Unpacking from SDFP, Intensive 1: Tribalism, Turnips, and the King

I'm home from the first "intensive" of the Carmelite Spiritual Direction program, and it's time to start unpacking the experience. 

I didn't go with a lot of mentally mapped out expectation. I wanted to simply arrive and let it happen, though I admit I went through a spate of anxiety a few days before as I packed my suitcase. The worries that popped up were strange ones for me. Along with the whole bit about flying (and the fact that my flight out was on September 11) I had tribal worries about the architecture of the retreat center. What did it communicate? Could I trust these people? I recount that not to engage tribalism, but to notice that it was surfacing. This was an approach I employed a LOT during the week. It's an entry point for a contemplative gaze to listen -- first -- to what is going on interiorly, and suspend judgment for a time. 

The word wasn't in vogue when I was converting to Catholicism -- tribalism -- but it was a reality I grappled with as I tried to make sense of finding my place in a completely foreign religious landscape. It stayed with me later, too. I remember telling a woman on a parenting/homeschool chat group when my kids were small that I loved being able to label myself (unschooler, crunchy, etc). She, a more experienced parent, had been saying that she found labels limiting and unhelpful. But I was feeling my vulnerability and helplessness, and labels helped give me a sense of myself, even if it was exterior, borrowed social currency. Labels gave me a sense of belonging, a built-in sense of which way to stand in the world, and to identify my opposition. 

The day came, and my anxieties faded into the prayers of the CACS team and other friends, and I was totally at peace with the flight, and guess what? The building didn't poison my soul! All these things were total non-issues, externally. I settled into the experience with gentle anticipation.

In a word, I come away from the week having seen a depth to the term "contemplative" that I had not experienced before. This is the huge Carmelite theme. It's a bit like we hiked out into a plain, away from the city, and I looked up and saw with my own eyes, the Mountain. Mount Carmel. The mountain of contemplation. It's very different from studying geography or soil samples or the mathematics or physics or tectonics involved. It's the experience of: there it is. And here we are. And God is calling you to become a sherpa. 

And the process there involves purification, vulnerability, cooperation with the Holy Spirit, and some good old fashioned Teresian determined determination. 

At one point, we had a long three-session talk on the wounds of abuse and how spiritual direction can aid in individuals receiving healing. I have to admit, I came out of those sessions affected. Wounds that I was not aware of living with and that I couldn't quite name made their presence known. Even from my interior place of relative peace, I realized a yet deeper, gauzy level of anxiety operating in me, habitually causing me to subtly stick my fingers in my spiritual ears and sing "LALALALA" to keep God at arm's length from me. 

One thing that supported this process was the strangeness of having no remnant of my "normal" life with me (except that which I carried on my computer). No one was expecting me to lead, to be in charge of things, no one was greeting me as Senior Church Lady with desired connections and information. No demands placed on me. I remembered that I am, by nature, quiet. I don't speak first to people, and if I'm not leading something or feeling responsibly connected to those who are, I naturally just step away and expect to be totally unnoticed. It's been ages since I've felt unnoticed. And, ooh. Feeling unnoticed stirs up some painful emotions.

Also, every time I leave Steubenville I feel a bit like I just fell off the turnip truck. Surrounded by doctors, psychologists, professionals of various stripes, and people who clearly could afford to be there, I found myself grappling with the questions about "what I do" and other things that I spend zero time thinking about when I am living my normal life. All week long when I mentioned my hometown, people asked me if I teach or work at the University. All I could say was that it's been a long time since anyone paid me for doing anything. By the standards of this world, my family and I are powerless and insignificant. Conversations around this didn't steal my peace, but they did surface interior things that just surprised me, because they are in the category of so close to me I can't see them.

Humility is the most necessary virtue for spiritual growth, and I recognize that God has built in a ton of opportunity for growth into my life. That's a win. 

During one of our practium sessions of group spiritual direction (a totally new concept to me) I was overwhelmed by this sentence: "At the heart of the Carmelite Rule there is a call for us to commit ourselves to Jesus..." Actually, that wasn't even the whole sentence, but that's as far as I got into the set of readings we were given for reflection.  This wasn't just a reading to me; it was an experience. I experienced... Jesus... calling to me. (He noticed me.) The image that came to me was Aslan from the Chronicles of Narnia. There's an exchange where Lucy asks if Aslan, a symbol of Christ, is safe.

"Safe?" said Mr. Beaver."Who said anything about safe? 'Course he isn't safe. But he's good. He's the King, I tell you."

Mr. Tumnus also says, "He's wild, you know. Not a tame lion."

I realized, I do not control, in this relationship with Jesus. Jesus is not my pet, nor my lapdog. And when He is present like that, you don't stop to go through the intellectual question of whether God is real because it is self evident. You move beyond that to a stance of He is the King, and He is calling me to a commitment to Him, personally. I can see that He means to cut through some things I've learned to find my identity in, and to re-establish, re-root my identity more profoundly in Him alone. 

Another key experience for me was of the Oxford Carmelite friars. I've followed them now for a few years, and participated in other things they've offered online. I don't yet know how to capture what has attracted me to them and garnered my respect, but I think it has to do with an answer to a question someone put to two of them at dinner one night. They said the Church in England is not polarized. I feel there is a depth of spiritual pursuit that I witness through them. They are Carmelites, so that means they are living the charism of the order. But in contrast, I feel the Church at large in the US bears witness to being blown and tossed by the winds, as St. Paul writes about in Ephesians 4:

And his gifts were that some should be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, some pastors and teachers, for the equipment of the saints, for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ, until we all attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to mature manhood, to the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ; so that we may no longer be children, tossed to and fro and carried about with every wind of doctrine, by the cunning of men, by their craftiness in deceitful wiles. Rather, speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ, from whom the whole body, joined and knit together by every joint with which it is supplied, when each part is working properly, makes bodily growth and upbuilds itself in love. (4:11-16)

I will have a lot of reading and work to give myself to over the next months and years. Please pray for me that the Lord may have a good return on His investment in me. This should prove an adventure.  

Making Peace with Intensity

Trying to reflect in writing about the training I'm receiving is a little bit like drawing, for a moment a eyedropper full of water out of a fountain, looking at it, then putting it back in. It's not possible or desireable to look at everything at once, but I take this one bit that stood out to me and pull at it a bit (to completely mix my metaphors) to see what's inside.

So today in talking about St. John of the Cross, there was a comment made about looking at emotional dissonances that can come up, and the question of whether one might attempt to dissipate strong internal movements. The context of course is prayer. I'm there with God, God is moving, causing something in me to move as well. How do I respond to that? 

Am I, for example, attempting to "calm down" the movement that churns up in me. Dissipate it. The context here was that sometimes we learn certain survival techniques to deal with woundedness. Or maybe we see them modeled by others. I remember, for example, how my Mom would stress-clean the kitchen sometimes when she was obviously upset. That can be a way of letting off steam so that that energy has a constructive rather than destructive place to go. 

The idea is, though, that what can begin as a survival mode response can become a coping mechanism, and now it is actually not necessary. I'm out of survival mode, but I'm stuck in coping behaviors. But now it is God who is moving, and I'm trying to "cope" with this as if it is something to control, something to escape. Do I then avoid the silence, the solitude. Do I habitually skuttle about as if to keep myself "safe" from God?

And like little spring crocuses, I see these little heads of things popping up that shows me I do in fact have points of this.

One of these is in fact about writing. 

But really it is about my real or perceived intensity, and whether I like that or whether it is good or not. 

I have a clear memory of going up for prayer at my charismatic fellowship in my early 20s, a Vesuvius of emotions roiling over as I first began to stop jamming them down inside with equal pressure. I was a disconcerting sight to the deacon who was going to pray for me, and he said something, gently, to the equivalent of "Ok, so before you go getting all intense here..." He was trying to calm me down. I remember that I took it as being shut down. Sure, I was a mess, but I took away that I should keep trying, at least a little, to push that stuff inside, at least so that other people would be more comfortable with me. 

I recall this without judgment. I can see myself telling someone the same thing. But objectively it wasn't what I needed to hear.

I also remember for many years around that time and after, if I was with someone pastoral having a good cry, the other person would tell me they could see I really wasn't done crying yet. I didn't empty out; I merely managed to turn off the flow.

In the course of my life I recall a good half dozen or so people to whom I have written letters by dipping my proverbial pen into the inkwell of my actual soul, like writing in blood -- or at least sweat and tears. In a more artistic sense, for a long time I wrote songs on a rather regular basis, and sometimes (forgive the indelicate expression) writing it down almost had the sense of scurrying off to the bathroom to have a huge dump. Like, this is coming out of me Right Now. In an even more generic sense, I remember sitting down to write something -- it may have even been a blog post here many years ago -- and in my hyper-pious sense, I paused to ask God for his words as I wrote. It dawned on me: what I needed to be looking for was my words. To access my heart. To write from my own dignity.

All of these in one way or another have been exercises in vulnerability, to myself, to another. In the case of writing to another, there was a point at which I had to realize that I would end up in total frustration if I did not realize the true aim of my life, my writing, my everything, is this thing I wrote about in the last post: to become more responsive to God. I have had a long road from absolutely dreading interaction with other people and avoiding it like the plague, to clinging to them like a leech that had to be pried off at great mutual pain.

I am healed of this. Selah.

But now I do see a little crocus popping up, and if I sense God moving and I start to feel these movements of intensity I might say, oh, let's read Facebook. Let's play a game online. Maybe go find something to eat. 

Could it be possible that for all these years the Lord was forming me to turn to Him with this capacity He created me with, so that He can show me what it does and Who it is for?

Writing about Writing

I'm spending some days away at a monastery on a kind of working retreat. It's an intensive training, really, formation in spiritual direction. I'm working towards certification to become a spiritual director. Since writing is such a huge way for me to process what's happening interiorly, I want to engage thoughts as they are fresh, here.

At this very moment I don't have a lot of time, so just one preliminary thought. 

Yesterday one of the sessions was about the requirement to keep a learning journal. The process was explained to us thusly. As we do spiritual reading, or listen to a talk, we should first note what strikes, puzzles, repels, or draws me. Then, ask, why is that happening. The next step, which may very well happen later, and my actually happen while writing about it, is the "Oh, now I get it" moment; piecing together why exactly that stirring is happening and what it is saying to me.

In my notes, I simply called number three the "naru hodo" moment. 

And I realize I have been doing this for almost 20 years on this blog. 

The presenter went on to give various points to remember, including: be as honest as you can; don't worry about feeling like you can't write or don't have anything to say at the moment; don't fear navel gazing; this is a form of conversation between you and God; face your fear of exposure, or use that as a starting point. (And through these I was interiorly nodding, saying, yep, extremely familiar territory).

But the main point she made was, remember that the purpose of doing this is to grow in being responsive to God. And to allow God to love you through writing.

I have sometimes dismissed the idea of writing as a form of prayer, even though I do do this from time to time. I dismissed it because it felt so natural, so easy. I am realizing that I have a habitual tendency to carry around heavier weights than is necessary. To feel that virtue lies in constant struggle and difficulty. Certainly there is a virtue involved in activating my will, but I see it's possible to get this out of whack. I think I'll be getting this put back in whack.

Writing has helped me get in touch with my own heart since I was a child. I have also had many "naru hodo" moments of understanding better what the Holy Spirit is saying, or at least in making room to hear. But my primary life relationship is with God, not with my anxiety or even with myself. I see this shifting also.

Time to go to the next session.