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. :)

You Can't Make God Happy

I regularly take BIG breaks from posting on this blog, generally because I am processing my thoughts in writing elsewhere. But like a cat out for a prowl, I always come back eventually.

I have indeed been processing some big life things, as I've been involved in formation to become a spiritual director. I've realized I owe it to the process to engage with all of my heart, mind, soul, and strength, and I've had significant help in that regard from the Lord who holds my life in His hand, and has brought some major shifts into this life of ours.

One of the results of that is that I have been going to counseling to address some things that I realized I've not addressed before, and that I can see have formed me, and not in healthy ways. 

One of the things that has come up is the concept of codependency. When the therapist mentioned that term, I instinctively knew by how I bristled at it that there was something there I needed to look at. When I was in college, I was involved in a local ACOA group (Adult Children of Alcoholics) with a few friends, and codependency was quite the buzzword. These friends were finding codependency in their every movement and breath, and the whole thing made me roll my eyes. Under the bristling I felt more recently I found an angry reaction -- one that insisted that codependency meant weakness, and weakness is hateful and no way buster am I that person. That sounded way too much like my angry teen self, the same way I was angry and hateful with the term alcoholic, which at that time was synonymous in my mind with my Dad. I was so angry with that term that I didn't learn to spell it correctly until I was nearly an adult. I wouldn't think about it long enough to do so. I realized I had been that way, in a buried sort of way, with the concept of codependency. 

So, I knew I needed to look there.

I am seeing how it has perhaps influenced my closer relationships to a degree. But the relationship that I am writing about here is my relationship with God. Is it possible I have inserted codependency into my relationship with God? That's today's question.

A priest once told me he used to approach prayer as if it were a daily dose of medicine that he had to administer to God, so that God would be okay. That struck me both in its ludicrousness and in its relatability. I should back up by saying that the definitions I have found for codependency settle in on the idea that the codependent lacks a firm sense of identity within herself. She doesn't know who she is without the responses and affirmation of other people. What she does in relationship to others, she does to learn who she is, not to express who she is. She is always motivated to make other people happy, because then she knows she is ok. If other people are not happy with her, then her identity tanks.

So I'm thinking about this: is it possible to go around "trying to make God happy?" How do I know when I've succeeded? What if I never can? What if God is so demanding that I'll just stay in constant stress, because He tolerates me, but constantly points me to the need of the world and to saints who converted thousands. I'm accepted (begrudgingly) but I have so far to go until He's actually delighted. Maybe even in heaven I'll just squeak in to some lowly place because I'll simply never measure up. 

Newsflash: God is perfect beatitude. I can't "make Him happy." Maybe, just maybe, that striving comes from a) poor formation in theology, Christian anthropology, and worship, and b) a codependent attitude. What if I am actually called to find my identity in Christ, to grow up into Him who is the head (Eph. 4:15) and from that place, express what God has put in me (namely, my created nature, deified in Him; the life of the Holy Spirit) into the world. What if building my entire moral life on some other foundation, even the most exacting religious standard, is going to fall apart, because it isn't built on the rock of Jesus Christ himself? 

Well, wouldn't that just blow your mind?

What if my sense of jangled nervousness comes from a lack of faith that God delights in me, that I am His child, that He has covenanted with me in my baptism, giving me new life, and that He is never going to let me go or require me to earn His favor? What if He eagerly awaits the slightest invitation from us to fill us to our current capacity with every good grace He has. What if these are new every morning, and we can constantly be filled with His goodness when we call upon Him? "How much more" will our heavenly Father give to those who ask? 

What if the thing that destroys my peace is believing that I need to give God just the right formula to get Him to be ok with me, so that I can be ok. What if that's just not the way any of this works?

Honestly, I think we could change the world overnight if this lie could be wiped clean from the depths of our hearts. 

The Urgency and Simplicity of Love

It seems that the Lord enjoys inviting me to go spelunking with Him. I am one of those people who, if an invitation seems too good, like too much fun, I panic and turn it down, thinking surely if I enjoy it, there must be something wrong with it. I'm silly, I know. 

This morning as I was reading, something caught my attention, and it feels like a spelunking invitation, so I'm here for it.

I was reading Temptation and Discernment by Segundo Galilea, and the section that caught my attention was from Part III, The Demons of Prayer, under the heading "Not Being Sufficiently Motivated." The author says that this distraction is all about being primarily motivated by felt need, whether emotional  psychological. Then, the part that caught my attention: "Above all... the ultimate, persisten motivation for prayer and its solid foundation is the conviction that God loves us and offers us the gift of liberating friendship. If this truth of faith does not genuinely persuade us, our motives will remain shallow... (p. 48, bold in the original).

When I read this, I immediately saw myself as an intense 20-something, sitting in my apartment in Milwaukee, interiorly clawing myself something fierce. I desired God. I had the example of my charismatic fellowship which taught me to throw myself whole hog into studying the Bible and pouring out my soul, keen to confront every painful, broken thing in me. I had a collection of books dealing with "healing the inner man" which focused a lot of forgiving those who had done us wrong and exposing these hurts to God to fix them. I was in the habit of going to church and crying buckets of tears in those days, because I was aware of lots of pains, past and present. My family felt very broken, and I was verging on desperation for God to "bring me a husband," because I felt certain that having a husband was to experience being loved and having proof that I was worthy of love. 

Ah, what would I say to young Marie if I were to meet her today...

I had some close relationships in those days, and honestly almost all of them netted more pain than good for me. One clear exception was my friend Ann (may she rest in peace) who was my prayer partner. We heard and supported one another, and she was even more interiorly quiet than myself. The others were men, and all of these were fraught with problems. My contribution to these problems I can trace back to one theme that I turned over and over in my mind in those days: I felt that I turned to God for fellowship and hanging out, and I turned to people to find my meaning and stability. In other words, I used God for what people are for, and I used people for what God is for. I did a lot of using, and not a lot of relating. 

I was doing Christianity as hard and as well as I knew how. But I really missed the basics. We had a discipleship class that I took in order to get dunked in the pool at the YMCA (which I later repudiated as a "re-baptism"). I heard it constantly, but I was unable to take it in that the foundation of life is prayer, and the foundation of prayer is that God loves us. And that prayer is receiving the liberating gift of God's friendship. To the best of my ability, I was wanting to give myself to God, but in reality I was terribly bound up in myself. I constantly betrayed and beat myself up verbally and emotionally. 

So, when this book Temptation and Discernment talks about the trap of going to God because of felt needs, I can testify that the danger is real. The enemy knew that my weak point was the desire for the love of a man (a natural good), and that I was not averse to putting a condition on God: if He would "bring me a husband" I would believe He loved me. Until then, I was going to agonize constantly and find reason to doubt whether what He says in Scripture is true.

And you know what? The enemy will use other misguided Christians. There came a point where my pastor at that time, who knew a small drama I was facing with one of the only single young men in the church, delivered what he said was "a word from the Lord" for me about God having a husband for me, and I in my deeply wounded credulity took it as gospel truth and affixed it to literally the first person who sat down next to me, who also happened to be the only other single young man in the church at that time. What ensued was several months, stretching into years, of me learning the very, very hard way the difference between standing on the Word of God and standing on foolishness. It's a long story.

But where sin abounds (and people's pastors mislead out of misguided compassion), grace abounds all the more. In the end, this became part of the grace that brought me into the Catholic Church, and back to the basics of the Incarnation of Christ -- the mindblowing reality that God came to live among us because of love. Because He loves us and wanted to live a human life so that we could share His life. 

When we come to discover and grow in our relationship to God it is so vitally important to be rooted correctly. And correctly, here, means in the conviction of the truth that God is love. The He loves me. That he offers the gift of liberating friendship. Some of us get so entangled with so many other things, and they all seem so dire or so important or so pressing or so distressing. The wounds yell. But when they are silent, and God gets a silent Word in edgewise, it always will be, "I love you."

Hiking, Love, and Transformation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And then there's today. 

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

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

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

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

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

Ponderings from Dear Master, Part Two

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

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

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

This quote captures something simple but central to my experience. 

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

You know that plastic thing that holds a turkey's legs together? (I had to Google it; apparently it is called a hock lock.) I feel like I had one of those taken off me. But instead of locking poultry legs, this thing held something in me to a way I -- or it -- wanted God to be, that He just isn't. A way I unconsciously was tempted to believe God is, and which subsequently kicked up a fight within me. What I could not see was it was the Holy Spirit fighting to get me out of the lock, and so I put up immense resistence. I was partnering with the wrong side of the struggle. 

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

Galatians chapter 3 says this:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ponderings from Dear Master, Part One

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But wait, there's more!

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

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

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

Human Formation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A New (Leg of the) Journey

 New years and new things may suggest each other, but I'm not one to choose some big newness project on January 1. Gosh, even writing that feels exhausting. Life is exhausting enough normally; I don't need to resolve myself any further.

This new leg is more something I am sensing I need and agreeing to. 

I think it just follows on what the Holy Spirit nudged me with last Good Friday with this line "everybody suffers." The second biggest take-away I had after I started praying the Seven Sorrows Rosary was that the suffering we experience is not meant to be a place to camp in, but a place to pass through, on our way to the glory of God. This little revelation came to me as I was out for a walk one Spring day, and I think these little revelations are like slow-blooming flowers, and they are meant to hold my attention for a long time, because they are gonna need awhile to really sink in.

I slipped into a blog post here and there last year that I've been dealing with anxiety more frequently than ... well, more frequently than I'd like to be the case, and more frequently than I'd like to admit. And more intensely than what has been normal for me. In fact, one Spring day I had a full blown panic attack, which hasn't happened for years, and really only happened to me one other time in my life, to my recollection. In the same time period I also had two episodes of anxiety hives, which was completely new. This got my attention and both by plan and sort of by happenstance I made some health changes, including ditching my exercise plan which was itself stressful and taking up one that fit me so much better, and was more demanding in good ways. I also completely gave up drinking coffee. I can't tell you how much good that did me. Between the two of these, my cortisol belly has all but disappeared, and my clothes fit me happily again. I'm also not completely freezing and interiorly curling up into a ball all of the time, despite the fact that our furnace has been functioning questionably for a solid month.

So all these are good things. But I know they aren't all that I need to address. I don't know -- yet, completely -- what I don't know, but I recognize certain sticking points in my life that don't just come out of nowhere. 

One tell-tale thing happened New Year's Eve. I read a friend's Facebook post that was a list of "23 ways I have seen Jesus' love in 2023," with the challenge to follow suit and post your own. I tried it. I started, but I couldn't finish it. I found myself focused on, Oh, that thing -- it wasn't nearly as bad as it could have been and I was worried about this, but it turned out ok and This really sad thing we survived ... It was all so heavy. And I thought of a few uplifting things but found myself afraid to share them publicly. Now, that's kind of a new one for me. I didn't like how this whole thing felt. 

Normally I pray about stuff like this, but I've really got nothing, there. No gush of words tumbling from the heart faucet. But I've been going back to St. Ivo and thinking of the Holy Spirit as the Advocate. So, I've prayed the Veni, Sancte Spiritus. Come, Holy Spirit. 

My favorite Carmelite, Fr. Iain Matthew, OCD, mentioned in one of his talks that, when it comes to allowing God to love us, one of our biggest difficulties is that 90% of us is in the deep freeze. It's there, we have it, but we can't really access this part of ourselves. This image and phrase has been tumbling around a bit, in this process. I want to love God with more of me. I want access to more of me to love God with. He deserves it.

So, I'm praying this way, and as I'm working through my used book inventory, getting stuff listed, I come across the book More Than Words: the Freedom to Thrive after Trauma by Margaret Vasquez (who just happens to be a regular at my parish). I set it aside to read, because it look valuable -- for someone else I know and what they are going through. (heh) 

So, I read it.

We pause here for the classic peanut butter and chocolate collision meme, signifying the creation of a new wonderful reality.

So I've ordered her second book, Fearless: Abundant Life through Infinite Love, and I've begun listening to her podcast about the integration of spirituality and human formation. This is a theme that Dr. Peter Malinowski also speaks and writes on at Souls and Hearts.com that I've been loosely following for a couple of years. But I know there is something for me to address, and I'm going to guess I'm going to discover it as I kind of make this my winter's work. 

One line that struck me from one of her videos was to the effect that God has more love for me than I need to heal my trauma symptoms. 

I think new avenues of growth await me. These often involve a good deal of falling apart, but I figure I'm gonna do that, regardless; or if I don't fall apart I'll just get stony and unfeeling, and I really don't want that. I really don't. 

So, here's to the journey.

Sorrow is Not Lord

If I am to take in the lessons of the Seven Sorrows that I have been learning lately, here's the main thing: I need to hold both the reality of the sorrow and the goodness of God. Hold both, together. I picture this like holding one reality in each hand.

Interiorly, though I think I've done this, I have given sorrow the first place, keeping it the most visible, as if the goodness of God as a reality has to be covered over or buried a bit. But sorrow is not Lord. I think this is the crux of Christian life. Sorrow is not Lord. 

I can't drum up -- in any kind of healthy way -- chipperness that allows me to bear (or ignore) sorrows. Something in my soul will give way, break, die, become deformed, become false when I do that. And I can't stuff the void sorrow creates with religious platitudes or mere observance. No, the antidote is not with me drumming up, putting forth effort, trying hard enough, to make sorrow dissipate, either in my own heart or in the world at large. Isn't this why people get either so angry or frustrated or overwhelmed or resort to escapism or addiction in the face of so much pain in the world? How do you cope with it all?

Christians say the answer is Emmanuel. Jesus Christ has shown His face on earth.

But how does that historical fact turn into access to something that makes a change in me? I'm baptized, I receive sacraments, I'm part of the community of the Church.... But I can still be this person who is proclaiming that Sorrow is Lord, and religious practices can feel empty. How do I move forward?

Here's the good news: The Lord knows my heart so much better than I do. The key is to go into that secret place (my heart), because the Lord is there, waiting for me. Our own hearts can be intimidating: deep, interior, cavernous places. What fears, hopes, desires -- sorrows -- are there? Does it make any sense that the path to regime change (Sorrow is Lord to Jesus is Lord) happens by way of stepping back into sorrow's territory again? Won't I just get sucked in to be its slave again?

Ah, but right there is the lie. The truth is, child of God, that the King of Love resides there. He waits for you there, eagerly. Sorrow as Lord has been trying to starve you off of the love and glory that is yours by right of your rebirth. 

Jesus is a man of sorrows, aquainted with bitterest grief. He knows this territory. He's lived it. He's not afraid of it. He's faced it, felt it, endured it, was killed by it, and then conquered it by getting up again, as it simply not possible by nature alone. And what it means to be baptized is that He has united you to Himself in that supernatural resurrection power. This absolutely does not mean that we will escape suffering. No. It is the human condition: Everyone Suffers. It means that when we suffer, not if, we have access to the same "juice" flowing through us. Grace: the very life of God. This is precisely how we share in His glory. We stand in the very real sorrows, we allow them to touch us (that is, we don't bolt and run, but neither do we chain ourselves to every sorrow that presents itself) and we turn to Jesus with our wills, with our interior selves. Where His love is. We pour out the sorrow to His loving heart, and we draw into ourselves the life He pours out to us in return. This exchange forms a bond of love, and as many times as we do this, with as many sorrows as we remember from the past or live through in the present, His love opens up a highway to flow through us. As St. Elizabeth of the Trinity says, we become His "supplemental humanity" through which He lives His life here, on earth. His love that conquers death flows through us into the world. This is prayer.

And in the process, yes, we continue to know sorrow, but we learn not to camp there. The hope of glory -- this marvelous exchange of our sorrow for His power -- enables us to keep moving forward, and to daily dethrone Sorrow as Lord, and to pledge our allegiance to the Good God.

Let Advent In

Tomorrow I'm singing in a community choir Christmas concert, and today was our dress rehearsal. Somewhere along the line this morning I finally became present to the words we were singing. I mean, this is perhaps an unusual community choir, where, for Christmas at least, we are singing almost all sacred music, or traditional carols, so almost every single song is actually about Jesus Christ. I confess I really haven't been tuned into that fact at all.

I confess I've gotten fairly comfortable with distracting myself pretty heavily from my interior life. Did you know that an easy way to do that is to get really busy with church stuff? At least six days out of the week I am leading music in one way or another. I found myself this week getting really bothered and ever so slightly confrontational with the sacristans about small things I noticed that went awry at Mass. Standing around the coffee pot after Mass I suddenly realized there were cobwebs in a corner of the ceiling right there. I confessed aloud to my daughter and a friend who was with us that I thought occasionally I should go to a different parish for Mass so I wouldn't be so distracted with being such a Church Lady.

And we won't even discuss hours passing through my fingers like water as I watch mindless reels on Facebook. Geez. Every day seems to go so fast, and I keep thinking about how I'm never going to get any of these days back. And yet, if I stop to ponder, even sometimes if I think I need to pull out that blog and write so I can actually dig down into it, I reprimand myself with Other Stuff I could be doing. Something supposedly more important. 

Distraction. Everything and anything except...

Reality. 

It's Advent.

Once upon a time, on a Christmas Eve night, a shockwave of grace went off in my soul that reverberated for, oh, something like 20 years. This shockwave taught me that becoming a human being was good enough for the Eternal Son of God. It isn't that I didn't know the doctrinal tenet of the Incarnation. But it wasn't so real to me until then. I can't explain the revelation except to say that Jesus embraced my humanity and said, "It is good. I made this." It was that night that, in my heart, I became a Catholic (followed be being received into the Church about 16 months later), and my Christian identity shifted from Luther's "poor, miserable sinner" who would never change, to a daughter who is redeemed, restored, and healed by the love of Jesus and the power of the Holy Spirit. 

But there was another shockwave that followed some 20 years later, and it was the Epiphany. Just search the blog for the word, and you'll see. 

And yeah, so here I am, in 2023, singing Christmas songs and just barely allowing the words to touch my heart. How did I get so controlling? What's the threat, here? 

There's a scary word in those Ephiphay posts: risk. I can't even write more about that right now, other than to say I need to bring my risk PTDS to the Lord. What I know to the marrow of my being is that God is good and there is nothing He cannot fill with His glory. The more cracked and broken it is, the bettter to showcase His glory. Honestly, I am eligible to be a massive, mighty showcase.

You know what? I don't want to be anxious and controlling. I know, better than I know my own name, that there is absolutely nothing for me to fear in God. I've spent my life feeling a fool to myself, so if there's new territory for me to scout there, hey, who doesn't love an adventure. I can set a daily intention to feel what is happening inside, and if I need to stop and smile, or stop and cry, or stop and write a blog post -- all are fine. All are just different verses I sing to the Lord, calling out, "Where have you hidden?" I can learn and I can change. I've been doing it for years. Any worthwhile endeavor takes some work, and I love work, as long as I also have hope and companionship.

This is the path of contemplation. How silently, how silently the wondrous gift is giv'n...

St. Ivo, pray for me.

Full Range of (E-)motion

One of the promises that Our Lady made to the visionary Marie Claire in Kibeho, regarding praying the Seven Sorrows rosary is this: 

Those who say it often... shall obtain clear understanding of their weaknesses and flaws causing them to sin, and those things we don't like about ourselves and thought were a part of our character, shall change.

That... sounds good to me! 

And while I didn't start praying it to cash in on promises, I have to admit that I am finding the promises delivered upon anyway.

In previous posts I've been reflecting on my sadness, and the love in which I know myself to be surrounded. Another significant theme of my life recently has been the need for me to enter into rest, and especially to deal with physical stress and anxiety (also mentioned here recently). I've been pursuing a new exercise program which is less about heart rate and pushing muscles and more about flexibility, and stretching. While I no longer have the back issues I once did (because I now have core muscles!) I am very aware of how much tension I carry in my body. So I've been learning how to purposefully move so as to release that tension as much as possible. The instructor pointed out that sometimes emotions can get released right along with the physical tension. We are integrated beings, and physical tension and emotional tension are connected. 

So I feel like all of this is converging for me for some needed change. It's all in process.

And today I went to confession, which is sort of like the power-wash of grace. Tension has a way of reinforcing my natural bent in on myself. Physically, it even looks like a pulling in, a squishing down. It's all about me exerting energy to try to get something to happen, but in a way that's like digging a pit in sand. Futile energy expenditure that wears me down and cuts off my awareness of the Life around me, the joy that weaves through small things, and the Voice of God in the still, small whisper. All of this self-reliance was clear to me today.

For my penance, I was told to slowly and meditatively pray the Anima Christi prayer. It goes like this: 

So I prayed... and then I got to the line that hit me: Separated from You let me never be. I had to repeat it over and over again for a couple of minutes as it all washed over me. I handed over old fears and even recent incarnations of my misplaced struggles with childhood abandonment. Although my parents divorced when I was five, my father was an elusive presence even before that time, due to him taking teaching jobs at some distance (the first about two hours away, another 11 hours away, so that he only came home on occasional weekends). When I was about six, my oldest sister moved away, and my second sister a few years later. One day when I was fifteen, my brother announced at dinner that he was moving out the next day. In our family dynamics, these were not relocations; they were severances. I panicked whenever friends at school talked about the possibility of moving.  And while it doesn't bother me to admit this now, for a long time I could not even admit to myself that I had recurrent bouts of absolute panic, until age 19, whenever my Mom came home after I went to bed and left in the morning before I got up, because I was absolutely certain that she had moved away and left me alone to fend for myself. 

Separated from You, let me never be.

I did a lot of self-protection by clinging to things that felt certain: knowledge, my academic abilities, God, as I understood Him. God has a wonderful way of dealing patiently with exceptionally messed up people who want Him on their own terms, but are still open to whatever really is true. That was me. 

To make that long story short, God duped me and I allowed myself to be duped (Jer. 20:7). It's a long story, but finally he brought me through two different experiences where I felt myself abandoned, by people, yes, but especially by God Himself, in that suddenly I did not understand Him anymore. 

What I see now is that I had always been separated from God to a degree by my anxious clinging, my fear of abandonment, my lack of ability to trust that He would keep me safe. He was doing a series of surguries in my soul. Really, before each painful one in that series there was an implant of joy and safety. Hard to explain, but in retrospect, it's extremely clear. 

And then he basically crushed the deformed measure I had made for Him. 

And it took time, but a new thing grew in its place, and is still growing. It is vibrant, and it is beautiful. 

Separated from You, let me never be. 

It is sin that separates us, and it is His love that unites us to Him. But it isn't only our active, personal sins that separate us. It is also these areas of weakness due to woundings which have never gotten full Son exposure. It's the ways we have responded in our own power to our wounds. Our flaws and cracks from mishandling can be not just sealed up, but completely transformed to bear the glory of God. And the more we know that we are weak, the more Christ's power can rest on us. Lord, teach me really what it is to delight in my weaknesses. 

Good Morning, and Welcome to my Anxiety

Writing has always been a key way for me to access and relieve the pressure built up in me by feelings and thoughts that develop as I journey through life. I am still meta-surprised to find I am human (surprised that I am still learning and encountering new chapters). And right now I am poking at my experience of anxiety, learning what is in it and listening for what the Holy Spirit is saying to me about it. 

And since it is a story, I'll back this up a bit and narrate from my last three blog posts as a starting point.

This little phrase that spoke to me on Good Friday has been growing into a strong, tall sapling: Everyone suffers. About a week after I began mulling on that, I was scrolling Facebook and found that a Carmelite friend of mine had posted about a conference he attended called (drumroll) "Everyone Suffers." I didn't need twenty nudges to check out the website, and saw that it was about praying the Seven Sorrows rosary or the daily prayer* which focuses on virtues and beatitudes. This linking of virtues and the Beatitudes sounded so much like what my OCDS formation group is working on right now that I immediately incorporated that prayer into my daily meditation. I also contacted a friend who makes rosaries and asked her to make me a Seven Sorrows rosary. 

My observation here is that I normally hesitate over moves like this. On a rare occasion, I listen to a speaker who is excited about something and I mesh with that excitement enough to go "rah rah" over whatever s/he is promoting, but those bursts of learning or practice are usually short-lived. This involved no one speaking, just seeing something concrete in front of me that had an undeniable connection to a word I heard God speak interiorly. I hesitate at the still, small voice sometimes because of a fear of getting burned. I know I have a capacity to get super excited over things, and it can make me feel unglued, scattered, and lost. I know that if I never follow any leads, I'll never end up feeling unglued, scattered, and lost. But there's a high price to pay interiorly for not following any leads.

So my friend finished my rosary, and it is beautiful. Oh, I have a picture:

One day, out for a walk, learning to pray this rosary, I had a foundational revelation about the grace I was being given. I'd say the Blessed Mother was teaching me that her sorrows, or the sorrows of Jesus, were not a place to camp. They passed through their sorrows on the way to glory. And I was to realize the same. My sorrows are not a place for me to camp or get stuck. And to the extent that I am stuck, what I need is the practice of virtues, according to the Beatitudes, which is basically Jesus' road map to the kingdom. One way that I repeatedly get stuck is that I measure my life by my own standard, and that standard is usually impossibly high, unrealistic, constantly shifting, or trying to be at peace with those who are not holy (including myself). It doesn't really matter which of these is the resulting mess -- the core problem is that I put myself in a wrestling lock against Jesus' Lordship. And it's usually because of my innate tendency to suspect incompetence everywhere, even in God. And because I'm a fool.

Basically the Blessed Mother has invited me to walk with her and learn to release my sorrows to the Lord.

And lo and behold, I find that my sorrows seem to be wrapped up in anxiety. More on that later.

When I started learning to pray the Seven Sorrows rosary, I remembered that somewhere in my vast collection of printed materials in my house, I had a booklet on how to pray it. I dug it out, and while I have not yet been able to really connect with those prayers (I tend to focus more on Carl Brown's prayer linked above), the booklet was by Immaculee Ilibagiza, whom I have known of by reputation and an occasional mention by my elderly Nigerian friend. I knew she was the woman who survived the Rwandan genocide by hiding in a bathroom, but I didn't know much more than that. 

Once again I did not squash an inspiration with excessive hesitancy, but went to Immaculee's website and ordered a copy of every book she's written. I have finished the first three, am in the middle of the fourth, and have three more that I have yet to start. 

Now, I had actually thought to write here earlier about this journey that began for me on Good Friday, but part of me wanted to wait to digest everything Immaculee wrote first. Clearly I've decided that it is ok to write while in process -- I mean, when am I not "in process." If there was ever a life which speaks to what the Blessed Mother is teaching me -- that sorrows are to lead us to glory -- then it is Immaculee's life and testimony. In brief, it seems that a big part of getting stuck is refusing to face or accept the suffering while still trusting in a Good God. Holding both. I can't summarize the intensity of her experience here, but if it intrigues you I certainly recommend you read her books. The scope of them is more than personal, because he also deals with the Marian apparitions of Kibeho which effectively predicted the genocide. It's huge, and more than I can even touch on right now. But it isn't strange to realize that any one of our little lives, in God, touches all of eternity. 

So, all of that is how I've gotten to the place today. For the last couple of months I have occasionally been experiencing unusual physical symptoms of anxiety, I mean, much more than is typical for me. As I look back on my life, I realize I have had chronic anxiety, even from childhood. But it was so normal for me that I didn't know there was another way to be. I recall a physical exam in my 30s where the doctor was trying to test reflexes in my elbow. He wanted me to raise my arm in an L-shape, letting my forearm dangle downward. I held my arm out like a concrete L. "Just relax," he said. "I am relaxed," I replied. I really could not tell the difference between tension and relaxation in my body.

I used to only notice anxiety when a new situation tested it, but that was pretty much all the time. Later, I started to only notice anxiety when I was able to feel rested inside; I began to notice a contrast. There's some strange looping going on there. In the last fifteen years or so the rest has greatly increased, and my ability to cope with new situations has increased. But down in between all of this, there is still more freedom that the Lord wishes for me.

Ah, another piece. A few days ago as I deep-cleaned my "cooktop," I listned to my favorite Carmelite, Fr. Iain Matthew, OCD give this talk: Making Life an Offering: Teresa's Experience of Life in the Trinity. In fact, I listened to it about four times in a row. The word that I needed to glean from it at the time was this notion of spaciousness in God. That St. Teresa's experience of God shaped how she related with people, and it was that there was space for her to be her. She could be playful. She could be a tad audacious. She could be free. She could be herself -- when she prayed and as she lived. The nature of God draws us to this. "Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom" (2 Cor. 3:17). 

This word reverberated around and around in me. Physically, anxiety makes me contract and pull in on myself, and it hurts my muscles and my back. This notion of space, spaciousness, of opening wide to God... it's all in the opposite direction of anxiety. No creature opens wide where there is no trust.

All of these things, physical, emotional, spiritual, mental... these are all where I'm at right now. It's good. It's in process. I see a lifetime yet of practicing these things ahead of me, though. Maybe this is wisdom of age starting to take root. 

*August 2023 Edit: Carl has taken down his old website, and the new one does not include that prayer. The text of it is below.

Seven Sorrows Prayer

Mary, by your example in hearing and accepting the prophecy of Simeon, may I learn the virtue of humility, and live the Beatitude: Blessed are the poor in spirit, the kingdom of God is theirs.

Through your example of selflessness in the flight into Egypt, may I learn the virtue of generosity, and live the Beatitude: Blessed are the sorrowful, they shall be consoled.

As you were single-hearted in searching for Jesus when you lost him for three days, may I learn the virtue of purity, and live the Beatitude: Blessed are the pure of heart, for they shall see God.

When things don’t go my way, may I practice the virtue of patience as you did, while watching Jesus carry his cross to Calvary, and live the Beatitude: Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God.

When I’m tempted to escape difficulties through self-indulgence, may I be inspired to practice temperance as you did when you stood at the foot of the cross with your son, Jesus, and live the Beatitude: Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for holiness, they shall have their fill.

When others harm me or those I love, may I grow in the virtue of the kindness that you demonstrated in receiving the dead body of your Son into your arms, and live the Beatitude: Blessed are the merciful, for mercy shall be theirs.

When I’m tempted to despair or become despondent may I recall your diligence at the burial of Jesus, and live the Beatitude: Blessed are those persecuted for holiness, the kingdom of God is theirs.

Amen.

Whether Paul or Apollos, or Charismatic or Latin

In 1991, when I first responded to the Lord's call to enter the Catholic Church, I belonged to an interdenominational charismatic fellowship. My first bridge into Catholic life was through a charismatic prayer group which was led by the parents of the worship leader at my fellowship (who was an ex-Catholic). The members of that prayer group befriended me and walked with me through my 18 month journey into the Church, and celebrated my Confirmation with me. 

But what formed me the most deeply during that time was my attendance at daily Mass. Going to daily Mass was something the Lord impressed on me within days of my saying yes to Him. As I recall, though, it took me the better part of a year to be obedient on that point. I finally began when I realized I could go to Mass after work. Most of the time I went to Gesu parish on the Marquette University campus, but sometimes, when I got off work early, I went to St. Bernard's in Wauwatosa. From the time I began this practice until I moved to Japan in September of 1994 I was stunned over and over again by how much grace the Lord could pour forth in a 25-30 minute Mass with no music, no fanfare, no lector, especially in the very plain basement church at Gesu. Time and time again, the Lord met me powerfully from the moment I entered the door. He met my miserable heart and began a radical transformation of my soul and mind. 

When I planned to leave Japan and had no idea of what to do next, I came to Steubenville in part because of its reputation as a focal point of Catholic charismatic renewal (and in part because I didn't know of any options for graduate school.) And while I mentally associated the charismatic renewal as something that led me to the Catholic Church, I knew full well that the destination of my soul was... the Catholic Church, or rather the kingdom of God through her. I did not like to label myself as a charismatic Catholic because this is redundant. Being Catholic is the fullness. As John Michael Talbot says, to be Catholic is to be "full gospel."

These days I see a trend that reminds me a lot of the charistmatic renewal in both its good and bad aspects, and that is the Latin liturgical movement. I believe that it is an authentic prompting of the Holy Spirit to draw Christians closer into conformity with Jesus Christ, to purify them for belonging to each other in the Church and bringing the lost to salvation. 

But I hope that these won't become "Latin Mass advocates." I hope that they will become disciples and apostles of the Lord Jesus Christ and of his gospel. I have always cringed hard when I hear people equate the charismatic renewal with a certain style of music, of worship, of prayer, or of anything external. It is about the person of the Holy Spirit, the one who overshadowed the Virign Mary, the one who guides us into all truth, the one sent by the Father and who establishes our identity in His Son. We can and do have our aesthetic tastes, and we do have documents from the Church guiding us in valid celebration of the liturgy. But earthly spiritual attachments form us in beginning stages of growth. St. John of the Cross teaches us that even these need to be surrendered. We long for our senses to be richly engaged in worship, and that is right and good, but we also must eventually leave the world of the senses and die to this to rise to deeper delights directly from God. 

I loved, and was deeply attached to, the powerful way we worshipped in my charismatic fellowship. But God called me to surrender that and to trust He could meet me in liturgy. I grew up with Lutheran liturgy and thought I was entering greener pastures when I left it -- and in some ways I was. All I knew of it was lifelessness. One form of worship or another is not, ultimately, where we find life. Liturgical or free, Extraordinary or Novus Ordo -- it isn't about that. It is about following Jesus Christ in obedience.  

Let us all, together, enter into life.

Intercession, or "Praying to Saints"

 In my conversations with non-Catholic Christians, I find that one of the most difficult doctrines to discuss is our relationship with others in the Body of Christ. Such a double irony, right? We struggle with relating to each other because we struggle with how Jesus teaches us to relate to each other.

This was one of my biggest bugaboos on my way into the Church as well. After all, when we talk about prayer, we touch on the secret sanctuary of our thoughts. It's hard enough to conceive of God being able to read everything that is written there before we even have the courage to dip in and pick out our worries, fears, needs, pain, exultation, and joys, hold these open to God and start to lay them bare to Him. How in the world do other mere human beings get in on this conversation? Are they omniscient, like Him, to hear my prayers and read my secred thoughts? Are they substitutes for God? Do we go to them because we are afraid of Him, or we aren't important enough to trouble Him? Are saints put in charge of specialties, like the Greek and Roman gods? Is this a syncretism carryover? Doesn't the Bible clearly say that there is one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus? If Jesus is the one mediator, doesn't that mean that anyone else going to God on our behalf is unbiblical?

So, let's start with that last point. The eternal Son of God who took on flesh in Jesus Christ is the only way that we come back into relationship with the Blessed Trinity, a relationship broken historically by the Fall. He is the only one who has taken on the penalty for our sins and has now opened heaven for us and welcomes us back into union with the Blessed Trinity. 

But the mediation of the Son of God is not the same thing as intercessory prayer, and that is illustrated all over the Bible, where we are commanded and taught to pray for each other. "Pray for those who persecute you," for example, from Jesus' own lips. And oodles of other references.

St. Paul also teaches us that in the Body of Christ, the eye cannot say to the hand "I do not need you." All of the parts are made to belong to one another. 

We don't cease to belong to the Body of Christ when we die. In fact, death leads to our glory in heaven, where after thorough purification from sin, we enter the Most Holy Place, where Jesus Himself is. There, union with God is no longer mediated by faith. We are known fully, even as we are fully known. Union is complete, to whatever degree our creation has been filled by Him. 

When we go to confession, one of the aspects of sin that we have to grapple with is that no sin is private, even when it is completely secret. Choices in favor of not-God ripple out from us. We seek reconciliation to heal not only our own hearts and our relationship with God, but also the relationship with the Body of Christ. 

So when I pray, you bet your booties I seek the intercession of those already in heaven. The way I experience it is like this: My soul comes before the Lord, in the majestic splendor of His glory, His heaven. (This actually exists, by his grace, within my soul.) As I pour out my heart to Him, praising Him for His grace and mercy and favor and soaking in His love, I also acknowledge the help that I need to live from this place. After I'm done praying, I need to not snap back into me being Lord and Ruler of all, Caller of all shots, Namer of good and bad, right and wrong. I soak in Reality, and I need to live out of that place of peace, even in the face of suffering, pain, responsibility, work, and all the rest. I call upon saints that I have gotten to know, who have run the race and fought the fight, and by God's grace have won the crown. They have learned to do what I am now wanting to do. Kneeling before the Lord, I ask them now to come in the Spirit and "lay their hands on me," invoking the Holy Spirit through their human love for me to send me that which I need, especially what they can see that I need that I cannot. 

I trust people on earth to do this for me. Or rather, I trust that when my friends obey God's command to intercede, that He will answer. I trust that God will answer as my friends in heaven ask Him, too. How can they hear me? I am speaking to the Head, and they are his members. I don't know if I can find this line in the Catechism, but if Jesus is the head, perhaps the Holy Spirit is the central nervous system. The same Holy Spirit that bids me call out Abba, Father, that bids me draw near Jesus, fills them and compels them. We can't really imagine what the communion of heaven is like, but it is perfect love both for God and for neighbor, because that's how love works. 

The impoverishment of the Christian faith leaves out the glory God gives us in being secondary causes, cooperators with His grace, agents of His love, fully alive in His Spirit, bonded intimately with Him, sharing His own loves and concerns for those still in the race.

A Gift of Grace

Six years ago today, something profound happened. In fact, it was so profound that six years later I know I'm only beginning to take it in and live by its truth. 

At the time, I wrote about it here, surrounding the main event in lots of context. By the sheer grace of God, I had the rare presence of mind to take a short video while this striking thing was happening. You won't see what happened, because it was interior, (you won't see much of anything due to camera and videographer quality) but you will hear something lovely:

This was captured on my last full day in Poland, after a month-long pilgrimage during World Youth Day in the Year of Mercy. Personally, it came at the end of a stormy period of several years where God was teaching me my vocation to love and purifying my heart in some really painful and humbling ways. It was during this juncture that I started formation as a Secular Carmelite.

I wrote a lot about the whole trip in a blog called A Pilgrim in Poland, which is pretty good. As I have begun re-reading, I've learned some things. I recommend it. 𝨾 

I think the most profound things are not "new truths," but the grace to believe truth.
Looking back, here are the graces I have received:
I know that God is Love.
I know that God loves me.

I know that His love is immense, powerful, personal, intimate, insistent, edifying, knowledgable, big, deep, wide, unconditionally available to every living being, fiery, awesome, desireable, healing. 

I know that His love is pain-inducing to the degree that we resist being love-shaped, to the degree we grip our fists, try to possess out of fear of loss, try to feed our addictions and our brokenness. 

I know that He is bigger than our wounds, and that we all have wounds. 

I know all human beings are made not only to belong to God, but to belong to each other.

I know we need not only God to be holy, we need each other. God made it that way. He makes us secondary causes of holiness for each other.

I know He has called me to Carmel to learn to be Love in the heart of the Church. To live in God, and God in me, on this earth, immersing everyone into the ocean of God's mercy and love (which is His heart, the Holy Eucharist, the Blessed Sacrament).

And while there were years leading up to being able to receive this, and while I am still working it out (and it will remain my life's task until I die), I know that on this day, six years ago, there was a significant grace deposit made, where in a prolonged instant, God gave me this.

Here's a secret. One of the songs the quartet played was Blue Moon. It was actually a pinacle moment of personally receiving this. It is why, on the rare occasion when I go to a restaurant and order beer, I order a Blue Moon. It is also one of the many graced musical moments in my life that make me a devoted non-stickler when it comes to the question of what kind of music God can use to minister life.

The only possible fitting thanks I can think of is to give my entire life to Him, trusting the Lord totally to take care of everything. Amen.

Christian Identity; Christian Prayer

 Here's what I'm hearing. Christian prayer is immersion into Christian identity. Christian identity is a spiritual reality, and comes from being engrafted into Christ in baptism and grows by faith, which is nurtured by prayer, that is, by communing with God. The fruit of faith and prayer is action, prompted by the love born in us through the Spirit and the Word. All of this grows out of the seed bed of hope, a position of receiving what God is giving.

Is prayer recitation? Words? This is where we need Teresa's mansions. We need to realize that each journey from the baptismal font into glory is individual, and that every plant grows differently, even though everyone needs the same basic dirt, sun, water, air.

The difficulty comes when there is a disconnect, either between a practice of prayer and Christian identity (when prayer becomes my own effort only, and that effort starts blocking off, choking out, working against, the flowing of the Holy Spirit and the intention of Jesus). Or when there is a wilting on the vine, and Christian identity itself is foreign, and we lose sight of who we are, and any attempts at Christian prayer are external words, and we struggle to find a connection to reality with them. The first disconnect can find us chugging along for quite some time, but without joy and peace -- basically with no fruit of the Holy Spirit. The second disconnect moves us away from the Church either literally, like we leave the Church, or it becomes or remains a cultural, human experience.

All of my Christian life, since childhood, I have felt myself called to Christians with these disconnects, especially to the latter.

I also suspect both disconnects can be operative at the same time.

What I am hearing now is that for me, prayer is my tether to my identity. My identity is not a product of my prayer. I don't make it. I don't fret over it. I don't try to discover it. I receive it. My life is hidden with Christ in God, and as I pray, I am receiving His life -- my life. Communing with God is an infilling. An infilling of His love. It isn't so much that I become enraptured or have any particular emotional experience as much as I am receiving what God is giving. Life. I don't actually comprehend the transaction nor what I receive, but I am aware of receiving. I mean, sometimes I am. Right now I am. I am also called to act, to care, to love, to intercede out of that -- regardless of what I feel, I know that I can immerse others in it, by my will of bringing them before the Lord and sharing what I am receiving with them in the spiritual exchange of "praying for them." I also, from this receiving, move into my active life, after I am done praying (Luke 11:1), and this life shows how deeply or shallowly my receiving soaks, and gives me opportunities to interact with the world around me, now shaped to the degree I have been by Love. And then later I go back to prayer and the cycle of growing and receiving and being washed of faults and seeing my nothingness and God's everythingness starts again. But, "it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me." This is what it means to be a Christian; to bear the presence of Christ in this way into the world. 

I have been baptized into Christ. I pray. This is how Christ comes into the world, now: through us who are formed into living stones, the Church.