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. 

Every Ending is a Beginning

My heart is full. Today was the major ending of my Spiritual Direction Formation Program. There are a few more minor endings; two more things to hand in, two more meetings. Then finalizing of grades in September and the graduation pilgrimage in October. But today was the last time for meeting as the large group online. The last formation sessions. The first goodbyes.

And one theme of the day was how every ending is a beginning. 

And like the program has been, consistently, there was the structured theme and the theme that bubbled up during the discussions. So much gratitude. So many reports of how the course has absolutely transformed lives and has ran parallel to huge life upheavals.

During these two years (26 months, if you count from the time of my initial interview for joining), I've experienced a lot of endings and beginnings, none of which I saw coming. As I've been saying to my cohort for the last few months, there has been the formation course, and then there's been the Lord's formation work. Today I heard that this was a common experience for many. In May of 2024 I would not have believed that my journey would have taken the path that it has. But for both the sorrows and joys of it, I am extremely grateful. The Lord looked at my life and smiled and set about a process of transformation that I could not have dreamed up, even though I see all of my dreams reflected in it. For me it has been proof that He knows me, that He is good, that He is all powerful, and that He sees the burdens I have struggled to carry without yielding to His help for way, way, way too long. 

One thing stated today that more or less cinched up everything for me was this statement about what Carmelite spiritual direction is: It isn't about helping someone figure out which path to take. It is about unveiling the One who leads. Once you see the One who leads, you don't need the map. You trust the One who is leading. 

And that is where I am. Spatially, on the map of my life, to be honest, there's plenty I don't see about exactly where I am going. But I know Who is leading the way. And my job is to sing along with the Sister Act choir -- I Will Follow Him. No matter where He goes. No matter what it asks of me. No matter what anyone else thinks of it. I Will Follow Him. That is true freedom. And that is the only way to accompany people, because that frees me to walk with anyone the Lord brings to me in whatever way He is leading them. 

To journey with people from all over the world, under the leadership of an incredibly faith-filled group of Carmelite friars has been a particular gift. I love my adopted hometown of Steubenville, but it has been a real growth opportunity to have imput from outside of this Catholic bubble. It is wonderful to know that for as long as I've lived in my neighborhood, most of my neighbors have been Catholic and would pray for me in any need. But it is also a joy and a deep, cleansing breath to know that the Holy Spirit is so much bigger than the Us Four and No More feeling a local community can become over the course of years. It has reminded me that the presence of God is not dependent on only certain people or relationships. 

It is easy for me to grieve endings rather than see them as beginnings of a new stage. Life has taught me that. But God has taught me that hope is a theological virtue -- a supernatural gift of God oriented towards what He has in store. A vulnerable stance before new life, in new vistas. "Now to him who is able to accomplish far more than we can ask or imagine, by the power at work within us, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus to all generations, forever and ever. Amen." (Eph. 3:20-21) 

An Unsuspecting Turn Towards Poetry

This morning I was looking in my Liturgy of the Hours book for a Marian hymn and randomly opened to a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins called "My Own Heart Let Me More Have Pity On." 

I was what I suppose you would call dumbfounded by this poem. So many thoughts crowding in, like children eager to see the cool thing and ask a hundred questions about it. 

I've been on a journey lately that has taken a decided turn towards lessons of self-compassion. When these lessons started, I was suspicious of the Holy Spirit. Self-compassion just didn't fit the schema I had unwittingly marinated in for so long. Finding this in my breviary (ok, yes, the same book that also contains Morning Has Broken, which makes me roll my eyes, which possibly also is a fault) made me realize that perhaps I am not the only one that the Holy Spirit has taken through this course. And perhaps, just perhaps, I ought to acknowledge that this has been a holy journey, and treat it accordingly.

That was the first thought.

I thought of how many priests I've heard quote Hopkins in homilies over the years, especially at my first parish, Gesu. Come to think of it, I was suspicious then, too.

Charitable. That word just tumbles out like its own sermon. One does not argue with a call to be charitable. Not even with oneself. 

I thought of how in the Psalms the author is often talking to his own soul just like Hopkins does here. "Let be!" Today this struck me gently, almost playfully, but I know there are other days when I have to say it more sternly.

This line made so much hope rise up in me: "let joy size At God knows when to God knows what." It's like peeling back the normal sarcasm or jadedness to hear the actual truth underneath. Because God does know when and God does know what, and I can trust Him with that.

And then the crescendo for me: "whose smile 's not wrung" -- isn't that just the longing of every human heart. A genuine smile, directed at me. Not forced or contrived or uncomfortable or awkward or apologetic or announcing departure. But a smile that stays and gazes. At me.

I love how Hopkins makes up words. His soul is saying something and to come close he has to jumble through his verbal workshop and jimmy something together. Hah! I guess you normally jimmy something apart, but you get the idea.

Then the last kicker. I read the poem and I had tears in my eyes thinking about how I used to love poetry. I used to love literature. Back in college, studying English, really losing myself in authors and finding myself in the emotion of it all. And I thought, where did she go? It was before I joined the charismatic fellowship and significantly before I became Catholic. I wasn't consumed in how a certain practice of Christianity had to define how I related to others in this world, I, a young adult who was so incredibly unsure of so much, and wanted doctrine to be a fortress that protected me because I wasn't sure how to be a person and doctrine was the only thing that had ever presented itself as absolute. I thought about how many layers of skin I've shed since then, about how my conversion to Catholicism happened on the Feast of the Nativity, the celebration of the Incarnation, when God became Man to teach man to become God. And when mystic lovers like John of the Cross try to speak about the soul and God, they have to resort to poetry, because mere words can't do it. 

It's like I became reacquainted with a certain part of My Own Heart, of which perhaps I should say Let Me More Have Pity On. Perhaps I have squashed too much down too hard because I thought what God wanted was a certain brand of religiosity, like forcing myself into a pizzelle press, instead of being

what was that word?

Charitable.

Therese, again

So, it's about time for a "shoot from the hip" post from me. Why the heck not.

I'm in the middle of writing an essay on St. Therese and the Little Way. I've told the story several times within my Carmelite community about how I was never really a fan of St. Therese before entering Carmel, and when I first approached the community, I figured I should see what all the fuss was about, and actually read Story of a Soul. I read it, and was duly unimpressed. What I saw was a perfect little girl from a perfect family who loved Jesus perfectly and then she died. It took me a few years to really understand her life, and to comprehend that she actually has a lot to say to people of this generation who deal with things like abandonment wounds, depression, and anxiety. I realized she is not at all a bit of pious fluff, despite the popular images of her with her roses and gentle smile and her beautiful, fresh face. 

But this Spring, she ripped into me. Her Little Way hits like Marine Corps boot camp. Forget picking up pins for the love of God. She is after taking one's whole life and throwing it with wreckless abandon into the arms of the Merciful God -- whom she knew with every fiber of her being was true and real, but whom she often experienced as sleeping, and whom she could not feel at all for the last stretch of her life as she died a miserable death from tuberculosis. She had delighted in heaven all her life, and when she came to her end, she wasn't even sure heaven would be there -- perhaps it was all going to be a black void on the other side. She was happy to sit at the table with the atheists, not as one of them, but to understand how some people might actually not believe there is a God; and to "share their bread" so that they could come to believe. She was incredibly brave. When she struggled to feel her faith, she wrote out the Creed in her own blood and kept the copy on her heart. She loved God and neighbor palpably to the end, but she could not feel faith. It was like God surrounded her so profoundly that she had no sense of faith, like not being able to taste your tongue. 

Her physical suffering was horrendous, and the treatments, such as mercury, were almost worse than the illness. That alone was enough to drive her nearly mad. She struggled with suicidal thoughts and advised the Sisters in the future to keep medicines away from suffering patients, because the temptation to end it all was quite strong. And in the midst of all this, she wrote about her Little Way.

And no, it isn't about picking up pins for the love of God because you are too inept to do anything else. (No Holy Spirit for you!) Ultimately it is about embracing your poverty, your littleness, your vulnerability. Not trying to fix it, not trying to be an ascetic super hero, not trying to be impressive for God, but to embrace that you are a little nothing. But here's the key that I'm talking about in my paper: Therese knew that because God revealed it to her. And here's how that hits me. God did not come and say "Therese, you are a little nothing." He came and said, Therese, here I am, and I am yours. And she corresponded to this grace, and saw herself as she actually is. God's magnificence revealed to her her vulnerability, her need. And therefore, she felt absolutely no drive to stop being small. In fact, it was her whole identity, because it was her correspondence to God's Almighty power.

What she received by a special grace, she teaches the rest of us to embrace by faith.

So when I feel my vulnerability: my trauma, the way people I have loved have left me, they way I feel my powerlessness to change situations that cannot be changed, my material needs, my emotional needs, my relational needs, my own volitility, my own realities in a thousand ways -- Therese says, yes, love that. Delight to see yourself just like that. And know that God loves you just like that. It's not that he wants us to suffer or be exploited or stuck. But just as we are -- just as we are -- that's how He loves us. And that's how He bids us come to Him. That's how He embraces us. 

In Therese's day, people were under the pressure of Jansenism. It really isn't so much different today, in many quarters. Try really hard to be good for God, to prove your love, to prove your worthiness, to prove your repentance, to prove yourself to God. Trytrytrytrytrytry. For Therese, cooperating with grace means surrendering, abandoning the whole thing to the Father and trusting that He wants nothing more than to love His little one. 

The little one, dying a painful, horrid death with no spiritual feelings in her at all. So little. United to Christ. And fruitful beyond measure in her death for the conversion of souls and poured out graces. 

So in my ripped open state, I'm hearing the call of faith to fling myself trustingly into the waiting arms of the Father. With trust and gratitude. With the pure expectation of finding Him and being immersed in His love. 

It's not a matter of first decision, or even the thousandth decision to trust Him. It's the decision to do give all, every moment, holding nothing back, with confidence that he's given me vulnerability. He's not given me perfect healing, perfect mental health, perfect relationships, perfect composure, peace, trust, or serenity. I'm a mess; a little nothing, and Therese says, "believe that is exactly who God loves. And run to Him."

One of my fellow Carmelites who also had some frustration with Therese once commented, "This is just the gospel. She didn't discover something new!" That's true enough, in a way. But all I can say is there comes a moment when God calls YOU to an act of total abandonment through a young French woman who taps you on the shoulder, and then it just hits different. It's not new; it's personal.

Renovation

As I prayed Lauds this morning, I hovered for some moments over this passage of Psalm 147: "The Lord builds up Jerusalem, and brings back Israel's exiles, he heals the broken-hearted, he binds up all their wounds." 

I just want to give the Lord a shout-out and acknowledge how incredibly efficient, all-knowing, all-wise, all-loving, and how downright sneaky He can be at times with me. There have been many, many times that I have honestly said Lord, I don't understand what you are doing, but never once has it turned out that it hasn't been for my good. Not one single, solitary time. 

Thanks to the advice a friend gave me when I was 19, I have been keeping a spiritual journal for most of my life. Right now I have several physical or virtual means of journaling, and it has become a way I exist rather than one particular object. What this leaves me with is quite a solid and long running record of self awareness. One observation from that Psalm this morning, combined with the Lord's sneakiness, is how long and patiently He has worked with me to heal this broken heart and bind all the wounds. All of them. 

Lately the Lord has been doing a renovation project which got messier and messier, until He just said, "ok, next we're taking down all these partitions. Don't worry; I'm your foundation."

And I'm all... Uh, Lord? Wait a second. Do you see how completely compromised my load bearing walls actually are?

And He's all... Yes. I've known that a long time. And now you do, too. What do you think we've been working on all this time? That work is actually done now.  

And I'm all... Uh, Lord? This doesn't feel in the slightest bit "done." I think I needed that support you just ripped out to keep the whole thing from crashing down. I think the whole thing is going to crash down. 

And He's all.... It would have. But trust the work I've been doing. I'm not wasting your life or playing with you. We're on to the next phase, expansiveness! 

The analogy isn't perfect, but my point is that the Lord has been doing a building work in me that I've only barely understood, even while I have desired it and sought it and cooperated with it. So many things can only be seen and understood in hindsight. This work involves me gathering up my whole life, not just this part over here, that part over there, and the thing I keep in the box in the garage. Everything into one, integrated. Which, paradoxically, comes by way of feeling like everything is absolutely smashed into oblivion. 

It's a bit like waking up from exploratory surgery and getting the report of the dire situation the surgeon discovered and repaired while you were under anesthesia and time ceased to exist to you. Maybe make that analogy one better by entering into it from an accident where you blacked out as it happened, so you wake up never aware surgery was even coming. And then you get the revelation of the problem -- which shocks you and worries you -- until you realize it actually is now a crisis that has been averted and an injury that has been repaired. And you are left with soreness that indicates not something that needs solving, but evidence of the solution being past tense. This is what I mean by God being sneaky. 

For me, my load bearing walls issue has been past trauma. I'm soon coming up on a year since I started working with a therapist to address what I figured were a few troublesome spots, and, well, a kinda rough childhood, that were impacting my current life. And thanks to my decision to be trained as a spiritual director, I realized I owed myself this work in order to have the needed levels of interior integration. Again, God is so sneaky. 

I actually came to a point where I felt so healed that I figured I was completely done. (Oh wait. The work was done? Really?) And then the Lord ripped out my structural support. Foul language rose to my lips. A lot of it. Because only then could I see how much devastation the Lord had actually replaced. And like someone getting the surgery report in post-op, my timeline got terribly confused and I relived every last bit of the devastation as if it were still happening in real time. That's what trauma does to you. And so while the Lord was trying to talk with me about future developments, all I could do is look at the wreckage and say that is my life.  

No, child, that was your life. For a long time, that was your life. Truth is, I've installed an entirely new support system, and now, living stone, you will have a secure dwelling.

I really came here to write about the second reading from the Office of Readings from today. It's from St. Gregory the Great, who wrote without a modern understanding of psychology, but with perhaps a less tainted understanding of the human person, and how love of God and love of neighbor is by necessity predicated on proper love of self. He says of the man ruled by the love of God, "The prizes he covets lie within; outward blessings do not elate him. His conduct is blameless, for he cannot do wrong in devoting himself entirely to love of God and his neighbor. He is not ambitious. The welfare of his own soul is what he cares about. Apart from that he seeks nothing. He is not selfish...." (italics mine). 

I can't tell you how long I have subliminally nursed practices that proclaimed that caring about the welfare of my soul, of my inner self, is the epitome of selfishness. If it weren't -- well -- surely those closest to me in childhood would have cared about the welfare of my soul! And therein lies the rub. In imitating the (lack of) care and formation I received, I perpetuated a load bearing capacity that was destined to make everything crash down.  

And now the Lord says, believe what I say, and receive it. Live in love, and begin with yourself by allowing Me to fill every last nook and cranny like I want to. 

Of Love and Needs and Clashing

This morning as I sat down to pray, I had one of those instantaneous downloads that crystalized for me exactly where I'm at in my interior journey. And that was this: I have had a severe, life-long disconnect between the notion of "I love you," and "I will meet your needs."

I felt a blaze of wrath of the Holy Spirit, not against me but on my behalf, against this disconnect. And I finally saw, on a human level, how being made in the image and likeness of God naturally makes us expect a connection between love and needs being met. 

And I realized I have never once presumed my needs being met to be something I was within my rights to expect, or even really to conceptualize. It's not like I've debated it in my head you should be meeting my needs, and you're failing. It's that it had never occurred to me concretely that it would apply to me, or really that it applies to anyone. To be honest, it has been hard for me to even articulate that I have needs. I have stories I've told in spiritual direction several times, once as a teen, once as an adult, where I was terribly hungry or thirsty, but denied it as a reflex, even though I was physically suffering and the remedy was literally in front of me.

And this makes sense out of so much of my life right now. 

I believe that because of the dependent nature of babies, we are born taking in the care we are given as the definition of "I love you," regardless of what that is. For me, somehow my sense of what it means to be in a cared-for relationship taught me that if I take in "I love you," it means I have just become the caretaker. Someone telling me "I love you" really translated into "I am dependent on you, and I'm weak, and I really can't do much for you at all." What a confusing message for a helpless child to take in. Because of course, care was given. Basic needs were met. Survival happened. And it all taught my brain that exactly food in the mouth and breath in the lungs was all life was truly about. Everything else was too much to ask. That which makes for human dignity is rightly kicked to the curb, locked out to whimper at the back door until it slinks away under the house in depression and neglect. And maybe, come to think of it, food in the mouth and breath in the lungs, under duress, really should end up in the "too much to ask" category. Because if my dignity can be booted, maybe survival deserves the same treatment. Probably so. And yes, I spent my later teenage years struggling hard with suicidal ideation. Under great duress, it still pops back up.

I chose to be a Christian already as a child. And my first responsive prayer to the Lord's call to me was, "I will go and be a missionary." That is, I know you are dependent on me to do for you what you need, and I will do it. Because I hear that you love me. And this is how I say "I love you" in response.  

We all start our inner journey where we are. And so this starting point for me is not surprising. But to be transformed in Christ is to grow out of where I was, into truth. And He is so patient with me, and knows how to grow virtue in the graced soil of my soul that still has rocks and weeds to be removed. He knows exactly how to lead me. Even when it scares the bejeebers out of me.

Jesus tells us we are to love our neighbor as we love ourselves, and that we are to love one another as He has loved us. I think there's some geometric proof here that would say we therefore must learn to love ourselves as God loves us. Because here's the thing. As I have lived both in grace and in the fallout of this total disconnect between "I love you" and "I will meet your needs," I have learned that I should ignore my own needs at the expense of (genuinely) coming to the support of other people. And I have learned that God (genuinely) wants me to serve other people, but expecting him to act on my account is selfish. That love, i.e. living in the image of God, means to be the caretaker of the world, while my human dignity is locked outside, whimpering for attention until it slinks under the porch in depression and neglect.

And God says no. The way I love you entails meeting your needs. Look around you. You've made it a little difficult at times because of the ways you have reflexively chosen things, but look at how I have taken care of your needs, even when I had to slide things in sideways and keep secrets from you so I wouldn't scare you away. Now imagine what could be if you trust me more. Imagine what could be if you worked with me in this instead of against me. Imagine what could be if we were both pulling in the same direction, and you learned to honor your needs, own your needs, even insist on your needs the way I do. Your dignity is non-negotiable -- remember when I told you that? This is what I was driving at. You are making great progress, but it is time for you to really throw out the old and throw yourself into the new. 

This is where I am at. Part of the flourishing of human (and Christian) community happens precisely when the needs of those in close proximity to each other clash. I learned to silence my clash instead of raise it. It's time to choose otherwise.

In Which I Relate What I have in common with St. Therese

I'm in my very final term of my Spiritual Direction Formation Program. It started with a prophetic bang back in September of 2024. There was a moment on the last full day of our in-person intensive, during a group spiritual direction session, where one part of one line of one reading impacted me so profoundly that I wept for the 20 minutes of meditation we had, and then I wept some more as I shared about it with my small group. The line was this: At the heart of the Carmelite rule, there is a call for us to commit ourselves to Jesus.... That wasn't even the whole sentence. But it struck me profoundly and memorably that the Lord Jesus was impressing upon me that up until that time, I had a concept of what it meant to follow Him. And He was calling me to an entirely new level. The tears were not exactly tears of joy, nor were they anxious tears. I suppose I could say they were sobering tears. What came to mind during the group sharing was the image of Aslan, how he is not tame, but he is good. I think I wrote a post about this at the time. Ah yes, here it is. I am reminded that I realized that I do not control in this relationship with the Lord. 

In 2025 I experienced a couple of totally unforseen developments in my life which picked up my identity, and really my practical day-to-day life, and shook them all about. In the midst of this, I came face to face with some of the highlights of traumatic things from my past and began dealing and healing with professional help, new personal habits, skills, and lots and lots of emotional support.

Then we had our fourth intensive in March, in Chicago. On the last day of that intensive, it became clear that I was losing that lots and lots of emotional support, instantly. Yeah, ok, forgive my coded writing, but let's just say that I have now been moving from the highlights to the deep depths of traumatic things from my past. Same Lord. Same call. Same formation. And now I am grappling with that commit ourselves to Jesus part from two years ago.

And this is where St. Therese comes in. I've read about her Christmas Eve conversion dozens of times, but it is speaking to me in a brand new way right now. Therese knew about loss and pain and trauma, having been ill as an infant, sent away from her family to a wet nurse, bonded there, then removed from there, sent back home with some degree of anxiety, possibly soaked in from her mother's anxiety. Then her mother died. Then she attached to her sister Pauline as her mother, and then Pauline abruptly left home to enter Carmel. So by the time she was 10, Therese had a "mystery illness" which was something of a psychotic breakdown. Even after she recovered, she recounts that she had the horrible fault of being extremely touchy and crying at the slightest provocation. (For the record, all of this is what I can relate with the best in her life.)

The Christmas Eve grace seems so simple and silly, but it was transformational for her and understanding it is powerful to me. Coming home late in the evening from Mass, 14-year-old Therese was on her way upstairs to put away her coat when she overheard her tired father make a comment about the custom of Therese opening the little gifts which were waiting in her slippers, that at least this would be the last year they'd have to do that. Her sister heard it too, and caught her glance, knowing that this was prime fodder for Therese to break into an emotional mess. But Jesus delivered to her a grace that changed her. She writes, "Forcing back my tears, I descended the stairs rapidly; controlling the poundings of  my heart, I took my slippers and placed them in front of Papa, and withdrew all of the objects joyfully." She says at that moment, she left her childhood, and found the strength of soul that had left her when her mother died. She was able to choose to navigate her emotions, rather than to allow her traumatized emotions to ride roughshod all over her. She was not surpressing; she was choosing. She was choosing to stand in the strength she had received rather than in the hurt she had known. And from then on, the choice to love God and neighbor was rock solid in her. Even in her final illness, when she struggled in feeling a sense of faith in heaven at all, she says she was still able to love. 

This is really foundational to her famous Little Way, which boils down to abandoning oneself to the merciful love of God, with gratitude. 

Let me tell you, studying this with a real-time experience of having so much childhood trauma triggered in me 24/7 has been ... a ... [squinting] ... grace... I guess I have to say. And it is a call. I'm not at the point where I've received the grace and I'm bounding down the stairs to be joyful in the face of the beloved one who just innocently had filled my eyes with tears a moment before. I'm meeting these old pains and hugging them tight because apparently I don't yet have the trust to hand them over. But I think right there is the commit ourselves to Jesus moment. It's so much deeper than thought or real time action. This is deep, deep trust in ways I've never accessed before. 

But I know and believe that God does not play with us. I signed up for formation, and formation I am receiving. I remember that during my application interview, I blithely said that I'm often saying yes to the Lord in things where I don't really realize what I'm getting myself into. This has definitely been another case of the same. 

Some sobering things are now on my plate. When I have a moment of dipping out of the 24/7, I'm looking at the sobering things. I'm in a very serious place of there's no way out but through. Please pray for me. On Thanksgiving Day I visited the relics of St. Therese in Virginia, and we had a chat about what I have felt as a call to trauma-informed spiritual direction. My dear Therese is informing me, that's for sure. So, yes. Please pray for me. 

There's Abandonment, and then there's Abandonment

 Right now, I really need the consolation of coming home from Mass in the morning and sitting down to write. 

It's the feast of the Annunciation, and on this date in 1997 I left Japan and returned Stateside. I was leaving a very painful era of my life behind. It was a time of deep isolation which I tried to patch up with a bad relationship which I got swept up in against not only my better judgment, but in an embodiment of what I now know as self-abandonment. I understand self-abandonment to mean a set of learned behaviors that began in survival when a child felt unloved, unsafe, uncertain, insecure, and those learned behaviors reinforced the idea that the child's basic humanity was the problem in the equation. Where she felt unloved, she became hard and aloof. Where she felt unsafe, she locked herself up and away from threats. Where she felt uncertain, she may have become the mastermind that figured everything out. Where she felt insecure, she hid herself away. 

This trend did not start when I lived in Japan, but it intensified. And it unfortunately locked into place a lot of trauma that I have only recently addressed and dismissed. And I chose to leave it all behind on the feast of the Annunciation, symbolically saying Yes to a new lease on life. 

If only symbolic actions took care of everything. 

Today it is the Feast of the Annunciation again. Again I am saying Yes to the will of God as it plays out in my life. I have just experienced a very significant relationship in my life rupturing. I'm not going to write about the details here, but while I have been well primed for this Yes, having exercised my will in case this day was necessary, it also ruptured very quickly, and so I am left dealing with how stunned I am. 

Feelings and thoughts billow through my mind and my body, tumbling wildly, gently, tiredly, sadly. What I know is that I am not the victim of my self-abandonment any longer. I used my voice, I owned my needs, I stated my needs and pursued them being met, I accepted the rupture, and I moved away. I was not stuck in fear, in self-pity, or without an ability to voice my anger or my love. I did a damn good job with it.

I now know viscerally that being a human being is a good thing -- in fact it is a glorious thing. It is beautiful. It is not to be apologized for, disowned, flattened, or dismissed. Human love is typically so flawed; there are always hurty edges and messy bits. We go in directions that bring us healing and reveal our weakness at the same time. C. S. Lewis famously said in his work The Four Loves: 

To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.

There is so much potential for pain in love, and yet God is love. The pain in us is part of the transformation and the mystery and the gift we become when we choose union with God and choose love.

St. Therese in her Little Way writes about abandonment to God. This is really the polar opposite of the self-abandonment. When she was a little girl, she believed she saw the capital letter T in the sky, and she told her father that God had written her name in the heavens. She then asked him to lead her by the hand, because she didn't want to look at anything on earth, but throw her head back and get lost in the contemplation of the heavens as they walked. Abandonment to God is giving oneself totally up in the ecstacy of the interior embrace of the loving God, writ large in the world that reveals it. It moves one beyond feeling loved, safe, certain and secure -- it is an immersion into Love itself. It is also a transformation into a soul of mission of being love. 

Towards the end of another dark time of my life, when I was on pilgrimage in Poland, I heard the call clearly that I am called to love everyone. I was struggling with the loss of another friend, as well as an ongoing silence with another. I really struggled to love even one person when that call came through. I'm in a very different kind of place with my circumstances today. I've made a commitment to love which now takes on a cruciform -- so be it. My name doesn't start with T, but I see God showing me my call writ large in my world, and I too want to throw myself open to God's will, which is love and mercy itself. I am weirdly bouyed up in knowing I am loved by my partner in rupture. But what I need now more than ever is that immersion in God who is Love, and to walk by that trust into new paths. So I say Yes with Mary to the God who does all manner of amazing, impossible things.

Learning to Pray All Over Again

The Carmelite saints and writers describe early stages of prayer in ways that always confused me. For example, Kevin Culligan writes (in his chapter in Carmelite Prayer: A Tradition for the 21st Century): 

Discursive meditation is primary sensory, involving both the external senses and the imagination and memory. One applies the senses to the object of meditation in order to be moved to an emotional response toward that object.

For example, a leader of a meditation group begins a session inviting the group to imagine that they see Jesus tied to a pillar, accepting the scourging of the Roman soldiers for love of them. Later, after a period of quiet reflection on this scene, the leader then instructs the group: "Now, allow yourselves to be moved in love to embrace Jesus by resolving to serve him more courageously in his people."

The saints took it as a given that everyone knew to pray this way, whether the focus was on the mysteries of the rosary or the stations of the cross or other Scriptural vignette moments. And from this taken-for-granted starting place, they talked about how prayer grew in other directions.

This confused me, because by the time I read this, I thought perhaps I was no longer a total newbie at prayer, and yet, because I began praying long before I became a Catholic and had now clue about rosaries or stations or these classic meditation points, I always wondered if I was just now totally lost because either I hadn't started yet, or I had started incorrectly.

Recently, though, I gained some wisdom here. I had absolutely had this foundation in prayer. I called it "praise and worship" or simply, singing hymns. I had just never really grasped what was happening for me. 

In my Lutheran college days, some of my professors took umbrage with Contemporary Christian Music where phrases were simply repeated and there was no theological depth. They were heirs of Luther's pedagogy: he firmly believed that the way to catechize the ignorant masses was through songs. This is how we came by our standard fare 15 verse theological hymns -- and the fact that we actually sang them. I don't at all deny the effectiveness of this. I often found hymns a lot more edifying, helpful, and  illuminating than sermons. 

But the repeated Scriptural phrases have their place as well, and it is to draw one into meditation, where one ruminates on the Word of God and allows it to speak to your soul. What is more, some hymns serve the same purpose as the rosary meditation. I took up one of these hymns this morning in my prayer time and it was quite an experience.

Here it is: 

My prayer experience with this today cemented something for me. This song has been floating through my memory recently. My Lutheran Sunday School was very big on having us kids sing for Sunday services a few times a year. (Have I mentioned what a big deal Lutherans make of music and singing?) This was a favorite song to have younger kids sing, perhaps in part for the cute factor for the congregation. But now that I'm pressing well past the midpoint of my 50s, as a Carmelite devotee of St. Therese to boot, this children's hymn speaks volumes to me.

Today I let it speak. Knowing that prayer needs to involve all of me, I also picked up my guitar and played as well. This is something I have done exactly twice this whole calendar year, ever since the grand music reshuffle at my parish. Prior to that, I had only one blip of personal guitar playing, while I recorded a CD in 2011. Every other time was either at Mass or in preparation for it -- at least once a week though sometimes many more, for roughly 15 years. But since age 11, I spent the equivalent of part time job hours every week writing and playing songs, pouring out my heart, praying, meditating, seeking. But I just called it music.

So, back to the hymn. Go read the words. I sang them, worked in my body and voice praying them, and repeated them until I felt the words in my current adult experience. 

For my Shepherd gently guides me/Knows my need and well provides me...
When I hunger, Jesus feeds me/Into pleasant pastures leads me
When I thirst, He bids me go/Where the quiet waters flow

And when I was done singing, I poured out my heart to the Lord, and He was right there, receiving me. Child Marie doesn't always get much airtime. But she did today, with the help of Psalm 22, childhood memories, imagination, and the fuller participation of my whole body in a way that is deeply meaningful to me. 

Carmelite prayer is not about following a formula or steps. It is about bearing witness to the reality of God as we ourselves step, as the Spirit mysteriously leads. And apparently it is something I can learn anew all the time.

Yes, I've Changed Parishes

On the morning of the feast of St. Martha (and Mary, and Lazarus), a friend who regularly prays Morning Prayer with our group asked me about my parish status. This became an interior prompt throughout the day (and, ok, it stretched out over a week or so) to finally address the matter of officially changing parish registration. And while I realize that I don't owe anyone an explanation as to why I've done this, for several reasons I think it is worthy of sharing some reflections about this whole thing.

Last September when I began my Spiritual Direction Formation Program with our first in-person intensive, I immediately, and much to my surprise (but totally consonant with the thrust of the program) began to grappling with questions about my identity. I remembered it as arising after meeting the others in my cohort, who are mostly professional people with professional identities. But as I reviewed my journal, I found that this started bubbling up even before I left home. How do I introduce myself? Who am I, and is it based on what I do? This bothered me a lot more than I thought it would. At home, I rarely was in this kind of setting where these things mattered. And before I left the intensive six days later, I found myself telling people "I'm a Church Lady." 

Although I'd been working my way towards that ever since initially becoming a cantor at Holy Family in 2008, since 2017 I had been on turbo boost in this identity. How I got there had its own history, including about six years of formation in community building with a youth/young adult ministry, and my formation as a Secular Carmelite. But at that point I began pouring out with all that was within me, and most of this landed in my parish. By this time last year, I was a serious right hand of my pastor, on parish council, involved up to my shoulders in music ministry, and in fact I was a regular go-to person for any number of parish friends if they either needed to know some detail about what was happening in the parish, or if they needed to connect with the pastor, because they thought I could facilitate that. I also felt interiorly, with alternating senses of self-satisfaction and weight, that when I walked into church, I had a deep responsibility there. 

After I applied for the SDFP, and especially after I came back from that September intensive, I began to notice a small hint of something else. I was weary. My Saturday morning Mass music ministry which I'd carried out since 2013 was starting to feel like I was belly crawling through gravel. This was strange to me, and disconcerting.

Then, as everyone in the parish knows, around Christmas our pastor announced a reorganization of music ministry. Even though it wasn't a complete surprise, it did hit me like a bombshell, and it was something I had to grieve, almost like a death. I say almost, because other factors interior and exterior began developing concurrently, to the point that the first quarter or more of this year was a huge round of reprocessing my entire life and... identity. (And this, concurrent with studying St. Teresa of Avila and the necessity of self-knowledge and humility!)

I think it is important for me to say, for the sake of community life, that I did not leave the parish because I was upset with our pastor. We had lots of open communication about the difficulties involved for both of us, but there was no picking up my marbles and storming off home moment for me. It was much more a moment of hearing "Martha, Martha, you are upset and anxious about many things. Only one thing is needed." I realized that even though my path of discipleship and growth for a season took me through a Martha role of service, now I am being called to something different. It felt like the death of one person, but I know it is really the emergence of a new and deeper identity. 

In the year or two previous to this, I would occasionally take a mini retreat day for myself and go to pray at Blessed Sacrament, where I have just joined. I did this knowing I craved a place I could go for both exterior and interior quiet -- one where I did not feel like I was going to work, and that every glance revealed something that needed to be done. In fact, I had driven to Holy Family so often that my phone identified it as my workplace!

I landed there because the whole choir decided seperately but at the same time to go join Blessed Sacrament's choir. There was no way I could erase from my heart, life, or history the community that I formed by singing together at Holy Family since 2009, even though it is true that we were limping by the time we sang our last for the feast of the Holy Family in 2024. We are now the core of a larger, fluctuating number of singers at BLS, and according to my most severe critic (my daughter) we sing as with one voice, and are actually good. I cantored for my first time there in July, and as I arrived early to set up, I heard two different women whisper loudly to their husbands, "She's going to sing!" That made me chuckle, but it is also interesting that parish communities are fluid enough in this town that I already know a large number of people there, and clearly a lot of people know me from my years of standing in front at Holy Family.

My parish family has always been the closest thing my heart as known as extended family, and so this is not something I chose lightly. I just feel that I'm extending my extended family now, and connecting from a deeper place in my heart. God is good, but the way is weird. Blessed be God forever.

PS: For those who wonder, my husband independently decided that he is going to join the Melkite rite, so he actually removed himself from the Holy Family rolls some time ago. 

You can also still find me every weekday morning at Holy Family praying Morning Prayer. :)

Embodied

"New year, new me" came with a jolt this year. It was as if the Lord woke me at midnight and said: Ok dear, buckle up. We're going for a ride right now, and you are going to need a few things for this trip -- here. 

And we were off, while I was still blinking and not even at the point where I could say I wasn't prepared for this. 

So I have a list of about 11 things that I've been incorporating into my weeks (has it been weeks already?), and one of these is from a website called EmbodiedCatholicWoman.com, called the Heart Safety Toolkit. God bless the Facebook ad that knew I was looking at resolving trauma on a somatic level. Sometimes intrusive marketing is helpful. 

At several turns in my adult life, people have told me that I need to get in touch with my feelings. My response was generally a raised eyebrow and an "ok..." because honestly I knew I had feelings. I felt them all the time, often to an overwhelming degree. I couldn't deny that I'm of an intellectual bent. Most of me shrugged off this entreaty, while the rest of me squirmed a bit, wondering if I'm just not really woman enough. 

Honestly, I had no idea how to do get into this "touch" they talked about. No one ever explained it to me. And though I am deeply intuitive, sometimes I need things spelled out super clearly before I get it, because I just don't have the ability to leap into whatever assumption the speaker is making.

Claudine at Embodied Catholic Woman spells it out, scientifically. Essentially, our bodies can go into different "gears" in response to trauma or chronic stress. These gears hang between our psychology and our physical bodies, and the effects go both ways. The key to resolving what trauma triggers is to become observers of thoughts, feelings, sensations that happen inside our bodies, and do certain physical things that can reset us over time physically and psychologically, to be better able to navigate the challenges that life brings. When we don't reset but stay in a gear where we are either unable to deal, or are hyper-dealing, we are left less and less capable of that kind of navigation, and we instead develop all kinds of unhealthy coping mechanisms, and we become knotty, and maybe even sick, people. 

So it hasn't been so much that I have needed to become more emotional as it is I have needed to become more embodied. By that, I mean to observe: this is what I feel happening in my body right now and eventually move to this is what I can do in response. In the past it was more like I feel x; I am x and it was as if there was no escape. So I would just avoid feeling x, by force, if necessary. Like that link I shared above about the "threat" of the women's Bible study at church. The only solution I could come up with was to guilt myself into not feeling what I felt. Or, one better, to accept, with some sadness, the way I am. What these somatic exercises have taught me (and the Lord, throwing this at me as we left on this trip) is that there's a stopping point between what I feel and who I am. And I can go there and actually accept what I feel into the fuller picture of who God made me. What a concept. I'm 57 years old, but it's better late than never to figure this out. 

This need became screamingly evident as I sat writing an email to a friend one evening, quite in a panic. I put my head in my hands and said out loud, "I'm becoming my father." What I heard was someone in a high state of anxiety, doing the social equivalent of desperately reaching for numbing alcohol to erase the pain, instead of taking courage to face it. (I'm currently reading The Shining as an exploration of the psyche of the dry drunk; more on that after I finish it, maybe.) This state of mind was, frankly, modeled to me by the adults in my life throughout my childhood, and had come to be somewhat emotionally normal for me, though I had not experienced it myself in decades. That was the moment I realized I needed what I was about to find in Claudine a few days later. 

Ok, so none of this was what I came here to even write about, but there we have it. Between Claudine and Manuela Mitevova and her somatic practices I am learning how to be whole. Now we give it time, work, and continued prayer.

Confessions of a Closet Gnostic

As soon as I type "closet gnostic" I am anticipating one of my more intellectual readers taking me to task for theological imprecision, so right off the bat I am going to invite those feelings of Precision Demand to go outside and attend to their own domain, like monitoring the Earth's orbit around the sun, or whatever it is they are for. I'm here to speak a bit more poetically.

The gnostic I'm talking about is the one who says knowledge is the savior, and secret knowledge is for the superior elite (understood as themselves), and this invisible realm is where all Good resides. The body, matter, and that thereto connected is deeply suspect. An apparent necessary evil, to be escaped or avoided. Slapped on to a Christian package, this encourages practices such as spiritualizing: when one avoids dealing with matters that originate in the material world by framing them as having exclusively spiritual origins and solutions. 

I'd say the opposite of this gnosticism is the Incarnation of Christ, and all of its ramifications. 

And I think I am still a recovering gnostic. 

It isn't so much that I started out being an enemy of my body or anyone elses, or the material world. But very early on I became an enemy of my emotions. I suddenly I feel like I've been dropped into a movie a little bit like The Kid where I am being invited to meet Small Child Me, or even Young Adult Me, and renegotiate a few things. 

One of the things I need to renegotiate is the reality that emotions give information, and emotions are experienced in the body -- and stored there unhealthfully if they don't make it all the way through to expression. 

I've been doing some somatic exercises lately, and I've just recently started a new set of practices designed to address traumatic experiences. This latter thing was designed by a Catholic woman for Catholic women, and now that I am finally actually open to something like this, I'm finding it very powerful. I have always kind of shifted uncomfortably in my chair when people would suggest, for example, beginning your prayer with taking deep breaths or being aware of your body in the space, etc. It just seemed too "woo-woo" to me. Intellectual things are my comfort zone, and all this body talk just seemed, I dunno, suspicious. 

But what is the case is that as a child, I spent a lot of time in extremely tense environments. Parents arguing, parents divorcing, my father being so sad and miserable, my mom being so stressed, hiding at the neighbors house with my mom when they split up, Then there was my dad drinking, and when he would get drunk, he would call our house, and that telephone became terror activation. Mostly my Mom would yell at him and slam the phone down, or sometimes he would ask to talk to me, and I'd be stuck on the phone listening to him drunk rant. I don't know how many times that happened, but in my memory it feels like a lot. Of course, we'd never know when he'd start drinking, so sometimes the phone ringing was just the phone ringing, and sometimes it wasn't. Sometimes he'd talk to me when he was sober, but those conversations were usually apologies, and they were short. I remember one time, in the midst of my dad's phone calls, one of my sister's college friends happened to call, and my mom yelled something about "operator, trace this call" and hung up. When we learned later who actually had been on the other end, the whole thing became something to laugh about. That was so weird and confusing. 

I remember this happening at least through to my teenage years. I suppose it became part of the normal warp and woof of my life. And it had a lot to do with why I shut down my emotions and ignored how this made me feel. It transferred over to basically numbing myself around other people entirely.

I have a memory from about age 19 that tells me how far I got with this. I had a friend at the time who was in her 30s, and she had two small kids, around ages 3 and 5. I started appearing at this friend's house somewhat frequently, as we were becoming Bible study buddies. One day when I arrived, her daughter, the younger child, greeted me at the door with an exuberant hug of my legs. I stood there, stiff as a board, and looked at her rather expressionlessly. I remember her face melting from a bright smile to something akin to utter fright, as she backed away from me. I had absolutely no idea how to respond to her, and she felt how abnormal that was, even though I couldn't. 

Now, things have changed for me a lot. But I am finding there are some areas I still need to renegotiate and allowing myself to listen to my body and the emotions that do commerce there is not, after all, poppycock. I even have to retrain my intellect (aka learn!) to accept this as important information, and to make some shifts. 

I've tried to erase my humanity, thinking that this is more spiritual. I'm pretty sure my prayer journals from past decades are filled with ridiculous and elaborate spiritual theories about why such and so was happening to me, when it really boiled down to: I'm not managing my emotions here. I'm denying my humanity over here. I'm avoiding addressing this conflict over here. I don't have all of the facts straight over there. It's not all about God testing me and it's definitely not all spiritual warfare and attacks of the devil, or elaborate communications from the Holy Spirit. Nor is it about my need to just try harder or beat myself up over stuff, or any other elaborate heap of chaff I've been able to create. So much froth, so little Incarnational Lord. 

He is, however, incredibly patient with me. 

This morning, I read the first Psalm from the Office of Readings (for the Baptism of the Lord). I found it striking.

O give the Lord, you sons of God,
give the Lord glory and power;
give the Lord the glory of his name.
Adore the Lord in his holy court.

The Lord's voice resounding on the waters,
the Lord on the immensity of waters;
the voice of the Lord, full of power,
the voice of the Lord, full of splendor.

The Lord's voice shattering the cedars,
The Lord shatters the cedars of Lebanon;
he makes Lebanon leap like a calf
and Sirion like a young wild-ox

The Lord's voice flashes flames of fire.

The Lord's voice shaking the wilderness,
The Lord shakes the wilderness of Kadesh;
the Lord's voice rending the oak tree
and stripping the forest bare.

The God of glory thunders.
In his temple they all cry: "Glory!"
The Lord sat enthroned over the flood;
The Lord sits as king forever.

The Lord will give strength to his people,
The Lord will bless his people with peace.

If this isn't physical imagery, I don't know what is. My embedded emotional paralysis can feel as immovable as a cedar of Lebanon, or like the very land itself, but the voice of the Lord currently speaking over me, I know, has the power to break that spell of death, and replace it with strength and peace. 

Better than a Hallelujah

 Recently I was reminded again of the song Better than a Hallelujah, which Amy Grant recorded in 2010. From the first that I heard it, it's been a tear-jerker for me, but now it strikes me on even a deeper level than before. 

When I first latched on to the song, I was drew encouragement and consolation from it, because I was in a time of pouring out my miseries. I needed to hear that my mess was indeed beautiful, and that pouring it out to God really was better than a choir singing out... The hallelujah, well, that spoke to me of trying really hard to have faith and to stand firm, when all I felt capable of was crumbling. 

We pour out our miseries
God just hears a melody
Beautiful the mess we are
The honest cries of breaking hearts
Are better than a hallelujah

Now it's some ten-odd years later. Now I'm in a formation program to become a spiritual director. Now this makes me weep for the sheer beautiful truth of it. 

God just hears a melody

It's in fact the Song of the Resurrection, which He has written and He pours into us even as we are pouring out our miseries to God. "Give, and it will be given to you. A good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over, will be poured into your lap" (Luke 6:38). It is precisely in those moments where we feel the most pitiful, when we cry out, that God is instantly reciprocating and pouring Himself out in return. It might take years to consciously receive, but "everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved" (Rom. 10:13). 

I think if there is one task of the contemplative spiritual companion, it is to bear witness to God's presence, who He is and what He does. In a way, it is what Amy Grant did for me (or rather Sarah Hart and Chapin Hartford, songwriters, did). The song affirmed to me, yes, it really is better to pour out your misery than it is to carry out mere religious action, even if that action is objectively good (and especially if it is just conformity for the sake of saving face or pleasing someone else). There is a messy point in life where honesty, for a moment, flies in the face of what is right, decent, and true. But the truth is, God hears through it. Hearing another human being affirm that pouring out one's heart to God is beautiful is enough to support faith until it becomes one's own interior knowledge.

Heaven knows there's no shortage of provocation to our cries of misery. It's a grace, actually. The misery itself? No. But the act of faith that knows there is God to whom I can turn meaningfully with it, that's such a tremendous gift. 

In reality, most of the time these exchanges happen in excruciatingly slow motion. I don't just feel miserable for an hour, cry out to God, and then skip along merrily through my life, blessed beyond measure. These things require patience, stamina, and determination. I think it is like planting a fruit tree, and it is why it is ten years later than I can look back and hold the fruit in my hand that grew from a dead pit. This is the spiritual life. There is no quick fix, but there is real transformation. It's true!

As a bonus, here's the official video, telling its own story: 

Slander, Justice, and Freedom

This morning as I was talking with the Lord I was reading Mark 7, where He is interacting with Pharisees. Verse 2 sets up where the difficulties start: "they saw that some of his disciples ate with hands defiled..." You can feel how this observation quickly turned into a judgment of Jesus, as in verse 5 they ask him, "why do your disciples not live according to the tradition of the elders, but eat with hands defiled?"

Jesus had inconsistency in his camp. Some washed, some didn't. Maybe the some who did were mindful of the tradition; maybe it was culturally engrained. Maybe those who didn't were unschooled in the ceremonial practices, or maybe they omitted it intentionally. We don't get any of that commentary. What, to the Pharisees, reflects back on Jesus is that He did not spend enough time enforcing the traditions, or He was not a careful enough rabbi to eliminate from his midst those who weren't doing it right, or simply this slipshod performance did not trouble Him. Clearly, He was either a lousy rabbi or a rebel. This is clear because they were their own standard of righteousness.

Jesus then proceeds to rip into them. From the text, I observe a few things.

First, He quotes Scripture against them (v. 6-7) to point out their hearts are far away, their worship is empty, and they teach human ideas. 

Second, the text is suggesting this was an ongoing exchange, not simply one conversation. Verse 9 says, "And he said to them," and again in verse 14 "And he called the people to him again and said to them." It sounds to me like Jesus often circled back to this theme when he talked with Pharisees and Mark is condensing Jesus' response in this account. I'm no scholar. But what I see in the paragraph begun by verse 9 ("you have a fine way of rejecting the commandment of God..." -- reminds me of Daniel 13 when Daniel is interviewing the two lying letchers who were accusing Susanna, "your fine lie has cost you your head") is that Jesus here is recounting for the Pharisees a detailed example of how they teach human ideas as doctrines of God. To me, this reveals He has spent time meditating on this, interceding with the Father for these wayward men. He is intimately familiar with their hearts, their words, and their deeds. This intimate familiarity is diametrically opposed to tribalism, where separatism rules.

As Jesus teaches his disciples about this exchange, he tries to help them arrive at the understanding which he says the Pharisees lack. And what caught my heart was in verse 22, where Jesus is listing the things which defile, and among these he includes slander. 

My Gen X heart stopped and did a little sideways glance around. Slander? As in, saying something publicly about someone else's behavior that makes them look bad? Ok, Lord. I just got done reading you ripping into the Pharisees and giving that group pretty much a bad name for the last 2,000 years, but I know that that wasn't slander, and that you are actually differentiating slander as a different thing.

This hits a real sore spot in my soul, one that I know needs healing and strengthening. My head knows that slander involves saying something that isn't true. Let's do some dictionary and catechsim definitions here.

slan·der

/ˈslandər/

noun

Law

1. the action or crime of making a false spoken statement damaging to a person's reputation.

CCC2477: Respect for the reputation of persons forbids every attitude and word likelyl to cause them unjust injury. He becomes guilty:

--    of rash judgment who, even tacitly, assumes as true, without sufficient foundation, the moral fault of a neighbor;

--    of detraction who, without objectively valid reason, discloses another's faults and failings to person who did not know them;

--    of calumny who, by remarks contrary to the truth, harms the reputation of others and gives occasion for false judgments concerning them.

1. Another good Catechism quote is paragraph 2479: "Detraction and calumny destroy the reputation and honor of one's neighbor. Honor is the social witness given to human dignity, and everyone enjoys a natural right to the honor of his name and reputation and to respect."

I'll be honest. I have always struggled with saying anything about another person to a third party, even when there is no real question of slander involved. I am certain this came from some confusing childhood circumstances which followed me into adulthood, both when I simply couldn't understand what was going on, and when my attempts to speak or ask questions were met with explicit or implicit demands of secrecy and "we don't talk about this." Or, I simply knew that exposing the truth of my pain would really rattle others in my life, which led me to keep silent about what was happening in me, to make it easier for someone else.

This was deeply formative for me, and not in a good way. I took in that revealing truth was in fact slander and it dishonored people I should honor. My deformation never stopped me from mentally creating a class of people* I felt didn't deserve my honor, and whom I could scapegoat to make me feel better. And of course nothing reminds me of that as much as our political atmosphere in an election year.

Nothing could be further from what Jesus was doing with the Pharisees and his disciples. Jesus was in fact confronting the intimate places in his personal culture that people had skirted away from out of fear: the hypocritical power of religious leaders. I'm sure there were folks who thought it was much wiser to just go along and get along. But Jesus spoke right into the heart of dysfunction with the hopes of change and of pulling people out from under the wreckage that already existed. We do too talk about this might have been his exact attitude. And this is not slander. It is justice. No longer will those who do harm find protection, and those who are wise will gain instruction. 

To me, this shows the difference between learning to pattern my life on Jesus Christ, and learning to be nice. Learning how to show honor starts in a heart where identity and truth are clearly understood.

Oh Lord, conform and transform my heart unto Thine. With St. Elizabeth of the Trinity, make me into a supplemental humanity for You through whom You may live again in this world.

*Generally, this class of people consisted of anyone who did not remind me enough of myself.

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.  

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.