A Woman in a Woman's World

Yesterday I had, well, let's call it an interesting experience. You know how you can be going through life, facing forward, living in the present, dealing, coping, stretching, learning. Doing the little advances that successful day-to-day life is all about. Then suddenly something comes along that has you stopping and looking back, looking far around you at places you once traveled through. Small thickets of confusion that are familiar in a distant way. That's what I did yesterday.

But it wasn't just in my memory. It was a concrete thing in front of me, invading my present. 

My parish is running a women's Bible study this fall. 

Now here's the funny thing. Maybe a year ago I visited a parish across the river for confession, and I saw that it was offering the same women's Bible study. I shared it on my Facebook page, being ever the promoter of things. I'm all for it, in theory, and I think I even momentarily looked into what it would take to offer it in my town. 

And I was asked to take a leadership role, similar to what I had done in our parish ChristLife, which satisfied my inclusion needs (aka ego. I was sought out. Thank you.). But ultimately I passed on it. Because to be honest, just the idea of being part of a women's Bible study sends me into the small thickets of confusion.

And I spent a chunk of yesterday spinning this around in my mind and checking out some interesting emotions that it conjured. 

It is intended not only as a Bible study but also as a community building thing. And this is where I needed to admit to myself what, for me, makes for community building. That would be work. That's why I liked the feeling of being offered the logistics and communication job. I even asked if I could do that part without actually going to the Bible study, but no, that wasn't the vision. That's ok. 

Shared work is probably my primary "love language" if you buy that expression. This is something I like about choirs and music; it requires that everyone work together. This is why I tend to take on huge tasks with a lot of excitement -- like the year our Bishop gifted our parish (and every parish) with hundreds of copies of one of Matthew Kelley's books, and my daughter and I gift wrapped every single one. I questioned the size of that undertaking, but my (then 8 or so year old) daughter proclaimed it "a labor of love," and so there was no turning back for me then. When parishes were reopened after our short COVID shutdown, I was asked to buy some rope from Lowes to make the required social distancing thingies look somewhat dignified. Oh no. My daughter and I braided ropes out of white tshirts and figured out a way to keep them firmly on the pews but also made them easily adjustable. That felt so good to be able to do that, whatever your thoughts on social distancing. 

Yeah, so what I don't find a helpful way to give myself is to sit in a group of women chatting about how Scripture impacts my day-to-day life, or study guide questions. Spiritual direction; yes. Theological discussion; yes. Lexical study, historical study; yes, yes. Pretty tablecloths, conversations where words fly fast and emotions fly faster, or women connect emotions to sensible things in attempts to "feel comfortable sharing..." I don't even know how to do that. And generally it makes me feel the opposite of community-built. I tend to sit there with my mouth shut, trying to track (or tuning out, depending on how my day has gone) and mostly feeling a thousand miles away. These days, my thoughts just dash to other things I could be doing. In the past, I sat there wondering why I did not know how to be a woman. Because I figured A Woman's World was what I was looking at.

Yes, yesterday I felt again that jab of feeling like an unwomanly woman. Like maybe I should try harder. Like maybe I was being weak or selfish or inadequate or unholy or rebellious or (insert more) for not wanting to participate. Like I really should. I thought of, and even played, that song by Wendy Talbot from the 80s "Woman of the Word" where she asked questions popular of the day about what women "should" do. It dawns on me now: we think the question "What is a woman?" is newly controversial. (Some) Christians have been making it difficult to answer that question, on a non-biological level, for decades.

In the midst of questioning myself yesterday, I found it extremely difficult to do the work that was actually in front of me. Suddenly I wasn't sure I could do anything.

If you diligently read this blog (😂) you'll realize I've been sinking deeply into the Seven Sorrows rosary in the last few months. After all these years as a Catholic, I am *just starting to sink deeper into understanding the Blessed Virgin Mary as woman par excellence. And as I've been meditating on her sorrows, I realize she has a lot of strength, born of emotional and spiritual pain. She probably did enjoy beautiful objects and she probably did chat with women friends. But there was only one Blessed Mother. In a common way, there is also only one of each of us. I have never been given to conformity, but I haven't always been at peace with being myself, either. It has struck me with terror; it has confused me. But humility says, I am who God made me, no more, no less. I will be me, because it is God's will for me.

This morning, as happens to me occasionally after a day on mental frappe setting, I woke with everything clear in my mind. Following the Lord is not a path full of should. Or as one priest once quipped, "Stop should-ing all over me." One must not should oneself, either. Jesus says, "Follow me and live." He commands, he invites, he speaks to us about reality, but he doesn't guilt us into things, so we need to refrain from responding to that kind of motivation. Ok, I need to stop it. Respecting freedom is super important, and it is grossly counter-productive to Christian life to not respect freedom.

I'm not guilty of being me; I'm responsible to be me, and to learn how to do it well. I need people in my life in order for me to be me well, but I also need space from people, and I can't expect that anyone is going to understand what I need unless I understand my own needs and make them known as necessary. I'm actually responsible to God to invest well the raw material of myself He's given me to work with, to try to gain a return. 

See -- it all boils down to shared work! 😉

*Everything in the spiritual life is always just beginning.

Submission Revisited

This morning, let's say it was by the time Mass ended, I realized I now have a refined understanding of submission. 

Sometimes spiritual insights just click, becn ause a grace God gives grabs hold of words that are spoken, and both goes to a place of past experiences, and then it all elevates, it changes key, and something new is perceptible. 

And this happened today regarding the reality of what it means to be in submission.

Fr. Mike Schmitz was addressing this in recent episodes of Catechism in a Year, because the topic has been the Sacrament of Matrimony. He was discussing the verses in Ephesians that tell wives to be submissive to their husbands, and husbands and wives to submit to one another out of reverence for Christ. Now, I've heard any number of takes on Christian submission, but how it landed in my mind was that submission means saying yes to what someone with valid authority tells you to do. I wrote a blogpost about this way back in 2007. Fr. Mike's definition of submission (CIAY, Day 224) is "to place yourself under the mission of the other person."

And I think those words just sunk in and hit a very deep part of my awareness today.

It's the Feast of the Assumption of Mary. Now, Mary was totally submitted to the mission, the plan, of the Blessed Trinity. She was totally on-board with the salvation of the world, the sanctification of the world, and bringing total glory to God in and through her every breath. She was also totally submitted to the mission of Joseph, who was specifically made Guardian of the Redeemer. He, in turn was totally submitted to Mary's mission as Mother of the Redeemer. Their marriage was a partnership in the mission God had entrusted to each of them. They were submitted to one another out of reverence for Christ, literally. 

And so it has to be with us. Our lives are about the mission: the Great Commission, to call to bring all souls to life in God through Jesus Christ in the Holy Spirit. 

Ok, so even as I'm writing this, I'm coming up a sense of well, duh. 

The changed key, the newly perceptible truth stems from an interior shift. How can I struggle this out into words...

In the aforementioned blogpost, I gave the example of how I might respond to the Bishop saying he was closing my parish. I said it would hurt, but I'd go with it. And that was pretty much my take on submission. Responding to something that happened. But if I place myself under the mission of Jesus Christ, or more concretely if I place myself under the mission of a particular human being, then I am going to employ all of my energies, all of my creativity, all of my resources into furthering that mission, that aim, that goal. This is how the dynamic of my life has been leaning for some years now, but today it clicked. This employing of my energies -- that is submission. It is not passive. I don't sit and wait for orders. I'm not a harem member that waits to be summoned. To waste my energies -- to spend them all on myself or my entertainment, or to fret myself away in anxiety or nitpicking, instead of love -- that's not submission. To chase after financial security or a name or success -- that's not submission. 

I would posit that spouses submitting to each other is not about each other; ultimately, it is also about Christ. It is about serving God, the common good, and learning where each other fits within that (because God always makes space for us). And it definitely is not about simply saying, "Yes, dear" and doing what the other person selfishly says or wants. It might keep peace, but it is not a way to grow holiness. If there's no mutual discernment of a virtuous path and an active desire to seek the Lord's will and way, then trouble ensues.

Several years ago, I had the strange experience of being contacted by an acquaintance who was leaving society to join a monastery. He had a few months as he transitioned into his new life, and just during this time he challenged me to write a song every week. He asked if I'd be willing to take it as a formal challenge and submit the new songs to him every week, and then he'd give me a new tweak in the challenge for the next week. I was intrigued, so I said yes. I had not written new music in a long time, but during that time I cranked out several new songs. I was very aware that I needed that piece of being called forth. Then he abruptly had to cut off communication, and that was that. I stopped writing, because I no longer had a mission to place myself under. That experience stayed with me a long time, and I didn't know what to call that powerful impetus. I think it is the power of submission. And I think one of my central life frustrations has been to rarely find a healthy person with a Christ-focused ability to say, I have this mission; join it. Well, I know now I am a Carmelite and I do have a mission there, but even there, we are still figuring out how to respond. Why are we so slow to live this reality in the Church? Why is it so unclear to engage the mission of Christ with our whole selves? Is it because we are not in possession of our whole selves? 

Well, it was Clear When I Started

Yesterday was the Feast of the Visitation, and something in the Scriptures for the Mass struck me significantly. It wasn't that I felt a sudden awareness or a "naru hodo" moment; it was more like I saw clearly something which was a long time in coming to that point. Like when you travel down a long, flat road and when you arrive at the landmark, you realize you've been looking at it already for some time.

The Scriptures were about how to love in practical terms, and the comparison was made to the perfection of how Mary went in haste to serve Elizabeth in her need, even after receiving the amazing news that Mary is now THE Theotokos.

Rom 12:9-16

Brothers and sisters:
Let love be sincere;
hate what is evil,
hold on to what is good;
love one another with mutual affection;
anticipate one another in showing honor.
Do not grow slack in zeal,
be fervent in spirit,
serve the Lord.
Rejoice in hope,
endure in affliction,
persevere in prayer.
Contribute to the needs of the holy ones,
exercise hospitality.
Bless those who persecute you,
bless and do not curse them.
Rejoice with those who rejoice,
weep with those who weep.
Have the same regard for one another;
do not be haughty but associate with the lowly;
do not be wise in your own estimation.

And here's how it hit me: My life formation was impacted in a fragmenting way by alcoholism, divorce, and mental illness. I wanted all the bad feelings from this to go away, and that was primarily the engine driving my understanding of love. If I couldn't fix the unfixable person, I could hate them, I could blame them, I could avoid them, I could shut them out, or I could hide myself from them so I could at least feel I had some freedom. Not only do I not remember the moment when I realized I couldn't fix the unfixable person, I do remember the feeling of more and more people in my life falling into the pit of a category called "unfixable people." I even started gravitating towards "unfixable people" (addicts, social misfits, impossible relationships). 

All of these interactions with unfixables also flooded me with guilt: I couldn't do it. I could make zero impact for the good. In fact, I didn't seem to be able to impact anyone at all.

Now, I do remember grace freeing me, step by step, from hating, from blaming, and from avoiding people who caused me hurt. And let's be honest, that came to be everyone, because that was all I expected from people, and so I dished out distance naturally, and hid behind my walls of hurt and my impenetrable armor. God has indeed freed me significantly.

But here I am. Generally speaking, I don't think of "unfixable" people as people that I must fix. Generally speaking, I have learned to accept people where they are. But, I realize a problem spot, and I think this is what the Holy Spirit is showing me. If I could describe it exactly it wouldn't be a problem spot (which is why the blog exists -- I write so that I understand). 

Part of me hasn't let go of the resentment, of the despair, of the experience of having "unfixable" people in my life. I see that I do not accept the broken human condition as a good. It just isn't. But there is a call to action that is stuck in me, when it comes to accepting individuals but not accepting that their brokenness is ok. I have a fiery love which is frustrated. 

Also, I give up too early when it comes to concrete actions of love sometimes because I have conceded that my love is impotent. I have at times mildly to grossly miscalculated the impact I can have on another. Generally, all I know for sure is how I respond emotionally to my own actions. I fail at times to even begin to realize how I impact another -- because of years and years of pouring myself out but never seeing it do anything.

So... now that I write this, what seemed clear and too obvious to me to even put into words has turned out to be much more nebulous than I thought. The sincerity of my love is measured in not feeling like I'm going to get something out of what I do for others. I'm not going to generate my own safety by any kind of juju I produce which is going to reunite my parents or stop their drinking or bring my family into peace. I'm never going to change another person by trying to change them. I am not going to ride on anyone's codependency merry-go-round, even if they hate me for it. Trying to feed myself on someone else is evil, and I hate that (Rom. 12:9). Let my love be free, from a desire to do good for another, not to try to win peace, respect, favor for myself or beat back feelings of guilt or whatever. But let my love be God loving through me, and may the frustration be broken open.

The Prodigal, The Fatherless, and St. Joseph

This morning's Mass has shaken loose quite a bit of useful thought fodder, so here I am to sort it all out.

The gospel reading was the parable of the Prodigal Son, famous of course for the son who squanders wealth, the father who compassionately welcomes him back after long expectation, and the brother who resents both of them. 

The homily I heard, though, was one of those ripping the needle off the record moments that backhandedly spoke into my personal situation and also has me pondering this year of St. Joseph.

Father mentioned, reminiscent of the writer to the Hebrews, that "we have all had that moment where we did something wrong, and we awaited that moment of how our fathers were going to deal with us about it." As Hebrews 12:9-10 puts it, "we have all had earthly fathers to discipline us and we respect them...they disciplined us for a short time at their pleasure, but [God] disciplines us for our good..."

The needle ripped off the record because, no, I don't have any childhood memories like that. In fact, the first thing I thought of was my experience of being corrected for singing harmonies out of turn when I joined our parish choir. I was ... 41 at the time. 

What felt so odd was to have this discussed as a universal human experience from which we all learned something about God. I went to that same category interiorly, and came up empty. That's not to say that God hasn't abundantly compensated that emptiness for me, because He has.

 My second thought went to the 23% of American households with children that are currently headed by single parents. And the divorce rate in the era of the childhoods of my generation (1970s and 1980s) that was at nearly 50%. And the trend, also prevalent within my generation of what Dr. Jonice Webb calls Childhood Emotional Neglect, where even physically present parents can be emotionally absent to their children. All of this is so much a given in my awareness of life around me that frankly Father's comments struck me like data from a different planet.

But my concern is not really with sociological trends, nor with Family Privilege, my personal experience or anyone else's per se. The direction these thoughts have taken me have been about human formation, and how that impacts spiritual formation.

I love what my Secular Carmelite Constitutions have to say about this: 

Both initial and ongoing formation in the teachings of Teresa and John of the Cross, help to develop in the Carmelite Secular a human, Christian and spiritual maturity for service to the Church. Human formation develops the ability for interpersonal dialogue, mutual respect and tolerance, the possibility of being corrected and correcting with serenity, and the capacity to persevere commitments. (OCDS Constitutions, No. 34)

Pope Francis has been insistent on reminding us that God meets us with His great spiritual riches on the peripheries of society and on the peripheries of our own hearts. The more clearly we see our poverty, our need, our lack, our misery, the more immediately God bestows His abundant grace. This is exactly why I say God has abundantly compensated me for the empty category I have felt in my human formation; though it did not always feel a blessing, I realize I have been tremendously blessed in being solidly in touch with my misery and crying out to God over it. It has taken me a few decades, but here I am!

I am now vigorously curious to learn how to help others in their human formation in this regard. Human formation happens when my human experience butts up against your human experience, and we both act with the graces God has given us. There is plentious room for correction and being corrected, for learning respect, to learn to tolerate persons and accept them as they are, not as we want them to be. The end result is to be that we both learn to persevere in our baptismal commitments, having been refined by the other. Multiply this by many people, many human experiences, much grace. This is an element that dare not be missing from spiritual formation (entailing learning Scriptural, doctrinal and spiritual truths). For dry bones to live we need both spirit and flesh to take part in resurrection.

And then my thoughts went to Our Lord Jesus. At the beginning of his life, he went straight for our vulnerable edges, in the persons of Mary and Joseph. Biblical scholars still debate over the nature of their legal and moral status at the time of Jesus' conception. They were betrothed but had not lived together as husband and wife; did this mean that Jesus' birth was legitimate or illegitimate? Regardless of how the eyes of the law looked upon them, or what people thought of Mary and Joseph, I can't imagine that Joseph avoided a dark night of faith. He knew that Jesus was not his child. Scripture clearly says he was of a mind to divorce Mary quietly. Some scholars say this was only because Joseph knew he was not worthy to be the father of the Son of God, and not that he doubted Mary or didn't know or believe that she was the mother of the Messiah until this was revealed by the angel (as if human Joseph having merely human thoughts somehow detracts from his holiness or vocation.) Mary also had to have needed to exercise dark faith in what the angel told her. I remember those early weeks of pregnancy where, in my case, I was sure I had lost my baby because I felt absolutely nothing. Mary had no advantage of seeing the blue line show up on her pregnancy test. In this very intimate, unprecidented and singular event of the pregnancy with the Son of God, both Mary and Joseph were pressed to the human limits of faith that God's word is to be believed above all else, including the entire natural order. I highly doubt that there were not intense conversations during that time that shaped and prepared them to live in their society in a radically, profoundly different way from anyone else. Their bond had to be a profound solitude that God transformed with every manner of compassion, wisdom, worship, and strength.

Jesus did not come to remove troubles by sanitizing humanity. He came to sanctify us by redeeming our broken humanity, and making sons of those whom sin had completely alienated. He entered into our human experience, sharing everything but sin, in order to drink the dregs and fill all with his healing and powerful presence, to make of us a people who witness to his presence in a broken world. As he raises us up to share in his divine nature, he fulfills through human beings what he promised in Psalm 10:18, "to vindicate the fatherless and the oppressed, that the men of the earth may strike terror no more."

The Church as Mother

Today is the solemnity of Sts. Peter and Paul, apostles. As I read the entry for the feast in Divine Intimacy by Fr. Gabriel of St. Mary Magdalen I was struck by two oft-repeated quotes: "He cannot have God as Father who does not have the Church for Mother" (St. Cyprian, † 258) and the dying words of St. Teresa of Jesus, reformer of my Carmelite order: "I am a daughter of the Church."

I don't feel like I'm going far out on a limb to say that in this generation, we are undergoing a shift in what it means in lived experience, and subsequently in Christian understanding, to have the Church for Mother. At the time and context that Fr. Gabriel wrote (as a Carmelite priest and academic in Rome in the 1940s), one gets the distinct flavor that to have the Church for Mother involves being a faithful, fully-initiated member of the Roman Catholic Church. And he is not wrong.

The Second Vatican Council had not yet happened, but when it did, it also did not pronounce Fr. Gabriel wrong is his view. But it certainly did bid faithful, fully-initiated Roman Catholics to lift up their eyes and take in a broader view of what it means, that we do not have God as Father who do not have the Church for Mother.

If we understand "church" as a juridical, political term that specializes in the observable external conditions that result in belonging, we miss dimensions of the words Father and Mother. I am a mother. My older child entered our family through the legal process of adoption, after he had called me Mama for three years. My younger child grew within me in the natural way. When the midwife handed her to me, her gaze penetrated mine with a knowing that was expanding, not new. Interestingly, we had finalized my son's adoption 15 hours before the midwife handed me my daughter. Legally, in one 24-hour period, I suddenly was the mother of two children. Strip away the growth dynamic, the nurturing, the bonding, the healing, the life of the matter, and this legal statement is what you are left with.

Drop a newborn and an almost four year old child into a new juridical arrangement with strangers (who may or may not have the wherewithall to provide for their human needs), and what do you have?

You have the the vision of the Church that the Second Vatican Council saw was in urgent need of expansion. It calls us to take a deeper look at what happens when being a faithful, fully-initiated Roman Catholic goes right.

There is a community where the love of God is made manifest. The truth of the gospel is spoken. We are told from Divine Revelation the truth about who we are, about who God is, about how sin is the cause of our brokenness, about how God's love is the cause of our salvation, about Jesus as the price of our redemption, about His act of love and obedience that opens heaven and that calls all people to follow Him and to share in His mission to announce this plan of salvation. The very dynamism of the gospel preached and responded to creates missional communities. And miraculously, because the source of these communities is the one life of God there is unity as each is united with the Lord who calls and empowers and sends and is preached. Those who have answered the call of Jesus share the call. They reproduce. There is a life dynamic. It nurtures, bonds, heals. This is why we call the Church our Mother when God is our Father. We receive new life.

Roman Catholics who get uptight about juridical belonging tend to have forgotten or ignored the life-giving dynamics of the Church's maternal nature to their own detriment, and the detriment of those they affect. It's a messy process for uptightness to decompress, recognize its own need, acknowledge the need of others. It's a death to self that can feel like the world, safety, right and good being destroyed before one's very eyes. But in truth, it is salvation. It is the love of God breaking through. It will be messy. Motherhood is messy. Family life is messy. Messy is necessary for real life and healing, and varying levels of messy can all be endured.

Enough of "failure to thrive" Christians. Enough of orphaned believers weighed by a sense of lacking belonging, siblings, nurture. Enough of harsh, one-sided law lovers.

I am a daughter of the Church. I draw my life from her. Let us drink deeply from the purity of Christ so that His living water wells us within us for the salvation of all.

Please People, Always Bring your Toddlers to Confession with You

I went to confession today.

I think some of the silliest temptations that ever go through my interior strike me when I am considering or planning going to confession. It is crazy. One of the thoughts is generally that I have no sins to confess. Another is that any other time would be better than now. Another popular one is that I am in the wrong mood or the wrong frame of mind to make a good confession. And it is all balderdash, of course.

Overthinking is no good either, and that used to be what plagued me, to the point where sometimes I could not get any words out at all because I had worked myself into a state of emotional paralysis.

So anyway, I went to confession today.

I hated going to confession for years, or rather I did it because I knew I should, but I couldn't really grasp what was supposed to be happening. I have stumbled and bumbled through for 23 years now as a Catholic, but now I realize that every single time I go to confession, I experience an encounter with the Lord. Often it shakes me deep down. Always, I think, I leave re-oriented.

Today I went by faith. None of the appropriate feelings seemed present. But then there was that woman with her kids.

One of them was old enough to be confessing, I'm guessing 8 or 9. The other was about 2. The older one popped out of the confessional just as mom was going in. This left the toddler looking a little forlorn about disappearing Mommy. He looked with huge, sad eyes at the closed door, and told his brother he wanted Mommy, and resisted a little being picked up by brother. Just then, he caught my eyes, too. I could feel that little boy's pain, and I tried to reassure him that his Mommy was right there and would be right back. Just then, the CD playing in the church went to a song based on Psalm 42: "Even as the deer pants for running streams, so my soul longs for you. When will I come to the end of my pilgrimage and enter and see the face of my God?" And the refrain rang out "My soul longs for you// My soul longs for you."

Those words, sung to that melody, and the face of the little boy became a sudden scalpel opening my heart in such a way that if it had lasted very long at all, I would not have been able to bear it. I realized that under all my adult clutter and dullness of soul and foul play in relationships, my soul is desperate for the tender embrace of God. I design so many things to hush up that desire, to make it more manageable, less of a panic.

But the panic is reasonable, because I am needier than a toddler. But it also is not necessary, because the tenderness of God, and of His Blessed Mother, his greatest minister, is imminently available to me. I need only come and ask.

It is hard to stay with the feelings, with the raw experience of the need that fuels asking, and of experiencing the need for tenderness being met. I thank God I can experience this to one degree; if I could really feel my need and God's response always I would not be able to carry on with normal life.

The beautiful thing to realize, of course, is that other people need simple human tenderness and personal presence from me, because this is the normal way that God's healing presence is mediated among people.

These days in our country have not been tremendous moments of tenderness. Everyone is riled up, it seems. We toughen as a way to cope.

But, let's do this: let's long for God. Let's allow our souls to long for God. He is able to break us out of cycles of longing for not-God, for things that never will satisfy. He is not slow to hear our desire, nor is He slow to answer. So let's honor Him with our trust and make a carte blanche of our souls, intent on Him alone.

And This is Why I Love Epiphany

God frequently seems to use the liturgy and liturgical feasts to teach me personal things. Sometimes the nature of how this works is that something significant will happen in conjunction with a liturgical celebration of a feast day, but the significance of it will only dawn on me several years down the road. My initial conversion to Catholicism at a Christmas Eve midnight Mass is the most obvious example.

And another such thing is connected to the Epiphany.

The liturgy of the hours for Epiphany preserves the tradition that it has, in the past, encompassed the Visit of the Magi, the Baptism of Jesus, and the Wedding at Cana: the Illuminatio, Manifestatio, and Declaratio. The message is clear: Jesus is on the scene with power and He's changing things.

It took me quite a long time to realize how that applied to this thing that happened to me six years ago tomorrow, on Epiphany Sunday.

That would have been one of those moments that if I had been able to see into the future, I probably would have turned and run away as fast as I could.

I'm glad I didn't. I think.

No, no: I'm sure. And I have the scars to prove it. 

It had been a quiet life for Jesus, Mary and Joseph (as long has he lasted) until the time of Jesus' public manifestation and His first miracle. I can only imagine Mary's heart at the moment when she knew it was time for Him to move on. We make a lot of her request that moved Him to His first public miracle. I'm convinced it was not a giddy moment for her, but one of surrender to the Father. Her statement "Do whatever He tells you," besides the other volumes it speaks, I believe was her fiat to the Messiah's mission which any student of the prophecies must have known would lead to His death.


The rest of us see these glory moments and think Cool! Dude, I want in on this! She realizes that the glory of God comes at the price of suffering and death. Which hearkens back to celebrating martyrs right smack after Christmas Day. Did the Church make some awful blunder in scheduling St. Stephen and the Holy Innocents? Of course not. We make the blunder in forgetting that Christmas flows into Epiphany which flows into Lent which flows into Holy Week, Easter, Ascension and Pentecost. Jesus' birth is the beginning of the pascal mystery.

Christmas is often presented as a sugar-coated fairy tale. But God is born into a world where there is also a great deal of suffering and misery. -- Pope Francis 

And God came to live that suffering and misery with us, as one of us.

And, you know, in my book, when there's suffering and misery and God shows up, that suffering and misery suddenly get changed. Where God is, there is delight. Even when the glory points to a cross, which points to glory.

Funny. Seems like I wandered far away from the purpose I started writing with, which was to remember that Epiphany six years ago when God used the liturgy to show me something I didn't understand yet.

But this is how it works. And that's all I've been talking about.

The Redemption of Fantasy Addiction

Here is another quote that struck me recently:

"Just imagine what Mary was actually saying in the words, 'I am the handmaid of the Lord. Let what you have said be done to me' (Luke 1:38). She was saying, 'I don't know what this all means, but I trust that good things will happen.'

"She trusted so deeply that her waiting was open to all possibilities. And she did not want to control them. She believed that when she listened carefully, she could trust what was going to happen.
"To wait open-endedly is an enormously radical attitude toward life. So is to trust that something will happen to us that is far beyond our own imaginings. So, too, is giving up control over our future and letting God define our life, trusting that God molds us according to God's love and not according to our fear.
"The spiritual life is a life in which we wait, actively present to the moment, trusting that new things will happen to us, new things that are far beyond our own imagination, fantasy, or prediction. That, indeed, is a very radical stance toward life in a world preoccupied with control."
---Henri Nouwen, from "A Spirituality of Waiting: Being Alert to God's Presence in Our Lives", Weavings, January 1987

What struck me about this is this matter of our imaginings:  "The spiritual life is a life in which we wait, actively present to the moment, trusting that new things will happen to us, new things that are far beyond our own imagination, fantasy, or prediction."

I live a very interior life by personality. As with all personality types, this means I lean toward specific strengths and weaknesses. And certain weaknesses can lend themselves towards even addictions and interior pathologies. I have had my own experience of this when it comes to the life of my mind. From a very young age, I learned that I could escape emotional pain by constructing an imaginary world that eliminated problems I could not change and provided saviors I otherwise did  not experience. This is a coping mechanism, a self-generated sort of mercy that serves a frightened child. But addiction arises when no other mercy emerges to move a soul from "coping with" to "dealing with." Mix in layers of religious ideas in accretion to this basic coping addiction. Compound it with a strong intellectual bent and a weak social bent. Yeah, you have a mess.

Among other things, one ends up with elaborate mental constructs about God that don't so much take the reality of a personal God into account, while never denying Him and while in fact crying out to Him regularly in desperation. One also ends up with severely contorted and intensely felt passions about other people and what they could and could not, or would and would not do for one. It is like living in a completely invisible but completely impenetrable bubble of Saran wrap, blocking a vital connection with reality.

And I lived this, on varying levels, for many years of my life.

Today it is easy for me to look back and see the work God has done in freeing me of all this. It was  during a most painful spiritual trial, when God seemed farthest from my cries, that I became aware of a distinct lack. It's hard to put into words, but that old place where one version of this coping mechanism had always kicked in was as if a lump I had had all my life on my arm or my leg was suddenly not there. I could feel its absence. And thinking about it couldn't make it come back. It was astounding. It was this kind of indisputable interior evidence that showed me God was active in me profoundly even though I otherwise felt like I was breaking apart.

But back to the quote, which reminded me of something I've blogged about before in this post called We are Saved in Community. It was a dream that I had which became part of the interior "catechesis" God gave me during the time I was becoming a Catholic (when I had really no human being to reliably teach me). In this dream, a voice asked me what I would like to eat, and I asked for a slice of pizza. "Is that all? Just a piece of pizza?" The voice seemed to want to stretch my imagination a bit. So I thought about it and changed my request to a whole pizza: large, and with lots of toppings. See, I was working my interior fantasy thing to its limit, to the wildest desire for myself that I could muster. But then in the dream, the voice seemed a bit disappointed with "my wildest," and asked me if I was going to insist that it had to be that. "No," I tentatively answered, but I was confused, because the voice seemed to want to know what I wanted. Why did you ask if you didn't want to hear my idea, I thought. Then in the dream my grandfather appeared carrying a huge container of homemade beef stew, and suddenly I was aware of an enormous banquet table set for many and stocked with all manner of delicious and lovingly made homemade food.

Now the point of what I learned from this, and the point of which this quote reminded me is that God actually is interested in my being aware of my imagination, my fantasy, my desires, my predictions, my earth-bound desires simply so that I can understand how tremendously transcendent and enormously good He is. So that I can begin to comprehend how far beyond my comprehension His love for me runs. How wide, how long, how high, how deep is the love of God. How far beyond my puny human power of desire His ability to fulfill me goes.

Sometimes my tendency is to waste a lot of energy on condemnation of what my mind dreams up to express my desires in life. But Nouwen here teaches me that my attitude should not be condemnation but surrender. I'm really not wedded to my request for a piece of pizza! But God wants to rouse my longings for what He knows will truly satisfy me. God is Reality; the mental world I wanted to construct was a feeble cry for Him to save me. 

 

And now I see He is here. He longs for my cry, and He personally steps in to save me.

Loneliness and Christian Emptiness

Earlier this week, I came across this quote which speaks volumes to me:

God looked over the world for an empty heart -- but not a lonely heart -- a heart that was empty like a flute on which He might pipe a tune -- not lonely like an empty abyss, which is filled by death. And the emptiest heart He could find was the heart of a Lady. Since there was no self there, He filled it with His very Self.
~ Fulton Sheen, The World's First Love: Mary Mother of God

In a manner of speaking, one of God's goals for us is for us to become empty. This emptiness, of course, has to be understood, as Sheen's sense has it, in the Carmelite way. Empty means ready. Empty implies availability, and it implies purpose and community. One is available for something, or rather for Someone.

It speaks, of course, to the scene of Joseph and Mary journeying to Bethlehem, looking for available space where Jesus might be born. Is my house, am I, available? Not much is made of this in Scripture, but much has been made of it in meditations such as the custom of Las Posadas. 

The enemy of this kind of emptiness is loneliness. When I read this, the naru hodo alarm rang within me as my personal history instantly shot up multiple instances of proof of this. Oh my goodness how my nature has recoiled from self-emptying for fear of loneliness, of that sense of being left out of the life-stream that certainly everyone else was deeply enjoying. The voices that speak contrary to truth: the world, the flesh and the devil, scream that I must have things, people, experiences that fill me, things I can possess, things I must hold on to to stay afloat. For certainly life revolves around something I don't have but need, or something I don't have enough of, or something I might lose, or something someone else controls and I have to posture myself in order to receive. Certainly without having, I am nothing.

Right?

Um, no.

In the midst of frantic craving I lose sight of reality. Reality is that the God of the universe, the Blessed Trinity, created me for a purpose. My purpose is to love and worship God in a holy communion of persons. I worship God as I lay down my life, as I empty myself and empty from myself all lesser pursuits.

I do this not because I am a masochist and don't believe in or want good things for myself. It is not Christian to understand "empty" in the sense of "denude." I do this out of great faith in the One who reciprocates my emptiness with Himself. The availability we offer to God is always for communion. God's ultimate goal for us is union with Him, not for us to become simply a great void. As I relinquish my obsessive self-factor I see that God loves, gives, and is deeply merciful in response to enter into human misery and to be, literally, God-with-us.

To break it down and make it real simple: faith in Jesus calls me to abandon everything to Him in love. I long to be empty, I agree to be emptied, I move towards emptiness because I know, love, and trust in the One who fills. And that infilling is what every smidgeon of my being longs for.

Oh yeah, there might be long, painful gaps where there are no blissful feelings. Stuff of earth feels useless and the bliss of heaven is nowhere. You experience loss, dependencies will be broken, and temporal security will be shaken.

But I believe and trust in the promise -- no, in the One who made the promise. He is faithful. He is true. I love Him; He calls me. To wait for such a One in emptiness is not the death-filled abyss of loneliness. It is the strengthening and deepening of love. It is worth giving your life for. In fact, it is the only thing worth giving your life for.

That Could be Sold and the Money Given to the Poor

I am becoming instinctively aware that there is a certain realm of the dignity of the human person that is graspable, but hasn't been grasped by me.

I could run to blame it on temperament or upbringing or other things, but maybe instead I should just look at it and see what there is to see.

(Geez, this is one of the things that zings me about November daily blogging, but then again it is one of the reasons I do it: it makes me vulnerable to my own thoughts.)

What conjures all this up in me is a certain event I'm watching develop which has reminded me of both a Scripture and a comment I once heard made that I think unintentionally quoted that same Scripture in a way I was able to recognize as unnecessarily sad. The said Scripture verse comes out of the mouth of Judas Iscariot, no less: "That could be sold and the money given to the poor." Scripture makes it clear that Judas had no real concern for the poor; he was a thief and was looking for a bigger treasury to steal from.

Now, before I go further, I wonder exactly how Judas stole. Did he take coins and deposit them in whatever banking system there was? Did he hand them off to his family? Did he make sure that he unevenly distributed whatever he bought for Jesus and the disciples, giving himself first and best dibs on food and supplies? When he was out to buy fish and bread did he pick up an extra chocolate bar, just for him? Whatever it was, somehow he took unto himself something that belonged to others.

And who were the poor, to Judas? Were they the unfortunate ones, people for whom he cared deeply? Was his heart filled with compassion? No, they were an excuse. He used other people's misery as an excuse to take stuff for himself. He may have even believed that the extra money he sought really was for them, because I'm sure some was indeed given to the poor. But in reality they were an excuse for him to pursue his comfort.

(Now here's a thought: was Jesus some kind of lame mismanager for not kicking Judas out of his position? Did Jesus not realize what Judas was doing?)

We have to remember what it was that prompted this comment: Mary was "wasting" expensive ointment on Jesus, expressing love in what Jesus saw as a prophetic and symbolic gesture: she was getting him ready for his burial. Jesus approved of her extravagant act of love. Was He somehow unmindful of the poor and starving? Such a thought should not even be articulated. As always, He values love above all things, and He knows that the sacrificial love involved in Mary's offering is worthy of acceptance and that His own offering of His life is the singlemost worthy act ever to be performed on earth. His death is worthy of all reverence.

Perhaps right here is the crux of the matter: why did Jesus offer His life? Because that singlemost worship-worthy act was for me. You. Him. Her. It was because human beings have immense dignity that Jesus gave His life. Because we are God's creatures, and the Blessed Trinity considers us worthy of Divine Blood as the price to pay for our ransom.

That's where I stagger and fall over and can't quite take it in.

That second time I mentioned, when I had heard words like this, was a few years ago when by odd circumstance a Protestant relative of mine happened to witness a May Crowning, with lots of children bringing flowers their families had purchased to lay before a statue of Mary. "They could have given that money to the poor!" was the almost knee-jerk response to witnessing this understandably difficult-to-digest event. What was really being said: Mary doesn't deserve that kind of honor. It's a waste to put flowers in front of a hunk of plaster!

Catholics understand (or at least are slightly more likely to understand) that teaching children to express love to God for the gift of our spiritual Mother is of great value. We understand what loving Mary means. She has immense dignity. Loving her is right.

Now I think of my own thoughts rumbling through me. My history of dealing with money, the poor, my own needs, and my own sense of dignity has not been without violence. The only natural virtues I learned to develop in this regard have been miserliness and suspicion. (Perhaps, deep down, Judas just couldn't trust in care for him coming from anyone but him. Maybe he stole because he couldn't entrust his dignity to anyone else. And so he lost it.)

For probably 15 years, the Lord has been enlarging my heart towards the poor to the point that I really long to effectively give more away. But giving things away, I realize, means nothing without love, as 1 Corinthians 13:3 makes clear. And love, if it is like God's love, is rooted in the reality of the incredible dignity of the human person -- that dignity that is worth dying for. We all possess a dignity which we need to learn to entrust to others, and we need to have the experience of it being honored and respected by them. And we need to extend that honor and respect to those, especially, who do not have it for themselves.

To really be able to look at another person and say, not "You're worth spending ten bucks on" but "You are worth dying for," especially with no personal gain to be necessarily had in return, well now, there's something worth opening myself to the Lord for.

Because that sounds Christ-like, doesn't it?

A Meditation on St. Ambrose's Commentary on the Visitation

Have I ever mentioned that I love Advent? And have I ever mentioned how thrilling it can be to pray and feel your life standing in God's presence, yes, even despite Him allowing a few more things to be unhidden about the mystery, often the totally miserable mystery, one is to oneself? Because when you stand in God's presence, even though you realize what a miserable wretch one is in oneself, one is also aware of God's all-sufficient love and being which is at the ready to fill us. The timing, the process are His. We need not fear or fret or let shame swallow us; we need only stay aware of our need and of His bigness.

This morning I read the commentary by St. Ambrose on Luke that appears in the Office of Readings for December 21. This is what has inspired my little outburst of delight in Advent and prayer. I found myself stopping in the middle of reading to exclaim, "Gosh, St. Ambrose, I love you!" Here's the link to the full text: http://divineoffice.org/1221-or/ (you'll need to scroll to the bottom).

Stroll through this with me and let me show you what makes me so happy.

First it says: "When the angel revealed his message to the Virgin Mary he gave her a sign to win her trust." God really seems to like signs. He felt one was appropriate for Mary -- I want to say even for Mary, the sinless one, but perhaps it should be especially for the sinless one. What is it about signs that require purity to be received? In the next paragraph, St. Ambrose says "she does not disbelieve God's word; she feels no uncertainty over the message or doubt about the sign." And I think, wow. Mary knows very well the difference between God's message, God's promise, God's word, and make-believe, her own thoughts, her own desires. She knows the Word of God before He is even incarnate. And she trusts Him completely.

I wrote about my experience with a big sign in my life, back a few posts. My experience has been, uh, quite different. Actually, I've had many incidents of "signs" in my life and frankly most of the time I've hated this kind of thing. But I realize now this is a process of purification for me, and what I've hated is the pain associated with purification. Every time, this type of thing drags out vast tracts of impurity out from hiding into my awareness. And that can be, well, a little hard to deal with, shall we say. St. Ambrose says the Blessed Mother goes "eager in purpose, dutiful in conscience, hastening for joy." I have often been stuck with an inner sense of certainty (for example, the moment of my first encountering the Lord in the Eucharist -- I knew for certain that I was before the Lord Jesus) and complications in my soul that left me anything but eager, dutiful and hastening for joy in response to my certainty. This scenario has played out again and again in my life. But I think I'm learning. Mary had nothing to learn about getting freed from sin since the Lord accomplished that work in her by a special grace from her conception, as a living portrait of hope for the rest of us, so we would have someone human to look to and follow. Our being able to do that is super duper important to God.

Ok back to St. Ambrose.

"The Holy Spirit does not proceed by slow, laborious efforts." Oh, this makes me happy. Someone once was sermonizing to me about how conversion is a slow process. As I listened, my gut said a firm "no." But most people who sermonize are quite sure of their wisdom, and this left me in the common position of listening patiently to something my deep-down simply flat out disagreed with. Conversion is a work of the Holy Spirit, and it is more like lightning. What takes a long time is the lead-up to conversion and the follow-on from the change He brings about. This is of course especially slow the more resistance we throw up to God's work in us. When I met the Lord at St. Anthony of Padua parish on Christmas morning of 1991, I was changed forever, but it has taken decades for that change to unfold. We can cooperate to unfold what God gives, but we cannot give ourselves that moment of encounter, regardless of how badly we want it. When God comes to us, it is His work and His gift, period. We stand in utter need of Him.

Then St. Ambrose looks at the contrasts involved with the four people present at the Visitation. Elizabeth hears Mary's voice, but John is the first to be aware of grace. I can relate just a little to John the prophet, and how his disposition makes for awkward social moments (if awkwardness is something one is to worry about). Elizabeth is aware of Mary, and certainly she has a joy in seeing her. But John is responding on a completely different level. There have been times when I've felt like people are exchanging the proverbial social niceties, and I am leaping for joy. And of course, the response of those who are "dealing with reality" is like: (raised eyebrow) what's going on there? But St. Ambrose goes on to say that when St. John leaps in the womb, Elizabeth is filled with the Holy Spirit. He responds to, and thereby points out and makes accessible for others, the unseen presence and reality of God. This can feel strange when it plays out in real life. It's like dancing to a melody others can't hear. And I realize this is one way to describe exactly the Carmelite vocation.

And then St. Ambrose talks about how Mary's soul is to be in each of us, in the sense that we are all to receive and bring forth the Word of God. "The Lord is magnified, not because the human voice can add anything to God but because he is magnified within us. Christ is the image of God, and if the soul does what is right and holy, it magnifies that image of God, in whose likeness it was created..." And thus we are blessed and exalted by God, purely as His gift.

And what he doesn't say is that this exaltation by God then draws others, enabling them to encounter God and enter into their own odyssey of faith. God is good. And He chooses to need us. To the degree one can grasp that, what other response can we give but to give our hearts to Him entirely in worship?

The Call to be Anawim

Lately I've been slowly leaking it out that I am in the midst of a difficult spiritual trial. Explaining it all is not something I intend to do because anyone can relate out of their own life; the details don't really matter to anyone else. But I am really writing about this to document for myself the Lord's faithfulness in leading me and responding to me.

In my last post I talked about the revelation I had about the Blessed Mother having gone through a time of being separated from Jesus when He began His public ministry. There was a certain communion of life that they shared that they simply never went back to after that time. Of course, the glory gained for the whole world (not to mention Mary's personal joy) far outweighed anything that was lost in that transition. And yet I cannot imagine that the change wasn't a suffering for Mary.

I can relate to this. This was the first "light" to come my way in this thing that has been brewing almost all of this year in my heart that gave me some sense of ... of purpose in what I am facing.

So I asked the Blessed Mother to teach me how to be with her in this place.

What has been flooding my mind, my heart, my spiritual radar screen since then is this theme of the anawim. The point of that is that the people God forms as His own are the poor, the lowly, the humble, those whose hearts are purified and whose hope is in God alone. They do not have power or resources of their own to lean on. They rejoice in the Lord, who finally rewards them with the Messiah, with the power of the Holy Spirit, and life in Him. They are contrasted with the wicked and those who oppress. Those who exercise power of their own. The proud.

This is a light, a significant and beautiful light, but also one to which it is difficult to open my eyes. There is pain in coming out of darkness and into light, but even more than pain there is the fear of pain.

A primary catalyst in seeing this theme has been the book The Beatitudes: Finding the Joy of God's Kingdom by Fr. Paul Hinnebusch, but in the last few days I have been seeing this in everything Scriptural, liturgical and prayerful. I also see why, psychologically, it can be so painful to accept the call to be poor, lowly and humble in this Biblical sense. One must trust that taking this stance before God is radically different from taking this stance before anyone else, and indeed one must trust that it truly is God before whom one stands in his/her present circumstance; that it truly isn't a matter of simply being done wrong by a person. It is all too easy to remember, for example, being a child or in another vulnerable state and experiencing hurt or mistreatment or the failure of others to protect when one was powerless. It is all too easy to let the decision "I will never let that happen to me again" block one from trust, and therefore to lead one to cling tenaciously to pride, and to refuse to take a stance of humility before God. Or to make it unthinkable. Or to wrestle to the point of exhaustion every time His call to humility is sounded.

If it is God who calls me to come in humility, I can trust it is because He wants to honor me with His love and presence. It might hurt, but He will not do me wrong.

To feel powerless in the face of a powerfully felt need for something to change is very difficult. That's the difficulty I've been facing. I get in certain circumstances where I feel it almost like a physical twisting inside my body. It is my natural reaction to want to do something, to want to be able to do something to make the change.

And it seems the Blessed Mother would teach me to embrace being poor and needy, and to trust in the One who lifts up the meek and the lowly, and Who fills the hungry with good things.

And I see why there is spiritual power in praising God. Praise is the song of the anawim. It is about the poor and lowly who hoped in God rejoicing when they are lifted up, and when they are filled with good things. It is rejoicing because God has visited His people. And it is an expression of faith that this is who God is in the moment when one might not be experiencing victory or deliverance. It is proclaiming the truth of who God is, and expecting that He is the same regardless of my current circumstances. And it must drive the devil batty. It almost reminds me of those images of the flower children standing in front of an army tank with a daisy. Spiritual battle, won by singing and chanting praises? People with no worldly power toppling spiritual forces by recounting in prayer and song God's faithfulness? What kind of craziness is this?

I guess it is the same kind of craziness as the one who taught us this:

Blessed are the poor in spirit,

for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Blessed are they who mourn,

for they will be comforted.

Blessed are the meek,

for they will inherit the land.

Blessed are they who hunger and thirst for righteousness,

for they will be satisfied.

Blessed are the merciful,

for they will be shown mercy.

Blessed are the clean of heart,

for they will see God.

Blessed are the peacemakers,

for they will be called children of God.

Blessed are they who are persecuted for the sake of righteousness,

for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Blessed are you when they insult you and persecute you and utter every kind of evil against you [falsely] because of me.  Rejoice and be glad, for your reward will be great in heaven. Thus they persecuted the prophets who were before you.

Meeting Mary in a New Way

Wow. Just wow.

You never know when reading a children’s book is going to completely peel your paint.

My daughter was sick yesterday with a fever, so I didn’t send her to her catechism class this evening. Which was too bad, because she was looking forward to the little party her class was having to which parents were invited to kick off the Year of Faith. There were to be snacks and games and prizes. I remembered to call her teacher beforehand to let her know Felicity would be missing, and the teacher (who lives only about seven doors down from us) dropped off my daughter’s portion of the stash of goods for this party before leaving to teach the class.

So while I was in the middle of a rosary, my daughter brought in these things to me and we took the little quizzes and played the games. And then she handed me the book The Holy Family by Fr. Jude Winkler. I read it to her. Then she took her stash back downstairs, and I sat and had a good heart-to-heart with the Blessed Mother, thanked her profusely, and shed more tears as I finished that rosary with new faith.

Because I was made to know something that had just never entered my radar before, ever.

The book simply presents everything the Scripture says about Joseph and Mary and their relationship with Jesus, and His with them. Consider this from Mary’s perspective. For 30 years she lived in daily contact with Jesus. Joseph died at some point; Jesus was her sole support. I’m sure they did not live in isolation from the community, but I’m sure they didn’t spend a lot of time in frivolous socializing, either. Imagine what it must have been for her to live in this kind of communion with her Son.

Then one day, it happens. Jesus is 30, and it is time for Him to go ministering. He leaves, and entrusts her to relatives. For the first time since she was very young, Mary is without Jesus.

They see each other only rarely, Scripture says. There’s the wedding at Cana, before He’s gone too far from home. Some would see it that he was disregarding her request at first. Then there’s the episode where Mary and those relatives come to see Jesus, and Jesus uses it as a teaching moment to say those who hear the Word of God and obey it are his mother and brother and sister. Hardly a response full of enthusiasm to run out and meet Mom. And then where does Mary find Him? At the end of the road, carrying His cross on the way to Calvary. Being crucified. Dead.

Jesus had lots of disciples, 12 apostles, and several women who followed them to care for their needs, and good friends like Mary, Martha and Lazarus. But it is not reported that His mother was among His followers. It was the Father’s will that Jesus travel about and preach; it was the Father’s will that Mary not join Him. It was the Father’s will that they endure this separation.

I can only imagine that Mary prayed constantly for the success of Jesus’ ministry and His apostles and for hearts to be opened to receive Him and to love Him as He deserved to be loved. Her prayers could not stop the intrigue that caused His death.

But I think the sword that pierced her heart was not only on Good Friday, but in relinquishing Him for three whole years. She was sinless, but she was completely and only human. Would this not have hurt deeply, to not be able to be at her Son’s side at every step? Would she not have missed Him horribly? Would it not have grieved her that He was rejected in Nazareth? She is a mother, after all!

And yet, she wouldn’t do the sorts of things I would be, and am, tempted to do, like be bitter and snarky and refuse to say hi when she did see Him, or complain to her friends about how He was treating her, or refuse to pray because of what a bum deal God was giving her. She faced the Father’s will with an open heart, even when her openness meant receiving the sword. Only she who had such a unique relationship with the Lord could experience the unique sacrifice of being without Him in the way she was.

In the particular difficulty that I currently navigate, I am clearly not sinless, and it is not so clear-cut and concrete a situation as Mary’s. But long before this difficulty became what it is today, I entrusted the situation over and over and over to our Blessed Mother, asking her to make of it everything she wants. As I told my husband recently, I can’t imagine what the Blessed Mother wants most is the mess it all currently is. This very morning I thought to myself Wow, I’ve prayed and prayed and it seems like heaven has failed me. But tonight as I gazed into the eyes of the icon of Our Lady of Perpetual Help, I prayed, Thank you for showing yourself a mother to me. You are not asking anything of me that you have not experienced yourself, only I require so much in the way of being purified from sin, and you teach me by your pure example. Let me stay with you in Nazareth, let me pray in faith, and let me embrace everything the Father wills with an open heart.

This, Too

This, too, is the face of my well-Beloved.

You called to me, oh Lord, and for three years I've followed you. Your words tugged at my heart; I could not help but follow. You taught me, and my heart was set ablaze. You healed me; I was made whole. You sent me, and I actually thought that was scary. I came back, only to be taught by you not to be so full of myself.

But now, what is happening? I know you told me plain enough this would be so, but I never thought it would be so... so like this. Everything is tumbling inside me. The last three years really did happen, didn't they? It wasn't one long self-deception, was it? Have I built my house on the sand, like you warned me not to? Lord, your words have become the bedrock of my life, but looking at you now, none of them make sense.

Wait. There's one thing that makes sense.

Mary is here. With John. And the other women. And there's St. Thérèse, catching the drops of blood that fall from your lacerations. She's bringing it to the souls of sinners, and they are being converted. Countless priests, feeding the nations with the food you provide. Countless suffering souls, who in you are not alone. Millions and millions and millions and billions of prayers ascending, ushering forth the mighty flood of mercy which you are unleashing for the life of souls in every corner of time and space.

No, I don't see all this with my eyes, just like I don't really behold your bloody body. But there you are. There they are. And here am I. Mary, and all you holy ones, and all you who at least show up -- stay with me, so that I can stay with you. And together we can see what happens next.

Learning to Trust

Last night I started writing about trust, but got too tired before I could get any clear flow of thought going. Today the familiar tide is rising -- the sense of having anxiety oozing like slime out of my veins and into my bloodstream. Perhaps this only makes writing impossible. But perhaps it makes it all the more vital to try to do.

Seems to me that trust is a lot like writing. Writers like having written; believers like having trusted. But writing and trusting both involve things that are not always easy or pleasant. You never have any reason to trust if you are never in a position of need, vulnerability, risk, danger, or dependence. In other words, you can get by fine without trusting as long as you don't insist on living.

Trusting God, I have found, is an astoundingly beautiful thing. I think that somehow from the first that I really became aware of God's personal presence in my life, I have desired to trust Him. Trusting other people was another story. How strange of God, who longs for us with all His heart, to allow human beings including ourselves to have such a big impact on whether or not we will trust Him. He must really like us. If I were God, I may have just made a lot of nice scenery and skipped the people part altogether.

But really, the point is, we look at everything that surrounds us, the good, the bad, the beautiful, the ugly, and we are supposed to realize that there is One who is bigger than all of it. He gives us signs, nudges, words, but all of that is simply supposed to make us go, "There's something to this that bigger than what I'm looking at, isn't there."

A big part of learning to trust, in my experience, is being willing to get into the place of being a child. That's probably the heart of why trusting can be so distasteful and so scary to so many people. It is certainly why I have at times found it confusing. We must be adult in our interactions; that is, we have to have our rationality in gear and we need to take responsibility for our actions, including our mistakes and sins. But at the same time, we need to be as simple as children. Wise as serpents and innocent as doves, Jesus put it. That requires an extremely conscious choice to be a dove, which excludes being a patsy. Too many people's experience of being a child is that patsy-dom, unfortunately. But I've learned it also doesn't work well to simply be wide-eyed and innocent. One can still end up doing regretful things that way. Jesus' way about trusting is never to just leave us exposed and vulnerable. But neither is it to be so crafty and calculating that rationality stamps out vulnerability, either. Really, what has to stand behind both our serpently rationality and our dovely vulnerability is the fact that God is Bigger. Trust. Our trust is in a person who relates to us as persons, leading, teaching, coaching, coaxing us. We can be the way Jesus tells us because we are in relationship with Him.

I'm thinking of something I prayed a couple years ago on Divine Mercy Sunday. Floodgates are open that day, you know, and during the afternoon vigil I asked the Lord for something, knowing full well that I was asking like a spiritual 2-year-old. (A 2-year-old might ask to have candy for dinner every night; that kind of thing.) The Lord doesn't always, or even all that often, answer me with words, but when He does you'd better believe I remember every one of them. After I made my request, the Lord told me, "What you really want is kept in heaven for you more assuredly than if [this thing I'd asked for were as assured as earth could offer]." What has really struck me about that every time I've thought about it is that God took my prayer very seriously, and He showed me that He understands me better than I understand myself. Because just like a little girl asking for candy all the time might be asking for more than candy (something she associates with candy, like happiness), God directed my heart to that "something bigger" that I couldn't even articulate. I've even prayed, "Lord, remember that thing that you told me that's what I really want? I'm not really sure what it is, but I know it's true. Can you move me closer to it, and closer to understanding what it is?"

There's something bigger involved here than what I'm looking at. Knowing that is the key to trust. God lifts up the simple, the humble, like Mary, whom He made the Terror of Demons! When I can be simple in God's hands, I'm on the right path. Constantly aware of God's presence, of my identity in Him, not clinging in fear or insecurity, but comfortable in His presence "like a weaned child on his mother's lap." There's a metaphor I can relate to! I can tell you a nursing child does not sit on its mother's lap without going after the goods! The weaned child has all the "goods" already, and is filled.

Remember the works of the Lord. Repeat them in your mind. Why did He do things for you if not for you to remember them? Has not God always given you everything you need? Do you for some reason think He will be different in that regard tomorrow?

Be still and trust.

This is Actually About Christopher West's New Book

Sometimes, living my life feels like witnessing a dramatic performance of a powerful and poignant symphony. It's made of sweet melodies that seem to lift effortlessly from silence, pounding, driving themes that push me relentlessly and leave me no escape, surprising crashes that make my heart pound, sad passages that blend into non-resolution to the point of evoking agony, and a brilliant ending and the stunned silence in which praise I could never put into words wells up, awaiting feeble expression as I stand and clap. This is music that makes me listen differently to everything around me for the rest of my life.

Translating that experience out of the realm of the spirit into English is for me a necessary and delightful work of prayer. But it is made possible by knowing that while it is mine to listen with great interior activity, all of my energies called forth, I am not the creator of the symphony. I experience and respond to something that is infinitely bigger than myself, something bigger than history itself, let along my personal history. I do not create meanings; I discover them.

I discover them because the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us.

I think on through eternity I will be repeating to myself: God became man, and that changed everything.

I believe, with a fierce, tenacious faith, that the Incarnation not only changes everything in all creation and all history, but that it also has the power to change everything about our individual human experience, radically, down to our cores. In other words, I believe sanctity is possible and is in fact the calling on the life of each person. Sanctity is living a human life in union with the Blessed Trinity. How we are progressing on the journey to which we are called is not something we can always see or know at any given time, but it boils down to how captivated our will are by Love, who is God.

How do we get ourselves captivated by Love? I laugh to myself as I write that, because the phrasing reminds me of the anxious intensity I've known to "get myself loved" by God. As I heard someone explain it once, that's like asking someone already seated to sit down. You can't sit down "more." But you can be powerfully loved by someone whom you completely ignore. You can even hear their words of love, see their deeds of love, but repeat to yourself, That's not love, and I'm not lovable. I'm not lovable, so that's not love.

How do we get ourselves captivated by Love? Theologians call it an actual grace: Something happens. Some domino, from a long cascade set off by the Incarnation, knocks something right into our lives that we cannot ignore. We are called, compelled to follow -- to move our life into sync with this grace. We quickly learn that the grace is alive. We are further compelled -- with deeper and deeper choices, whether to follow, and counting how great a cost. We begin to give ourselves to life. We reject lies. We allow our hearts to be reshaped, broken, softened. Our gaze finally moves off self and onto Other.

And through it all, one word of abandonment, of gift, of union emerges from the depth human spirit, a response to the One once ignored and disbelieved: Yes. It is not the yes of a slave, threatened and coerced. It is not the yes of the hireling who agrees to an arrangement for his own benefit. It is the yes of the lover who says I give myself to be entirely yours.

This is the yes of Christ on the cross, the yes of Mary, standing at the foot of the cross.

There is a profound mystery here -- I am speaking of Christ and His Church. And of marriage.

Here I set out to write this blog post about Christopher West's new book At the Heart of the Gospel. In fact, I have just written about it. But for those requiring less poetry, I shall try again later, and comment more directly on the text.

PS: That later try can be read here.

Incarnation, Sacraments, and the Power for a Changed Life

At the moment my heart is overflowing with the one theme the Lord has been immersing me into for at least the last 20 years of my life -- the Incarnation.

Directly tied to the reality of the Incarnation (which, for clarity's sake, means the fact that the Eternal, the Almighty God, the Word, became flesh and dwelt among us in the conception of Jesus Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit within the womb of the Blessed Virgin Mary) is the reality of sacramentality. Sacramentality means that God uses created things for supernatural ends.

This is as clear as day to me right now, but there was a time in my Christian journey when I thought I was defending truth, right and good by rejecting the very concept of a sacrament. Of course I didn't understand what a sacrament was, and I was correct in rejecting what I thought it was: a "magic ticket" that excused people from needing to personally encounter Jesus. For there are many people who have received sacraments who do not live them out in faith. What am I saying, I am one of those who do not fully live out the sacraments I have received. But the sacraments are not a blockage; they are a door into the divine. I still need the understanding, the formation, and the virtue to move through the door. Jesus leads, nurtures and feeds but He won't force me through.

I am speaking here of the seven sacraments of the Church. But all of what God has fashioned is now imbued with this sacramental reality. That, I think, is the meaning of Christ's redemption not just of souls for heaven (thanks be to God for that alone!) but of all of creation. Scripture speaks of this repeatedly. The psalms are filled with exhortations to creation to praise God. The earth has no voice, but those who are in Christ and who see with sacramental vision begin to see the purpose of God in creation when we experience it calling us to contemplate Christ, to contemplate Truth, Beauty and Goodness.

For so long I was afraid that "the world" was going to pollute me, destroy my spiritual good, and pull me away from God. That term in the Bible can be confusing. It cannot mean that which God created. Yes, sin has entered the world and creation itself is affected by human sin. But when Jesus came into the world, He touched the lepers, the unclean, the hemorrhaging woman, the dead. Instead of becoming ritually unclean as the Law stipulated, He brought healing and restoration. We who are in Christ are as Christ in this world. We do not become unclean by living in this world -- we are part of restoring all things in Christ. Music, art, sports, environment, even (gasp) politics... we make our way through the things of this world and we are called to restore, not retreat from. I sin, you sin, they sin: it's true. Defilement comes not from things into us, but out of our hearts (Mt. 15:10-20). It is our hearts that need to be purified, and not only in the initial moment when we are united with Christ by faith in baptism, but again and again by constant conversion and awareness of Christ with us. Daily. Hourly. Every Moment.

And so we are back at the sacramental reality, because we need for everything to remind us to turn again to Our Lord. Humility tells us that though we possess everything, we have nothing. Our nature is neediness: complete dependence upon God and interdependence with one another. Yet we are united with Him who is Almighty and Providence itself, so we have no need for fear or insecurity in the face of anything. We are rich in Him in every way.

Our model for this kind of Christian life is none other than the Blessed Virgin Mary. I was struck this last Monday while celebrating the feast of the Queenship of Mary to be reminded that the Scripture reading at Mass is exactly the same as the Midnight Mass of Christmas. The Incarnation made Mary who she is. She is completely insignificant except for the monumental fact of her unique vocation as the mother of God Himself. We each are completely insignificant, except for our vocation to respond to the fact of the Incarnation by uniting ourselves in faith to Love who calls us to belong to Him forever, and to live our lives announcing that call to our fellow sojourners and to all of creation by everything we are, everything we do, by our very existence and our every breath.

Our Lady of the Incarnation, pray for us. It's all about Jesus coming into this world.