Words, and Hearts, and Saints

Part of my morning prayer routine is invoking the intercession of my prayer team of saints. I have a standard team that has been with me for I-forget-how-many-years, as well as my patron saint that changes every year at the beginning of Advent, and those I've added as I intercede for several specific individuals in my life.

My relationship with my standard team has been evolving, especialy over the last year to two. And by that, I mean that I'm aware of a change of need in what I think of as their "department." Essentially, I'm asking the Lord for different things.

My team consists of several pairs and a triad: St. Teresa of Jesus and St. John of the Cross; St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross (Edith Stein) and St. Therese; Holy Father Elijah, St. John the Baptist, and St. Cecelia; and St. Joseph and our Lady of Mount Carmel. They are my constants.

I consider my triad my "words" department. And as I stop and ponder, the recent changes in my life where my "words department" is involved is somewhat overwhelming to take in. As my reality has changed, my prayer has adjusted to it.

For years I have prayed that my words would become a means through which God's power could be made known. I eventually adjusted that to specify the words that I speak, the words I write, and the words I sing, since that covered three major areas of my life. I changed that to include the words that I think, and the words I meditate on or ruminate on, because I realized the importance of what I let go through my mind. I've now added "the words that I battle with in my mind," because I had to admit that some of the words going through my mind are temptations. They come with an agenda to get me to doubt that I am loved and designed for intimate communion with The Word Himself. And my ultimate petition here is that my words in every category would arise from the place within me where I seek to live this union with God.

Words have always been important to me, but I've realized in the last year especially how trauma had impacted my "voice," making speaking up and speaking out -- in some moments and on some levels -- physically impossible. Big shout out to EMDR therapy for reaching into the depths to heal that. 

I feel like I'm exiting a season of healing and excavation, and entering a season of healing and activation. "Use your words" takes on a whole new meaning, here. "Out of the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaks" is true in many ways. I was in a setting recently where I was told I appeared very confident, facing the prospect of a task that would require meeting strangers at their worst, most vulnerable moments. Do I feel ready for that? Of course not! It's very unsettling. But I can indeed find words there if I have gotten comfortable with my own worst, most vulnerable moments. And frankly, the Lord has been walking me through just that. 

So our words (or lack thereof) show our hearts. Our hearts, in the Lord's hands, are safe, despite their breaking and aching, and all the scary traffic in and out of them. Our words reflect the truth of hearts back to ourselves in ways that can be incredibly hard to swallow. But our heart is exactly where the Lord wishes to meet us, exactly as we are.

Integration

Writing, for me, is often about integration. Integration is a quest towards processing change. I change frequently, and hopefully this goes in a change-for-the-better direction most of the time. I certainly have much in me that needs continued growth; I don't seem to ever run short there. 

The ending of this last term of my spiritual direction course has me looking back over the last four months, which quite frankly feels more like a year if not a few years. And I suppose I might sound like I am just going over and over the same territory in several blog posts, but you know what? It's my blog and I'll write what I want to. 🙂 And what I need to, towards that integration.

Because while in the beginning of the course, and just before it started, I began grappling with my sense of identity. Then, much to my surprise and shock, a fissure opened up in the earth and swallowed whole a central feature on which my identity had rested. And it was gone. My sense of emotional safety was slammed, and interiorly I involuntarily went time traveling into young adulthood. But at the same time, I was given a precious gift of safety personified, which helped me process this identity-rending. One of these "interior meetings" I had was a first time re-visit of a significant trauma I experienced as an adult. I had filed it away as "things I will pretend never happened." Yeah, honey, it doesn't work that way. 

In the course of time, I decided I really, really liked the taste of emotional safety I had, and I knew that I needed to go to counseling, because it was a contagion I really wanted to possess me whole. And I kept meeting areas within that were frozen and not capable of freeing up in the face of safety. It took me all the courage I had at the time to make that appointment, but I am so glad I did, because we started EMDR therapy, which is highly effective with trauma. I had thought of my life as "a little rough" but fairly typical. The more I looked at it, I realize I am the poster child of Complex PTSD. But I'm getting ahead of the story.

In early March of this year, one of those EMDR sessions left me feeling absolutely melted like butter inside, where my "inner 4 year old" was concerned. This is how I think of the mental space where I remember things going wrong -- namely, my parents splitting up. And at that point, the little girl was very much at peace, and all was right. And then another fissure opened up in the earth, and my safety personified was swallowed whole, and was gone. 

Now this -- this -- was a problem. In hindsight, on the prior occasions when I had some premonition of this happening, I associated it with my death. And in the interior landscape I'm exploring, this now makes 100% valid sense. Because the Lord was now going down deeper, as I entered into this study of and spiritual partnership with St. Therese of the Child Jesus, the Lord was going into the recesses of my soul before any memories found words, and had instead only feelings. What I've learned about trauma is that it is not so much the thing that happened as the reaction is evoked which never got completed. The emotional response that stopped short of the running or yelling or crying or verbalizing or whatever would have completed the interior signal that fired when the thing happened. And when something very primordial is threatened, and a trauma is triggered, the brain essentially cannot tell what year it is. The brain reacts exactly the same way when the initial trauma occurred. Until such a time that the thing can be completed, dealt with, addressed. One of the things about EMDR is that it doesn't work very well when a person is in the throes of something in real time. It requires a memory you can access while in real time you are basically stable. So for a bunch of weeks there, we didn't do any EMDR and I labored through it all the hard way: by living.

But the Lord knew what He was doing, pairing me up with St. Therese, my SDFP friends, and the program itself. All I can say is, the Lord wanted to get to the bottom of my childhood trauma, and He did. I recognize that everything about how I have lived has been effected. I wrote a paper on St. Therese and the Little Way which has revolutionized my understand of God as my Father and of myself as His child, and vulnerability as the way of holiness. It will crush you to death, like Jesus on the cross -- yes. But Jesus rose from the dead, and cannot die anymore. In Him we live a resurrected life.

Something a little strange happened while I prayed during the throes of the worst of these weeks. I clocked about 250k steps in about a month of prayer walks. I kept having this image that greatly disoriented me, of a vast green field. Everywhere I looked, I could see nothing but grass. No trees, no birds, no buildings, no people. For several days when I prayed, I had this image. It was deeply bewildering to me, and I kept telling the Lord, "There's nothing here! There's no one!" And after a few days of this, I suddenly realized, Wait. That's not true. I'm here. It almost felt wrong for me to notice I existed. Like, as I prayed. In this space that was supposed to be sacred and very, very important, to recognize and acknowledge that I existed, because I was the one seeing this grassy field. It was akin to a feeling of guilt. And honestly, one of the core beliefs I carried out of my childhood was that the world would be better off if I didn't exist. This was the beginning of the Lord re-orienting me to truth.

I will have more to integrate in the future, I know. But for now, I know safety in a new way: it lives in me, and I care for it and protect it for myself. It means some things have to change about how I've lived -- but so much has changed already, so it no longer feels impossible. God's care is something I am learning to become aware of daily; to see it, acknowledge it. I don't have to beg for it or wonder if He'll follow through. I do have to believe it when it shows up, though, which is usually much quicker than I'm prepared for. I'm learning to show up for myself in things like making goals and accomplishing them, so that I'm not either feeling like I have to be a workaholic or that I'm lazy and wasting my life (which I've usually felt at the same time). I am the Lord's to guide and care for. I'm in good hands. 

Thoughts from Today's Gospel: Jesus Heals the Paralytic

Today's gospel reading is Matthew 9:1-8, the account of Jesus healing the paralytic. (If you are like me, when you hear this it is hard not to picture how The Chosen rendered this scene. That's helpful, because it is almost word-for-word, with imaginative context added.)

What strikes me in the text is, first, three points of action. It says, "Jesus saw their faith." Their faith was expressed in pressing in to make a way to get the man to Jesus. Matthew's gospel actually omits the detail that they let him down through the roof; Mark and Luke pick this up. Then, Jesus commands an action: "Rise, pick up your stretcher, and go home." His healing entails the man doing something, not just feeling it in his heart or embracing a new attitude. Jesus is more concrete than that. Then the last point of action was the crowd's response: "[T]hey were struck with awe and glorified God who had given such authority to men." They saw Jesus' action, and it landed like a seed of transformation in their souls. Some of them may have walked away from witnessing this without ever deciding to follow Jesus or believe in Him. But for others, it may have been a turning point that changed how they lived from then on. We readers, with them, are left with that grappling.

Another point. Jesus speaks boldly in a way that reveals His divinity to the crowd, but He isn't provoking the observing crowd or goading them on. He speaks that way because He is in an intimate exchange with the paralyzed man. Someone, recognizing his utter need, has come to Jesus. That's when Jesus acts in power. It's for the human need of the vulnerable. Jesus says to him, "Courage, child, your sins are forgiven." 

And what kind of response does this evoke from the scribes? (Luke throws in the Pharisees.) Accusations of blasphemy. Their thoughts were not on salvation. Their hearts did not quiver at the prospect of forgiveness and reconciliation with God. They were judging Jesus by comparing what He did to themselves, as if He were just a man. Self rules, for them. And the text says Jesus knows this and calls out their "evil thoughts." Why are your hearts not fixed on God? Why are they stuck on yourselves? That's the definition of evil, here.  

And so the work of healing that Jesus does has two different effects. It is a work of salvation for the paralytic, which evokes praise and awe from those who witness and accept Jesus' testimony that this miracle confirms His authority -- from God -- to forgive sins, even though theologically this is a big pill to swallow at the time. It is a work of consternation for those stuck on themselves. It calls to everyone to make a decision about which camp you are in. Do I brush off Jesus' power, not out of a desire to reject God, but maybe because I lack the faith to believe His power could do anything in my life? Brushing it off is brushing it off, regardless. Do I feel the awe and cultivate that awe, and start thinking about bringing all the stretchers and paralytics I know (and am) to the Lord in faith?