Such a Thing As Glory

This morning, new pieces are coming together in a naru hodo moment, so here I am. It's more accurate to say that old pieces are coming together with new clarity.

I was driving home from the airport this morning, enjoying a beautiful, bright sunny fall sky and getting inspired for my own turn to be dropped off there just several days from now. I was genuinely feeling this is good as I hummed down the highway. My this is good neural pathways are, frankly, about as frequently used as is the airport highway for me. I know where it is, but it is far from a daily or regular trip.

A decades-old memory popped up as I drove. One fine May Sunday in the early 90s I strolled through downtown Milwaukee in a state of being fairly drunk on the Holy Spirit. It was a rare moment, but it fit with a collection of graced moments I experienced when I was on my way into the Catholic Church. I did not really have a human companion in my life to encourage me on that path, but the Lord did it directly, with this collection. I remember that the weather was perfect and the sky was blue. I had gone to an earlier Mass, but returned to Gesu just to hear the thunderous pipe organ bathe the entire block with its beauty. Further up Wisconsin Avenue I stopped into a Taco Bell for a quick lunch, and I was overcome at the sight of a somewhat harried mother and her toddler. Again, it was the beauty that awed me. It was like that quote from C. S. Lewis about how an average person has the potential to appear to us as a goddess that we might be tempted to worship. The third panel in this memory was of returning home and looking down at the bricks that comprised the building I was passing. I nearly wept at the beauty of it, aware that I was beholding the work of a human being -- and even as a faint reflection of human dignity, those bricks spoke to me of the beauty and grandeur of God, shining through His human creation.

The glory of God is man fully alive, and the life of man is the vision of God. So quoth St. Irenaeus.

So this morning, my neural pathways leaned into this is good with the delight of a human, safe in a world made by a God who loves not only this human, but all of us. And safe not only in a world made by God. Safe in a world impacted by other human beings. Flawed as we are, we are still the means through which God's glory is expressed in time and space. In fact, that expression of glory is not dependent on our perfection. It is dependent on our humanity. Our humanity is a given, but our acceptance and expression of it hinges on the degree to which we hum with the vision of God.

Then I had another memory. 

I belonged to a church -- we called it a non-denominational charismatic fellowship -- in the late 80s and early 90s with a pastor named Skip. Skip preached a sermon one Sunday which stayed with me, not in a good way. He made reference to a verse that was trending in that culture in those days -- 2 Chronicles 7:14 -- which reads:

If my people who are called by my name, shall humble themselves and pray and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways; then I will hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land. 

We were all about healing our land, understood to be the United States, and it specifically needed healing from the sin of abortion, and also homosexuality. 

Skip said what we really needed to do was to re-understand this verse by removing the word "wicked" and replacing it with "pleasurable." So he repeated it multiple times, that what we needed to do was to turn from our "pleasurable ways." He went on further to explain that he felt this meant giving up ice cream, and limiting his news intake to only include The Jerusalem Times. His sermon was really some kind of private rumination that he shared as a teaching.

I never held Skip to be a good or convincing preacher, and this was in fact one of the reasons I joined this fellowship. I had heard too many stories of people in charismatic circles following their pastors like brainless sheep, and I thought because I knew he was a bit off, that I would be protected in that regard. But I was more impressionable than I realized, and even though this sermon struck me as off, it lodged in my soul like the Satan's tare that it was. Evil boils down to anything that gives pleasure. Pleasure is wicked. It is my duty for the salvation of the world to live without pleasure. I knew it.

The glory of God is man fully alive. It is pleasant to be fully alive. 

It is pleasant to have a well constructed road that makes travel safe. It is pleasant to have a modest car that moves down the highway, with temperature controls that make me comfortable. It is pleasant to encounter another person and smile at them. So many things that we experience in this world are pleasant. When by grace we enter the vision of God, we in fact gain this pleasure. And the vision of God teaches us that we don't grow in aliveness by stockpiling pleasures like a filthy hoarder, clutching them to ourselves for dear life so they keep us alive. We also understand that part of the human vocation is the common good, where we are all entrusted with the goods of this world mutually. 

But my healing journey has taught me that many people operate as I have -- fearful on a deep level that this created world is wicked and untrustworthy, and that the only people we can trust are the ones who tell us that our misery deeply pleases God. Every bit of happiness feels stolen, or compromising. Many others angrily reject even a mention of God, because of people who represent Him this way.

We know that there is evil, but Satan is a clever bugger and he likes to switch labels. This world is God's world. Human beings are God's beloved creatures, who reflect Him. The center of the universe is not more power and money to get more goods to give us more pleasures, nor secret, shameful, slavish addictions that promise a few fleeting moments of pleasure -- until they can't. 

The glory of God is man fully alive, and the life of man is the vision of God. 

God who died on a cross, and rose again. And we follow by faith that same path. 

And as Rich Mullins said, there is such a thing as glory.

So, This Finally Made Some Sense...

I'm going to share about something now that I've hardly thought about for ages, and I don't know that I have ever discussed with anyone in my life. But I thought about it this morning. Because it is no longer the 1970s and 80s and I can pull up any bit of information with my interwebs box, I was able to reclassify a bit of my life's experience in a way that was both a bit surprising, and very not surprising at all.  

Maybe you have experienced the same thing. 

I'm literally reorganizing this information in my brain as I write, so please track with me as I move these boxes around a bit.

From the time I was a child of at least ten (I really have no memory of a "first time" of this) I rather frequently experienced a kind of electric sensation that would seem to radiate from my core, through my body. It registered as pleasant and restful -- a sort of momentary rejuvenation. Sometimes it would accompany someone saying something to me, or perhaps a nice song, or a thought. But sometimes it would happen more or less unaccompanied. 

Because I am me, my mind set to to try to figure out what was happening. I was a child; I had no interwebs, and (this is significant) never in a million years would I have told anyone about this type of experience happening in my body. Never, ever. I concluded at one point that this happened because it was how God was speaking to me. This is definitely a moment where adult spiritual director me steps in and says No, that is not how God communicates. But it felt good, and, like I said, it was often connected to a response to something happening outside me. So I thought it was what God did when He wanted to clear His throat and make me pay attention. 

I also had some issues with deception in my younger days, precisely because of my mind working like this. I remember saying to God, "So, if we get five pieces of mail today, I'll take it as a sign that you want xyz." Lo and behold, we did get five pieces of mail. How I approached this was a bit like divination, and I heartily don't recommend it. We need good formation. But I'm getting a little ahead of my story.

At some later date, I thought better of considering my electric shudders to be God's voice, and I set that idea aside. I just sort of vacated the need to understand what was happening, and just let it happen when it did without giving any thought to it at all. But it also didn't happen quite as often in later years.

This morning at Mass it happened, though.

And it dawned on me that I could hop on Google and ask it several probing questions and maybe I could learn something about what this actually is. Like, maybe this is simply a normal human phenomenon. 

And it is, more or less.

According to Dr. Peter Levine, it is the discharge of left over "fight or flight" energy in the body that never got used. It happens when you enter a moment of safety after being on high arousal, and the nervous system essentially sends this spontaneous rush of pleasant energy through the arms or neck or wherever. It is the body discharging stress or trauma. When stuck for a good long time in hyperarousal, the nervous system sometimes down regulates, and this little energy burst happens. And when it doesn't, well, you end up in trauma therapy in your 50s, and then you deal with it. 😬

So, I understand now why I felt this feeling was a divine intervention. In a way it is, as a natural stress reset. But even as a child I could not fathom that God created the human body with a means to simply feel good. I figured it had to be a secret, cryptic message, and one that I apparently had to work really hard to comprehend. But I also have to realize that even as a child I was under a considerable amount of chronic stress. And this was clearly compounded by a decision that was rock solid long before age ten, that I would not go to any adult in my life and talk to them about something happening inside me, or in my thoughts. I feel like I had that decided probably by age five. I realize that my childhood conversion to embrace faith in God came in part because I desperately needed to know that there was something bigger than myself that I could turn to. It was confusing for awhile, though, and so I did things like reading the tea leaves of my shivers. 

One of the things I've been working on in my therapy is to learn to accompany by own frightened little self as she still turns up. And to make sure she knows the real Jesus (ooh, must share my picture). And now I realize she also needs to understand some real science, too. It's ok little one. You can rest now. God is good, and you can shudder and shake and rest in His arms.

I bought this painting in March of this year, 
and not a moment too soon. It has been a well-timed
focal point of meditation for me. 

Integration

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

An Unsuspecting Turn Towards Poetry

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

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

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

That was the first thought.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

what was that word?

Charitable.

Confessions of a Closet Gnostic

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

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

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

And I think I am still a recovering gnostic. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He is, however, incredibly patient with me. 

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

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

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

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

The Lord's voice flashes flames of fire.

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

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

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

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

The Urgency and Simplicity of Love

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hiking, Love, and Transformation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And then there's today. 

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

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

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

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

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

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)

Let Advent In

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

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

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

Distraction. Everything and anything except...

Reality. 

It's Advent.

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

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

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

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

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

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

St. Ivo, pray for me.

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? 

Full Range of (E-)motion

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

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

That... sounds good to me! 

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

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

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

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

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

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

Separated from You, let me never be.

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

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

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

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

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

Separated from You, let me never be. 

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

Cleaning, Anxiety, and Magical Thinking

I feel things moving and changing in good ways. I've giving -- sometimes unintentionally -- developments a few days to marinate before I write about them. But I want to be sure to write, to grasp well the good things.

I had a revelation the other day about cleaning and housework. I know I'm not alone in having some odd emotional connections (or disconnections) where housekeeping is concerned. I've realized that as I am praying the Seven Sorrows rosary and handing over my anxieties and developing new practices, my emotional relationship with housekeeping is one of the moving pieces.

I have distinct childhood memories of cleaning out of anxiety. One memory is of knowing my mom was expecting some kind of business man coming for an appointment (insurance salesman, maybe a contractor, I don't remember) one certain late afternoon or early evening. Being the Gen-X kid that I was, I was home by myself after school on a regular basis for a couple of hours before my mom returned home from work in my elementary school years. So on this day, I knew that this appointment was coming, and I looked around the living room and saw it was a total wreck. I was anxious over the fact that the time was getting really close and my mom wasn't home yet. I couldn't let someone come into our house and see it be such a wreck, so I quickly got to work and cleaned everything. My mom came home at almost the same time that the man came for the appointment. When he left, she thanked me for cleaning up.

I also witnessed my mom stress-cleaning on occasion. I suppose the stress was induced by my dad's drinking and calling our house when he was drunk, because that was usually the thing. I know it left me in distress, too, but watching my mom stress-clean stressed me out all the more, and without knowing it I believe I drank in that the way to deal with emotional threats was to try to fix unrelated problems, such as our dirty sink. Magical thinking gets cemented this way, and carried over beyond the age of reason, I think, when there is no discussion or acknowledgment of the step that belongs between threat and response, i.e. coping strategy.

Ultimately, in my example, I was stressed because of my mom's absence and my sense that I, as a child, had to take on responsibility, rather than accept direction from my family's leadership team. Because there wasn't one. The way I understand it, my mom's stress led her to scour dirt, because it was something she had control over, unlike the relational mess of her former marriage. 

Fast forward to my adult life. Dirt is an objective reality of living in a house, regardless of what my emotional baggage contains. For many years I have noticed that whenever I go through a time where I feel emotionally strengthened, I clean and get rid of old junk with a good degree of joy. It's a feeling of liberation. But I've noticed as well periods of time where I avoid, avoid, avoid certain tasks. "I'm not a visual person," I say, and that is true. I don't get as easily bothered by clutter or grime as some people do. Plenty of times I have grumbled that other people could be helping me, even while feeling like asking someone to take on certain tasks wouldn't be quite right or good of me. I'm really the one who *should* do things, but if others spontaneously just knew and did, they would be higher quality human beings. So goes the endless ping pong game. Hiding inside, like cobwebs and giant dustbunnies, were a lot of unexamined and unresolved emotional issues that were fueling the endless back and forth between two losing options.

At holidays, I willingly welcomed the panicked stress-clean. We're having visitors, so, CLEAN! I treated this like a treasured childhood recipe, a necessary part of the celebration. Other times, I felt like the put-upon maid, the servant of my family, whose job it was to do everything because everyone else was lame (or a child). (Cue subsequent guilt and shame for these feelings.) There was also a good dose of, No, I'm not the maid, and I don't have to stress. And guess what? The house became a wreck. And I don't like that, either. So I plod along, just clean it, with mind turned off and tuned out.

So the revelation that has hit me is that there is another way to live with this. There is a way to find actual joy. I can approach housekeeping as caring -- in the first place, for my own self. I can tidy the kitchen because a tidy kitchen makes me happy. It frees me feel at home, to want to be there, and to do whatever I'm doing with a little note of the joy of being alive. (Ooh, the glory of God is man fully alive. There we go.) And then, if there is something else that really needs to take priority at the moment, I can peacefully realize that the task at hand just needs to wait; it doesn't become a threat. And I can say to the person next to me: "Could you do xyz?" I don't have to do everything. My family can learn to be a team, especially if I figure out how to lead the team that way.

I suppose I've gotten very close to working this way most of the time over the years, but having this as a conscious operating system is stunningly new. 

And you know what else? I can even engage in stress-cleaning effectively, if I acknowledge to myself that doing something physical would really feel good right about now, and it would help me release some of the pent-up anxiety or stress I have going on. 

I have found that emotional baggage is an enormous energy drain. The subconscious avoiding of messes because they represent my lack of being God, or at least not a magic fairy who makes all things bright, glittery, and happy -- yeah, it numbs a big swath of my heart, mind, soul, and strength. I need those for other purposes. Time for the anesthesia to come off. 

But everybody suffers. And the Seven Sorrows rosary is teaching me how to face my own pain and to live in virtue instead. Thanks be to God.

Real-time photo of my "office"

Both Sides Now

 When I was younger, I prided myself on everything.

Other people seemed so lazy. They would tell me of the one thing they had planned for that afternoon, and I thought how I could do that in five minutes and thirty other things as well. Other people seemed so stupid. They struggled with things that had such obvious answers to me, as if they didn't even know how to think. They were always complaining of their struggles. I forced myself through things and pushed all the pain away. When I had breakdowns and couldn't cope, other people were uncaring and went on about their business around me in the most callous way. It was clear to me that I was superior in practically every category, and that if people would just listen to me, they would learn a lot.

When I was younger, I was really lonely.

I was filled with anxiety and didn't even realize it. I was afraid at every turn that I would be literally abandoned by those who were supposed to care for me, or that my house would burn down or that I would be killed. I had no reassurance that any other human being had my back in any way that I could rely on tangibly. The good in my world had to come from me, and therefore had to come from the few things I could do well. Working hard to be independent was survival and mandatory. I was always disppointed that I seemed to struggle far harder than I was rewarded for; the crisis was always too small for my effort.

I thought people were hell. God had to teach me that heaven was people. Community. Communion. Outside myself, or rather, people allowed in. All the people, all the way. God's own way.

Jesus Christ gave me His body and blood, soul and divinity. He said, it's for you, and for all. When I came to Him for peace, He told me He's a package deal. "Unless you love the brother you have seen, you cannot love God whom you have not seen." 

"I will take from you your heart of stone, and give you a heart of flesh." (Ez, 36:26). 

God's design was never for me to be a prideful machine or to be lonely. Humility enables intimacy to be, thrive and grow. Jesus Christ wants us to learn meekness and humility from Him so that we can actually experience joy and life, beginning here and now. Purification from our sin hurts like hell. But living in our sin hurts like hell. It all depends whether we face going deeper into anesthesia or farther out into freedom. 

I choose the pain of life, freedom, and love.

A Gift of Grace

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pentecost Retreat

So, this last weekend, Pentecost weekend, I was on retreat at Little Portion Hermitage and Monastery in Arkansas, the home of the Brothers and Sisters of Charity, the community founded by John Michael Talbot. I'm writing now to try to process that experience.

In the past, retreats or conference weekends were the types of experiences where I would arrive with great, vulnerable-feeling anticipation, which would be met with equally explosive emotional catharsis and maybe either spiritual breakthrough, or at least enough of a feeling of a new freedom, that I could come home and say, "This is what happened...."

This time was different. Probably the last several retreats I've been on have been not like I described above, and that might be a factor of both the retreat and a change in me. But this time was not only different from my earlier experiences, but different from recent stuff too.

Speaking of the old days, this was actually my fourth trip to Arkansas. The first two times were to other retreats at their old retreat center. Well, the first one was actually cancelled, but I went anyway and spent time on my own, because I felt such an intense need to go there. It was on St. John of the Cross, actually (hah!) and was called The Lover and the Beloved. When I arrived, there was a young priest or seminarian who gave me his copy of the book that he had brought to the non-retreat. So, I read the book there. Now, I was not Catholic yet, but I believe I was at that point decided that I would become one. I remember the point in reading the book where I was brought back to my college library and reading the Carmelite mystics, and saying to the Lord, "If there's anyone left on the face of the earth who knows you like this, those are the people I want to be with."

The second retreat was with John and Paula Sanford, on inner healing, and my third trip was to the location I was at for this retreat, while I discerned joining the community. That last time was October of 1993, and I did not recognize anything this time, between it being so long ago, and their buildings burning down in 2008.

So, this retreat was called "Exploring the Gifts of the Holy Spirit." The information presented was not what I'd call new to me. It was a very small group; under 20 retreatants. In theory, the bulk of Saturday was in silence, but in reality not much of that happened. Yeah, that's ok. Being in their gardens and just drinking in the views -- not something I'm necesarily known for -- was very restful. I embraced my inner Franciscan. Right upon entering the dining room (after my GPS sent me on a wild goose chase, and my cortisol levels were boosted), I met another woman from Ohio, and that was pretty much the only social interaction step I needed for the weekend. We sat by each other in all the session and meals and chatted a bit. In such a small group, we were able to get to know each other a bit just from the interactions. 

But what impacted me the most? I think for one it was meeting the anxiety level in me, the froth, the kind of addictive behavior that emerged in a land without data access (honestly, after that was hard, it was quickly very nice). I realized I had been trying to fill myself with work, with social media "connections." But seeing it, I was able to be dissatisfied, turn from it, and seek God. Peacefully.

The other thing that impacted me was just looking into John Michael's face, figuratively speaking. I found in him an authentic and dedicated seeker after God. I found in him the imprint of long obedience, of conformity to Christ, a witness to living in faith, a witness to what happens when one seeks truth and surrenders to love. He was careful with his words, but I got to hear not the part where he is still working at saying the right thing, but the evidence that the Lord has taught him through long experience. He was the most welcoming and open-hearted to non-Catholic Christians of any Catholic, I believe, that I've met. He also spoke truth about the identity of the Catholic Church more firmly than any Catholic I've met. He simply lives in Christ, in Scripture, in the Church. He does not live in politics, in factions, in trends. I know he has said that among Catholics, he is considered too progressive for the conservatives to stomach, and too conservative for the progressives to stomach. I think it reveals how we all want to make gods after our own likeness.

But it really isn't so much about him. It is really about what Christ does in a soul surrendered to Him. 

One point of discussion that impacted me was that of speaking in tongues. I received tongues when I was 19, when I was still Lutheran. I came to associate tongues and charismatic gifts with the non-denominational fellowship I joined and spent five years in. Then part of me felt some disassociation with all of that when I became a Catholic, and part of me never had a good theological grasp of what was happenning with this gift. So to a large extent, I ceased to use it. 

John Michael's comments on this gift, in part, emphasized how it involves our spirits praying and bypassing our rational minds. Our spirits can use this gift to praise God when our minds "can't even." And then he talked about how when we pray in faith, we actually speak into existence those things that we are agreeing with God about. I know that I have found this to happen, that when I am praying in tongues, my spirit then knows what to pray for with my mind. As he put it, the veil between heaven and earth is made very thin when we use this gift. 

Now, if you look at how many words I feel the need to churn out just to finally write about an impact, you see that my rational mind has a lot to say. And I realize I tend to get very elaborate thought trains which sometimes take me off in directions and tangle me. Bypassing my rational mind and seeking instead to agree with the mind of God and speak forth his praise by faith is a prescription I need right now.

I have arrived home with a lively sense of God's presence with me. I see clearly how much we need love, hope. I see more clearly how we have an enemy that wants to rob us. I see how walking by faith is our way of living in union with God. Where there is faith, love and hope grow, too. 

He made one comment about St. Padre Pio and the "Three Days of Darkness." I've had this flavor of thought before, as well. He believes that this is an accurate prophecy, and that we are currently in the Three Days. The beeswax candles without which we won't see? Pure faith. From there, one can extrapolate what it means about "going outside" and "looking out the windows," and the many other things that are mentioned. 

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.