My Testimony of Asking in Faith for the Holy Spirit

In the summer of 1987, when I was about to enter my Junior year of college, I met two people who had a significant impact on my spiritual life. One was Mary, mother of two pre-school children, a member of my hometown Lutheran church. The other was a middle-aged man named Jim. Mary had a prayer gathering for women that met occasionally in her home; I had seen it advertised in the bulletin. Within maybe 48 hours of my first conversation with Jim, he was in a crisis state which both landed him him jail and brought about, in his words, his trying to come back to the Lord. Going from my quiet, solitary life as a fast food employee to being caught up in the whirlwind of this stranger's "reversion" shook me pretty hard, and I felt an urgent need to pray, both on my own and with other people. So I cold-called Mary, asked her about her prayer group, and she invited me over and befriended me. 

At this point in my life, I was serious about reading Scripture, serious about evangelizing, serious about writing music through which I poured out my heart to God. I had graduated from a Lutheran high school and was in a Lutheran college and considered myself a committed Christian, although I felt somewhat restless. I was very, very good at knowing the Lutheran catechism answers, and I asked adult-level questions of my church. The intellectual quest invigorated me and took the edge of not being satisfied with the answers I was given.

But then Jim started challenging me about the person of the Holy Spirit. Over the phone, he walked me through a study of the book of Acts, pointing out how things changed when the Holy Spirit showed up on the scene. 

I knew about people who believed that, and I knew that my church had an official position that actual manifestations of the Holy Spirit where "things happened" no longer happened. As a high school student at a youth rally I had even witnessed pastors telling jokes to the whole assembly that made fun of people who said they were speaking in tongues and who raised their hands in the air. 

But then one day, Mary also asked me if I believed that God still filled people with the Holy Spirit as in the book of Acts. "Maybe He does," I responded. It was actually a radical openness that flew in the face of my Lutheran identity.

I studied those passages of Scripture again and again that summer. Mary even prayed with me that I would be filled with the Holy Spirit. I didn't notice anything happen. 

By the time my fall semester started and I was back at school, I was doctrinally convinced that there was no reason to believe God didn't pour out His Holy Spirit on people today, like in the Bible. I had changed my mind.

But changing my doctrinal position did nothing for me, personally. I was like a person who got an A in her nutrition class, but was suffering from an eating disorder. This came to a head when another mutual friend of Jim's, Mary's and mine, who had also been studying about the Holy Spirit with us, actually asked the Lord to fill her with the Holy Spirit, and she experienced a transformative encounter with the love of God. She was changed.

I remember hanging up the phone on my dorm floor after hearing this news. I was depressed for two days. So, God loved her so much that something real actually happened for her. The lies that had suffocated me for my whole life blew up again. I'm not loved. I'll never be loved. God does things for other people, not for me. It's hopeless. I'm hopeless. Forget it. I'll just stay here, alone, like always.

I tried to pray, but this sadness (and all these lies) kept pulling me down. But I had this nagging thought that we always talked about "receiving" the Holy Spirit. There was something I actually had to do. I never actually had gone to God to ask or receive. Literally, I had NEVER thought to ask God for any spiritual good, believing that he would give it. I doctrinally believed God gave things to people; I just didn't at all believe He'd do it for me. 

After the two depressed days were done, I decided I was going to pursue asking God. But I couldn't just ask. I had to go buy a book, and read it first. I spent all night reviewing all the theology again. Then finally I prayed the prayer that was in the book, thanking Jesus for saving me, asking Him to be the Lord of the my life and to fill me with the Holy Spirit. 

It was like a lightning bolt struck me. I was washed over with the most profound sense of love and cleansing and acceptance. My hopelessness was replaced with ecstatic joy. The next day I went down to breakfast in my best dress, and a professor, seeing my smile, said, "My, you look.... radiant ... this morning!"

It wasn't an instant fix of everything in my life, but it was the equivalent of going from standing in line for a rollar coaster, and riding it.

And it all boiled down to asking.

Turning Hardness of Heart into Purity of Heart

Recently I was called upon to teach a formation session for my Carmelite community, a task that doesn't typically fall to me. Given the circumstances, I essentially listened to a teaching on CD by one of the Carmelite friars, digested it, followed his outline, and presented his talk myself. The subject of this talk was the sixth beatitude from St. Matthew's gospel: "Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God."

It is one thing to read a teaching, and another to hear a teaching. It is an entirely different animal to give a teaching, and to really meditate on it. It was a gift to be able to do so.

And now, several days later, something is jumping out at me from the teaching that I think has application to the current social turmoil which Christians are not immune from. 

Fr. Kevin Culligan, OCD, taught that there are two things about the heart that are involved in becoming pure of heart. First, there are the matters of impurities which arise from the heart, such as those Jesus enumerates in Matthew 15: fornication, theft, murder, adultery, avarice, malice, deceit, indecency, envy, slander, pride, folly. These things which come from the heart, and not the ritual purity and obedience, is what makes a person impure, because the "heart" in Scripture is the center of all that we are: our emotional, spiritual, moral life, our desires, passions, our thoughts, will and choices. 

So part of having a pure heart is our own choices, flowing from all this stuff going on inside us.

But the other part of having a pure heart has to do with that which Fr. Culligan states is that which Jesus laments the most: hardness of heart. If our hearts are hard, they will not be pure. Why? Because having a hard heart closes one off from the Word of God. Hardness of heart isolates you from love/Love. And how does hardness of heart develop? Through becoming overly absorbed in one's own agenda. The beatitudes, after all, are, if you will, Jesus'  plan of blessedness, of happiness, and not that of uninformed human striving to fill itself. 

Religious people know not to pursue big commandment-breaking matter. But religious people can get hot and heavy over their own agendas without necessarily realizing it.

This is why St. John of the Cross's teaching on detachment is so vital for us. He presumes that someone pursuing the Christian life will leave behind attachments involved with breaking the Ten Commandments. He teaches us, though, the dangers entailed in remaining attached to anything, even good things, even spiritual things. He is relentless.

And the point is not austerity for the sake of austerity, or detachment out of some kind of psychological aberation that leaves one wanting to grind one's own self into powder to win some divine approval. 

The point is that the beloved longs to see her lover, and God longs for us. To see Him, we must have soft hearts. We must not be overly absorbed with our own agenda, even if our own agenda is something we think is great: service to the Church, loving my family, prayer, being holy, speaking the truth. If it is mine, if I grasp it tightly, if it becomes my identity, if I've forgotten God in the midst of trying to serve Him, then we risk hardening our hearts. We risk what we perceive as our own steadfastness, our own faithfulness becoming that which actually closes us off from the Word and isolates us from Love.

But a beautiful thing happens then. God meets us then with a gift that St. John calls the Dark Night. The Dark Night of the Senses (very generally speaking) is when we are left without the external helps and supports that once held us up. The Dark Night of the Spirit is when we are left without the internal and interior helps that once held us up. This is the time when God is at work within us in a mysterious way. It hurts like the dickens. It is God's purifying action in us, which we cannot produce ourselves, and in which the only way to move forward is in faith. We don't tend to get to understand much of anything or feel like we can see where He leads. 

What might it look like practically? It might entail facing having our doctrinal or religious certainty shaken deeply. It might involve a public humiliation, or someone close to us embracing something which we deeply oppose, thereby challenging how we love them. Losing a job or having a business or a venture fail could trigger this. Facing a sudden and drastic health change... anything that throws our hearts open in a way we could not have anticipated, that leaves us thinking, "How did I get here," and where nothing we knew before quite fits. And these things might all be interior so that no one else would even know anything is going on. 

But what God does in this is call us to have faith in His goodness with us, His presence with us, and His leading, even though we may feel nothing, or animosity, or even doubt that He exists, because we thought the things we lost were where He was. It is here that God softens our hearts, takes our agendas, and gives us His.

But we can't make the Dark Nights happen. They are a gift. We can't give ourselves this kind of purification, but when we have tastes of it, we can say yes. We can ask the Lord to soften our hearts, to take away our hearts of stone and give us hearts of flesh.

When we have soft hearts, the Word of God speaks to us easily. When we have a soft heart, love flows to us and through us easily. When we see Jesus hanging on the cross (in the person of the least, here with us) we can look on with sorrow. We can empathize. We can feel His pain. Our love is not cold. We are not caught up in the thinking that standards must be met before love is given. We are also not caught up in the thinking that evil in any form can be winked at, because all that matters is that everyone feel comfortable. Primarily we experience God's love flowing to us, and then through us as He would give it, without bitterness, unforgiveness, resentment and other corrosive elements. 

Having that in which we trusted shaken is messy business, and it is painful. Broken bits fly. But we need not lose everything. We can tell the Lord, "not my self-righteousness, but Yours; not my understanding, but Yours; not my will, but Yours. And I'll leave behind all my acts of uncleanness." Our trust that He is good will be rewarded, and like the men in the fiery furnace (Daniel 3) we will lose only that which was bondage for us.

A Few Thoughts on Fear

It seems the first stage of corona virus infection is the spread of fear. If you spend any time on Facebook or other social media, or even any humans at all, you've already probably witnessed people taking up positions. I've seen people emote, learn, educate, change, grow, plan... and mostly try really hard to keep laughing.

This is new territory for us. That alone can be enough to make people afraid.

This morning as I prayed Office of Readings, I read from Exodus about Moses receiving the covenant from God on Mout Sinai. There was some fear built into this process for the People of God. The threat God told Moses to pass on to the people was that no one should approach the mountain, and if they did, they were to be stoned to death or shot with arrows. Their signal was to be the ram's horn. When they heard that ram's horn, and then only, they could approach.

Think of it: we hear that God purposefully struck fear into the hearts of his people.

St. Irenaeus explains why this was the case: "He made them afraid as they listened, to warn them not to hold their Creator in contempt."

con·tempt

/kənˈtem(p)t/

Learn to pronounce

noun

1. the feeling that a person or a thing is beneath consideration, worthless, or deserving scorn.

As Irenaeus sees it, God was training his people to give him the consideration he deserves. Why? because God is an insecure egomaniac? Of course not. We need to give God due consideration because he is our origin, our Creator. Without giving him his proper due, his proper worship, we are serious out of tune with ourselves and we fall short of that for which we were created. If we don't worship, we are dysfunctional. It's for our good.

Fear, therefore, like all things we can feel, should be our servant. In this case of the corona virus, it is not a bad thing for fear to move us to prepare, if not for ourselves, then to be able to serve the vulnerable around us who don't have means, who won't necessarily be able to care for themselves, and who will suffer. Use the precautions that scientists advise to flatten the curve. Become more aware of the needs people have, if we tend to be on the dull side of thinking about others.

Fear, however, should not be our master, nor our enemy that we desperately try to beat away from us. Allow fear to do its necessary work, then bring it to Jesus, to Perfect Love, who casts it out. Pushing down fear, refusing to feel it, will create the panic that harms. Don't refuse God's servant. Don't forget it is ONLY God's servant. God is the master. Let him be that. Trust him, and entrust all of your concerns to him.

Therefore, put on the armor of God, that you may be able to resist on the evil day and, having done everything, to stand. Ephesians 6:13

Silence

Recently I had a revelation about how much I both need and love silence.

The silence I love and need is more than the lack of sounds reverberating around me, although that is a good start. Silence, or within the silence I am drawn to and crave, there is a presence. The French OCDS talk about it a bit here. This silence is primarily a meeting place. It is a place where I meet God, or at least I am available to be met, should He desire to make his constant presence with me felt and sensible. It is me tuned in, tuned away from distraction, setting all the clatter aside.

Some people surround themselves with clatter, hug it to themselves, and panic if they are without it for a moment. This wearies me, saddens me, drains me.

But it isn't only about sounds: music, TV, radio, talking, "white noise," and so forth.

Thoughts make noise. My thoughts aren't as noisy as they used to be, and I don't find them demanding or deserving of the same attention they once did. It probably is why I don't blog as much as I used to.

But speaking of blogging, I have also known the state where I have to say something in order to enter into this silence. It's like another presence will stand in the middle of my heart and clear its throat until I pay attention to it, say or write the words to the one I need to say or write them to, thereby dismissing or rather dispatching this presence to go where it needs to go. And then I also can go where I need to go, which is into silence.

This silence is also linked to solitude. And since I am re-working this clunky English language to be able to express the state of my soul, I will also re-work the word solitude. I don't necessarily mean by solitude a state of being alone. I definitely do not mean by it a state of being lonely. I think of it more as a state of there being one present. Only one being is present. It is more of an idea of union, or communion, than of isolation. If I am in solitude with you, I am at complete peace, and your presence speaks and ministers peace to me, and I to you. In this peace, we are united, one, and more importantly it is a communion with the One who fills the silence. It is actually the most heavy, profound presence rather than some kind of lonely state. In this way, I think heaven would actually be perfect solitude (communion) and perfect silence (presence).

So I need and love heaven. Yeah, it always comes down to that, doesn't it.

But be practical. I'm on earth. I'm talking about an earthly experience. Our earthly experiences of divine communion must pale to the real thing. But you know what, I'll take pale experiences of heaven on earth any old day.

I experience this at times when I am home alone, and my heart is peacefully pouring outwards. I experience this at times in prayer at church when suddenly I am aware of God's presence, and I'm there, too. I experience this at times with another person, even without saying anything. Peace. Presence.

And the other day it struck me that this is real need of my soul. I could throw my husband's TV out the window, but that would not be the entire solution. I also need to throw out the things that make me feel rushed and therefore not peaceful -- like a disordered sense of responsibility for situations real, imagined, or unconsciously triggered.

And I suppose like the spiritual life often goes, entering into this silence is something one needs to practice, seek after, and pour energy into. It is both gift and task, as the trite, hippy-flavored saying goes.

My Beloved is the mountains,

The solitary wooded valleys,

The strange islands,

The roaring torrents,

The whisper of the amorous gales;

The tranquil night

At the approaches of the dawn,

The silent music,

The murmuring solitude,

The supper which revives, and enkindles love.