Hiking, Love, and Transformation

Eight years ago, I hiked in the Tatra mountains. Come to think of it, it was exactly this time of year I was there. The scenery was beautiful, but it was an emotionally wrenching time. Also, hiking sounds glamorous but it was grueling. At one point, my then-11 year daughter asked me why in the world we were doing this. I told her that at some point in her life, someone would use the metaphor of climbing a mountain, and this would teach her what that really means.

St. John of the Cross famously uses the metaphor of climbing Mount Carmel for growth in the spiritual life. Since he traveled all over Spain by foot, even though he was no soft modern, unaccostomed to physical effort, I'm sure he fully intended the implication that the human effort part of spiritual growth isn't easy.

One thing I remember doing often on the Tatra hike was stopping for rest and looking back down the path I had just come up, and then looking ahead to how much farther to our destination. I took some photos, fully thinking that when I got back home I would appreciate their beauty. At the time I was just trying to catch my breath, wipe some of the sweat off my face, give my aching feet and legs a momentary break, not think about whether I was going to need to pee in a nearby bush nor about the painful relationship issues that were clanging around in my heart, and will myself to move forward again. 

Today I had reason to pause interiorly and look down the mountain I've been climbing spiritually. I was challenged by the reading we studied in my Carmelite community formation yesterday, where St. Therese talks about how she learned what the Lord means by His command to love one another "as I have loved you." She talked growing in specific, active acts of charity for two particular Sisters that she could not stand. 

I've read Story of a Soul now countless times, and of course the Lord's command to love is not a new thing to me. But I was both convicted by this, and led to take this particular pause on the mountain and look back down and my lived reality, in order to start back up differently.

What I saw clearly in looking back is that in my early life I developed a thick, defensive shell against the people around me. I was a well of pain, and felt I personally was the cause of every broken relationship and every moral failing around me. The defensive shell kept me from feeling my own pain and perceived failures, and kept other people at a distance so they could do me no more harm. Both the well and the shell grew with me, never quite adequate for my need. I was constanly anxious to pull myself in.

God was at work by His grace, even as I was at work strictly regulating human contact. He had a much easier time reaching directly into my soul to bring me what consolation I would allow in. Increasingly, he would use the ministrations of people, and so by the time I was an adult I had let a couple of people into my circle of trust. Mostly, these were people I did not actually interact with except by an exchange of letters or a visit every couple of years. But they were like pilot lights to me that kept me alive. That was all I allowed. Mostly I learned to endure people, or to cope until I could escape their presence and actually relax and breathe. Hah, who am I kidding. Relax? I escaped their presence and crumpled into an anxiety I never even let myself feel. 

The process of grace transforming my heart made its steady progress, despite my lack of understanding (mostly) of the problem or the cure's path.

A key moment in this hike was clearly visible today. I remembered a crisis conversation I had with my pastor and a small group of people where I had managed to create a lot of hurt. My pastor simply pointed out that God called me to love everyone equally. I felt as if he was asking me to juggle boulders, because just then my felt choice was between hating everyone and allowing God to help me authentically love one human being in my faulty way. "Loving everyone," if I was honest about it, was nice Christian gibberish to me.

He had the right answer. But it was lightyears from my experience, because I was still operating in the mode of allowing, possibly, one person at a time into my trust. Except this time, it was a real person. It reminds me of a scene from some TV show I saw ages ago where a psychopath would steal female corpses and tie them to a table in a freezing room, pretending to have dinner with them, and then he finally kidnapped a living woman he admired and tried to do the same with her. He saw this as great personal growth. He was the only one with this perspective. 😏

When I was in Poland, same trip as my Tatra hiking experience, and a few years after that difficult moment of counsel from my pastor, I had an experience of being prayed with by some Polish-speaking women. One paused as she was praying, and said to me in English, "God calls you to love everyone." The Lord had said the same thing to me in prayer a few days before. This is how patiently God works our transformation. As soon as we are ready to open our hearts for more, He's there with what we need.

And as I climbed the Tatras, I struggled with a different real-life relationship, and felt the grueling process of handing over to the Lord the hard-fought trust in my friend that I had developed, and my fear that He would leave me, that His love wasn't real, wasn't enough, that my vision of the world that caused me to build shells and stare into wells in the first place were all there was to reality. I was trying to choose this loving everyone, or as the Carmelites call it, chastity. In reality it was a beautiful moment, but it was surrender at the point of exhaustion.

And then there's today. 

I am free, now. I came back from Poland with the unshakeable confidence and knowledge that God loves me. And a lot more has happened more recently than that. Today I know that the love God pours into me is eternal and infinite, and I do not need to bind my prey. We are all made with the same design, and we even all tend to malfunction in the same ways. I am called to love everyone with the Love God pours through me. And this is tested by those who are most disagreeable to me and where my natural bend towards self-protection activates. Like St. Therese, I can choose with my will to allow the Lord to love through me. And in fact, I am called to it. 

That's the thing, today. I'm free, and I get to choose what I do with my freedom. It's not just that loving everyone is possible or that it is a good idea. I am called, daily, to make decisions to do and to choose the loving thing. It's so easy for this to get bogged down and mired in psychology and just human evaluations of what is best and reasonable. But, going before the Lord and simply suiting up for growth in virtue and acts of charity is the key. My former pastor used to always say, "At least you can pray for them." I think I always heard that as a cop out. But to sincerely pray for a person you don't like to deal with is definitely an act of charity, not an act of dismissal. And I realize I need never be afraid, because I am never on my own doing this. It is not me who loves. I know, by looking down that mountain, that I just DO NOT HAVE a natural capacity for loving people. God had to reconstruct everything in me that is involved in loving. The fact that I do love is evidence to me that God has transformed my soul.

When I got to the top of our hike in the Tatras, we weren't, of course, at the top of the world. The mountain went on to the right and to the left. In fact, it was considered just a starting point for the more strenuous hikes. What I had climbed was labeled "Family Friendly hiking," meaning even children did it. I literally saw ladies in heels doing my path. I wonder what it would feel like to go do it again. By the time we got back to our cabin that evening, I could not walk because both of my knees were like water. 

This also teaches me something about the spiritual life. The small things we do (or avoid) every day impact greatly who we become. 

Let's start today and be diligent in allowing the Lord to love us, and to love through us.

Ponderings from Dear Master, Part Two

Fortunately I marked for myself the second piece that struck me as I was reading Ponderings from Dear Master, which I had intended to write about. I'm forgetful that way. In fact, one of my primary purposes for writing is to be sure that I return to things that I know I have more to glean from, like marking an unmined vein of gold. 

Here is the line, from page 15 of Susa Muto's book:

My faults were at war with God's faith in me, but God was the victor on this battlefield. His perfect virtues gained the upper hand over my imperfections.

This quote captures something simple but central to my experience. 

In January, I tried to write about the moment I had a revelation about this phrase: "[m]y faults were at war with God's faith in me." With God's faith in me.  Here's what I wrote then: 

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. 

My faults were at war with God's faith in me. 

Galatians chapter 3 says this:

Now before faith came, we were confined under the law, kept under restraint until faith should be revealed. So that the law was our custodian until Christ came, that we might be justified by faith. But now that faith has come, we are no longer under a custodian; for in Christ Jesus you are all sons of God, through faith. (Gal. 3:23-26, RSV-SCE)

 What Paul was saying about the point in salvation history when the Jesus entered it seems also to have application to the path of spiritual development. Maybe a better way of putting that is that we go through stages of purification of our interiority after baptism; it doesn't all happen at once. That's actually the whole basis of purgatory and of "growth" in the spiritual life. God has a schedule, and our job in partnering with Him is to continue to say yes, intelligently, to His designs for our transformation. And the "intelligently" part requires that we have accurate information about who God is and what He wants. His goal is that we become partakers in the divine nature (2 Peter 1:4). He is our loving Father (Mt. 6:9). We can need decades of meditation on these truths before they break through into our experience of them with God Himself. Or, He can communicate them to us in an instant, or by any combination of means. 

"Faith" in an incorrect understanding of God clearly is never going to be born of and fueled by the Holy Spirit. I will always be "trying to believe." Say for example that underneath my formal training in catechism, I hold a rather primal belief that God is secretly disappointed that I'm a human woman with physical senses, intellect, and desires. Say further that my religious training left me linking that which is intrinsically human with that which is intrinsically evil. What I'm left with, as an adult, then is that at best, God tolerates me, even though I'm bombarded with homilies about God's love for me. I will be "trying to behave" according to standards of a God who finds my humanity rather disgusting, all the while I'm "trying to believe" that He actually loves me. Or, maybe I will completely buy that God does hate transgressors and they deserve fierce condemnation. They'll just always be someone who's not me, because if I can prop myself up to look better than some vile sinner, that will help me "try to believe" in my faith.

The Holy Spirit will always and only lead us to embrace the truth. The more deeply we are able to tell Him, "I don't care what the truth is or what it costs; I want You" then the easier time He will have in leading us. 

False beliefs, lies about the image of God or His will for us, can in fact twine themselves so closely around good things that we cannot see them. We simply cannot save ourselves. We will have blind spots. Such a blind spot I encountered in January.

And I found that I was fighting against God's faith in me. Wow. That almost sounds audacious. I was trying to believe that needed me to be restrained, like by law, like a criminal in handcuffs, like a woman in a burqa, like the toughest Bill Gothard devotee. This was all humming at a level far below my conscious thought. But when I had the experience of going to confession, and then coming across that one line in the Catechism as directed by my penace, I encountered the living power of God. BAM! "God does not want to impose the good, but wants free beings."

In other words, faith has come. You are a son [daughter] of God by faith in Christ Jesus. To the core. Or at least to the deeper core than yesterday. 

The battle was what I was trying to do because I believed it was my Christian duty, my Christian battle even, vs what the Holy Spirit wanted for me. 

And as I intuited then, that exchange has brought tremendous peace, happiness, stability, certainty, and freedom to my heart. And has stripped away so much overgrowth of "should," or self-imposed obligation, that I didn't even realize I had. 

I remember writing to a friend in the 80s that my life on the outside always looks about the same, but inside, my life is like a three ring circus. I've realized that is because God calls me to be a contemplative, and He's been wrecking and building and renovating and designing in me for years. It is actually an exciting, adventurous life. 

Ponderings from Dear Master, Part One

 I want to draw out and mull over two points that struck me as I was reading the other day. The book involved is Dear Master: Letters on Spiritual Direction Inspired by Saint John of the Cross. It's a clunky title, and the premise of the book, objectively speaking, is a little strange to me. But I leave that aside to focus on these two bits that helped me clarify two episodes of my interior journey.

The first point is on page 4, where Susan Muto writes (in the voice of St. John of the Cross to his directee Ana Penalosa): "...let us be...like the Samaritan woman, who forgot her water jar as soon as she tasted the living waters offered to her by the Lord (Jn. 4:28)."

First, this admonition implies we have a choice to forget something. And having a choice to forget something requires the ability to distinguish between or among things. The "thing" in this passage is natural water versus the living water which Jesus gave this woman through their encounter. Ponder with me on this a moment.

The woman came to the well to get water. This was a normal, daily task, and she may not have been very mindful about what she was there to get, being in the sort of auto-pilot mode in which we frequently live. Functioning practically, but not very tuned in. Our primary energy expenditure is on some kind of survival, the endless cycle of trying to keep impending doom from overtaking life. For her it may have been social rejection, a shame and identity of worthlessness that broke her heart. She'd lost at least five lovers. This defined her life.

Jesus came to give her access to a very different interior well, one that could meet needs that screamed so loud she could not hear them, one that would redefine her life. Immersion into the very interior of God that He was coming to reveal. And he pierces from the normal daily task, into her hidden interior, finally into the mystery of Trinitarian life. All by talking with her. 

She feels the power of the mystery even from His first words. Why are you talking with me? This is so different from my normal life. This jars me out of auto-pilot and suddenly I'm aware again that I'm a person. 

A lot of things get stirred up in her: old issues she needs to understand. Hurts that are real, but at a safe distance, like the struggles between Samaria and Israel. 

Then her personal heart is pierced, and her longing for The One who will come is laid bare. And when The One is longed for, He answers immediately: I who am speaking with you, is He. 

In the gospel, she then drops her jars and runs and tells everyone. But in my experience, where this drama of encounter did not take place in a ten minute conversation, but over years, this part looked a little different. And it seems that this author implies that St. John of the Cross would say this is a real step in the spiritual journey: choosing to drop the jar, and seeing the difference between the natural and the supernatural gift from God.

Because (indulge me in some imagination here, a moment) what if the Samaritan woman had gotten confused at that point between realizing she has just met the Messiah, and instead realizing she had just met a man who finally understood her. What if she had not had this instant conversion, touching into the heart of the Trinity and finding her ultimate purpose fulfilled, and instead embraced the penultimate healing of her sad history of relating with men who either died, or left her, or repudiated her, or however it was the she had gone through her sad history that now left her devaluing herself with Lover Six who wouldn't even marry her. What if it took her a minute to stop at the way station of psychological and emotional healing, and maybe in the process even became inordinately attached to the Jesus of Her Dreams as potential Number Seven as she reveled in the purely natural gift of knowing that human being that she forgot she was, was actually created by God to be loved, not as chattel? 

The beauty of the real Scriptural episode is that the grace of God present through this conversation with Jesus was so powerful that she left completely changed. Grace can and does operate differently, as God wills it, for different purposes. This woman would not have time for years of processing; Jesus was moving in power during His ministry and He had a world-transforming Church to establish. 

And He still does, but now we live in the long haul phase, where He gives the world witnesses to  transforming interior power, like the fire in wood that St. John was so fond of talking about. 

For one who starts out deeply wounded and mired in indignity, there needs to be the step of first even being able to appreciate the natural gift, the natural state God intends for human beings. Children are not meant for abuse or neglect; adults are not meant to be slaves, handing their lives over to anxiety, job, debt, the expectations of others. Religion is not meant to be fearful or grudging or guilty submission to rules and rituals. There is a natural wholeness into which Jesus desires to bring us by freeing us from the idolatry of sin and breaking the bonds of the world over us. 

But wait, there's more!

We weren't just created to not be used and abused. Re-creation in Christ calls us to union with the Trinity, to divinization, to become glorious. The supernatural gift from God causes us to drop our natural water jars, ah, but causes us to see that there's a choice there. And at and the same time the choice is such a no-brainer that it is hardly a quandry. Because finally, love compels us. Love has pierced into our old, broken identity, healed it, and made us sons in the Son, the spouse of the Beloved. The living water springs up inside me, and I don't need to fear being without Him again.  

I guess this says to me that it is so important to know that the interior life, the life of prayer, the life of relationship with God has somewhere to go. To me, this is the vital importance of the Carmelite charism. I probably should write about that in its own post. Suffice it to say St. Teresa's seven mansions, St. John's journey up the Ascent of Mount Carmel, these tell us we don't just come to faith in Jesus and then wait to die. There's growth, there's progression, there's a journey to undertake. God has adventures waiting for us. There's somewhere to go, something to look forward to. And you aren't lost, and you aren't alone if you are somewhere along this path.

Well, point two will have to wait for another time.

Traveling Retreat

I just returned from just under a week of travel, so it's time to unpack. My suitcases were emptied yesterday, but this unpacking is for the interior experience.

This trip really wasn't supposed to be a retreat, in the sense that a retreat is a thing you go to with others who are seeking God, and you listen to conferences and process the information you hear. To be honest, several of the formal retreats I've been on in the last several years have felt more frustrating than fruitful. Like I was always waiting for something to happen, trying to engage my interiority but not finding the connecting point in my changed surroundings, or talks, etc. On this recent trip I did in fact have that occasion to go to another place interiorly as well as exteriorly. And I was able to spend most of one day at the Shrine of Mary Help of Christians, better known as Holy Hill, the Carmelite basilica and the heart of my Carmelite Province. 

I had a mixture of facing anxiety and nostalgia. And for once, these met and gave me a practical take-away. I realized that I cannot always take away my anxiety or grow away from it by myself. Really, the thought that I can or should is a cause for anxiety in and of itself. The realization that Mary is the Help of Christians, and therefore my help, too, is a relief. We disciples of the Lord are here to help each other. And Mary can steer me in such a way that suddenly the grace of the Lord is close at hand. Because she knows how to take my hand and draw me through the crowding thoughts in my mind and make it all seem easy.

I realize that God has my needs at heart, and He wants me to have His needs at heart. Anxiety clogs that with so many other things, taking up so many other jobs, pressures, concerns, frustations, imaginary scenarios, etc etc... I am faced regularly with things I can't control, and I can believe that because I am not in control, that horrible things are going to happen. Case in point: yesterday, the Mass I attended got a late start because they were waiting on a pilgrim bus at the shrine. I had picked that location because it was going to be feasible for me to reach home before the post office would close for the day, and I had books to ship. I noticed the moment I was in, and instead of frothing over with frustration, I entrusted my need to the Lord and offered the difficulty for the spiritual good of all those present. It was a little bit of a battle, but I realized that right there was The Point of why I pray for growth in virtue. It all turned out fine, and I was at the post office with time to spare. It made me see how entrusting my needs to the Lord keeps me free to focus on the needs of the people around me instead of on myself, and keeps me from adding to the misery in the world by my attitude, grumbling, harsh words, rage, etc.

God is working on freeing my heart for the bigger picture of life, too. In my parish, I am like a big fish in a very little fishbowl. The fishbowl is to a great degree being created by my own attitude, but I realize it isn't healthy for me or anyone. An attitude adjustment is in order, giving me more room to breathe, and allowing my environment also to change without internalizing some kind of threat from it all. Growth and change are both necessary and inevitable, and God is called a gardener for good reason. I'll let Him carry on with general management of my universe. 

I also spent a good chunk of one day with my Mom's cousin Jane. Jane's parents were both deaf, and she spent a good deal of her life interpreting for them whenever there was a family function, since none of the extended family learned ASL. I recognized from my youngest days that there was a totally different way of communication in her family than, say, with my grandparents, aunt and uncle, and my Mom. They were outgoing and made great efforts to communicate with everyone. Spending the afternoon with Jane and her husband this time made me realize how much they are both story-tellers. They love to share details, and love to hear details, but not in the way I have experienced with some people. They do not tell stories to wall themselves off or to cling to the chance to be heard or exit isolation. They speak to build community. I happened to see a thing on Facebook right after I spent time with them, and it hit the nail on the head. Of course I cannot find it now, but I believe it was a quote from Henri Nouwen that talked about speaking to build relationships, to form community, to welcome others. Like laying down a path from the heart and then encouraging, asking questions, showing interest, that welcomes the conversation partners to do the same. It's like verbal hospitality. Boundaries kept and respect shown, but openness that creates a place for peace, like seats around a campfire. I want to grow in doing this myself. It was lovely.

I decided I never want to live in a big city again. I also love summer nights and summer mornings, and daylight in general. Streets where I live are unbelievably narrow. When did it become socially acceptable for an employee to use the phrase "f***ing stupid" with a customer as a way of commiserating? Travel is good for the soul. Solitude is like oxygen to me. Quiet country roads are so beautiful. I treat my dead ancestors like stars in one of my favorite dramas, and it is enjoyable to me to visit where they are buried and learn details about their lives that even they themselves probably found boring. Rushing is a symptom of anxiety. 

These things and more I have thought.

And now, to live accordingly. 

PS: The photo shows an open field which used to hold the old apartment house where I lived for five years, and the building in which I worked from 1989-1990. 19th and Wisconsin, in Milwaukee.