Snipping off the Hock Lock

Something happened this week that I can't describe. But I have a feeling I will look back on this as a deeply significant moment. 

Words escape me, so of course I come to try to write about it (lol). I think words fail me because the grace I met hit in a pre-verbal place in my soul. But I am curious, by way of pursuing integration, to see if I can in fact build a word bridge to help me grasp more of what happened (rather than obscure it with a lot of cerebralizing).

I also stop and ask myself why I write these things about my interior life. Sure, my premise for this blog is that I write to understand. Fine. I don't have to publish it all, though. (Here's a secret -- I write more than I publish.) The Constitutions of the Secular Carmelites say we are "witnesses to the experience of God." Specifically it says this:

...The Secular Carmleites are called to strive to make prayer penetrate their whole existence, in order to walk in the presence of the living God (cf. 1 Kings 18:14), through the constant exercise of faith, hope and love, in such a way that the whole of their life is a prayer, a search for union with God. The goal will be to achieve the integration of experience of God with the experience of life: to be contemplatives in prayer and the fulfillment of their own mission.

So, I don't write about my interior life, bearing witness to the experience of God, because I am a Carmelite. I'm a Carmelite because I bear witness to the experience of God. This is how I know I am in the right place in my life and in the Church. This is how I fit, how I belong. This feels quite validating.

So, what happened this week? I wish I could tell a narrative, but instead I need to do kind of what the blind man in John 9 did. ("All I know is, I was blind, and now I see.") You know that plastic thing that holds a turkey's legs together? (I had to Google it; apparently it is called a hock lock.) I feel like I had one of those taken off me. But instead of locking poultry legs, this thing held something in me to a way I -- or it -- wanted God to be, that He just isn't. A way I unconsciously was tempted to believe God is, and which subsequently kicked up a fight within me. What I could not see was it was the Holy Spirit fighting to get me out of the lock, and so I put up immense resistence. I was partnering with the wrong side of the struggle. 

At one point I went to early morning confession, not under any feeling of constraint or even the slightest angst. I had learned a lesson again recently that confession gives grace that helps, and I was looking for help. Did the confession; again, no bells or whistles. Received my penance, which was to meditatively pray one Our Father, and ask the Lord to show me which petition of it He wanted to show me something from. Again, the answer was clear, but no peals of thunder or choirs of angels singing. A bit later, I looked up the said petition in the Catechism, and, among other things, read this:

God does not want to impose the good, but wants free beings.

And I think right there, God took His cable cutter and snipped off that hock lock. 

Yeah, that pretty well sums it up.

And now I'm back to not having words, because it is just such a flood of peace. I didn't until now actually see how much drama I have carried around inside of me all my life, and occasionally sprayed others with. (Mea culpa.) I am sure this is at the heart of a lot of my habitual stress and tension, trying too hard, my proverbial driving with one foot on the gas and one foot on the brake at the same time. 

But, like a plant that rehydrates at the rate the roots can handle, I want to just be with this. I know that my "integration of the experience of God with the experience of life" is not just about me. I know this has affected my relationships, and that integration means receiving  deeply so that I may give what God has given me, just from the sheer joyful overflow of new habits. 

We are made up of so many layers and facets, and God really does want to take every one of them up into Himself and fill us with His glory. He does really want us to be resplendent with life. I used to find it a little depressing that I had so much need for healing, as if I was infinitely broken. But I think it is that God is infinite love, and He will continue to transform us and fill us more and more for as long as we live. We are made for union with God. There is literally no end to the love we can receive from Him.