time to write.

But writing has always helped, and so I will attempt to once again take up the discipline.