But Wait... There's More

When I was 14 I hit my first spiritual crisis. I had been confirmed the year in my Lutheran church and had started high school, my first exposure to a Lutheran school. My confirmation prep had been two years of catechism classes, in which we memorized (again) all the parts of the catechism (this had been a facet of Sunday School as well) and hundreds of Bible verses. By any standards I have witnessed since then, it was a rigorous intellectual preparation. We had Examination Sunday where, in place of a sermon, we were asked questions off of a list of at least a hundred which we were expected to either memorize or be able to articulate thoroughly -- or face the embarassment of standing mute in front of the whole congregation. That was a practice from earlier decades that our new pastor revived in my second year. One of the more dreaded questions was to recite all the books of the Old Testament. I rose to the challenge and knew my stuff.

So when I got to high school and found my Freshman Old Testament class not very much of a challenge, the crisis hit. Here I was, 14 years old, and I knew everything there was to know about God. I had conquered Luther's Small Catechism, and it seemed there was nothing else out there to challenge me. Now, basically, I had to hold on to this knowledge until I died. 

I trust you can hear how laughable this is, but I felt it keenly and it made me depressed. I tried reading Luther's other works, and started to get frustrated that even though these were supposed to me authoritative documents for doctrine, no one was teaching them or studying them or encouraging that.  I found in subsequent years, including college, that commentaries or Bible studies never really expected any intellectual advance beyond the point we attained in confirmation prep. And I realized I hungered for something beyond sheer memorization of the Ten Commandments, Apostles Creed, and catechesis on the sacraments. I really hungered for someone to show me how to live this out. These days I would call it discipleship. I wanted to share life with people who wanted God to lead them through life together.

I had no one, literally. I started listening to Christian radio every day, and became a devotee to a lot of the Bible teachers there, even though much of their doctrine turned me off and some of their voices grated on me. The music was very Lawrence Welk-ish, with a touch or two of very mild pop, so it really didn't appeal to me. Yet I listened because I was starving for connection, for fellowship, for answers, for direction, for peace. During the summer when I was 15, too young to work and home alone most of the time, I played solitare at the kitchen table and listened to Christian radio all day long, almost every day. I wrote letters to almost every ministry that gave their address and asked them to pray for me. It was actually a really depressing stretch as I think of it, but I believe that at least some prayers were offered for me, because my life did start onto a new trajectory about a year later.

My point in getting in touch with these memories is to share what is now one of the most precious truths to me about Christian life: There is always somewhere to go.

Years later I became familiar with St. Teresa of Avila's teaching on the mansions, or interior castles as she puts it, or the four waters -- all these ways she breaks down what God taught her about stages of spiritual growth. You know, I remember clearly the first time I read about this, including her seventh (and final) mansion, which she calls Spiritual Marriage. I think it was an entry in the Catholic Encyclopedia I read while researching for a paper. I was, at the time, also depressed that no Prince Charming had appeared and I was desperately afraid one never would. When I read that Teresa taught that few people reach Spiritual Marriage, I groaned inwardly: Great. Yet another joy I'll never have. 

And here I am, about 34 years later, a fully professed Secular Carmelite. Now I have read and studied Teresa a bit, and I tell new aspirants, with great confidence, that there is always more. God always has some place for us to go. Our life of prayer is a life of seeking and being open, and God always will be leading us on and bringing us somewhere.

This morning I have to check in with myself and ask if I am feeling that. Am I believing that? I can't say that I am conscious of a burning desire to move forward. 

I've been writing about overwork and being busy and clogged and tired and stiff, and I realize this might be a spiritual reflection. I mean, like a mirror to my interior. I'm pretty comfortable in life. I'm fairly connected with people. I have service and work that I love to do. I'm not bored. I'm learning. I either have a lot of things that make me comfortable, or I've figured out how to be comfortable enough without them. I manage to turn over to the Lord the stresses and distresses that come my way. 

So, I don't have a lot poking me in the side, motivating me to want more. 

I wonder though... Maybe I do, but I'm not feeling it. Maybe I don't really want to feel it. There's nothing wrong with not desiring turmoil. But if I apply my mind to this, and leave my feelings to one side for a bit, I know that God's adventures always leave me with an increase of peace, even if they come by way of increased tension for a time. I do, objectively, choose openness to God. I know my daughter is going to be an adult in basically one short year, and her growing independence will take her away from me. So I'm due for some changes soon. 

This is probably going to be one of those blogposts I look back on and say, see, God was prepping me. I'm totally at peace with that, and really I don't want to get so caught up in finding everything all nicely settled that I miss it. I know with certainty that God has always been patient with me. 

So, today I purpose to say, yes Lord. I open my heart to whatever More you desire for me, because I want to be able to offer you a wider heart through which you can give life through me.

Birthing Grace

I had frankly forgotten how well writing serves me. Life has seasons, and like anything organically growing, seasons change and all that. But this Lent I realize that writing helps me take seriously the path of discovery to hear the voice of the Holy Spirit, and to not forget significant moments. It isn't so much about memory, actually, as it is about faith. "Remembering" isn't "not forgetting" as much as it is believing that God loves me, is with me, that I hear His voice, and therefore can follow with confidence.

What I'm seeing taking shape on the horizon is the absolutely incredible reality of the incarnation of the Son of God, and how that changes everything. And how full of folly it is to act like God becoming man, coming to earth, dying for us to remove every blockage we have to the divine, and then sending His divine power to reside within our persons, by which miracles of transforming grace happen --- is all a normal, run of the mill, human religious idea. The thing that throws it all off is transforming grace. Miraculous power. 

My Psychology prof in college stood there one day explaining how, once someone has a dysfunction, a problem, whatever, it never really goes away. There is no healing, essentially, he said. Now, I'm not sure what he meant to say, because he was a Christian man in a Lutheran school. But I know what I heard. And I sat there with a hot, defiant tear going down my cheek. If God has no ability to heal, then I don't want anything to do with him was what I raged, interiorly. Hope and despair were wrestling hard.

My Catholic theology prof stood there one day about ten years later explaining how grace does not destroy nature but elevates and perfects it, and I knew I was hearing THE truth whose lack I felt so keenly in Protestantism. Grace is power. It is real. God does things in us, with our yes, that we are not able to produce within ourselves. He doesn't invade and sort of abuse our freedom to give us life, like a woman being drugged and date raped, and thereby impregnated -- which we are supposed to somehow be grateful for later because the gift of life is so great.  Grace builds us as a people. We are made for community, and when parents bring their children to receive sacraments, they are doing what they can to avail them to all the aspects of life, not only the natural life they have co-created, but the supernatural life in which they also partake. But to live as the community of grace, that child must activate the gifts received. This is both so necessary and so often reduced to a meaningless formula. In fact it is right here at this point that my heart groans like a woman in labor. Sometimes I just want to, I dunno, sit on people and groan until they open their hearts to the Lord, and say "Yes! Yes, to what you want, Lord. Yes to all of it. I will live my life in the fellowship of believers seeking your grace and moving with every word you speak!"

The sense that I get is that this groaning, this kind of spiritual/physical/emotional frustrated yearning, is actually a gift of grace, too. When Elijah prayed for rain in 1 Kings 18 it says this: "Elijah went up to the top of Carmel, crouched down to the earth, and put his head between his knees." Seven times he had his servant to look for rain, and only on the seventh was there a small cloud. He was in the position of birthing. As mothers and prophets know, birthing is a work of grace. No one conceives a child all by herself; she must receive and co-create. And once the process in begun, there is a dynamism there which will call forth all the mother's energy, and yet is not controlled by her. Her reactions can stall it, but her cooperation in availability will see that child born. And yet who that child is that is driving the dynamism is a complete mystery unto him or herself, also a gift of the Creator. 

So there's something like this going on in me. For years and years I have had this call to pray for conversion of souls, and the awareness that so many people need to know how to ratify their baptism. Not just a sinner's prayer, leaving one anxious if one "really meant it" this time, so that it really took, or leaving one feeling absolved from actually doing anything Jesus commanded. Not just a perfunctory mumbling of the renewal of baptismal promises during the Easter season and a vague sense of relief that I can pretty much do whatever, because I can always go say it in the confessional. Not just the assurance that I'm basically a decent person, like many other secular folks, and frankly better than those five religious people I knew. 

Rather, the experience of God. God who is present, the outpouring God. The God who acts. The God who hears. The God who responds. Who "is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness."

Carmelites are called to be witnesses to the experience of God, as Elijah was. If I weren't one already, I know I would need to become one.

* TIL: as I searched for an image of Elijah crouching on the ground with his head between his knees, I first observed that I can't find any depictions that are completely faithful to this description, and I second observed that there is a name for this postion in Sanskrit, which translates to: garland, necklace, or..... rosary..... position. You just can't make this stuff up.

Unless you Forgive

I gently employed the same prayer approach today at Mass as Sunday, looking for the Lord's gaze at me through the Scriptures. It was then that I recognized a little whisper I had heard a few days before regarding my need to forgive a certain person. Today's gospel reading, and the homily that I heard that unpacked it, were of the walloping sort. Forgive or go to hell. Not exactly an episode of Gentle Jesus, Meek and Mild. But I heard something else in this, other than what can feel like a frightening threat.

Here's the gospel (Mt. 18:21-35):

Peter approached Jesus and asked him,
“Lord, if my brother sins against me,
how often must I forgive him?
As many as seven times?”
Jesus answered, “I say to you, not seven times but seventy-seven times.
That is why the Kingdom of heaven may be likened to a king
who decided to settle accounts with his servants.
When he began the accounting,
a debtor was brought before him who owed him a huge amount.
Since he had no way of paying it back,
his master ordered him to be sold,
along with his wife, his children, and all his property,
in payment of the debt.
At that, the servant fell down, did him homage, and said,
‘Be patient with me, and I will pay you back in full.’
Moved with compassion the master of that servant
let him go and forgave him the loan.
When that servant had left, he found one of his fellow servants
who owed him a much smaller amount.
He seized him and started to choke him, demanding,
‘Pay back what you owe.’
Falling to his knees, his fellow servant begged him,
‘Be patient with me, and I will pay you back.’
But he refused.
Instead, he had him put in prison
until he paid back the debt.
Now when his fellow servants saw what had happened,
they were deeply disturbed, and went to their master
and reported the whole affair.
His master summoned him and said to him, ‘You wicked servant!
I forgave you your entire debt because you begged me to.
Should you not have had pity on your fellow servant,
as I had pity on you?’
Then in anger his master handed him over to the torturers
until he should pay back the whole debt.
So will my heavenly Father do to you,
unless each of you forgives your brother from your heart.”

So, what happens with this being commanded to forgive? When I went back to read the Scripture again after Mass, what I noticed was Jesus says there's a king, who is settling accounts, a debtor, and the debtor's master. It isn't entirely clear to me anymore that the king is the debtor's direct master. Rather, it seems like the king is the one who is now hearing about the conduct of the debtor, the master, and the debtor's fellow servants who complained about the injustice they witnessed. I'm not sure this matters, other than the fact that it would make much more clear that the judgment that God extends is directly about humans interactions with each other, rather than with some abstract moral code that is represented by the king. It would sound like the king is hearing the case pleaded by the master about the debtor's injustice. I'll leave the biblical exegetes to deal with that.

Another question: what is forgiveness, anyway? What is being commanded here? Fr. Drake mentioned in his homily that the Greek text makes it clear that the amount of money owned by the debtor would have taken multiple lifetimes of daily wages to pay off. In other words, it was an impossible, unpayable debt. This clearly represents the human standing before God. We are broken, we fall so far short of divine standing, and we start life out this way. Through the mystery of sin, we simply are not fit by nature for relationship with God, and nothing we can do can get us there. Nada. 

So the first movement we see in this story is that the debtor is forgiven his debt. The master of the debtor takes this debt into himself, and takes it away, freeing the debtor and his family from being sold into slavery. In the Old Testament, too, God had a system for forgiving sins. He had prescriptions for offerings, symbolic deaths, symbolic gifts, brought to a symbolic place with symbolic people who offered prayers to wipe out offences. All of this was to point to the one who was to come, was to point to some amazing promise of fulfillment that God would one day send to His faithful people. Israel had a very mixed-bag track record of staying faithful to this type of worship, of all the laws that were to prevent the sins in the first place, and the hope that was to sustain them that God would come as their redeemer. 

But Jesus takes it one step further in the story. The forgiven debtor was supposed to, now, have within him the same nature, the same lifeforce that allowed for the unforgiveable debt to be forgiven him. He was to operate with other people the way that God forgave through sacrifice. Yikes! Something stronger than the Old Covenant had to come into play here. Jesus is here expecting that the debtor act like God, not live out of brokenness but live with the divine nature actually present within, to act like God! Wow, Jesus, that's impossible, isn't it? 

The heart of the gospel isn't only that God has forgiven us and so we are off the hook and our sins don't matter anymore. The heart of the gospel is that God's divine nature comes to take up residence in us, transforming us, and causing his own life to be active in us and through us. We are made sons in the Son. We are called to live in union with God, like the flame totally consumes the wood.

If that is the Christian call, what does this gospel say about forgiveness? That priest who just was convicted of grossly abusing a vulnerable woman for years with basically spiritual torture -- is she, are we all, just supposed to say "you are forgiven, it's erased, done; you are free"? I actually had a man in my life at one point whose only exposure to Christianity was listening to a few sermons on the radio. He actually suggested to me that I should allow him to sexually violate me, because I was a Christian, and Christians are supposed to forgive everything. Is that what this is?

No, thank the Lord, the command to Christians to forgive is not the command that we provide a pass for violation to romp unchecked. Quite the opposite. We need to know righteous from unrighteous as God knows it.

Note the pattern in the latter portion of the gospel: The forgiven debtor perpetrates violence against one of his equals, overpowers him, and takes up an arrogant position against him, putting him in debtor's prison. The fellow servants are deeply disturbed and report it. The master responds to the deeply distubed report. He declares the wickedness of the arrogant one and declares pity for the fellow servant. 

The master has ears for the one who has been sinned against. The master takes it in hand.

I see two things here. First: from experience I know that sometimes it is difficult for a person who has been violated to say, That was wrong for you to do to me. An injustice was done to me. Righteousness would have looked different, this was not it. 

I wish parsing righteousness from unrighteousness were never difficult, but at times it is. Consider, for example, a person placed for adoption as a baby. She may have loved her adoptive parents so dearly and exercised so much gratitude for the fact that she was born and cared for, that she may feel grossly disloyal and guilty for acknowledging the feelings surrounding "I had the right to be raised by the mother and father who created me." Consider someone who, at the cost of losing the only scraps of feeling loved they know, cannot admit that the relationship partner has wronged them, or is continually doing so.

Second: when the deeply disturbed report reaches the master's ears, not only forgiveness, but healing is unleashed. We don't hear that debtor #2 was released from prison, but we hear that debtor #1 owed him pity. 

Jesus's punchline is that each of us needs to forgive his brother from his heart. How I hear it is not that we say, "that thing you did doesn't matter." It is that we admit, "that thing that you did violated me. I'm punched in the gut." First, our thinking gets corrected about the nature of what happened (righteousness vs unrighteousness). Then, because we are in a community of equals, those around us see, and are deeply disturbed. We experience the healing love and intercession of those to whom we reveal this brokenness. We experience intercession: someone takes my hot mess before God, who responds. Healing pours out. 

Because we are all equals, and because each of us needs to be in this process, we are formed as a people who, because we have the very nature of God poured into us in baptism, are constantly being built up in the grace of the Holy Spirit. We are all in varying stages and places of hurting, forgiving, repenting, being forgiven, receiving healing, calling out injustice, interceding. But the one who tramples another faces the king's judgment.

This is Jesus telling us how the new covenant people of God will act.

I'm reminded of John's reminder of sins you pray about so that the other will be forgiven, and sins that lead to death, that you don't just pray about (1 Jn. 5:16-17). 

It takes tremendous courage to open up our brokenness, especially those things that happened to us as children or in a particularly vulnerable time. It takes the courage of knowing and trusting that we are loved, by God and by people. These things are not healed immediately, but the power of God absolutely does heal them. The new covenant people of God, the Church, is to be this place where God's healing is unleashed through us, to the world. That is why Jesus begins with "the kingdom of heaven may be likened to..."

The Gospel Has Eyes

Today is Sunday. I went to Mass this morning with this prayer: to find God's gaze on me in His Word. 

This book that I love so much, The Impact of God: Soundings from St. John of the Cross by Fr. Iain Matthew, OCD, has as the title of chapter of chapter five "The Gospel Has Eyes." This expression has helped my heart so frequently. As I have noted elsewhere, I could quote huge chunks of this book, but here is the heart of the topic:

The gospel has eyes -- 'the eyes I long for so', John calls them -- and the point comes on the journey where the bride meets those eyes which had long been looking on: 'It seems to her that he is now always gazing upon her.' It is a moment of exposure, as she finds herself a factor in another's life and heart... It has been said that 'a person is enlightened', not 'when they get an idea', but 'when someone looks at them'. A person is enlightened when another loves them. The eyes are windows on to the heart; they search the person out and have power to elicit life... Christianity is an effect, the effect of a God who is constantly gazing at us, whose eyes anticipate, radiate, penetrate and elicit beauty. (p. 28)

"Christianity is an effect, the effect of a God who is constantly gazing at us." Yes, that's what my heart was calling out from this morning. Lord, you are gazing at me. I need to catch your gaze. My heart, my whole being, needs the life-giving joy of catching your gaze on me. 

I pre-read the Scripture readings and listened attentively and was reminded how one listens actively, hungrily, like when I'm with someone and I want them to hear some truth coming from someone else and I'm eager for every word that comes out, in hopes that it is going to make a great penetration...

But as it often happens, it wasn't the Scripture reading where I caught the gaze. It was a hymn we sang based on Psalm 139. It was in fact the same psalm, the same song, played and sung by the same musician who played for my son's baptism almost twenty years ago. I've been thinking about my son's baptism a lot lately, perhaps about all of our baptisms. How we are given so much. How we need to learn to receive. How so much gets in the way. When I was my son's age, I had actually repudiated my baptism. I was theologically confused, had joined a church my aunt thought was some kind of cult, and was mixed up frankly with an addicted con man who was more than twice my age as his side-chick. It's funny how my life has only looked (to me) like a total diarrhea-production in hindsight. 

When I walk or lie down, you are before me

with love everlasting, you besiege me

You are with me beyond my understanding
God of my present, my past and future, too

Although your Spirit is upon me
Still I search for shelter from your light
There is nowhere on Earth I can escape you
Even the darkness is radiant in your sight

Safe in your hands, all creation is made new

God is the one. He alone has been my Savior, He alone has kept me safe, despite my numerous very foolish steps. And this promise is for me, and for my children, and for those who are far off. 

And Christianity is an effect, the effect of God who is constantly gazing at us. As Psalm 33 says, from his dwelling place, God gazes on all the dwellers on the earth. For all of us who are baptized, his dwelling place is within us. 

Let us hear this call to enter the castle, the mansion, the dwelling of God. Meet his gaze, and enter into his rest.

 

Enter into God's Rest

 "Let us listen to the voice of God; let us enter into His rest."

This is the way we begin the invitatory psalm on Saturday of weeks two and four of the Liturgy of the Hours. It evokes Psalm 95 (which typically is the psalm prayed at this point), where we exhort each other to "listen to the voice of the Lord, do not grow stubborn" [and not end up like the people to whom God said] "They shall not enter into my rest." Who were they? People whose hearts went astray, who challenged God and provoked God, regardless of seeing him in action, people who did not know his ways.

It also evokes Hebrews chapter 4 where we read that there remains a Sabbath rest for the people of God. Our Sabbath rest is our union with the Blessed Trinity, opened to us by Jesus and modeled for us by Jesus, to which we are drawn by the Holy Spirit to our identity as sons and daughters of the Father. 

I woke unusually early this morning and listened to a 50 minute teaching on YouTube which a Facebook friend of mine happend to post. What drew me was the title: Becoming a Non-Anxious Presence. The title comes from the work of an Internal Family Systems psychologist (something else I've been learning about within the last year), and in my mind it struck me as equivalent to someone who embodies hope. That's language that makes my spiritual antennae perk up. And while I've pulled a minor imitation of mi Madre Teresa of Avila in not going back to re-read my recent posts, I feel like I have been developing a life theme right now of letting go of anxiety in its various manifestations. 

So, yeah. This Vineyard minister, apparently right before shut downs affected public gatherings in the UK in 2020, is teaching here on the need for contemplative silence and prayer in leadership and life, to operate from a place of listening to the voice of God, not with a goal of fixing problems. 

Consider the witness of martyrs, like Ss. Perpetua and Felicity. The account of their martyrdom shows them basically in a state of ecstacy so profound that they do not feel physical pain. Now, I do not take that as a guarantee that martyrs do not feel fear or pain (the Carmelite martyrs of Compiègne certainly had to steel themselves to approach their deaths). But there is also the Scriptural account of Stephen, the first martyr, who saw heaven opened and Jesus standing there. This is an extreme example of entering God's rest in the midst of turmoil, and I believe it is an example left to us by God on purpose. It doesn't glorify death; it reminds us that we have nothing to fear. If death and hell have lost their sting, then there is nothing before which we ultimately must cower. 

What we must journey through is purification of our attachments, or as Comer puts it (referencing St. Ignatius Loyola), our journey to freedom. Purification frees us for union with God; purification frees us for service, for ministry, for life to flow through us. We cease being reactive, of being determined by problems, by fears, by other people's issues, by the rage machine. 

It was a good talk. Where does it leave me?

Human formation is really important. If we think that all we need is correct doctrine or right worship or receiving sacraments, or any of these other things that are all objective, we don't get the whole picture. For good life, we need good human formation, good ground in which the seed of truth is sown, grows, and bears fruit. 

I personally need to examine my drive to produce. I've been on overdrive. God is calling me to slow down and rest in Him. And to not make prayer "more work to do." I think there's a danger for Carmelites and for intercessors to make prayer always about "work." 

Fasting is, in part, about letting go and letting God. "Letting God" is such an ironic expression. But to take God seriously at the level of relationship, every day I need to realize, to touch, the reality of his presence with me, and to once again acknowledge that I am partnered to him, apprenticed to him, and that once I catch his eye on me (the gospel has eyes, as St. John of the Cross says) I am drawn once again into the drama that is my unfolding life in him. And sometimes I'm just tired and can't even focus my eyes. And still he is with me. 

I have also been reminded how anxious my thinking can be. I remember back in the 90s I tended to specialize, at work, in trying to mentally solve problems in other departments that weren't even my responsibility. Seeing big problems just laying out there, apparently unattended, is a huge anxiety trigger for me. It is part of how I try to calm myself through overwork. Insert rueful laugh. I am drawn back to the realization that I am not the Savior of the universe, I just belong to Him. He is the master orchestrator, and I am available to Him in whatever way our partnership asks of me. 

Lent isn't over; it's barely under way. So for now I guess this is enough...

Called On

There is a big danger in being a highly religious person. I mean, there's a big danger in being a person, period, but there's a special kind of deception that can trip up people who engage in religious disciplines, and it enters through self-referentialness. If we purport to serve the God of the universe, the Almighty, the All-Wise, then we are signing up for a life where we are not Masters. We are not The Teachers. We don't stand in self-made security; slick, triumphant, neatly-packaged ease, if there is any reality in it at all, is on the flip side of a broken, humble heart that is the first to acknowledge the good of "the other," the first to bow before mystery, the first to cry "help my unbelief," the first to know that to be held in love by the Almighty is our rightful place.

Human dignity upheld, regardless of whose it is. 

Certainty of divine revelation and security only in it.

Humility of heart and freedom to bend between heaven and earth. 

These are somehow the hallmarks that I saw among Catholics in my early days in the Church that struck me with their subtle witness to truth and reality. I used to believe that Catholics were the epitome of those "caught up in religion," that is, those who practiced meaningless ceremony and recited empty formulae and relied on their own righteousness to stand before God. I was taught to believe that this is the foundation of Catholicism. Rather, I think that this is the foundation of humanity and "natural religion." I think it is probably where we all start, because we have to start somewhere. In the Old Testament, God certainly instructed Israel in all sorts of sacrifice ceremonies, and I highly doubt that at the time they enjoyed the pinnicle of mystical involvment in their interior meaning. God was teaching them. And just as children can listen to a story at ages 3, 6, 9, 12 and 17 and exercise completely different abilities, so as time went on, what Israel experienced in these sacrificial commands was different, I suspect. 

But isn't this just the thing: We can get stuck with what we exercise at the six-year point, and not move on to what the 12-year point calls forth from us. We are ready to build our monuments to truth-mastery and settle into being Masters and Teachers, because we have this one really figured out. Or we can forget, and get reminded of six-year-point truth, and feel happy that we have found our true home again, and vow never to leave.

Somewhere along the line, Christians can fail to register that we are called to union with the God of the universe, the Almighty, the All-Wise. Rather than yearning with openness to the Infinite, we celebrate learning to stand on a small, finite plot of solid earth under our two feet, and call it a day. 

Standing on solid ground is good, but we are called to more. We are always called to more. God is Love; Love is infinite, He does not wish to stop until the flame of His heart enkindles the dried wood of our own hearts and we burn as one. We can't make that happen, but God can. This is the story of the interior mansions: God draws us where we cannot go. There is always somewhere to go. This is such a word of hope for me! There is always somewhere to go. At some stage, moving forward means allowing the breaking up what we have all figured out. It means holding our hearts upwards to the God we cannot see, cannot feel, and whose existence we perhaps question. 

If God is Love (and He is), then God is the one who is waiting to in-fill us. This is the witness of the Carmelite saints. This is our experience. When all is lost, God is, and He in-fills us, and we are brought beyond our sins, beyond our wounds, beyond our limitations, our efforts, our abilities. This is who God is. This is what God does. 

This is not the tame, manageable God that we so easily mistake for ourselves and then begin to inflict on others to bend them to us. This is Reality before whom every knee will bow. This is the God who heals and transforms by His presence, from the interior. 

When Evil Overwhelms

My heart is aching. My spirit is troubled, and my prayer is heavy. News of the war in Ukraine, Putin's relentless barrage that seems very unlikely to stop at the boarders of Ukraine draws my heart out in solidarity with especially with women and children fleeing, or staying. Even amidst so many accounts of beauty, of love, like so many Poles opening their homes and welcoming refugees, reports of divine interventions, and demonstrations of faithfulness of believers turning to God in earnest -- even amidst all these, there are the other stories, the other cries:war, hatred, lies, destruction, death, accusations, greed, arguments, blame, complaint, pride, fear, evil, disregard. 

And then locally there was another priest sentanced in a horrible case of sexual battery and spiritual abuse. It stikes close to home, because it is close to home, literally. This is a priest I was acquainted with and at one time thought well of. I read the victim's horrific statement. The psychological, physical, and sexual abuse was bad enough, but the abuse of spiritual authority was perhaps the most devastating. It left me gazing into my own abyss.

So it is from this place that I am trying to write and pray today, to find a coherent thread.

To be honest, when I read of the sentencing of that priest (five years' probation), I was left with a feeling of responsibility to fix this horror. There was such a failure of human formation, such a mistaking of what is human, what is spiritual. Such an ignorant and evil response to human brokenness. My husband had to remind me that brokenness is the human condition. And I recognized in myself the "trigger" if you will of seeing the failings of those I don't want to have failings, and scrambling -- for the sake of my own sanity -- to figure out how to fix their failings. It's "I need you to not have failings so that I can be at peace." And that simply can never be. It is a perverted longing for "holiness."

Jesus on the cross sure looked like a failure, a scandal. He sure as hell did not look like someone one desires union with. He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief. (Is. 53:3). We know that God is love. Love was despised. Love was rejected. Love was acquainted with grief. Why? Because of how deeply those whom He had created turned away from what they were made for. "Yet it was our pain He bore, our sufferings He endured. He was pierced for our sins, crushed for our iniquity. He bore the punishment that made us whole, by his wounds we were healed."

Where is God in all of the suffering? Somehow, He is the one who is suffering; that's how close. 

We have a grave responsibility to the vulnerable. Because the pain in this world is so exhausting, and we humans are so limited, this must include in a primary way our own vulnerable hearts and souls. We must not forge new armor of hard hearts; we must turn these hearts to the Lord in His own agony. Look closely and weep with Him, and He with us. Then our first duty is to weep with those other people who weep, stepping into the Lord's own love and strength and not hesitating to hear and listen, and feel, all the while handing it all back to the Lord. 

At the end of the day, being the Lord's good servant means that He is in charge. It is a relief not to be God. To make our home in God means that we have an eternal refuge, a place of rest to which all are invited. We become the message: there is a place of rest and healing for you. Do not grow deaf to your own heart, and do not fear, but turn with trust to Love. 

What Does God Want?

Historically for me Lent always carried this specter of some need to reach a misery quota so that God would be happy with me, or so that I could grow, or so that somehow good things could come of it. Or, I figured God wants prayer, fasting, and almsgiving, so I'll do those things, not really grasping any interior depth to them, but I'll do them because that's what God wants. 

This year, the Lord is helping me to glimpse some interior depth on the "why" question involved here -- always my favorite one to ask. 

At the core, God wants us to embrace and live in our own human dignity. It is His creation. Our difficulty is that so much clutters us, so many layers accrue over our souls, and we get satisfied with much less, with the things we create for ourselves and call our worth. And when and if we do touch the raw parts of our hearts, where our dignity resides, we often respond negatively: kicking, beating, shutting out, starving off, or otherwise incapacitating and silencing.

So we can spend Lent either rearranging our false worth, or doing a bunch of self-harm. Yikes. What person in their right mind wouldn't give up on that?

But what God wants us for us to know ourselves the way He knows us. To pray effectively, we have to go to silence, open that dark heart, and allow the light of the Word of God to shine into us. To know God and to know ourselves, we must stand before the Word, Jesus. We must soak in the light and power of the Holy Spirit coming to us in Scripture.

Fasting has always been hardest for me to seperate from self-harm for obvious reasons. For some reason it has been hard for me to grasp that fasting entails a choice: deciding to eat or not eat in a certain way. I set aside something of mine for another person, either by giving away the food, the money, or the time that would have been entailed in my eating. In my state of hunger, I offer my emptiness to the Lord to fill. I turn my desire for food into a desire for justice. This makes me actually feel the dignity of the person next to me, and in the light of that, my own dignity as well. My dignity is not to be found in how productive I can be, how sleek and strong, but in my existence itself.

Almsgiving, living in a wasteful, affluent society, can't just be about throwing a few bucks at a cause. Almsgiving is the ability for one heart to hear the cry of another, and to answer it at one's own personal cost. I feel like our notion of job and employment have cut off many from what it means to serve others with what we have. Maybe we are given people to help, 9-5, but then the rest of our lives are for us. We have our protocols and parameters of what we do for others, and stepping out of these is unprofessional. Public and private life have firm boundaries, and those in need of help need to find the professional agency or program set up to help them, the proper way. People, in this system, lose the dignity of acting freely, of learning how to organize themselves together, to truly pool their human strengths for the common good of all. We lose our dignity when we don't know how to give to one another freely. I think of those in Poland who have opened their homes to 1-2 million Ukranian refugees. From what I saw of Poland in the month I was there, this isn't because the average Pole lives in an expansive house with luxury out the wazoo. 

Pursuing these facets of Lent personally and corporately is transformational. God wants us to be transformed in Him, because He wants to heal our interior pain and our exterior need, and to make us whole.

Achy Bodies, Moving Parts

 

Fr. Iain, the Carmelite who teaches me so much, says that St. John of the Cross teaches us that the point witin us to delve in to prayer (presuming we already have the prayer relationship open and active) should be our point of felt need. Something like that.

Today what I feel is my aching body. I'm only 54 years old, and even as I type that I can hardly believe it. I feel like when I turn 55 this year, there's just no turning back! I feel young on the inside and still very connected to my early adulthood, at least in the good ways. But, the reality is, I'm getting old, just like my Mom did, just like my grandma did, and just like my ancestors before her who died before I was born. This way I too shall go.

Aging is teaching me something about cooperation, though. I mean in the sense of St. Paul's analogy of the Church being the Body of Christ. And this does actually fit in to my own Lenten meditation I have going. 

Lately I've been doing physical therapy, and while I'll spare you all the gory details, this process has taught me the price of one part of the body chronically doing the work of another part, or shielding parts from fully doing what they are meant to do. It has been fascinating to me to experience that as I stretch some bits, use other bits more reliably, protect the right bits and work the other right bits -- that all of this is also freeing emotionally and mentally, not just physically. 

Yesterday I was hinting around at how I love to do hard work for the sake of hard work, and I can feel good about my capacity to work (even if it is intellectual, or what have you). Here's a think I've learned: I have believed that exercise is good if it is hard, and that is not always true, because you can sweat and strain with bad form, and really do your body some injury. Effort is not queen. Effort must be united with good form, and good form is actually more important than hard effort.

I'm not entirely sure that in normal parish life we have either good form or hard effort. I rather fear that we have a lot of couch potatoes who feel a strain to do normal daily things that should flow from us much more freely. There's a mountain that could be said there, but that's not really my point.

In me, I have been catching myself acting with a kind of habitual anxiety that has been a culprit in my spiritual life and definitely the main culprit with my physical difficulties. One of the demonic refrains in my life since childhood has been that the best thing I could do for the sake of humanity is to shut up and go away. Now, I've wrestled down the large boulders of that lie, but vestiges, echos, of this lie still attack as temptation. It can show up in my love of efficiency: move along, get out of the way, think fast, no stalling, chop chop. This can meld into acting like there is no love for me, no one will be patient, no one will embrace me just for being me. And it leads me to interior anxiety if I have a misstep or waste ten seconds. 

If I am in touch with the presence of God and am held in his patience with me, and am responding to his eyes on me, then I will be less likely to crush myself with this kind of interior anxiety. And the more I let it go, the more peace will become habitual. But I have to become aware when these pains spark up, and respond to them differently. 

So, another shift here. What strikes me is how important it is, not just within my own body to let go of anxiety and replace it with peace and to function in that, but how important it is for every member of the Body of Christ to peacefully be their part. When one part of the body is at peace and freedom, it will release others. Still others will hurt and crab more. But no one should embrace lies in order to silence the hurt and crab of another. The one with the hurt and crab has to respond to the Lord, too. I can't do anything to make another person change, but I do believe I can do something to make people want to change. And most of the time it does not happen because I lecture someone, but because someone observes something in me while I'm not even aware of it. I did my first week of prescribed leg exercises, and then ohhhh I wanted to sit with criss-cross legs and it felt soooo good. 

Christians are called to be people of continual conversion, who live daily in the presence of God, who bear witness to Him with us by the faith, hope, and charity we exercise in our interactions. There is movement, dynamism, inherent in this life. Something is always new, always moving. 

Your Father Knows What You Need

The Word of God is alive. One of the things this involves is that "now" words can spring forth from it, mixing with my heart in a variety of ways. I'd say it is something like different chemical reactions, if only I knew something more about chemistry. But it sounds reasonable.

Maybe it is more like an adaptogen. The Word comes to meet my now need. Ok, enough of analogies.

What I heard in today's gospel struck me in a new way, even though I've heard it hundreds of times before. "Your Father knows what you need before you ask him." The context there is not to rely on the number of words you can produce in prayer, or (ahem) feeling like you can find just the right word to express what you want to say to God. (Caught out -- yes I love precise words and find it pretty important to do the work to reveal my interior thoughts in all their magnificent brilliance...) Yeah, ok. Jesus says our Father knows what we need before you ask him. A couple things stood out there with immediate clarity.

First, God does actually know what I need and want better than I do. That is not the same thing as saying that God denigrates what I feel I need because He is smarter and knows better and I'm stupid. He is smarter, and I am stupid, but he doesn't treat me that way. He is a father, a teacher, and as Fr. Iain Matthew OCD says, he loves us from the standpoint of what we will be in eternity: whole, complete. God loves us into that; that's kind of the process that life in Christ on earth is all about. 

There have been plenty of times when I've come to the Lord with desires and realized his communication that he has a complete grasp on what my desire entails, while I have a partial grasp. At first, this was a bit offensive to me, because I did feel like he was rejecting something deeply important to me. Anything that gives a mental image of God as a mean oger is a lie and feeds spiritual warfare and human pride. My thought was something like, "Well, why would you care about knowing about my desires if you just want to tell me that they are aiming way too low?" It really revealed to me something about myself -- that I expected to be thought little of, not called on to fuller potential. This put me on the defensive and fed my distrust in God and my belief that I had to somehow pull myself up by my spiritual bootstraps, and THEN find favor with God. Wrong, wrong, wrong.

One time I specifically prayed about something, knowing completely full well that I was taking the posture of a toddler asking a parent for delightful goodies. There's something big in that. Theresianly big. In the first place, I approached God as a Father that I trusted in, and delighted in at least as much as the goodies I was asking for. I kind of knew my priority was not the goodie, but my posture of asking, because it was a trustful act of opening my real desire to God. It was on a Divine Mercy Sunday. It is not super often that the Lord will answer me in clearly discernable words, but this was one of them. His response was, "What you really want is kept in heaven for you with more certainty than if you had [this thing you are asking for all scheduled and prepared for today]." For years and years, that phrase echoed in my mind: "What you really want." For the first time I realized there was more in my desire than met my eye. God's desire was in it... but I didn't know Him -- or myself -- well enough to grasp the actual potential it was pointing to. Once I trusted God, he was ready to answer my prayer by this kind of confounding revelation.

Which leads me to the second point that became clear today. If my Father knows what I need before I ask him, a worthy chunk of my prayer is profitably spent on burrowing my heart into the infinite heart of Almighty God, who has all wisdom, all understanding, along with all provision for things temporal and eternal for me, and for all of creation. That, I suppose, could define contemplative prayer. 

I have a very strong need to understand things. If I am facing a crisis, whether that be health, relational, practical, spiritual, or any combination of these, my first natural response is to investigate every avenue to understand it. It gives me a sense of control of chaos, of peace and order. But I've definitely learned that this has limits. Sometimes some things really are out of my control. I can't understand problems away, or fix them by knowing about them. 

My Father knows what I need. Maybe lately I have felt like I have things pretty well in hand. As if "I and my Father are one." But this is also pride, and pride is danger. Humility is the true foundation of all prayer. What I am hearing today is the call to come to God, needing to be shown who I am. Not, obviously, fearing condemnation. But also not settling in to a comfort and control of my own making, that already has everything in hand.

Work, Overwork, and Listening

 So if I live in this awesome reality of partnership with God, as I see it I have two primary responses to that. First, I should respond to the needs that are obvious: doing my daily duty (oy vey -- try being a seer of endless potential and ridiculously high ambition, and then figure out what I "should be doing" every day!), the things asked of me by the commitments I have undertaken, and second, I should listen for the directives of the Holy Spirit. 

I guess I could group that as another task I should do, but it seems a different kind of thing, so I'm trying to distinguish in order to unite.

St. John of the Cross says somewhere or another that we shouldn't wait to feel inspired to do what we know is right to do, because sometimes we are only given the knowledge of what we should do, and not any accompanying feeling. I know that I have had the tendancy to check in with my feelings in a rather primary place when "discerning" what to do. I would try to figure out if God wanted me to do something by considering how much I wanted to do it. As if God motivates solely through making us want to do things. Sure, "for it is God who works in you both to will and to do in order to fulfill his purpose" (Phil. 2:13). But that willing part is about choice, not necessarily about feeling like it. I can feel like all sorts of things. Sometimes I know that my duty entails faithfulness to a task. That needs to be able to movitate me right there.

If you are like me, you have a issue with being right. Doing right. Pridefully hating to be wrong or to miss something that will make me look like I'm not all together, in command of myself and everything. It's kind of an anxiety; something in me can't settle unless I feel like I know what to do. And I have looked for that in myself. I think that's why I would scour every little feeling that would go flitting through my interior radar, because I thought perhaps God would be sending me a message, and I would miss it, and screw up. But if as partner with the Holy Spirit I can reliably know that I don't have to feel anything to know I need to be faithful to my obvious duty entailed in my commitments, well then, that helps. All of that interior scouring of my feelings leads to being very complicated. Faithfulness to duty frees me for simplicity.

Listening to the directives of the Holy Spirit. I think of the song by John Michael Talbot called We Are the Exiles. The chorus says this:

We are the exiles in the far end of solitude

We are the exiles living as the listeners

With hearts attending to the skies, we cannot comprehend

Yet waiting for the first far drums of Christ the coming King

Planted like sentinels, upon the earth's frontier in exile we sing.

It's a song about cloistered contemplatives, and while I'm definitively not cloistered, I am called to contemplative life as a Secular Carmelite. 

And you know what, I really love to just be busy. I'm thinking maybe I like it just a bit too much. Or perhaps it is that I can take care of the work that is on my plate with a deeper element of contemplation. And maybe that's what is really, really vital to living in partnership with the Holy Spirit, this think of actually not ignoring my partner, but checking in deeply, expectantly. People have been telling me for at least ten years that I am a natural-born leader, something I never saw in myself earlier. More and more in exercising that I have found freedom and growth, but it also plays into a life-long fear that the people around me are not going to step up and take their own responsibility, and that I will end up with it.

Work, yes. Not as a slave, but as a creator, because only Love creates. 

I think maybe I need to get myself registered for that JMT retreat over Pentecost!

Partners

We are therefore Christ's embassadors, as though God were making His appeal through us: Be reconciled to God. -- 2 Corinthians 5:20

I feel like I just heard this reading today at the funeral I attended. If I didn't, it has been resonating of its own accord. But I'm fairly certain that was the context. 

It sums up well the lightbulb that went off when last I wrote. Well, that's misleading, because it wasn't so much an idea that I had as a "light shining in a dark place" as 2 Peter 1:19 would have it -- the dark place being my own grasp of my life. ("We have the prophetic message as something altogether reliable, and you will do well to pay attention to it, as to a light shining in a dark place, until the day dawns and the morning star rises in your hearts.")

God calls me into a partnership with Him. He calls me into union with Him, as a bride with the Bridegroom. My sense of that parallel is a bit fraught with stuff, not unlike I wrote last time about my concepts of penance and Lent in general. So much fraughtedness in my history. But a partnership... My sense of this is He calls me to share His life, His work, His heart. To learn from Him not only to imitate, but to actually receive His own presence, His own power.

When a woman gives birth, while her body is fully engaged (or is, ideally), so is the body of the child. The child actually sends out the hormones that trigger the beginning of labor, or so I'm told. If the Holy Spirit is the life within us which we do not create but we receive and are given, so the Spirit initiates things within us, which then engage us fully (ideally). This partnership is mysterious. 

I remember vividly seeing my daughter's face for the first time as my midwife handed her up to me. Her eyes were already searching for me and seeking that first contact. It was almost like she was welcoming me into motherhood as much as I was welcoming her into life. Maybe I expected a more passive glancing partner. She was 100% intent on connecting with me. There had been this whole hidden exchange whereby she took in everything I did, everything I heard, everything I ate, everything I felt. 

The Holy Spirit knows me on a completely different level, being God. But I am like the clueless mother who is surprised to find this life inside. When my daughter was born I had struggled with infertility for five years, and in some ways, it took me right up to birth and even after to realize that I carried an actual human baby inside me. I was in awe even days later that it was a baby that came out of me. I remember a few days before she was born, my breasts were producing colostrum already, and the thought escaped my mouth with a gasp: "I'm pregnant!" (At the time I was like nine months and 10 days pregnant, but it was still a shock.)

So, yeah. What is striking me is the awesome reality that the Holy Spirit actually lives within me and speaks, acts, moves, calls, shapes my life. That I can act in partnership with God. In fact, this reality is essential to my design as a human being. 

God makes his appeal through me. That is freaking awesome. 

Checking In

There's nothing more deceptive, I think, than the feeling you get on the day after Ash Wednesday. Like almost every year, I was up very early to eat breakfast. I went to bed early Wednesday night because when fasting is new to me again I suddenly get tired very quickly. So, being the Latin rite Catholic that I am, I was making my eggs with ham and enjoying breakfast by 6am. One day of fasting, especially when you aren't doing it any more, doesn't seem so bad. 

Then Friday comes and I realize Easter isn't until half way through next month.

So I have to ask myself: how accustomed am I, really, to running on my own steam? 

Frankly, Lent brings up specters of thorny questions for me. Once I got to a certain place in my spiritual life, say, in my early 20s or so, I acted like I believed God was happy if I was miserable. Or that he liked to see me kick my humanity in the shins, and laugh when said humanity started to cry. I did see this kind of behavior modeled for me by a former pastor I had (in my non-denom days) who very intentionally changed the verse of Scripture to "If my people who are called by my name will humble themselves and pray, and turn from their pleasurable ways (not wicked ways, you see), then I will hear from heaven, and forgive their sin and heal their land." It was interesting, because basically what he said in doing that stated a) I don't have any wickedness to turn from, but also b) pleasure is wicked, and displeasing to God, so really I am wicked.

There is a lot in religion, faith, Christians -- whatever term you want to use that means "us, not them," that perpetuates garbagy thinking, brokenness. I don't blame it on a religious system, except where sound theology is just lacking. I blame it on the fact that we spout us when we should be speaking the Word. Probably more on that thought in days to come.

So, specters. If I run on my own steam, I'm likely to start tripping over them.

My task here is to stand under the word "Be holy, for I, the Lord, am holy." And the extremely vital thing in that equation is self-knowledge. I'm hearing this statement addressed to me, and I am a particular person, not generic humanity. I have a history, I have a soul of a certain shape, a body of a certain age, a color, an interiority, a mission, a call all my own. 

Also when I was in my 20s, I was very aware of this fact, that I wrote into a song: "I cannot find the way for me by looking at anyone but Jesus. That feels so out of sync with the way of the world." I am not very conscious anymore of feeling like a red marble in a sea of yellow marbles. I've come long distances in accepting myself and soaking in the respect of my daily companions, especially in my church circle. That is all very much at peace. I don't get as emotionally stung, in a positive way, when I am acknowledged for who I am, and I think it pleases God that this is normal, at least within that social context. 

I do yearn, though, I do ache. I do long for more. When I hear "be holy," it's like I feel my spirit stretching forward, wishing it could go further, really with groans that words can't express -- not even to myself. What I think of is all the birthing scenes I've been watching on Call the Midwife lately. It isn't a mental process. I can't sit down an figure it out, or make a plan to carry it out as work. It's actually helpful to realize that, as thinking and working are two of the most natural reflexes to me. It's a tad scary to feel without these "helps." In fact, it's hard to even get quiet enough to allow myself to feel the ache. That's a little surprising to me, because I also like silence. But interior and exterior silence are not the same thing, for certain. 

So my check in conclusion is, when I feel a yearning for more, for a fruit-bearing closeness, for traffic across the bridge that is my life between the divine and the human, there is a dynamism at work that is bigger than just me. Cooperating with the life Jesus brings forth is a work to enter into.  

Be Holy

Yesterday's Mass reading from 1 Peter concluded with the line: "Be holy, for I (God) am holy."

What I heard in that is not an invitation to fruitless and impossible striving after perfection issued by a God who isn't satisfied with us and wants us to do better. Or the echoing of an arrogant mind that makes projects of self-improvement, calling it "pursuit of holiness." Or some confused and shame-infused realization that I should be better, and I'll have to try, now that it's Lent.

What I heard is God at creation. He has an intent in His heart, and he makes it reality by speaking it forth: Let there be light, and there was light.

What I heard is Jesus with the leper who has approached Him in faith: I do will it; be made clean. 

What I heard is Ananias, sent on a mission of healing to Saul who is in the midst of the conversion of his life: Brother Saul, receive your sight.

Faith, hope, charity. Hmm, do they fit? Creation itself receives its substance from God. The leper cupped his heart upward to Jesus to receive from Him, requesting with hope of receiving. Ananias went to Saul animated not by his own understanding, feeling, motivation or decision, but by the word and call that Ananias was able to receive because he was in a communion of love with God. That love brought Saul healing.

There's definitely human agency involved with the command of God Peter records, but it isn't a case where God makes his expectation known and the human then consults his merely human efforts and fulfills God's demand. Rather, this command of God calls forth what it commands. As St. Teresa of Jesus explains (in Chapter 25 of her Life, as well as other places), "When the Lord speaks, the words are accompanied by effects," and "he appears to wish (the soul) to realize His power and the efficacy of his words."

So hearing this Scripture proclaimed, "Be holy, for I am holy," I hear it as a command to receive from God. Receive this grace, be open to what He is doing, allow it free course, and cooperate with what it is pursuing within me. Wisdom! Be attentive! God is inviting you to an encounter with Him. 

To Teresa, prayer is an intimate sharing between friends. "It means taking time frequently to be alone with the One whom we know loves us." So the command to be holy is one to be received in this context of being wholly, intimately, and personally loved. It is a willingness to have called forth from us that which makes greater potential for this way of love. To be holy, we have to go to what is intimate to us interiorly, what makes for our integration, what involves our whole person. 

For me, writing is an integrating, personal, and intimate experience. So I shall write this Lent, to stand under this word: Be holy. There's usually some poking at fears, pain, shame, etc involved with receiving grace and allowing it free course, not to mention human stupidity and whatnot. That's all fine. I'm not going to try to produce but to respond. So, here we go.