Joy Comes in the Morning

This morning as I enter into prayer, I find a strange gratitude welling up inside of me. Gratitude in general is unusual enough for me. But I review scenes of my past and find them a wellspring of gratitude that I wasn't expecting.

Let me be clear. I'm not grateful that these things happened. Bad things happen to everyone, and God is not some ogre who gets his jollies from this. 

When bad things happen, I at least (and I'm guessing this is rather true of everyone) become an expert wall builder. I don't want to feel the bad thing, so I wall it off. I snip the nerves that connect me to the experience. When you lay on your arm or leg and it goes numb, it feels heavy and useless, but it doesn't really hurt. It is after you free it that it starts to hurt. So a common and maybe subconscious reaction to emotional pain is to numb it, one way or the other. I have always done this with my mind. Some people do this with addictions. It's all the same mechanism, I think.

So part of the wonder is that all of this is now out of anesthesia. What was master is becoming servant.

I can trace through a whole list:
My father's mental illness and alcoholism, apparently in full swing already when I was born. His absence, in turn with my parents' fighting. My parents' divorce and my mother's stress and an utterly tumultuous relationship with my dad (for all of us). Feeling like a piece of furniture in a house rather than a member of a family. Gut-wrenching desperation and fear over chronic singleness, concurrent with toxic and sometimes abusive relationships with men who proverbially had red flags tattooed all over their faces. Anger and desperation over infertility. Spiritual confusion all along the way over what God's love actually is and layers upon layers of deception that I embraced. And the terror of trusting through actually being healed.

I am not grateful that a single bit of that happened. Except that last word, of course.

I am grateful to realize that God, by His Spirit, was closer to me than I to myself, through all of that. He never abandoned me. He never gave up on me. He never lost patience with me. 

Why didn't He stop it all? In answer to that, I'll invite you to watch Season 4 of The Chosen. In this world, things are unleashed. It's the way things are. Jesus did not come to stop the bad things; He came to go through them with us. He gave me the dose of grace I could handle, and infinitely more than I deserved as I consistently rejected and resisted His efforts to draw me closer sooner.

The end, the telos, of humankind is not a happy life on earth. We are made for something much more profound than that. We are made for union with God, forever in eternity, and with eternity starting now and entered into now. And as I see my past and see Jesus with me (which I absolutely, totally and completely, could never see in real time) I see the capacity I have within me now to receive the life of God into me. If I'm a thimble, God will fill me and I'll be a full thimble. If I'm a bowl, God will fill me and I'll be a full bowl. Swimming pool, crater, canyon. We don't have to make hollowing ourselves out a project; life does that. God will always, always, pour out Himself more abundantly than we can hold, because His love is always beyond our power to hold. Our work is to receive from Him and believe what He says.

And I know that whatever may come, this is the reality. I don't like pain and suffering. But I also don't have to fear it or dread it. Because God is faithful. 

Weeping may endure for a night, but joy comes in the morning. (Psalm 30:5)

Fr. John, Belonging, and Conversion

My first spiritual director, back in the early 90s in Milwaukee, was a Jesuit priest who I was very personally fond of. His was the first daily Mass I frequented, at 5:30 every afternoon after work, in the basement chapel of Gesu Church. His homilies were intelligent and helpful, and I delighted at what I suppose might have been a stereotypically "Jesuit" way of phrasing certain things, for example in his prayer intentions, so they could have a meaning to cover every angle. I wasn't fond on how he would never call God "he," though. I'll never forget the line of the Psalm which became "God Godself is in the midst of God's people." Come to think of it, I did go through a time when it drove me up a wall, and I even was ready to walk out of a Sunday Mass for which I saw he was main celebrant. But the Lord pulled me up by the scruff of my neck and I felt rebuked for allowing my prideful judgment of him. It was maybe a year later I asked him to be my spiritual director, which he did for about nine months, before I left for Japan. I missed him so mightily when I left. He was essentially the only Catholic I had any connection to at the time.

I never wanted to ask him his thoughts on theology, however. It was a time and a place where there were some wild ideas going around, and I thought it possible that he might sympathize with things I would not have known how to handle. 

The one thing he did very, very well was that he accepted me, exactly as I was. And I was a newly converted Catholic who was a big mess. I hardly remember what I talked to him about, but I know I talked a lot, and he listened a lot. He also told me some stories of his own vulnerability, like how he was terrified of flying because he had severe closterphobia. I recall one session where he actually suddenly excused himself and bolted out of the room. He had a pathway into his office in such a way that he couldn't see the door from where he sat. He explained this was due to his closterphobia also. 

He died of throat cancer at age 60, just a couple of months after my daughter was born. I felt alone in the world when I found out, even though at that point I hadn't been his parishioner for over a decade. 

So why am I thinking about Father John tonight? 

I'm thinking about the power of belonging. Belonging both to the Church and in the Church. Fr. John was Gesu's RCIA director and welcomed people into the Church from all walks of life. I remember he referred to those who came in with little religious background as having "less deformation" to work with. I was definitely the opposite (though I did not go through his RCIA). 

Are Catholics weak at welcoming people exactly as they are? Loving people where they are? What about people who are already in the pews? Do we have an ever lengthening list of behaviors that people need to conform to before they are acceptable? Do we think God treats us that way? 

Conversion is about transformation. People change people (or try to, or want to) from the outside in. God changes people from the inside out. 

We are good at saying we need constant conversion. Yes. That's why we observe Lent. But to convert, we have to stop trying to make ourselves acceptable like some kind of DIY, and trying to get others to conform to our standards. We need to seek the One who is Love and let Him embrace us as we are. All of it. As we do, He will give us His own life in return.

This video spurred my thoughts the other day: Ever Wonder Especially this line: "To belong is to be seen, to be known, to be understood, and to be accepted.... Belonging is found in God."

My Body Will Rest in Safety

I've pretty much always had a social circle of people older than I am. One such friend mentioned his uncomfortable awareness that everyone's chatter now gravitates towards aches and pains and doctor visits. It makes sense. Pain makes us vulnerable and we need to know we aren't alone with our fears of losing ourselves. 

When I briefly cared for my Mom while she was dying in hospice, I made a mental note to change my relationship with my body. I had always softly scoffed at the idea of going to the gym and doing exercises. My farmwoman epigenetics sang a distant song, to the tune that the goal was the work hard rather than sectioning off body movement away from normal daily activities. Eventually I had to admit that I was not chopping wood, plowing fields or drawing water from wells on any regular basis, and I was, in fact, a cushy modern. Through trial and error (and a lot of back pain) I figured out which kind of exercises I needed, and I've gradually worked towards actually doing them. 

Lately I've been doing a program called Hips Like Honey which focuses on strength and flexibility. It doesn't do much for cardio stamina, but even though it is rather gentle, it has really done its job. I love the feeling of waking up in the morning and doing that huge reach across to the other side of the bed to turn off my alarm, and lay down again, and not only not throw my back out, but to feel solid. 

So today I had my monthly chiropractic visit. I am still actively learning to stop tensing my body all the time, and the doc was showing me an exercise to help me out with that. The moment gave me something to ponder. Essentially he said that the tension in my sacrum comes from my back muscles trying to do the work that my core muscles are designed to handle. It's like two siblings going around together, and the loud, overbearing one is always doing all the talking, leaving the quiet, reserved one unskilled in initiating and carrying out a conversation. The overbearing one is tired and overused, and the quiet one needs focused, gentle attention. As he showed me the exercise, I realized, I don't do gentle very well. Farmwoman is out there, hoisting bales of hay overhead and throwing them. I need to find my interior delicate crystal goblet, or.... something like that. I guess when I find it I'll know what it is.

Something significant happened last month, and it is still settling in. Speaking of tension, lately I feel my mouth relaxing in just an incredibly unusual way. In my experience, I feel tension only after letting go of it, and my jaw and my teeth are apparently not clenched anymore. The other amazing thing is that as I read Scripture, or pray it, or hear it read, I feel like it is all about joy, peace, and God's incredible goodness. And safety. And rest. 

If there's a way to tie together these rambly thoughts, maybe it is this realization. Somewhere in my soul, a pre-verbal baby Marie has, for more than five decades, beheld a fear: that joy, and peace, and safety, and rest, and love, and important people, all disappear. And that little girl is powerless to stop it. Using all my might, and tensing myself silly isn't going to stop it. Like aging, like dying, it's a point of incredible vulnerability. But into that moment of vulnerability, someone has come. And He is Love. And Love is eternal. And I realized I will never lose Him. And more than that, every day I live in Him, I will never lose, either. Part of how I do that is I share my woes with others, and they share theirs with me, and the Lord is there (Mal. 3:16). We live our lives together, and even though we grow weak and die, this is where we find joy.

And in the meantime, the exercises that remind me that I'm weak -- I'll do those. Maybe I'll even become friends with gentle and vulnerable and make a soft nook for Farmwoman to rest in. 

Human Formation

I've been thinking a lot lately about human formation -- the process of becoming whole, in terms of how one relates to oneself and to other people. 

I thought about this a lot in my 20s also. Before I was Catholic, and for a time afterwards as well, I was a disciple of John and Paula Sandford, who wrote a lot about inner healing, as they called it. John had a phrase that stuck with me, (and I paraphrase, not able now to find the exact quote): One must be fully human before one can be safely spiritual. I believe that phrase covers a lot of the shipwrecking we find in the church today. It also has accounted for a lot of my own spinning of wheels at times when I thought I was making such great spiritual progress.

The fact that Jesus called me to the Catholic Church on Christmas Eve resonated like a gong through my heart for at least 20 solid years (read the story here). Christmas Eve, both theologically and socially, hits on all the points of the Incarnation. Jesus Christ took on human flesh to live a human life with human people, in order to bring us salvation. And He entered my world, my family trauma, my history of feeling barfed up into existence without dignity and purpose, to bring me salvation. Christmas encapsulates all that so well. 

What I already knew theologically in 1991: that Jesus was true God and true man, and died on the cross to take away sin, and that He pours out the Holy Spirit to empower believers -- all took on a dimension I had known how to describe, and had experienced in rudimentary ways. But I had no idea how much more was possible. Jesus set out to bridge theory and reality for me, by introducing me to His Real Presence. You could say His Real Presence was on a search and rescue mission for my real presence. For that, I needed transformation. I needed human formation.

In my early days I had a lot of hatred inside me. I identified as a misanthrope: a hater of mankind. I had no strong bonds to anyone in particular when I hit college age, and I spent three years in deep self-pity and thinking every day about ending my life. I could go on, but suffice it to say life was a mess. 

All this time I was a committed Christian. But I used to hold God in a drawer called Truth. I loved to crawl up into this drawer and nestle up with Truth and feel right. No one could hurt me if ultimately I was right and they were wrong. When I felt lonely or distressed, I crawled into this drawer and comforted myself with these thoughts. Mostly, I felt distressed when I was around other people, whether that was overpowering women with whom I never felt I could connect, or creepy men who I couldn't make go away, or people I wanted to befriend but didn't know how. My conversation skills were limited to academic ideas, and I hated "shallow talk" which was how I saw all interactions with just about everyone.

So I loved my safe Truth drawer. It was a great escape from learning to navigate reality, and to face myself. 

As I said in the beginning, human formation is about relating in a healthy way to oneself and other people, and it is necessary for a healthy spiritual life. God is an expert at meeting us where we are, taking what we present with, and filling that with His grace, ever widening our path beneath us. Always inviting us to more. The more we say yes, the more He will open up in front of us. He has met me in some very weird places. The beautiful thing to me is that He never seemed to be wringing His hands, worrying about me. 

This path of human formation has been long and arduous for me, as I suspect it is for everyone. To me, the worst scenario is not knowing there IS a path forward. The glory of God is man fully alive, said St. Irenaeus. We are fully alive when we allow the Lord to remove all the drawers and become single-hearted, and then turn that one heart totally and completely to Jesus, to love God and neighbor with His own love, and in our own gifting. 

I want to recommend a book on the topic of human formation, and I'll try to write more about it later. Fearless: Abundant Life Through Infinite Love by Margaret Vasquez.