Novena of Surrender Of My Heart

The other day as I was praying, I wanted to find a copy of the Veni Sancte Spiritus and vaguely hoped I had one in my basket of stuff on my small bookshelf next to me. (Turns out it I had the Veni Creator Spiritus.) But while I was looking, I pulled out a sheet of paper with a prayer in my handwriting, dated August 27, 2022, the feast of St. Monica. Frankly, I didn't remember ever seeing this before, nor could I remember if I copied it from somewhere, or if I actually wrote it myself. 

Whichever it was, it was exactly what I needed right then. I prayed over it a half dozen times. There are enough phrases in it that I tend to use to make me think I did write it, and a Google search didn't turn up anything like it. I marveled at the fact that at a moment when I was feeling utter devoid of anything positive in me (I've struggled, lately!) I was prompted to go dig for something that one way or the other I had stored away for just this moment of need. 

It is titled: 

Novena of Surrender of My Heart and Intercession

Most Holy Trinity, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, you are love. From all eternity, you are the furnace of ardent charity. You open your hand, and all created things come from you. We adore you and we gaze in wonder at the revelation of your magnificent generosity.

When you were incarnate by the Holy Spirit in the womb of the Virgin Mary, Lord Jesus Christ, you revealed to us the eternal love of the Father. We give you thanks and praise, most blessed Trinity, for making us one with Christ through the sacrament of baptism. I long, O Lord, to live my baptism and my other sacraments faithfully, opening my soul to receive every aspect of every gift you have given me in Christ, to the fullest extent possible for me today.

And so come, Holy Spirit:
        Come with your purifying fire. 

        Come with your cleansing Word. 

        Wash from me the sin which deals death

        Immerse me in the ocean of the mercy of God, which quickens, heals, revives, strengthens, purifies, enlightens, safeguards and sanctifies me.

        Make me whole.

        Make me one with you, most holy Trinity, that I may bear witness to you and make you known, loved, and worshipped by more of your children

        Until the day the prayer of Christ is fulfilled that all would be one as He and The Father are one.

        Heal our aching world

        Teach us to hope

        Teach us to love

        Teach us to trust

        Break the chains of death

        Revive us that we may call upon your name.

Amen!

I Will Make You a Threshing Sledge

The reading from Isaiah in yesterday's Mass struck me, weirdly. Listen to this:

I will help you, says the Lord; your redeemer is the Holy One of Israel. I will make of you a threshing sledge, sharp, new, and double-edged, to thresh the mountains and crush them, to make the hills like chaff. When you winnow them, the wind shall carry them off and the storm shall scatter them. But you shall rejoice in the Lord, and glory in the Holy One of Israel.

 What is God's activity here? He's there to help by making me into a threshing sledge. Ok, hold on one second. I thought I knew what this is, but here's an actual threshing sledge:

It's used to pull over the harvested grain to separate the kernal from the chaff. See, I hear sledge, and I'm picturing this: 

But no. I'm a threshing sledge, sharp and new, and double-edged. A sharp piece of board doesn't sound nearly as menacing as a sharp sledge hammer. (Why a hammer would be sharp, dunno, but we've got that cleared up now.)

And why is He making me a threshing sledge? To thresh... the mountains. See, what you do with that item is you drag it over the grain, drag it, drag it, drag it, until everything is broken down. Then you winnow it. Winnowing I at least recognize, even though I've never actually done it. You gather the grain, throw it into the air, and the wind takes the useless chaff away, while the valuable, heavier kernals fall back down to be bagged up.

Here's what struck me. God says I'm going to help you... and we're going to do a ton of hard work. How long do you think it would take to thresh a mountain? To wear that thing down, reduce it to winnowable chunks? 

I think my default expectation of Advent prophecies of the Lord's coming sound to me like, "Ok, just hold tight. The Lord is coming, and He's going to wave His magic wand, and everything that has ever troubled you is going to be transformed into light and glory right before your eyes, and it's going to take maybe a week or so at the very longest, and you'll never have to excercise faith or hope ever again because He's your serious Sugar Lord..."

Um, no. 

He says He going to help me by making me effective against what looks like impossible, insurmountable blockages. He'll send the wind and the storm to carry away all the yuck, and it sort of implies that He's going to be pulling the threshing sledge back and forth and back and forth over these mountains, so I'm going to be covering a lot of rocky territory again and again. And then I get to winnow, and participate in Him taking away the useless and keeping the nourishing. (Then, let's not forget that those nourishing grains still need to either be cooked, or ground for flour, then made into bread, to actually eat.) What the Scripture is talking about is absolutely not instant gratification.

Ironically though, I do find it immensely gratifying. This describes the reality of spiritual growth and progress. 

So, in today's drag across the mountain, I find that in the past, I had broken up something within me that used to be far too depressed and despondent to ever make my life and my time available to anything outside my own survival, really. I mean, I held a job and took care of myself, but interiorly I was semi-catatonic. That piece of Mt. Marie has been broken up. I have gotten used to a posture of, "Anything, anytime, anywhere, here I am for it." But I realize I am still the threshing sledge getting dragged across that. Sometimes, saying yes to things has been life-giving, but sometimes I have said yes to fool's errands and worn myself out.

I'm kind of in a new season of life. My children are adults, and need me in completely different ways than they used to. I slowly worked my way out of being a homeschooling Mom. I have plenty on my plate to do, and admittedly, my posture of "anything, anytime, anyhwere" has made me several people's "go-to" person. Today a lightbulb is coming on as I make another pass over this territory. If I don't manage my time and choose my actions, someone else will, and instead of getting freed up to be able to respond generously, I'm going to be resentful, and working at cross purposes to what I actually need and desire -- which is to seek to live (consciously) in the presence of God. 

If you aim at nothing you're sure to reach your goal, no? I started out buried under passivity, and now I see a new level where I need to be watchful, attentive, and gently active. I have long struggled with ignoring what I need and desire, finding it incredibly shameful to be found in the normal human condition. Poppycock. That's going out with the chaff. I also used to think that old people (like my age now) were all dreadfully lazy, because they weren't like manic workers with the zoomies. Being proud is like being unfamiliar with deodorant. No one wants to tell you how you seem, and few get close enough to you to do so, anyway.

All of this is an illustration of why the prayer, "My life is Yours, Lord" can be new every day. Because the Lord keeps moving my threshing sledge self around, even after I stop and winnow for a while. Then maybe suddenly there will be the instruction to walk forward, because that mountain that once blocked me simply isn't there anymore.

Sorrow is Not Lord

If I am to take in the lessons of the Seven Sorrows that I have been learning lately, here's the main thing: I need to hold both the reality of the sorrow and the goodness of God. Hold both, together. I picture this like holding one reality in each hand.

Interiorly, though I think I've done this, I have given sorrow the first place, keeping it the most visible, as if the goodness of God as a reality has to be covered over or buried a bit. But sorrow is not Lord. I think this is the crux of Christian life. Sorrow is not Lord. 

I can't drum up -- in any kind of healthy way -- chipperness that allows me to bear (or ignore) sorrows. Something in my soul will give way, break, die, become deformed, become false when I do that. And I can't stuff the void sorrow creates with religious platitudes or mere observance. No, the antidote is not with me drumming up, putting forth effort, trying hard enough, to make sorrow dissipate, either in my own heart or in the world at large. Isn't this why people get either so angry or frustrated or overwhelmed or resort to escapism or addiction in the face of so much pain in the world? How do you cope with it all?

Christians say the answer is Emmanuel. Jesus Christ has shown His face on earth.

But how does that historical fact turn into access to something that makes a change in me? I'm baptized, I receive sacraments, I'm part of the community of the Church.... But I can still be this person who is proclaiming that Sorrow is Lord, and religious practices can feel empty. How do I move forward?

Here's the good news: The Lord knows my heart so much better than I do. The key is to go into that secret place (my heart), because the Lord is there, waiting for me. Our own hearts can be intimidating: deep, interior, cavernous places. What fears, hopes, desires -- sorrows -- are there? Does it make any sense that the path to regime change (Sorrow is Lord to Jesus is Lord) happens by way of stepping back into sorrow's territory again? Won't I just get sucked in to be its slave again?

Ah, but right there is the lie. The truth is, child of God, that the King of Love resides there. He waits for you there, eagerly. Sorrow as Lord has been trying to starve you off of the love and glory that is yours by right of your rebirth. 

Jesus is a man of sorrows, aquainted with bitterest grief. He knows this territory. He's lived it. He's not afraid of it. He's faced it, felt it, endured it, was killed by it, and then conquered it by getting up again, as it simply not possible by nature alone. And what it means to be baptized is that He has united you to Himself in that supernatural resurrection power. This absolutely does not mean that we will escape suffering. No. It is the human condition: Everyone Suffers. It means that when we suffer, not if, we have access to the same "juice" flowing through us. Grace: the very life of God. This is precisely how we share in His glory. We stand in the very real sorrows, we allow them to touch us (that is, we don't bolt and run, but neither do we chain ourselves to every sorrow that presents itself) and we turn to Jesus with our wills, with our interior selves. Where His love is. We pour out the sorrow to His loving heart, and we draw into ourselves the life He pours out to us in return. This exchange forms a bond of love, and as many times as we do this, with as many sorrows as we remember from the past or live through in the present, His love opens up a highway to flow through us. As St. Elizabeth of the Trinity says, we become His "supplemental humanity" through which He lives His life here, on earth. His love that conquers death flows through us into the world. This is prayer.

And in the process, yes, we continue to know sorrow, but we learn not to camp there. The hope of glory -- this marvelous exchange of our sorrow for His power -- enables us to keep moving forward, and to daily dethrone Sorrow as Lord, and to pledge our allegiance to the Good God.

Let Advent In

Tomorrow I'm singing in a community choir Christmas concert, and today was our dress rehearsal. Somewhere along the line this morning I finally became present to the words we were singing. I mean, this is perhaps an unusual community choir, where, for Christmas at least, we are singing almost all sacred music, or traditional carols, so almost every single song is actually about Jesus Christ. I confess I really haven't been tuned into that fact at all.

I confess I've gotten fairly comfortable with distracting myself pretty heavily from my interior life. Did you know that an easy way to do that is to get really busy with church stuff? At least six days out of the week I am leading music in one way or another. I found myself this week getting really bothered and ever so slightly confrontational with the sacristans about small things I noticed that went awry at Mass. Standing around the coffee pot after Mass I suddenly realized there were cobwebs in a corner of the ceiling right there. I confessed aloud to my daughter and a friend who was with us that I thought occasionally I should go to a different parish for Mass so I wouldn't be so distracted with being such a Church Lady.

And we won't even discuss hours passing through my fingers like water as I watch mindless reels on Facebook. Geez. Every day seems to go so fast, and I keep thinking about how I'm never going to get any of these days back. And yet, if I stop to ponder, even sometimes if I think I need to pull out that blog and write so I can actually dig down into it, I reprimand myself with Other Stuff I could be doing. Something supposedly more important. 

Distraction. Everything and anything except...

Reality. 

It's Advent.

Once upon a time, on a Christmas Eve night, a shockwave of grace went off in my soul that reverberated for, oh, something like 20 years. This shockwave taught me that becoming a human being was good enough for the Eternal Son of God. It isn't that I didn't know the doctrinal tenet of the Incarnation. But it wasn't so real to me until then. I can't explain the revelation except to say that Jesus embraced my humanity and said, "It is good. I made this." It was that night that, in my heart, I became a Catholic (followed be being received into the Church about 16 months later), and my Christian identity shifted from Luther's "poor, miserable sinner" who would never change, to a daughter who is redeemed, restored, and healed by the love of Jesus and the power of the Holy Spirit. 

But there was another shockwave that followed some 20 years later, and it was the Epiphany. Just search the blog for the word, and you'll see. 

And yeah, so here I am, in 2023, singing Christmas songs and just barely allowing the words to touch my heart. How did I get so controlling? What's the threat, here? 

There's a scary word in those Ephiphay posts: risk. I can't even write more about that right now, other than to say I need to bring my risk PTDS to the Lord. What I know to the marrow of my being is that God is good and there is nothing He cannot fill with His glory. The more cracked and broken it is, the bettter to showcase His glory. Honestly, I am eligible to be a massive, mighty showcase.

You know what? I don't want to be anxious and controlling. I know, better than I know my own name, that there is absolutely nothing for me to fear in God. I've spent my life feeling a fool to myself, so if there's new territory for me to scout there, hey, who doesn't love an adventure. I can set a daily intention to feel what is happening inside, and if I need to stop and smile, or stop and cry, or stop and write a blog post -- all are fine. All are just different verses I sing to the Lord, calling out, "Where have you hidden?" I can learn and I can change. I've been doing it for years. Any worthwhile endeavor takes some work, and I love work, as long as I also have hope and companionship.

This is the path of contemplation. How silently, how silently the wondrous gift is giv'n...

St. Ivo, pray for me.

St. Ivo

 I don't even remember how long I've been claiming a patron saint every year, on the Saturday before the first Sunday of Advent, but it has been a good long time. I use Jen Fulweiler's Random Saint Generator. The nature of a saint is that we all have something to learn from them, something to gain from them in terms of the riches of God's love. But there have been many, many times when either immediately or as the year went on, my random saint's involvement in my life proved very fitting and helpful. A few times, they were people who left writings. Usually it was something about their lives that I reflected on, or that frankly came to do a jump-scare on me. 

This year my selected saint is St. Ivo of Kermartin. I had never heard of him, but a perusal of his biography has me just a bit up in my feels, as they say. 

Patronage: Abandoned People; Advocates; Attorneys; Bailiffs; Barristers; Canon Lawyers; Judges; Jurists; Notaries; Orphans. That's what came up on Jen's site.

Lately my prayer, formed by listening to the fourth pillar of the Catechism in the Catechism in a Year podcast, formed by a lesson in Becoming Who I am, formed by a blink-and-refocus look at my Carmelite vocation -- all these point me to my need to be authentic, real, raw with God. To try to do something else is futile and a waste of my life, and to be otherwise through laziness is reason to throw open the windows as I carreen down the highway of life and let in the blast of cold wintery air that sets me right again. 

This entails being honest with myself first about my felt needs. 

And I have felt such a need for an advocate. It's hard to put into words. There's a psalm that says, "Though I constantly take my life in my hands..," or another translation says, "Though I constantly put my life at risk.." My feeling of what an advocate does (or THE Advocate, the Holy Spirit) is to take my life in His hands. The Advocate knows me, knows all the ins and outs, understands it all, and is for me, to plead my case against the Adversary who comes to try to ruin my life with his claims. When I just let that scene sink in, I let out a huge sigh. The weight of things falls off. Without a doubt, I can trust the Holy Spirit. But so often I act like I have to defend myself against Him. It really is more like I need to humble myself before Him. 

Parts of me can relate to feeling like an abandoned child. If not because of actual life events, definitely because I abandon my own self regularly. I recognize in me the anxiety that makes it hard to relax, hard to enjoy things. It's an imbalanced overvaluing of my work and an impoverished eye toward the granduer, majesty, and love of God that actually holds me in life and, in fact, shows a feeling of having been abandoned as the utter lie that it is. 

My sense is that St. Ivo would say to me, "Nope, you aren't abandoned, and you don't have to do everything for yourself. Let me remind you to how the Holy Spirit actually operates for you."