Trauma-Informed Lent

I'm not trying to be trendy with this title; I'm trying to share my heart. 

For roughly the last nine months, I've been seeing a therapist who has a specialty in trauma work. Why, you say? Well, as I progressed through my Spiritual Direction Formation Program, I realized I had both childhood and adult trauma that I needed help addressing. Now I only wish I had started this process decades ago. It  has been incredibly freeing, like it would be freeing for someone to get rid of sciatica pain, but who had somehow spent so long with it they no longer recognized it wasn't the body's intended function. 

Both trauma and its resolution has impacted a lot in me, but for right now I want to look at how trauma had distorted Lent in my mind for a long time.

St. Paul reminds us that our thoughts are vital to our spiritual life. "Take every thought captive" and make it obedient to Christ (2 Cor. 10:5); "set your mind on things above," (Col. 3:2) and "whatever is true, noble, right, lovely... think upon these things" (Phil. 4:8) are examples written to three different cities' communities of believers. In other words, this was standard in his instruction of how to be a Christian. It does make a presumption, though. It presumes that people had already learned to seperate which thoughts were obedient to Christ, true, good, and from heaven -- from those that came from and led to disobedience, lies, bad, and from hell. 

Experience tells me that we life long Christians can make serious mistakes here. If I think it all the time, it must be true and good. Right? Right? 

Enter trauma to seriously mess with your mind. If the wheat your life long Christianity has mixed with the weeds of childhood trauma, you might just be clinging with all your religious might to things that definitely are not true and good. But they are so familiar, so worn in, so me that, certainly I must be understanding this correctly. After all, I'm a Christian. 

This is why we have the famous saying "anyone who takes himself for his own spiritual director is the disciple of a fool." We need to receive input from others to know ourselves.

I want to share a prayer we hear at daily Mass during Lent to illustrate how we can twist truth around our trauma, and believe we hear God confirming us in our dysfunction. From Preface II for Lent (italics mine):

...For you have given your children a sacred time
for the renewing and purifying of their hearts,
that, freed from disordered affections,
they may so deal with the things of this passing world
as to hold rather to the things that eternally endure.

Now, I have nearly a Master's degree in theology, but I'm telling you that my trauma did not care about that. I also have a BA in English, and I understand words well, but my trauma also did not care about that. My trauma latched on to emotional content, especially anything that struck fear of loss or demand for a certain kind of herculean  moral performance.

Disordered affections? This meant affection, attachment, and human feeling were ultimately bad news, and being a good Christian meant being willing to live without these, ready to rip them out, trample them underfoot. Yes, I know the prayer really means that a good, created thing like affection needs grace to raise it from the natural level (by that purification mentioned above it). But in the past as I prayed this, I baptized the voice of trauma and practiced steeling myself against my own humanity.

Dealing with the things of this passing world? Ok, what passes away. Voice of trauma says: the reliability of others. A sense of safety. A sense of others acknowledging I have intrinsic worth. What things eternally endure? I have to be the responsible one. The buck stops here. Maybe if I hold my breath long enough I will finally be able to escape.

Yeah, no. 

If you would have asked me for an analysis of these prayers in any recent year, I would have been able to theologically parse exactly what they really mean. But deep down, I would have found it hard to believe or connect the explanation to my experience. 

But today when I heard this at Mass, I heard it differently. I heard that the Lenten observance purifies my mind from clinging to lies and fears. I heard that the lost little one within who clung in fear to herself can in fact open more deeply to love and to life. God is love, love is eternal, and Jesus is right here with me all the time! His love fills me, and of course I'm going to love all the things He made; they're His! For me! And all the people He made -- they eternally endure, too. Some are harder to love, because they are curled up, clinging in fear to themselves, too. But just like trauma shapes us, love shapes us, too. It renews and purifies. We deal with the world by loving. So we already live in what eternally endures. Disordered affection means we don't love like Jesus. He puts things right so that we can. His love went to the cross, that place of ultimate shame and pain, taking our sin.

Freedom from disordered affection is when we allow Jesus to meet us right there: in our shame and our pain, and our sin. Jesus has been there the whole time. We are the ones who really can't bear to look up at Him, as long as we are curled up on ourselves. Sometimes tying ourselves down tighter with ropes made from religious words. 

God Himself will set me free from the hunter's snare.
   From those who would trap me with lying words  (Lenten responsory, Morning Prayer)

The Pain in My Side

Each year during the Triduum, I lead and participate with a group of parishioners who pray the Office of Readings and Morning Prayer together. (Actually, we pray Morning Prayer together daily already, but we tend to gather a few more people during the Triduum.)

One line from the Office of Readings struck me this morning as if I'd never read it before. It is Jesus the Victor speaking to Adam whom he has gone to free from Death. He says, "My side has healed the pain in yours."

For context, there's the whole paragraph:

I slept on the cross and a sword pierced my side for you who slept in paradise and brought forth Eve from your side. My side has healed the pain in yours. My sleep will rouse you from your sleep in hell. The sword that pierced me has sheathed the sword that was turned against you.

The entire reading is of course about the Lord freeing Adam from the death brought upon him through his sin, the sin that lost innocence for the whole human race. By extension, then, of course it is about how we are all freed from bondage to sin by Christ's victory over death.

This ancient homily was written before fundamentalism got its teeth into the book of Genesis. But what struck me is that while the text talks about sin, it was not Adam who opened his own side to create Eve. It was God. God caused the pain, if you will. And then, it says, he heals it. 

But no, I don't think the healed pain that this speaks of is just that God opened Adam's side, and now He's saying, oh, my bad, let me fix you up again. The opening of Adam's side and drawing forth Eve speaks about how on a deep level, human beings are created to be interdependent on one another, needing one another, accountable to one another, and indeed responsible for one another. The pain in Adam's side was that when Eve, a separate person, but also part of himself, faced the dragon, he stood aloof, mute, passive, actionless. The ache in his side, which he passed on to his offspring, was this "Am I my [wife's] keeper?" She's bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh, but I'm totally tuned out from any sense of connection to her, or to myself that would arouse me to act when I see this assult on human dignity. "Ain't no my job."

Salvation is indeed union with God, and union with God entails communion with other human beings. In my days when I identified as a misanthrope, I really struggled to get that. It is the grace and power of God which creates both union and communion, and we are his co-operators in both. Love of God and love of neighbor are of a piece. And we will struggle with both until we accept and care for ourselves as the locus of receiving and giving of this love, and allow the pain in Christ's side to heal the pain in ours, where we mourn how our connections with others involve failure.

Joy Comes in the Morning

This morning as I enter into prayer, I find a strange gratitude welling up inside of me. Gratitude in general is unusual enough for me. But I review scenes of my past and find them a wellspring of gratitude that I wasn't expecting.

Let me be clear. I'm not grateful that these things happened. Bad things happen to everyone, and God is not some ogre who gets his jollies from this. 

When bad things happen, I at least (and I'm guessing this is rather true of everyone) become an expert wall builder. I don't want to feel the bad thing, so I wall it off. I snip the nerves that connect me to the experience. When you lay on your arm or leg and it goes numb, it feels heavy and useless, but it doesn't really hurt. It is after you free it that it starts to hurt. So a common and maybe subconscious reaction to emotional pain is to numb it, one way or the other. I have always done this with my mind. Some people do this with addictions. It's all the same mechanism, I think.

So part of the wonder is that all of this is now out of anesthesia. What was master is becoming servant.

I can trace through a whole list:
My father's mental illness and alcoholism, apparently in full swing already when I was born. His absence, in turn with my parents' fighting. My parents' divorce and my mother's stress and an utterly tumultuous relationship with my dad (for all of us). Feeling like a piece of furniture in a house rather than a member of a family. Gut-wrenching desperation and fear over chronic singleness, concurrent with toxic and sometimes abusive relationships with men who proverbially had red flags tattooed all over their faces. Anger and desperation over infertility. Spiritual confusion all along the way over what God's love actually is and layers upon layers of deception that I embraced. And the terror of trusting through actually being healed.

I am not grateful that a single bit of that happened. Except that last word, of course.

I am grateful to realize that God, by His Spirit, was closer to me than I to myself, through all of that. He never abandoned me. He never gave up on me. He never lost patience with me. 

Why didn't He stop it all? In answer to that, I'll invite you to watch Season 4 of The Chosen. In this world, things are unleashed. It's the way things are. Jesus did not come to stop the bad things; He came to go through them with us. He gave me the dose of grace I could handle, and infinitely more than I deserved as I consistently rejected and resisted His efforts to draw me closer sooner.

The end, the telos, of humankind is not a happy life on earth. We are made for something much more profound than that. We are made for union with God, forever in eternity, and with eternity starting now and entered into now. And as I see my past and see Jesus with me (which I absolutely, totally and completely, could never see in real time) I see the capacity I have within me now to receive the life of God into me. If I'm a thimble, God will fill me and I'll be a full thimble. If I'm a bowl, God will fill me and I'll be a full bowl. Swimming pool, crater, canyon. We don't have to make hollowing ourselves out a project; life does that. God will always, always, pour out Himself more abundantly than we can hold, because His love is always beyond our power to hold. Our work is to receive from Him and believe what He says.

And I know that whatever may come, this is the reality. I don't like pain and suffering. But I also don't have to fear it or dread it. Because God is faithful. 

Weeping may endure for a night, but joy comes in the morning. (Psalm 30:5)

Fr. John, Belonging, and Conversion

My first spiritual director, back in the early 90s in Milwaukee, was a Jesuit priest who I was very personally fond of. His was the first daily Mass I frequented, at 5:30 every afternoon after work, in the basement chapel of Gesu Church. His homilies were intelligent and helpful, and I delighted at what I suppose might have been a stereotypically "Jesuit" way of phrasing certain things, for example in his prayer intentions, so they could have a meaning to cover every angle. I wasn't fond on how he would never call God "he," though. I'll never forget the line of the Psalm which became "God Godself is in the midst of God's people." Come to think of it, I did go through a time when it drove me up a wall, and I even was ready to walk out of a Sunday Mass for which I saw he was main celebrant. But the Lord pulled me up by the scruff of my neck and I felt rebuked for allowing my prideful judgment of him. It was maybe a year later I asked him to be my spiritual director, which he did for about nine months, before I left for Japan. I missed him so mightily when I left. He was essentially the only Catholic I had any connection to at the time.

I never wanted to ask him his thoughts on theology, however. It was a time and a place where there were some wild ideas going around, and I thought it possible that he might sympathize with things I would not have known how to handle. 

The one thing he did very, very well was that he accepted me, exactly as I was. And I was a newly converted Catholic who was a big mess. I hardly remember what I talked to him about, but I know I talked a lot, and he listened a lot. He also told me some stories of his own vulnerability, like how he was terrified of flying because he had severe closterphobia. I recall one session where he actually suddenly excused himself and bolted out of the room. He had a pathway into his office in such a way that he couldn't see the door from where he sat. He explained this was due to his closterphobia also. 

He died of throat cancer at age 60, just a couple of months after my daughter was born. I felt alone in the world when I found out, even though at that point I hadn't been his parishioner for over a decade. 

So why am I thinking about Father John tonight? 

I'm thinking about the power of belonging. Belonging both to the Church and in the Church. Fr. John was Gesu's RCIA director and welcomed people into the Church from all walks of life. I remember he referred to those who came in with little religious background as having "less deformation" to work with. I was definitely the opposite (though I did not go through his RCIA). 

Are Catholics weak at welcoming people exactly as they are? Loving people where they are? What about people who are already in the pews? Do we have an ever lengthening list of behaviors that people need to conform to before they are acceptable? Do we think God treats us that way? 

Conversion is about transformation. People change people (or try to, or want to) from the outside in. God changes people from the inside out. 

We are good at saying we need constant conversion. Yes. That's why we observe Lent. But to convert, we have to stop trying to make ourselves acceptable like some kind of DIY, and trying to get others to conform to our standards. We need to seek the One who is Love and let Him embrace us as we are. All of it. As we do, He will give us His own life in return.

This video spurred my thoughts the other day: Ever Wonder Especially this line: "To belong is to be seen, to be known, to be understood, and to be accepted.... Belonging is found in God."

Suffering, and Lenten Lessons Learned

 Here we are, a week after Good Friday. Time to take a break and reflect on what stood out to me at the end of Lent. Sometimes, without stopping to examine, I'm likely to lose or ignore the gifts I've received.

Right at the end of Lent, something was happening in my heart regarding suffering. I found grace reaching in to heal a blockage, with the simultaneous revealing to my conscious mind that it was even there. This blockage entailed a denial of suffering. Not a distaste for it, not a fear of it, but a refusal to accept that suffering happens, and is an unavoidable part of life. Oh, I'd heard and spoken words about this all my life, and on one level I knew what was true. But I discovered a part of me that insisted "This is not happening." A part that shuts down in the face of suffering. 

And now I'm remembering a meditation on the psychological suffering of Jesus in Gethsemane that I listened to on Wednesday of Holy Week. In it, Dr. Peter Malinoski looked at human responses to deep trauma, including this kind of total shutdown in the face of grief. (Remembering these pieces and how they fit together is exactly why I write this stuff out! Would lose it otherwise!) Jesus, bearing unimagineable pain from all the sins committed of all time, went through the same psychological processes we would, except without short-circuiting and beginning to malfunction. I, on the other hand, had been living with parts of me going into shut down mode. And it all seemed to revolve around a faulty sense of responsibility: It's my job to make sure no one suffers.

I had a weird sense of relief with the Veneration of the Cross on Good Friday. Everyone suffers. Scripture even says "Christ had to suffer..." (Luke 24:26). Mary suffered. This is of course one of those theological topics that one could spend a lifetime studying, but in the moment, the blockage removed from me was that somehow I and I alone bear guilt and responsibility for the suffering of the world. This realization frees me from weight and also frees to me receive the grace and power to then respond to suffering with compassion, with the LOVE that literally drew Christ into suffering in the first place. 

As Dr. Peter points out in that reflection, Jesus was crushed under the weight of sorrow, but then as he passed through all of that and Judas came with the crowd to arrest Him, He was in command of the situation and was actively acting in love, not being dragged along in their nets like a victim. I really need to go back and listen to that reflection again.

Butterfly Release

Today is Good Friday. I'm not quite clear whether technically the Triduum is Lent, or if it is uber-Lent, but regardless, I am pausing to reflect on what I sense the Lord has been pointing to for me this Lent.

• For probably the first time (hah, we are constantly only beginning) I feel that I have entered into fasting with some intensity, and without a worried layer of doubt that what God really wants is to watch my misery. As I wrote about early on, that has been hard for me to shake. And I cannot say how fasting works, but I find a resulting clarity and freedom that is striking in its power. When I fast, I feel anything but clear-minded and powerful. But subsequently I find myself with a level of freedom from old tethers that I did not anticipate, and clear resolution to questions on courses of action that had left me frustrated when I tried to just noodle them out.
• Writing really is a form of prayer for me. I had lost motivation to do much of it here. But it helps me dig to the bottom of my heart, and access to that place is the best place from which to speak to God and make available to Him to receive from Him. But I can kill that process by thinking too much or writing as for publication (even though on a blog, technically, I am writing for publication).

Here's a big gong that went off for me yesterday. I happened to read a Facebook ad for a vagus nerve therapy. It started out (and I paraphrase): "An inability to speak is one of the most common yet unknown symptoms of unresolved trauma." BAM.

Very BAM.

My life started to flash before my eyes. First scene: the first time I was "slain in the Spirit," before I knew what that meant.  I had gone forward, asking for prayer, I was overwhelmed by the presence of the Holy Spirit, fell backwards onto the floor of the church, and lay there, continuing to be overwhelmed by the presence of the holy. What I became aware of was that my mouth felt like it was electrified, like the angel had taken the hot coal (ala Isaiah) and touched my lips. This lasted for several minutes, and I was left with a permanent knowing that God wants my mouth.

I thought of how, in my early 20s, I tried in a few occasions to tell people about painful things in my life, but all I could do was cry. 

I thought of how I used to panic for days whenever I had to make a phone call.

I thought of the hundreds of times I have keep silence instead of speaking forth what I wanted, needed, or thought. Probably thousands of times. 

I thought of how I found a refuge in narrow denominational or intellectual arguments, because they were words I felt sure of (because they weren't my own).

I thought of how I learned, starting at age 10 writing to my friend Gail, how to safely express myself in writing when I couldn't say things. Of how letters opened up a vein of exposure, healing, and then crisis.

An inability to speak is one of the most common yet unknown symptoms of unresolved trauma.

I believed as a child that the best thing I could do to bring peace to my divorcing parents and family trauma was to "shut up and go away." I got that wrong. And I clung so tightly to that wrong solution. 

When I was laying on the floor of that church, sensing that God wanted my mouth, I realize that I internalized a bit of a belief that God was displeased with my lack of courage to speak up. I thought he had expectations of me that I was not meeting. Sometimes I would feel urged, in a panic, to speak up about something, I wrestled with condemning thoughts that I lacked courage, or that I should not worry that something I was considering saying seemed wreckless or ill-advised; I had to choose courage or I would be failing God. Insidiously subtle temptations.

What I realize now is that when I went up for prayer that evening at church, God saw my trauma and wanted to initiate freeing me from it. The very first time I gave God an opening, He rushed in. He is able to bestow time-release graces that may take an entire lifetime to be absorbed. Blessed be God forever.

A long, long time ago I wrote a reflection after watching a butterfly that was trapped in a car repair shop. It was fluttering up and down the window, "seeing" the outside, but not able to access it through that window. A hand reaching in to bring it to freedom made it panic all the more, because hands like that are able to crush and destroy. I watched that poor butterfly sit on the wrong side of that window, seeing freedom but being unable to participate. I knew that butterfly was me.

Now I realize that God has slowly, slowly, worked with me to restore my voice to me, to give me the ability to speak, both literally and metaphorically. His wanting my mouth is not about "measuring up." It is about him redeeming me, reclaiming me, and setting me to live in his presence, as He wants for every single one of us. It is about His love. Lent is about His love. Purification is about His love. Jesus' death is about His love. His love frees, His love empowers, His love sets ablaze. 

The graces He gives us are personal, and they are intended for making us fully alive in Him, transforming us into a union with Him that is both unique to each created individual, and universal in availability. 

Gratia non tollit naturam, sed perficit; And Community

The Lord has been faithful to pour out His graces to me this Lent; and I hope to be more faithful than I have been to be attentive and responsive to what He gives. 

Today's thought: if the enemy of our souls cannot pick apart our faith, he will try to pick apart our fruitfulness. One way he can do this is by muting our spiritual gifts, burning us out, heaping up the opposition, blocking the edification; causing us to doubt them, "sacrifice them" in trying to "practice detachment" from exercising them and thinking we are doing a good, unselfish thing. If we do not employ the means God has given us to build up others, we ourselves will be less purified, and there will be less praise and glory rising up from those who are meant to see what God has given us, and rejoice in the help it gives them. 

When we come to serve the Lord, we can expect refining, says Sirach chapter 2. Serving the Lord implies putting the gifts he has given us to work. I love the phrasing of St. Thomas Aquinas: Gratia non tollit naturam, sed perficit, or "Grace does not destroy nature, but perfects it." There are such things as natural gifts, certain talents or potencies we are born with. These we are called to live fully, and they are to be integrated into our relationship with Jesus. As we give Him our hearts, we are giving Him everything about us; everything we have, everything we are. This includes all of our abilities (and our disabilities!). Everything finds its place in Jesus' heart. 

Not everything easily finds its place in this world, though, and so we face this process of refining. We entrust ourselves to Jesus, and we live in this world. This fallen world is bound to hurt us. We are bound, at some point, to not fit, to be told we in our very essence are wrong, bad, untalented, lacking, worthless. If we aren't very careful, we will internalize these voices (and we will have demonic help with this). If we aren't careful again, we will spend our lives fighting representatives of all the warring voices, spending ourselves in self-protection, self-justification, or self-rejection. Or all of the above.

Grace does not destroy nature, but perfects it. To live as human beings in grace in a fallen world, we must first believe in the love God has for us. We must acknowledge the worth He says we have. We must embrace the identity He says is ours as children engrafted into Him by the new covenant. We must stop fighting the warring voices and listen to the One who shows us who we are. We must live in truth. We must internalize truth. 

When we then turn our hearts over to Him daily, asking for His grace, we are not asking for the destruction of our nature. We must stop cooperating with every aspect of the agenda of the enemy here. We must instead seek his purification. We find this purification as we live out the gifts he has given. We allow ourselves to be seen as we truly are. We bring our vulnerable hearts out of their coffin storage. If we have pushed them down too hard and too far, they'll come springing out like tennis balls under water. It might be embarrasing to us and mess with those who try to manage everything efficiently. Conflict might very well erupt with those who don't know how to deal with our nature and try to force us back into our coffins, thinking that coffin is where holiness is to be formed. We might misunderstand the correction we are given, thinking we are being forced back into our coffins, when in fact we simply lack a category in our understanding for what lived virtue actually looks like. 

This right here is the life of Christian fraternal community. Grace perfects nature. I'm not likely to have all the wisdom to perfect you. I'm certainly not likely to have all the wisdom to perfect me. You are not likely to have all the wisdom to perfect me (and this hearkens back to the post I wrote last week, about all the voices telling me what is the will of God, and me gloming on to each individual one as authoritative). What it takes is community.

So many times, what has powerfully spoken to me was not words spoken to me at all, but something I observed pass between two other people. For example (and it almost makes me shudder, now), I recall overhearing a choir member telling our director that he wouldn't be at rehearsal the next week or two. In response: "Ok." Today, this seems like such a normal exchange. But at the time I was just coming out of a relationship that was so cloyingly weird, where an announcement of someone being away would have been met with effusions of how the person would be missed and was so valuable and on and on until you just about wanted to puke... that that "ok" spoke to me as the voice of respectful freedom, instead of the emotional manipulation that I felt compelled to sell my soul to. Yuck.

So what do you do when you need to stand up and say "yuck"? Well, you are going to need fortitude. You are going to need strong internalized truth, and a knowledge of your identity in Christ. You are going to need to exercise the role of the prophet, perhaps, to speak out, or you are going to need to exercise discernment to realize it is time to move out of an unhealthy group, to help it fall apart and disintegrate.

All Christians need a healthy community where we become who we are, where we exercise and grow in our gifts, where we are supported by one another, where we are lifted out of lonliness and learn to belong to one another. Without it, we get desperate and we do desperate things. Without it, the church suffers. Without it, the lost stay lost, and more and more of the baptized drift away and become lost. God gives each of us gifts for the upbuilding of the others. We have to get to the point where we are with others and allowing this upbuilding to happen, open-heartedly allowing grace to perfect our nature.

What is Prayer

 

As a Secular Carmelite, I have committed myself to a 30 minute slot of mental/silent/interior prayer every day. Let me tell you what this feels like much of the time.

I sit down, and the main thing I am aware of is that I don't even know what it means to pray. I come with purpose, with intentionality, to open my heart, to listen to the Lord in Scripture, to bring all and everyone that is in my heart and present them before the Lord, all this yearning love, but mostly I feel like I don't even know what prayer is. 

I said that once at an OCDS community meeting, and one of the women just reflexively blurted out, "Oh, of course you do." I mean, I just described it above. So yes, I do know what it is. But it feels bewildering. Sometimes it feels like a force field that I'm pressing into. Sometimes the image that comes to mind is someone who hates winter, but is heading out into a wintery night to go to the outhouse, because the interior pressure cannot be withstood.

Sometimes I think prayer should feel like sunshine and roses and the delight of a conversation between lovers. I think even when prayer is consoling, it is never quite that. And I think that speaks to my questionable experience of sunshine, roses, and lovers more than to the reality of prayer.

When it is sweetest the time flies, and I am most aware of Emmanuel: God with... me. At times like that, I find myself suggesting that He deflect his love: Lord, what about xyz and this other person. Surely what I need to be doing is reminding you about them and "praying for them." While the reality that is going on is that God's immense love in seeking out me. 

Always start prayer at your place of felt need. That's where God is going. 

It took me a few years as a Carmelite to lose this idea that long lists of the intentions of others were all there was to prayer. What God wants is to transform me into a saint. To do that, I have to open all the secret hatches, at least the ones I have keys to. And point to the others where I've lost the keys and ask Jesus to access them through other means. In prayer, I soak in God, so that when I leave prayer and interact, I am not wearing myself out over the weight of the world with my own limited energies, but instead I learn to love and give from what I've soaked in. 

I think I have a long habit of feeling that I am poor when in fact I am rich. For the longest time, I truly believed that I was the single most messed up person who existed. The self-centered egotism of youth, no doubt. The voice of an isolated person who didn't realize that everyone has problems. 

Someone said to me yesterday that she has begun having a little interior jubilation when she sees another Catholic out in public, because it reminds her how she isn't alone and that others are walking the same path and fighting the same fight that she is. That was a lovely statement, really. We need to acknowledge the gift we have from God, that we share, that belong to each one, and to one another. 

So, where is this going. Maybe instead of going in to prayer and being overwhelmed with what I feel I don't know, I can go, knowing that I belong, and that my prayer belongs, and my time belongs, not just to me, but to the Church. And I a praying with her for all people. 

That consecration on March 25 -- what a wonderful feeling it was to be in a large crowd of people all praying, and I was one voice among many. It is a great feeling to be one voice, lifted to God, among many. And even when I pray alone, I know that's what I am -- one voice among many. It's just that I can't see or hear the others. 

Union of Wills: A Lenten Breakthrough

This morning's gospel and the homily I heard on it helped turn on some lights for me to see and name a problem I have danced with for most of my life. The passage at issue was Jesus saying, "I do nothing on my own, but I say only what the Father taught me" (John 8:28). 

The homily's emphasis was on how Jesus models for us -- even though He is the incarnate Son of God -- submission to and union with the Father's will, as opposed to Him just doing what was right in his own eyes, the way humans tend to do (Judges 21:25). 

The lights that turned on showed me this: For decades, when I have heard exhortations to do "not your own will, but God's," or even when I have exhorted myself, there was a piece missing, and a wrong piece present. I generally heard it this way.

Random Person: You should not choose your way; you should choose God's will. 

Me: Ok, that's right.

Random Person: And now I'm going to tell you what God's will is.

Me: Ok, I'm sure you're right

The direction that followed was a flood of all sorts of things: Unmarried women should live at home under their parents' authority until they are married. You should never complain about any injustice done to yourself. Your husband is always going to be right, and even if he isn't, it is your Christian responsibility to be on his side. Woman, you shouldn't pursue serving in the church or community. If you become Catholic you are worthy of rejection. Pleasure is wrong. The teachings of the Church need to be re-written by people who use their imagination in prayer. You need to be on hand whenever I need you to feel better about myself. You must never step out with initiative. All you really need to do is keep going to church on Sunday, and don't become an atheist. It doesn't matter. Here's my dress code and rules of conduct that shows that you really love God. Here are the rules to being a good person.

And on. And on. And on. 

Whether these were significant relationships with lots of strings attached or teaching purported to be infallible truth, I have unwittingly collected a swarming brood of voices telling me what God's will is. 

The missing piece absent was the agency of my own will to choose a course of action and to have my own relationship with God in prayer. That wrong piece present made it clear I was to be directed by someone who was going to inform me. Lo and behold, whatever I was given to drink tasted an awful lot like the vessel and not the Water of Life.

But what Jesus was talking about was union with the Father. What St. Teresa of Jesus and St. John of the Cross point me to is union with the Father. What my Carmelite practice trains me toward is union with the Father. What God Himself has been calling me to, woven in between all of these distorted messages that I then believed I needed and sought out, was a partnership of union of wills with Him. 

So along my path towards union with God, I have needed to learn how to identify and exercise myself in what I actually want. And I mean, on the level of acknowledging my needs on every level -- food and water, for example! It means giving up the violence I've done to myself by handing over my will to others. It means feeling, as an adult, the very real pain of wanting formation and direction as a young child, but having the Gen-X experience of raising myself. 

It now makes sense to me that for years and years, when I have prayed, what God impressed upon me was "to serve me, simply be yourself." When I first heard this, frankly it terrified me because I had no idea how to do it. I didn't know that I had a self, with whom God wished to engage, by which I would excerise self-mastery. To be fully a human being is to bring our wills into union with His, not to crush and destroy our own identity and call that service to God.

This is big. I linked to just a few of the blog posts above where I see I have been grappling with this for decades. Thanks be to God.

One Day You Shall Laugh

Listening at today's Mass was a completely different experience than it was when I wrote about this on Sunday, March 20. Today was an experience, not of searching for the gaze, but of feeling myself held in the center of God's heart with his presence all around me. Every element of the Mass seemed to speak from previous years' journeying with the Lord. I was in an ocean of gratitude. 

Father asked the rhetorical question, "What would it be like for you if Jesus had not come?" And honestly, thinking about it, I had to restrain myself from energetic crying. The encounter with Christ in my life that was speaking to me so profoundly -- where would I be if I were still where I was in my faith journey at, say, age 15. I could easily see myself mixed up with courses of life involving highly illegal and addictive paths. 

During communion we sang "Be Not Afraid," which, when I was in Japan, I sang almost every time I prayed night prayer with the Sisters at their house after our weekly shared dinner. Consider, we sang this song because it was in English, and I was there. When we came to the words, "blessed are you who weep and mourn, for one day you shall laugh," I almost always started to cry and couldn't continue. I just had so much pain right on the surface of my heart in those days that it whapped me silly, every time. 

But what I saw and heard today was a promise fulfilled that God spoke to me years and years ago, when He first called me to become a Catholic, but hadn't entered the Church yet. It was, "I want the glorious to become commonplace in your life." And, by the grace of God, it has. I have walked through some very frightening darkness, times that my soul felt completely shredded, but I can now look back and see God has never been the source of my pain. He has been the source of my healing, but it has not been without spiritual surgical procedures to free me from clutching death and destruction. He absolutely desires glory for His children and bestows it. When he tells us, give, and it shall be given unto you, I think what He desires we give him is everything of our brokenness, held open, frankly, before our mutual gazes. Not in a way that we pursue crushing our own selves, as if for his attention. But owning it, surrendering it to His lordship, and trusting him to see us looking at our own poverty. He, of course, knows. We are only coming to know ourselves, and Him. This looking, owning, and bringing is an act of humility. This is an act of hope. This is an act of trust and vulnerability which grace empowers. Hope heals our memory. Hope unites us to God. Hope makes sense of things. Hope brings laughter. 

"Neither do I condemn you," says Jesus to the woman, left alone with Him. Yes, child, I see it. But I see more than anyone else does, including you. I don't condemn you; I give you your life back. Live it now as my gift. You don't need to scrabble for bits of love or purpose any longer. You have met Me, now. Nothing, and no one, can ever take this encounter away from you.

Thanks be to God.

But Wait... There's More

When I was 14 I hit my first spiritual crisis. I had been confirmed the year in my Lutheran church and had started high school, my first exposure to a Lutheran school. My confirmation prep had been two years of catechism classes, in which we memorized (again) all the parts of the catechism (this had been a facet of Sunday School as well) and hundreds of Bible verses. By any standards I have witnessed since then, it was a rigorous intellectual preparation. We had Examination Sunday where, in place of a sermon, we were asked questions off of a list of at least a hundred which we were expected to either memorize or be able to articulate thoroughly -- or face the embarassment of standing mute in front of the whole congregation. That was a practice from earlier decades that our new pastor revived in my second year. One of the more dreaded questions was to recite all the books of the Old Testament. I rose to the challenge and knew my stuff.

So when I got to high school and found my Freshman Old Testament class not very much of a challenge, the crisis hit. Here I was, 14 years old, and I knew everything there was to know about God. I had conquered Luther's Small Catechism, and it seemed there was nothing else out there to challenge me. Now, basically, I had to hold on to this knowledge until I died. 

I trust you can hear how laughable this is, but I felt it keenly and it made me depressed. I tried reading Luther's other works, and started to get frustrated that even though these were supposed to me authoritative documents for doctrine, no one was teaching them or studying them or encouraging that.  I found in subsequent years, including college, that commentaries or Bible studies never really expected any intellectual advance beyond the point we attained in confirmation prep. And I realized I hungered for something beyond sheer memorization of the Ten Commandments, Apostles Creed, and catechesis on the sacraments. I really hungered for someone to show me how to live this out. These days I would call it discipleship. I wanted to share life with people who wanted God to lead them through life together.

I had no one, literally. I started listening to Christian radio every day, and became a devotee to a lot of the Bible teachers there, even though much of their doctrine turned me off and some of their voices grated on me. The music was very Lawrence Welk-ish, with a touch or two of very mild pop, so it really didn't appeal to me. Yet I listened because I was starving for connection, for fellowship, for answers, for direction, for peace. During the summer when I was 15, too young to work and home alone most of the time, I played solitare at the kitchen table and listened to Christian radio all day long, almost every day. I wrote letters to almost every ministry that gave their address and asked them to pray for me. It was actually a really depressing stretch as I think of it, but I believe that at least some prayers were offered for me, because my life did start onto a new trajectory about a year later.

My point in getting in touch with these memories is to share what is now one of the most precious truths to me about Christian life: There is always somewhere to go.

Years later I became familiar with St. Teresa of Avila's teaching on the mansions, or interior castles as she puts it, or the four waters -- all these ways she breaks down what God taught her about stages of spiritual growth. You know, I remember clearly the first time I read about this, including her seventh (and final) mansion, which she calls Spiritual Marriage. I think it was an entry in the Catholic Encyclopedia I read while researching for a paper. I was, at the time, also depressed that no Prince Charming had appeared and I was desperately afraid one never would. When I read that Teresa taught that few people reach Spiritual Marriage, I groaned inwardly: Great. Yet another joy I'll never have. 

And here I am, about 34 years later, a fully professed Secular Carmelite. Now I have read and studied Teresa a bit, and I tell new aspirants, with great confidence, that there is always more. God always has some place for us to go. Our life of prayer is a life of seeking and being open, and God always will be leading us on and bringing us somewhere.

This morning I have to check in with myself and ask if I am feeling that. Am I believing that? I can't say that I am conscious of a burning desire to move forward. 

I've been writing about overwork and being busy and clogged and tired and stiff, and I realize this might be a spiritual reflection. I mean, like a mirror to my interior. I'm pretty comfortable in life. I'm fairly connected with people. I have service and work that I love to do. I'm not bored. I'm learning. I either have a lot of things that make me comfortable, or I've figured out how to be comfortable enough without them. I manage to turn over to the Lord the stresses and distresses that come my way. 

So, I don't have a lot poking me in the side, motivating me to want more. 

I wonder though... Maybe I do, but I'm not feeling it. Maybe I don't really want to feel it. There's nothing wrong with not desiring turmoil. But if I apply my mind to this, and leave my feelings to one side for a bit, I know that God's adventures always leave me with an increase of peace, even if they come by way of increased tension for a time. I do, objectively, choose openness to God. I know my daughter is going to be an adult in basically one short year, and her growing independence will take her away from me. So I'm due for some changes soon. 

This is probably going to be one of those blogposts I look back on and say, see, God was prepping me. I'm totally at peace with that, and really I don't want to get so caught up in finding everything all nicely settled that I miss it. I know with certainty that God has always been patient with me. 

So, today I purpose to say, yes Lord. I open my heart to whatever More you desire for me, because I want to be able to offer you a wider heart through which you can give life through me.

Birthing Grace

I had frankly forgotten how well writing serves me. Life has seasons, and like anything organically growing, seasons change and all that. But this Lent I realize that writing helps me take seriously the path of discovery to hear the voice of the Holy Spirit, and to not forget significant moments. It isn't so much about memory, actually, as it is about faith. "Remembering" isn't "not forgetting" as much as it is believing that God loves me, is with me, that I hear His voice, and therefore can follow with confidence.

What I'm seeing taking shape on the horizon is the absolutely incredible reality of the incarnation of the Son of God, and how that changes everything. And how full of folly it is to act like God becoming man, coming to earth, dying for us to remove every blockage we have to the divine, and then sending His divine power to reside within our persons, by which miracles of transforming grace happen --- is all a normal, run of the mill, human religious idea. The thing that throws it all off is transforming grace. Miraculous power. 

My Psychology prof in college stood there one day explaining how, once someone has a dysfunction, a problem, whatever, it never really goes away. There is no healing, essentially, he said. Now, I'm not sure what he meant to say, because he was a Christian man in a Lutheran school. But I know what I heard. And I sat there with a hot, defiant tear going down my cheek. If God has no ability to heal, then I don't want anything to do with him was what I raged, interiorly. Hope and despair were wrestling hard.

My Catholic theology prof stood there one day about ten years later explaining how grace does not destroy nature but elevates and perfects it, and I knew I was hearing THE truth whose lack I felt so keenly in Protestantism. Grace is power. It is real. God does things in us, with our yes, that we are not able to produce within ourselves. He doesn't invade and sort of abuse our freedom to give us life, like a woman being drugged and date raped, and thereby impregnated -- which we are supposed to somehow be grateful for later because the gift of life is so great.  Grace builds us as a people. We are made for community, and when parents bring their children to receive sacraments, they are doing what they can to avail them to all the aspects of life, not only the natural life they have co-created, but the supernatural life in which they also partake. But to live as the community of grace, that child must activate the gifts received. This is both so necessary and so often reduced to a meaningless formula. In fact it is right here at this point that my heart groans like a woman in labor. Sometimes I just want to, I dunno, sit on people and groan until they open their hearts to the Lord, and say "Yes! Yes, to what you want, Lord. Yes to all of it. I will live my life in the fellowship of believers seeking your grace and moving with every word you speak!"

The sense that I get is that this groaning, this kind of spiritual/physical/emotional frustrated yearning, is actually a gift of grace, too. When Elijah prayed for rain in 1 Kings 18 it says this: "Elijah went up to the top of Carmel, crouched down to the earth, and put his head between his knees." Seven times he had his servant to look for rain, and only on the seventh was there a small cloud. He was in the position of birthing. As mothers and prophets know, birthing is a work of grace. No one conceives a child all by herself; she must receive and co-create. And once the process in begun, there is a dynamism there which will call forth all the mother's energy, and yet is not controlled by her. Her reactions can stall it, but her cooperation in availability will see that child born. And yet who that child is that is driving the dynamism is a complete mystery unto him or herself, also a gift of the Creator. 

So there's something like this going on in me. For years and years I have had this call to pray for conversion of souls, and the awareness that so many people need to know how to ratify their baptism. Not just a sinner's prayer, leaving one anxious if one "really meant it" this time, so that it really took, or leaving one feeling absolved from actually doing anything Jesus commanded. Not just a perfunctory mumbling of the renewal of baptismal promises during the Easter season and a vague sense of relief that I can pretty much do whatever, because I can always go say it in the confessional. Not just the assurance that I'm basically a decent person, like many other secular folks, and frankly better than those five religious people I knew. 

Rather, the experience of God. God who is present, the outpouring God. The God who acts. The God who hears. The God who responds. Who "is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness."

Carmelites are called to be witnesses to the experience of God, as Elijah was. If I weren't one already, I know I would need to become one.

* TIL: as I searched for an image of Elijah crouching on the ground with his head between his knees, I first observed that I can't find any depictions that are completely faithful to this description, and I second observed that there is a name for this postion in Sanskrit, which translates to: garland, necklace, or..... rosary..... position. You just can't make this stuff up.

Unless you Forgive

I gently employed the same prayer approach today at Mass as Sunday, looking for the Lord's gaze at me through the Scriptures. It was then that I recognized a little whisper I had heard a few days before regarding my need to forgive a certain person. Today's gospel reading, and the homily that I heard that unpacked it, were of the walloping sort. Forgive or go to hell. Not exactly an episode of Gentle Jesus, Meek and Mild. But I heard something else in this, other than what can feel like a frightening threat.

Here's the gospel (Mt. 18:21-35):

Peter approached Jesus and asked him,
“Lord, if my brother sins against me,
how often must I forgive him?
As many as seven times?”
Jesus answered, “I say to you, not seven times but seventy-seven times.
That is why the Kingdom of heaven may be likened to a king
who decided to settle accounts with his servants.
When he began the accounting,
a debtor was brought before him who owed him a huge amount.
Since he had no way of paying it back,
his master ordered him to be sold,
along with his wife, his children, and all his property,
in payment of the debt.
At that, the servant fell down, did him homage, and said,
‘Be patient with me, and I will pay you back in full.’
Moved with compassion the master of that servant
let him go and forgave him the loan.
When that servant had left, he found one of his fellow servants
who owed him a much smaller amount.
He seized him and started to choke him, demanding,
‘Pay back what you owe.’
Falling to his knees, his fellow servant begged him,
‘Be patient with me, and I will pay you back.’
But he refused.
Instead, he had him put in prison
until he paid back the debt.
Now when his fellow servants saw what had happened,
they were deeply disturbed, and went to their master
and reported the whole affair.
His master summoned him and said to him, ‘You wicked servant!
I forgave you your entire debt because you begged me to.
Should you not have had pity on your fellow servant,
as I had pity on you?’
Then in anger his master handed him over to the torturers
until he should pay back the whole debt.
So will my heavenly Father do to you,
unless each of you forgives your brother from your heart.”

So, what happens with this being commanded to forgive? When I went back to read the Scripture again after Mass, what I noticed was Jesus says there's a king, who is settling accounts, a debtor, and the debtor's master. It isn't entirely clear to me anymore that the king is the debtor's direct master. Rather, it seems like the king is the one who is now hearing about the conduct of the debtor, the master, and the debtor's fellow servants who complained about the injustice they witnessed. I'm not sure this matters, other than the fact that it would make much more clear that the judgment that God extends is directly about humans interactions with each other, rather than with some abstract moral code that is represented by the king. It would sound like the king is hearing the case pleaded by the master about the debtor's injustice. I'll leave the biblical exegetes to deal with that.

Another question: what is forgiveness, anyway? What is being commanded here? Fr. Drake mentioned in his homily that the Greek text makes it clear that the amount of money owned by the debtor would have taken multiple lifetimes of daily wages to pay off. In other words, it was an impossible, unpayable debt. This clearly represents the human standing before God. We are broken, we fall so far short of divine standing, and we start life out this way. Through the mystery of sin, we simply are not fit by nature for relationship with God, and nothing we can do can get us there. Nada. 

So the first movement we see in this story is that the debtor is forgiven his debt. The master of the debtor takes this debt into himself, and takes it away, freeing the debtor and his family from being sold into slavery. In the Old Testament, too, God had a system for forgiving sins. He had prescriptions for offerings, symbolic deaths, symbolic gifts, brought to a symbolic place with symbolic people who offered prayers to wipe out offences. All of this was to point to the one who was to come, was to point to some amazing promise of fulfillment that God would one day send to His faithful people. Israel had a very mixed-bag track record of staying faithful to this type of worship, of all the laws that were to prevent the sins in the first place, and the hope that was to sustain them that God would come as their redeemer. 

But Jesus takes it one step further in the story. The forgiven debtor was supposed to, now, have within him the same nature, the same lifeforce that allowed for the unforgiveable debt to be forgiven him. He was to operate with other people the way that God forgave through sacrifice. Yikes! Something stronger than the Old Covenant had to come into play here. Jesus is here expecting that the debtor act like God, not live out of brokenness but live with the divine nature actually present within, to act like God! Wow, Jesus, that's impossible, isn't it? 

The heart of the gospel isn't only that God has forgiven us and so we are off the hook and our sins don't matter anymore. The heart of the gospel is that God's divine nature comes to take up residence in us, transforming us, and causing his own life to be active in us and through us. We are made sons in the Son. We are called to live in union with God, like the flame totally consumes the wood.

If that is the Christian call, what does this gospel say about forgiveness? That priest who just was convicted of grossly abusing a vulnerable woman for years with basically spiritual torture -- is she, are we all, just supposed to say "you are forgiven, it's erased, done; you are free"? I actually had a man in my life at one point whose only exposure to Christianity was listening to a few sermons on the radio. He actually suggested to me that I should allow him to sexually violate me, because I was a Christian, and Christians are supposed to forgive everything. Is that what this is?

No, thank the Lord, the command to Christians to forgive is not the command that we provide a pass for violation to romp unchecked. Quite the opposite. We need to know righteous from unrighteous as God knows it.

Note the pattern in the latter portion of the gospel: The forgiven debtor perpetrates violence against one of his equals, overpowers him, and takes up an arrogant position against him, putting him in debtor's prison. The fellow servants are deeply disturbed and report it. The master responds to the deeply distubed report. He declares the wickedness of the arrogant one and declares pity for the fellow servant. 

The master has ears for the one who has been sinned against. The master takes it in hand.

I see two things here. First: from experience I know that sometimes it is difficult for a person who has been violated to say, That was wrong for you to do to me. An injustice was done to me. Righteousness would have looked different, this was not it. 

I wish parsing righteousness from unrighteousness were never difficult, but at times it is. Consider, for example, a person placed for adoption as a baby. She may have loved her adoptive parents so dearly and exercised so much gratitude for the fact that she was born and cared for, that she may feel grossly disloyal and guilty for acknowledging the feelings surrounding "I had the right to be raised by the mother and father who created me." Consider someone who, at the cost of losing the only scraps of feeling loved they know, cannot admit that the relationship partner has wronged them, or is continually doing so.

Second: when the deeply disturbed report reaches the master's ears, not only forgiveness, but healing is unleashed. We don't hear that debtor #2 was released from prison, but we hear that debtor #1 owed him pity. 

Jesus's punchline is that each of us needs to forgive his brother from his heart. How I hear it is not that we say, "that thing you did doesn't matter." It is that we admit, "that thing that you did violated me. I'm punched in the gut." First, our thinking gets corrected about the nature of what happened (righteousness vs unrighteousness). Then, because we are in a community of equals, those around us see, and are deeply disturbed. We experience the healing love and intercession of those to whom we reveal this brokenness. We experience intercession: someone takes my hot mess before God, who responds. Healing pours out. 

Because we are all equals, and because each of us needs to be in this process, we are formed as a people who, because we have the very nature of God poured into us in baptism, are constantly being built up in the grace of the Holy Spirit. We are all in varying stages and places of hurting, forgiving, repenting, being forgiven, receiving healing, calling out injustice, interceding. But the one who tramples another faces the king's judgment.

This is Jesus telling us how the new covenant people of God will act.

I'm reminded of John's reminder of sins you pray about so that the other will be forgiven, and sins that lead to death, that you don't just pray about (1 Jn. 5:16-17). 

It takes tremendous courage to open up our brokenness, especially those things that happened to us as children or in a particularly vulnerable time. It takes the courage of knowing and trusting that we are loved, by God and by people. These things are not healed immediately, but the power of God absolutely does heal them. The new covenant people of God, the Church, is to be this place where God's healing is unleashed through us, to the world. That is why Jesus begins with "the kingdom of heaven may be likened to..."

The Gospel Has Eyes

Today is Sunday. I went to Mass this morning with this prayer: to find God's gaze on me in His Word. 

This book that I love so much, The Impact of God: Soundings from St. John of the Cross by Fr. Iain Matthew, OCD, has as the title of chapter of chapter five "The Gospel Has Eyes." This expression has helped my heart so frequently. As I have noted elsewhere, I could quote huge chunks of this book, but here is the heart of the topic:

The gospel has eyes -- 'the eyes I long for so', John calls them -- and the point comes on the journey where the bride meets those eyes which had long been looking on: 'It seems to her that he is now always gazing upon her.' It is a moment of exposure, as she finds herself a factor in another's life and heart... It has been said that 'a person is enlightened', not 'when they get an idea', but 'when someone looks at them'. A person is enlightened when another loves them. The eyes are windows on to the heart; they search the person out and have power to elicit life... Christianity is an effect, the effect of a God who is constantly gazing at us, whose eyes anticipate, radiate, penetrate and elicit beauty. (p. 28)

"Christianity is an effect, the effect of a God who is constantly gazing at us." Yes, that's what my heart was calling out from this morning. Lord, you are gazing at me. I need to catch your gaze. My heart, my whole being, needs the life-giving joy of catching your gaze on me. 

I pre-read the Scripture readings and listened attentively and was reminded how one listens actively, hungrily, like when I'm with someone and I want them to hear some truth coming from someone else and I'm eager for every word that comes out, in hopes that it is going to make a great penetration...

But as it often happens, it wasn't the Scripture reading where I caught the gaze. It was a hymn we sang based on Psalm 139. It was in fact the same psalm, the same song, played and sung by the same musician who played for my son's baptism almost twenty years ago. I've been thinking about my son's baptism a lot lately, perhaps about all of our baptisms. How we are given so much. How we need to learn to receive. How so much gets in the way. When I was my son's age, I had actually repudiated my baptism. I was theologically confused, had joined a church my aunt thought was some kind of cult, and was mixed up frankly with an addicted con man who was more than twice my age as his side-chick. It's funny how my life has only looked (to me) like a total diarrhea-production in hindsight. 

When I walk or lie down, you are before me

with love everlasting, you besiege me

You are with me beyond my understanding
God of my present, my past and future, too

Although your Spirit is upon me
Still I search for shelter from your light
There is nowhere on Earth I can escape you
Even the darkness is radiant in your sight

Safe in your hands, all creation is made new

God is the one. He alone has been my Savior, He alone has kept me safe, despite my numerous very foolish steps. And this promise is for me, and for my children, and for those who are far off. 

And Christianity is an effect, the effect of God who is constantly gazing at us. As Psalm 33 says, from his dwelling place, God gazes on all the dwellers on the earth. For all of us who are baptized, his dwelling place is within us. 

Let us hear this call to enter the castle, the mansion, the dwelling of God. Meet his gaze, and enter into his rest.

 

Enter into God's Rest

 "Let us listen to the voice of God; let us enter into His rest."

This is the way we begin the invitatory psalm on Saturday of weeks two and four of the Liturgy of the Hours. It evokes Psalm 95 (which typically is the psalm prayed at this point), where we exhort each other to "listen to the voice of the Lord, do not grow stubborn" [and not end up like the people to whom God said] "They shall not enter into my rest." Who were they? People whose hearts went astray, who challenged God and provoked God, regardless of seeing him in action, people who did not know his ways.

It also evokes Hebrews chapter 4 where we read that there remains a Sabbath rest for the people of God. Our Sabbath rest is our union with the Blessed Trinity, opened to us by Jesus and modeled for us by Jesus, to which we are drawn by the Holy Spirit to our identity as sons and daughters of the Father. 

I woke unusually early this morning and listened to a 50 minute teaching on YouTube which a Facebook friend of mine happend to post. What drew me was the title: Becoming a Non-Anxious Presence. The title comes from the work of an Internal Family Systems psychologist (something else I've been learning about within the last year), and in my mind it struck me as equivalent to someone who embodies hope. That's language that makes my spiritual antennae perk up. And while I've pulled a minor imitation of mi Madre Teresa of Avila in not going back to re-read my recent posts, I feel like I have been developing a life theme right now of letting go of anxiety in its various manifestations. 

So, yeah. This Vineyard minister, apparently right before shut downs affected public gatherings in the UK in 2020, is teaching here on the need for contemplative silence and prayer in leadership and life, to operate from a place of listening to the voice of God, not with a goal of fixing problems. 

Consider the witness of martyrs, like Ss. Perpetua and Felicity. The account of their martyrdom shows them basically in a state of ecstacy so profound that they do not feel physical pain. Now, I do not take that as a guarantee that martyrs do not feel fear or pain (the Carmelite martyrs of Compiègne certainly had to steel themselves to approach their deaths). But there is also the Scriptural account of Stephen, the first martyr, who saw heaven opened and Jesus standing there. This is an extreme example of entering God's rest in the midst of turmoil, and I believe it is an example left to us by God on purpose. It doesn't glorify death; it reminds us that we have nothing to fear. If death and hell have lost their sting, then there is nothing before which we ultimately must cower. 

What we must journey through is purification of our attachments, or as Comer puts it (referencing St. Ignatius Loyola), our journey to freedom. Purification frees us for union with God; purification frees us for service, for ministry, for life to flow through us. We cease being reactive, of being determined by problems, by fears, by other people's issues, by the rage machine. 

It was a good talk. Where does it leave me?

Human formation is really important. If we think that all we need is correct doctrine or right worship or receiving sacraments, or any of these other things that are all objective, we don't get the whole picture. For good life, we need good human formation, good ground in which the seed of truth is sown, grows, and bears fruit. 

I personally need to examine my drive to produce. I've been on overdrive. God is calling me to slow down and rest in Him. And to not make prayer "more work to do." I think there's a danger for Carmelites and for intercessors to make prayer always about "work." 

Fasting is, in part, about letting go and letting God. "Letting God" is such an ironic expression. But to take God seriously at the level of relationship, every day I need to realize, to touch, the reality of his presence with me, and to once again acknowledge that I am partnered to him, apprenticed to him, and that once I catch his eye on me (the gospel has eyes, as St. John of the Cross says) I am drawn once again into the drama that is my unfolding life in him. And sometimes I'm just tired and can't even focus my eyes. And still he is with me. 

I have also been reminded how anxious my thinking can be. I remember back in the 90s I tended to specialize, at work, in trying to mentally solve problems in other departments that weren't even my responsibility. Seeing big problems just laying out there, apparently unattended, is a huge anxiety trigger for me. It is part of how I try to calm myself through overwork. Insert rueful laugh. I am drawn back to the realization that I am not the Savior of the universe, I just belong to Him. He is the master orchestrator, and I am available to Him in whatever way our partnership asks of me. 

Lent isn't over; it's barely under way. So for now I guess this is enough...

Called On

There is a big danger in being a highly religious person. I mean, there's a big danger in being a person, period, but there's a special kind of deception that can trip up people who engage in religious disciplines, and it enters through self-referentialness. If we purport to serve the God of the universe, the Almighty, the All-Wise, then we are signing up for a life where we are not Masters. We are not The Teachers. We don't stand in self-made security; slick, triumphant, neatly-packaged ease, if there is any reality in it at all, is on the flip side of a broken, humble heart that is the first to acknowledge the good of "the other," the first to bow before mystery, the first to cry "help my unbelief," the first to know that to be held in love by the Almighty is our rightful place.

Human dignity upheld, regardless of whose it is. 

Certainty of divine revelation and security only in it.

Humility of heart and freedom to bend between heaven and earth. 

These are somehow the hallmarks that I saw among Catholics in my early days in the Church that struck me with their subtle witness to truth and reality. I used to believe that Catholics were the epitome of those "caught up in religion," that is, those who practiced meaningless ceremony and recited empty formulae and relied on their own righteousness to stand before God. I was taught to believe that this is the foundation of Catholicism. Rather, I think that this is the foundation of humanity and "natural religion." I think it is probably where we all start, because we have to start somewhere. In the Old Testament, God certainly instructed Israel in all sorts of sacrifice ceremonies, and I highly doubt that at the time they enjoyed the pinnicle of mystical involvment in their interior meaning. God was teaching them. And just as children can listen to a story at ages 3, 6, 9, 12 and 17 and exercise completely different abilities, so as time went on, what Israel experienced in these sacrificial commands was different, I suspect. 

But isn't this just the thing: We can get stuck with what we exercise at the six-year point, and not move on to what the 12-year point calls forth from us. We are ready to build our monuments to truth-mastery and settle into being Masters and Teachers, because we have this one really figured out. Or we can forget, and get reminded of six-year-point truth, and feel happy that we have found our true home again, and vow never to leave.

Somewhere along the line, Christians can fail to register that we are called to union with the God of the universe, the Almighty, the All-Wise. Rather than yearning with openness to the Infinite, we celebrate learning to stand on a small, finite plot of solid earth under our two feet, and call it a day. 

Standing on solid ground is good, but we are called to more. We are always called to more. God is Love; Love is infinite, He does not wish to stop until the flame of His heart enkindles the dried wood of our own hearts and we burn as one. We can't make that happen, but God can. This is the story of the interior mansions: God draws us where we cannot go. There is always somewhere to go. This is such a word of hope for me! There is always somewhere to go. At some stage, moving forward means allowing the breaking up what we have all figured out. It means holding our hearts upwards to the God we cannot see, cannot feel, and whose existence we perhaps question. 

If God is Love (and He is), then God is the one who is waiting to in-fill us. This is the witness of the Carmelite saints. This is our experience. When all is lost, God is, and He in-fills us, and we are brought beyond our sins, beyond our wounds, beyond our limitations, our efforts, our abilities. This is who God is. This is what God does. 

This is not the tame, manageable God that we so easily mistake for ourselves and then begin to inflict on others to bend them to us. This is Reality before whom every knee will bow. This is the God who heals and transforms by His presence, from the interior.