Sadness, and Love

Photo by Jan Axelson
Cherokee Marsh, Madison, WI

Yesterday, we buried our pastor. There is still a tinge of the surreal to it for me. I'd really only known him for fifteen years, but I am a completely different person today than I was fifteen years ago. And so much of that change happened in the context of the community which he lead. It's going to take awhile for me to wrap my mind and heart around the new day that it is. 

The last two weeks were intense. They were intense on a social level, because my parish community has been grieving together. Our daily Mass community has been grieving together. Several people randomly spoke to me or got in touch with me to tell me their experiences, and several of us who see each other more often were able to check in with each other, sometimes several times a day as we gathered for our prayer vigil. It struck me how several years ago I would have thought it stupid to ask a grieving person "How are you doing?" because I knew how they were doing -- they were sad. But that was the old me, the person who stood outside, away from my emotions, and observed other people -- with significant awkward discomfort -- experiencing their emotions. Hoping they wouldn't splash up on me. Because I would look at them like they were rocks. Or rather, like I was a rock.

But there was none of that for me in these two weeks. My parish is my family. I was going to say it is more a family than my extended family has ever been, but really, it is just my family. I'm realizing as I write that the only reason I can feel that word at all is because of my parish. I mean, yes, it's because of the grace of God. But the grace of God doesn't come wafting down invisibly as I sit cross-legged and vocalize in an empty room with my eyes closed. It comes through the Incarnation, extended in time and space: the Church. And the Church comes to us through our local parish.

So even though I have been sad, the sadness I feel shows me the measure of the love that is normal to me. Without love, sadness becomes depression, despair, hopelessness. Been there, done that. So one thing these intense weeks have been is a surprise inspection of my heart. 

Before all this developed, my primary meditation had been revolving around the Seven Sorrows rosary. This theme came up for me: Do not camp in your sorrow. Now I see this is a coin, and on the other side it says: Do not run from your sorrow. Be with it. Right now there seems incredible peace and wisdom in this, and I see that it means that my life really is not my own. I was bought with the precious blood of Jesus Christ (1 Pet. 1:9), and God lives in me. And He is Lord. So when sorrow comes, be with it. When joy comes, be with it. Our Bishop's homily at the funeral made this statement: "Jesus instructs us that to be credible Christians is to have and to express human emotion, not taking a stoic stance." Old me really wasn't a credible Christian, for this reason. I was so stuck, emotionally. Despair and hopelessness froze me. I did not know myself held by one stronger than myself, free to feel things that passed. Free. 

To be free, one has to know oneself to be loved. And more than I ever have before, I do.

I am Sad

Yesterday, I told a friend, "If grief comes in waves, my waters are pretty choppy right now." 

On Saturday evening, the pastor of my parish passed away after just over a week in hospice care. He had been battling health problems for just about 18 months, but eschewed retirement (though he came of age to do so) and every report he gave on his health condition was that he was feeling better all the time. The last time he was present at church for the after-morning-Mass coffee gatherings [about a month ago] he was famous for having started, he was telling stories and passing on information in such an oddly intentional way that I commented to my daughter on the way home, "He was telling stories like someone who knows he is going to die." 

After he went into hospice I was compelled to organize a week-long prayer vigil. First, it struck me that when he was ordained a deacon, he made a promise to pray the Liturgy of the Hours daily. If he was no longer able to pray the hours, I wanted the parish family to be able to pray the hours "for" him. I've been told we've always been a bit of a pastor's dream parish, because there are lots of people in place to take care of many aspects of parish life, freeing the pastor for his actual ministry (instead of maintenance and such). There's a lot I can't do, but as a Carmelite, at least I can pray, and lead people in chanting. 

Also, I realized that sometimes people need to physically move their bodies into church and produce words with other people, in order to process difficult news. When my mother died and my sister did not hold a funeral until six weeks later, it was extremely hard for me to not have anyone to gather with. 

Another also, last week meshed with a very free week for me at home since I was home alone (or far more alone than usual) most of the time. And while I knew the schedule would get a little intense, I need things to be a little intense in order for me to match the intensity going on inside me emotionally.

And still when I got the phone call, and in the hours that have followed, I'm bouncing from disbelief, shock, tears, joy, gratitude, anger, more tears, and, well, blogging.

What I realized throughout the week is that it is one thing to lose a person you love. It is another thing to lose a person you love who has been with you at and through your life's most difficult moments and most joyful moments. Because there is not only the sadness of losing their presence, their very felt presence. There is also the re-opening of both the gratitude and the entire drama of pretty much everything you've ever felt deeply in their company.

Maybe that's obvious to some, but I think this is the first time in my life for such an experience.

There's more to say on this in connection with my Seven Sorrows rosary journey, but I'll save that for later.

Cleaning, Anxiety, and Magical Thinking

I feel things moving and changing in good ways. I've giving -- sometimes unintentionally -- developments a few days to marinate before I write about them. But I want to be sure to write, to grasp well the good things.

I had a revelation the other day about cleaning and housework. I know I'm not alone in having some odd emotional connections (or disconnections) where housekeeping is concerned. I've realized that as I am praying the Seven Sorrows rosary and handing over my anxieties and developing new practices, my emotional relationship with housekeeping is one of the moving pieces.

I have distinct childhood memories of cleaning out of anxiety. One memory is of knowing my mom was expecting some kind of business man coming for an appointment (insurance salesman, maybe a contractor, I don't remember) one certain late afternoon or early evening. Being the Gen-X kid that I was, I was home by myself after school on a regular basis for a couple of hours before my mom returned home from work in my elementary school years. So on this day, I knew that this appointment was coming, and I looked around the living room and saw it was a total wreck. I was anxious over the fact that the time was getting really close and my mom wasn't home yet. I couldn't let someone come into our house and see it be such a wreck, so I quickly got to work and cleaned everything. My mom came home at almost the same time that the man came for the appointment. When he left, she thanked me for cleaning up.

I also witnessed my mom stress-cleaning on occasion. I suppose the stress was induced by my dad's drinking and calling our house when he was drunk, because that was usually the thing. I know it left me in distress, too, but watching my mom stress-clean stressed me out all the more, and without knowing it I believe I drank in that the way to deal with emotional threats was to try to fix unrelated problems, such as our dirty sink. Magical thinking gets cemented this way, and carried over beyond the age of reason, I think, when there is no discussion or acknowledgment of the step that belongs between threat and response, i.e. coping strategy.

Ultimately, in my example, I was stressed because of my mom's absence and my sense that I, as a child, had to take on responsibility, rather than accept direction from my family's leadership team. Because there wasn't one. The way I understand it, my mom's stress led her to scour dirt, because it was something she had control over, unlike the relational mess of her former marriage. 

Fast forward to my adult life. Dirt is an objective reality of living in a house, regardless of what my emotional baggage contains. For many years I have noticed that whenever I go through a time where I feel emotionally strengthened, I clean and get rid of old junk with a good degree of joy. It's a feeling of liberation. But I've noticed as well periods of time where I avoid, avoid, avoid certain tasks. "I'm not a visual person," I say, and that is true. I don't get as easily bothered by clutter or grime as some people do. Plenty of times I have grumbled that other people could be helping me, even while feeling like asking someone to take on certain tasks wouldn't be quite right or good of me. I'm really the one who *should* do things, but if others spontaneously just knew and did, they would be higher quality human beings. So goes the endless ping pong game. Hiding inside, like cobwebs and giant dustbunnies, were a lot of unexamined and unresolved emotional issues that were fueling the endless back and forth between two losing options.

At holidays, I willingly welcomed the panicked stress-clean. We're having visitors, so, CLEAN! I treated this like a treasured childhood recipe, a necessary part of the celebration. Other times, I felt like the put-upon maid, the servant of my family, whose job it was to do everything because everyone else was lame (or a child). (Cue subsequent guilt and shame for these feelings.) There was also a good dose of, No, I'm not the maid, and I don't have to stress. And guess what? The house became a wreck. And I don't like that, either. So I plod along, just clean it, with mind turned off and tuned out.

So the revelation that has hit me is that there is another way to live with this. There is a way to find actual joy. I can approach housekeeping as caring -- in the first place, for my own self. I can tidy the kitchen because a tidy kitchen makes me happy. It frees me feel at home, to want to be there, and to do whatever I'm doing with a little note of the joy of being alive. (Ooh, the glory of God is man fully alive. There we go.) And then, if there is something else that really needs to take priority at the moment, I can peacefully realize that the task at hand just needs to wait; it doesn't become a threat. And I can say to the person next to me: "Could you do xyz?" I don't have to do everything. My family can learn to be a team, especially if I figure out how to lead the team that way.

I suppose I've gotten very close to working this way most of the time over the years, but having this as a conscious operating system is stunningly new. 

And you know what else? I can even engage in stress-cleaning effectively, if I acknowledge to myself that doing something physical would really feel good right about now, and it would help me release some of the pent-up anxiety or stress I have going on. 

I have found that emotional baggage is an enormous energy drain. The subconscious avoiding of messes because they represent my lack of being God, or at least not a magic fairy who makes all things bright, glittery, and happy -- yeah, it numbs a big swath of my heart, mind, soul, and strength. I need those for other purposes. Time for the anesthesia to come off. 

But everybody suffers. And the Seven Sorrows rosary is teaching me how to face my own pain and to live in virtue instead. Thanks be to God.

Real-time photo of my "office"

Good Morning, and Welcome to my Anxiety

Writing has always been a key way for me to access and relieve the pressure built up in me by feelings and thoughts that develop as I journey through life. I am still meta-surprised to find I am human (surprised that I am still learning and encountering new chapters). And right now I am poking at my experience of anxiety, learning what is in it and listening for what the Holy Spirit is saying to me about it. 

And since it is a story, I'll back this up a bit and narrate from my last three blog posts as a starting point.

This little phrase that spoke to me on Good Friday has been growing into a strong, tall sapling: Everyone suffers. About a week after I began mulling on that, I was scrolling Facebook and found that a Carmelite friend of mine had posted about a conference he attended called (drumroll) "Everyone Suffers." I didn't need twenty nudges to check out the website, and saw that it was about praying the Seven Sorrows rosary or the daily prayer* which focuses on virtues and beatitudes. This linking of virtues and the Beatitudes sounded so much like what my OCDS formation group is working on right now that I immediately incorporated that prayer into my daily meditation. I also contacted a friend who makes rosaries and asked her to make me a Seven Sorrows rosary. 

My observation here is that I normally hesitate over moves like this. On a rare occasion, I listen to a speaker who is excited about something and I mesh with that excitement enough to go "rah rah" over whatever s/he is promoting, but those bursts of learning or practice are usually short-lived. This involved no one speaking, just seeing something concrete in front of me that had an undeniable connection to a word I heard God speak interiorly. I hesitate at the still, small voice sometimes because of a fear of getting burned. I know I have a capacity to get super excited over things, and it can make me feel unglued, scattered, and lost. I know that if I never follow any leads, I'll never end up feeling unglued, scattered, and lost. But there's a high price to pay interiorly for not following any leads.

So my friend finished my rosary, and it is beautiful. Oh, I have a picture:

One day, out for a walk, learning to pray this rosary, I had a foundational revelation about the grace I was being given. I'd say the Blessed Mother was teaching me that her sorrows, or the sorrows of Jesus, were not a place to camp. They passed through their sorrows on the way to glory. And I was to realize the same. My sorrows are not a place for me to camp or get stuck. And to the extent that I am stuck, what I need is the practice of virtues, according to the Beatitudes, which is basically Jesus' road map to the kingdom. One way that I repeatedly get stuck is that I measure my life by my own standard, and that standard is usually impossibly high, unrealistic, constantly shifting, or trying to be at peace with those who are not holy (including myself). It doesn't really matter which of these is the resulting mess -- the core problem is that I put myself in a wrestling lock against Jesus' Lordship. And it's usually because of my innate tendency to suspect incompetence everywhere, even in God. And because I'm a fool.

Basically the Blessed Mother has invited me to walk with her and learn to release my sorrows to the Lord.

And lo and behold, I find that my sorrows seem to be wrapped up in anxiety. More on that later.

When I started learning to pray the Seven Sorrows rosary, I remembered that somewhere in my vast collection of printed materials in my house, I had a booklet on how to pray it. I dug it out, and while I have not yet been able to really connect with those prayers (I tend to focus more on Carl Brown's prayer linked above), the booklet was by Immaculee Ilibagiza, whom I have known of by reputation and an occasional mention by my elderly Nigerian friend. I knew she was the woman who survived the Rwandan genocide by hiding in a bathroom, but I didn't know much more than that. 

Once again I did not squash an inspiration with excessive hesitancy, but went to Immaculee's website and ordered a copy of every book she's written. I have finished the first three, am in the middle of the fourth, and have three more that I have yet to start. 

Now, I had actually thought to write here earlier about this journey that began for me on Good Friday, but part of me wanted to wait to digest everything Immaculee wrote first. Clearly I've decided that it is ok to write while in process -- I mean, when am I not "in process." If there was ever a life which speaks to what the Blessed Mother is teaching me -- that sorrows are to lead us to glory -- then it is Immaculee's life and testimony. In brief, it seems that a big part of getting stuck is refusing to face or accept the suffering while still trusting in a Good God. Holding both. I can't summarize the intensity of her experience here, but if it intrigues you I certainly recommend you read her books. The scope of them is more than personal, because he also deals with the Marian apparitions of Kibeho which effectively predicted the genocide. It's huge, and more than I can even touch on right now. But it isn't strange to realize that any one of our little lives, in God, touches all of eternity. 

So, all of that is how I've gotten to the place today. For the last couple of months I have occasionally been experiencing unusual physical symptoms of anxiety, I mean, much more than is typical for me. As I look back on my life, I realize I have had chronic anxiety, even from childhood. But it was so normal for me that I didn't know there was another way to be. I recall a physical exam in my 30s where the doctor was trying to test reflexes in my elbow. He wanted me to raise my arm in an L-shape, letting my forearm dangle downward. I held my arm out like a concrete L. "Just relax," he said. "I am relaxed," I replied. I really could not tell the difference between tension and relaxation in my body.

I used to only notice anxiety when a new situation tested it, but that was pretty much all the time. Later, I started to only notice anxiety when I was able to feel rested inside; I began to notice a contrast. There's some strange looping going on there. In the last fifteen years or so the rest has greatly increased, and my ability to cope with new situations has increased. But down in between all of this, there is still more freedom that the Lord wishes for me.

Ah, another piece. A few days ago as I deep-cleaned my "cooktop," I listned to my favorite Carmelite, Fr. Iain Matthew, OCD give this talk: Making Life an Offering: Teresa's Experience of Life in the Trinity. In fact, I listened to it about four times in a row. The word that I needed to glean from it at the time was this notion of spaciousness in God. That St. Teresa's experience of God shaped how she related with people, and it was that there was space for her to be her. She could be playful. She could be a tad audacious. She could be free. She could be herself -- when she prayed and as she lived. The nature of God draws us to this. "Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom" (2 Cor. 3:17). 

This word reverberated around and around in me. Physically, anxiety makes me contract and pull in on myself, and it hurts my muscles and my back. This notion of space, spaciousness, of opening wide to God... it's all in the opposite direction of anxiety. No creature opens wide where there is no trust.

All of these things, physical, emotional, spiritual, mental... these are all where I'm at right now. It's good. It's in process. I see a lifetime yet of practicing these things ahead of me, though. Maybe this is wisdom of age starting to take root. 

*August 2023 Edit: Carl has taken down his old website, and the new one does not include that prayer. The text of it is below.

Seven Sorrows Prayer

Mary, by your example in hearing and accepting the prophecy of Simeon, may I learn the virtue of humility, and live the Beatitude: Blessed are the poor in spirit, the kingdom of God is theirs.

Through your example of selflessness in the flight into Egypt, may I learn the virtue of generosity, and live the Beatitude: Blessed are the sorrowful, they shall be consoled.

As you were single-hearted in searching for Jesus when you lost him for three days, may I learn the virtue of purity, and live the Beatitude: Blessed are the pure of heart, for they shall see God.

When things don’t go my way, may I practice the virtue of patience as you did, while watching Jesus carry his cross to Calvary, and live the Beatitude: Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God.

When I’m tempted to escape difficulties through self-indulgence, may I be inspired to practice temperance as you did when you stood at the foot of the cross with your son, Jesus, and live the Beatitude: Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for holiness, they shall have their fill.

When others harm me or those I love, may I grow in the virtue of the kindness that you demonstrated in receiving the dead body of your Son into your arms, and live the Beatitude: Blessed are the merciful, for mercy shall be theirs.

When I’m tempted to despair or become despondent may I recall your diligence at the burial of Jesus, and live the Beatitude: Blessed are those persecuted for holiness, the kingdom of God is theirs.

Amen.