Confessions of a Closet Gnostic

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

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

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

And I think I am still a recovering gnostic. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He is, however, incredibly patient with me. 

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

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

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

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

The Lord's voice flashes flames of fire.

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

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

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

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

Better than a Hallelujah

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

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

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

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

God just hears a melody

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

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

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

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

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

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)

A New (Leg of the) Journey

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So, I read it.

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

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

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

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

So, here's to the journey.

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.

Disturbing Feast Day

Léon Cogniet (1794-1880), “The Massacre of the Innocents” (photo: Public Domain)

I don't like the feast of the Holy Innocents. That was my main thought as I prayed Morning Prayer at church this morning and chose hymns to play for the morning Mass. In every Jesus movie where the slaughter of the innocents is depicted, I flinch and pull my blanket up a bit to hide. When my children were small I just flat skipped over it. It's a horrible thought and it's even more difficult to figure out how to enter into a liturgical celebration of a horrifying event. Babies saying "yeah! We were killed for Jesus who got away safely!"? What are we doing here, celebrating how great it is to be killed? What will we do next, celebrate child soldiers who join our bloody causes without any ability to comprehend the evils involved?

So I turned these things over in my heart this week. And I found my way clear of that disturbance, to a better and deeper one.

The liturgical calendar can be like the quiet cousin at the Christmas gathering who frequently gets upstaged by the more boisterous guests: feasting, gifting, more feasting, more gifting. But when we learn to celebrate Christmas with the calendar, we are brought right away to martyrdom with St. Stephen, to contemplate loving union with Jesus with St. John, and then to the gory effects of violence and fear in the world with the Holy Innocents. The Incarnation is so incredibly mind-blowing that a lifetime would not exhaust the depths of how God desires to impact us with it. But the liturgical calendar makes it quite clear that union with the incarnate Son of God preps us not only for eternal glory, but also for transformation into His image on earth. And He was "a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief" (Is. 53:3). 

One of the deepest causes of grief is sin which causes innocent people to suffer. That could be simplified: Sin causes grief. 

Herod ordered the destruction of life because of his fear, his clutching at power, his arrogance. The thought of sharing the stage with someone, let alone bending his knee to reverence Another, was totally foreign to his soul. Those who carried out his orders were formed in a milieu that accepted force as a higher good rightly served. It's just a few children. 

This is the world Jesus came into, as one of the vulnerable. At this point, the Scripture text makes it clear he is totally dependent on Joseph's ability to receive a directive from God's messenger: Take the Child and His mother and flee. I wonder at the role that Israel's far history of pain and suffering, and  Joseph's, over Mary's pregnancy, prepared his heart at this moment to respond in complete detachment and obedience to just go. Pain and suffering are evils. Pain and suffering, united with the heart of God, become portals for God's glory to shine on earth. That is redemption. This can be pondered, but it is known most purely in the experience of it. Joseph in this moment obeyed God and this obedience preserved salvation for the whole universe.  

I take away two things from this. Union with Christ is a call to His vulnerability. We lay bare our hearts which are wounded and woundable to each other, to God, to our own gaze. I've been the worst at beating and castigating my own self for simply being, believing it to be a great fault. I have walked the path of learning to trust God and wearing Him down at every step, begging for certainty and protection instead of going by faith. I've done the chip on my shoulder, angrily raising walls against others, preemptorily blocking them out of my heart for fear of the harm they might bring. I've done stupid dependence on people who proved I could not ultimately depend on them as my gods. But God's vulnerability draws us into eternal peace. "Nothing will hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain" (Is 11:9). It's true.

Second thing: I must open my heart to the Lord, looking in His light for how I am like Herod. How do my attachments cause me to trample others underfoot? How do I exercise oppression to get what I want? How am I totally cut off from the hearts of others in their joys and sufferings? And how can I experience the same transformation Joseph did, that deep attachment to and freedom for the Lord? 

Jesus enters straight into the suffering of the innocent, and union with Him brings us there as well. May we repent of everything in us which is poised to cooperate with Herod. May we entrust ourselves like Joseph, in our own vulnerability, in the interdependence which is ours. May we walk by faith in God who does not exempt us from dark nights, but who is trustworthy.

Butterfly Release

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

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

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

Very BAM.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Inflating my Christmas Hope

I admit it; Christmas has been going flat for me. As a small child there was, I suppose, glitz that even I managed to be excited about, and as an older child, there was plenty to weigh down my soul with sadness, and later I brimmed with cynicism as we approached the celebration of the birth of Christ. No one could do it right enough for me.

But all of that changed for me on Christmas Eve of 1991 when I went to a Midnight Mass with a guy I was very interested in, though I managed to be even more interested in finally taking the step of personally experiencing something of Catholicism with as open a heart as I was able to muster. 

I was two years out of college. My grandmother had just died, I was emotionally paralyzed over remaining unpursued by any romantic interest, I constantly whined to God about how He didn't love me, my employment was purely survival-driven, and in many ways I was still waiting for my life to start. I plodded through life but dreamed, rather despairingly, of possibly having a future with meaning. 

It all seemed perfectly normal and relatively stable at the time, but when I look back, I realize I was in a rather dark place. 

This morning at Mass I began to recall the importance of keeping my personal journey fresh in my mind. I've written about that Mass many times in this blog; here's a link to the full story. Suffice it to say here that God stepped into my history as with a trumpet, announcing that He had come to save me -- me, not mankind. He showed up. He called to me: Here I am! This electrifying encounter shook my life for decades. 

Just like a little baby showing up in a poopy stable, He burst upon the scene and changed everything forever.

(Oh my goodness, I just realized I am coming up on this being 30 years ago! How did I suddenly get so old?)

It really was like being born again, in the sense that a brand new life started for me that night, and I also had much to grow into. When God again burst into my life within the last decade or so, which ended up with me entering the Secular Carmelites, I learned that a Christmas Eve conversion is something I had in common with St. Therese. I learned how Carmelite-y Advent is. I learned that my call is to be the intercessor that invites the same grace of conversion I have received to be present to souls who, like me, searched without hope of finding, whined after love with a cold, closed, cynical heart, and doubted the value of my own creation. And I realize how it makes me weep when I encounter souls like I was! Oh dear God, I can't stand to witness that pain! It makes me feel so helpless, so powerless, so... desperate! I could wish I had a magic wand to take away this pain, but in this moment I realize I have something that is real, and powerful: I have my own history of God's action in my life. Don't forget, Marie.

The proof of the power of the love of God is now in me. It is my life. It is in my reality. It is in my faith. 

For whoever is begotten by God conquers the world. And the victory that conquers our world is our faith. 1 John 5:4

Faith is the realization of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. Hebrews 11:1

Faith calls me, places me, into the community of believers. As a Carmelite, I know that my vocation is ecclesial; is of the Church and belongs to the Church. I also have long had the intuition that there were people of the Church praying for me -- I mean many more than the actually individuals who told me they were, or whom I experienced praying for me. Hidden people prayed for me. I know this.

And now I am one of the hidden people, and I pray for others. I have prayed for decades for the conversion of people's hearts. Some people "specialize" in praying for healing or praying long-term for those walking through difficult situations. My speciality has been to pray for the bottoms of people's hearts to open up to Love, and respond to Love's call to belong to Him. 

What I want most is to know that the people I love know and believe that God loves them, that they deeply respond to that love. This is my joy.

And I am going to keep on reminding myself that human pain is never the end of the story. Love is patient. The Lord Jesus Christ is powerful; He is present; He pursues our hearts and will never give up. Love is not desperate, nor whiny. Jesus is with us and is pursuing us for the long (or short) haul of our entire lives. His presence brings joy, life, peace, healing, truth, beauty. We have only to open to Him, and receive.

The Day to Say Yes

Twenty-four years ago today, I set out on a journey home. I had been in Japan for two and a half soul-crushing years, and even though that Spring was the anticipated end date of that time, I had been strongly entertaining the possibility of either staying in Japan for the long term and entering a marriage that would have been a disaster, or returning home long enough to earn a degree to spend my life supporting both of us. I hadn't completely forsaken the latter possibility when my plane landed Stateside, but I did come eyeball to eyeball with the immensity of my brokenness which left me even open to this possibility. I felt very much like Jonah, transformed into a great heap of whale vomit. 

But I timed my return with the Feast of the Annunciation, because my return to the States was an act of saying yes to the Lord, saying yes to a new life, as the Blessed Mother had. Well, not exactly as she had, but in my attempt to imitate her faith that when we say Yes, God unfolds His graces.

His graces are still unfolding, and there's nothing magic about it. One false image of God that I grappled with a lot in those days was God as a Great Magician. I had learned to believe in the supernatural, but I had not so solidly experienced a good natural foundation on which grace was to build. So my prayer did sometimes unwittingly devolve into magical thinking, or just meditation on my own anxieties. In my early Catholic days, I often caught a glimpse of something I could barely identify, but for which my soul deeply hungered: it was this good, natural, human foundation. I heard it in how many priests spoke. I witnessed it comfortably being lived by some believers. It was a healing dew; I could never see it arrive and I could never preserve it to examine it, but when it fell it was so refreshing.

Today, I am chosing to continue to say yes. The history that was mine in 1997 is still mine today, and while I've grown, it isn't like we ever leave our brokenness behind. Jesus rose from the dead with His wounds in tact, oddly enough! No matter where we have "arrived" in relationship with Jesus and life on earth, we can never exhaust the degrees and measures of Love that God has ready to pour out, if only we have emptiness in us for Him. 

When Mary said yes, the Word became flesh. Jesus entered our disorderd, broken, sinful world to love, heal, redeem. He comes to bring glory, grace, sonship, belonging. This is such a mind-boggling truth to me that it is part of my name in Carmel: Elijah Benedicta of the Incarnate Word.

Even so, Lord Jesus, Come.

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."

Ego and Conversion

I'm probably not the only one.

As I was sorting out adulthood, faith, and what it meant to hear God's call, I regularly got tripped up over Scripture passages like "deny yourself and follow Me [Jesus]." (Mt. 16:24, Mk. 8:34, Lk. 9:23, Jn. 3:30)

In looking back at that, I believe it was because of having a strong yet unconscious formation in annihilation as a positive value. (Is that what nihilism is all about?) What I mean of this is I had an underlying diabolical belief that my personal existence is a fault, an error, the bad element in the equation of what is. That it would be better if I were not.

And there were reasons for that, but this post isn't aimed there. This is aimed at how this affects the workings of ego.

And by ego, I mean the self. Self at the center. Self as Lord. Self as master.

As a young Christian, I knew that self wasn't supposed to be master. Literally, the essence of the gospel invitation had been presented to me as a promise of Jesus sitting on the throne (the place of determining courses of action and thinking) when the self gets off the throne and invites Him there. These gospel passages of self-denial mentioned above seemed to take this dethronement even further, into a kind of required self-death or self-hatred. I figured, what else would it mean to "deny yourself" or to "hate your life" in this world to keep it for eternal life?

Because I already had this latent self-annihilation wish gnawing at me, I found myself pretty good at self-hatred. This became a twisted religiously-decorated ego-delight: how much I could castigate and hate my selfish self. And when I came up for a breather from self-loathing, I smiled up into an imagined face of God who clearly took delight in me for doing this.

In reality, however, I was stuck. I thought I was deeply religious, but I was not making significant spiritual progress, even to the minimal extent I understood spiritual progress could or should be made. While I lived a normal looking life, in my interiority I mostly hardened out a path between these two points: feeling deeply unloved, and trying to impress God with how hard I was on myself. And being rather an intense sort, that path was trodden down rather firmly.

When I encountered Jesus on my way into the Catholic Church, He beckoned me off in a completely new direction. Significantly, the first big episode here happened at a Christmas Eve Midnight Mass. The message came through loud and clear: I, Jesus, entered your human reality. If it shocks you that becoming a human being was good enough for Me, it is because you are grossly mistaken about the value of your own human creation. You are not an error. You are not a mistake. You are not a problem or a curse. Your being is not a blight on this world. You are loved. You are here on purpose, and it's My purpose.

Allowing myself to be loved, all the way down into my depths, took a long time. But knowing that Love was the trajectory of reality helped tremendously in reshaping my thinking about God, about myself, and about everything in between. I came to realize that having Jesus seated on the throne of my heart does not start with a hateful kicking and beating of myself, like so much evil garbage. The pleased face I sought out in my attempts at self-annihilation was not the face of God, but of the father of lies. Bowing in worship before the Lord Jesus Christ is an act that brings right order. I, a beloved creation, limited by nature, bow before the Creator who gives Himself to his creation. This is not a relationship of domination and subjegation, of conqueror and conquered, of the All and the obliterated. God is Love; Love gives Itself. I open; He infills. I become a son, I share the divine nature, I am brought into union (2 Pet. 1:4; Jn. 17:23; Eph. 1:23).

This is the sense in which one must understand the self-emptying, the self-denying. As St. John of the Cross would put it, the nada, nada, nada we embrace as God becomes all for us. By faith I can move out to receive from this supernatural transcendant reality.

A Few Thoughts on Fear

It seems the first stage of corona virus infection is the spread of fear. If you spend any time on Facebook or other social media, or even any humans at all, you've already probably witnessed people taking up positions. I've seen people emote, learn, educate, change, grow, plan... and mostly try really hard to keep laughing.

This is new territory for us. That alone can be enough to make people afraid.

This morning as I prayed Office of Readings, I read from Exodus about Moses receiving the covenant from God on Mout Sinai. There was some fear built into this process for the People of God. The threat God told Moses to pass on to the people was that no one should approach the mountain, and if they did, they were to be stoned to death or shot with arrows. Their signal was to be the ram's horn. When they heard that ram's horn, and then only, they could approach.

Think of it: we hear that God purposefully struck fear into the hearts of his people.

St. Irenaeus explains why this was the case: "He made them afraid as they listened, to warn them not to hold their Creator in contempt."

con·tempt

/kənˈtem(p)t/

Learn to pronounce

noun

1. the feeling that a person or a thing is beneath consideration, worthless, or deserving scorn.

As Irenaeus sees it, God was training his people to give him the consideration he deserves. Why? because God is an insecure egomaniac? Of course not. We need to give God due consideration because he is our origin, our Creator. Without giving him his proper due, his proper worship, we are serious out of tune with ourselves and we fall short of that for which we were created. If we don't worship, we are dysfunctional. It's for our good.

Fear, therefore, like all things we can feel, should be our servant. In this case of the corona virus, it is not a bad thing for fear to move us to prepare, if not for ourselves, then to be able to serve the vulnerable around us who don't have means, who won't necessarily be able to care for themselves, and who will suffer. Use the precautions that scientists advise to flatten the curve. Become more aware of the needs people have, if we tend to be on the dull side of thinking about others.

Fear, however, should not be our master, nor our enemy that we desperately try to beat away from us. Allow fear to do its necessary work, then bring it to Jesus, to Perfect Love, who casts it out. Pushing down fear, refusing to feel it, will create the panic that harms. Don't refuse God's servant. Don't forget it is ONLY God's servant. God is the master. Let him be that. Trust him, and entrust all of your concerns to him.

Therefore, put on the armor of God, that you may be able to resist on the evil day and, having done everything, to stand. Ephesians 6:13

After Reading the Report

I combed through the Pennsylvania report yesterday. I feel like vomiting. I also found it very appropriate to hear the beginning of Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata as the prelude before Mass this morning.

But I am not writing to connect with my feelings about this, nor to offer commentary on the situation or the like. I am writing to pray and to connect this present moment with past moments in my journey of faith, to see what I can see. I write to understand.

I made my way into the Catholic Church in 1992 and 1993 in Milwaukee when Rembert Weakland was Archbishop. Catholics I knew had no respect for him, preferring to rearrange the letters of his Benedictine order's designating abbreviation. He eventually resigned, the day after being public accused of date rape by a man who had been part of his life decades before.

The Church in Milwaukee was a total mess when I entered, and I felt it keenly on a spiritual level. I felt the moral topsy-turvy. Learning who to trust felt like navigating through land mines. I did not believe that most priests were following Christ, and when I found one who spoke of Jesus' passion I was pleasantly surprised. My primary response was arrogant judgment and the assertion within myself that I, clearly, was far superior. Just ignore the fact that my faith, hope, and charity were as strong as a wet garbage heap. I certainly did.

And yet, I knew beyond the shadow of a doubt that God had called me. To be honest, the Lord bombarded me with mystical graces in those days. As I look back, I had no one else but Him, and that is not the normative path. We need other human beings. I did frequent the Carmelite shrine of Mary, Help of Christians (Holy Hill) in Hubertus. I remember a particular healing Mass, one of their monthly such Masses, at which they had, stationed around the church, teams of lay people to whom we could go to pray with. To this day, I am not sure if they were members of the local OCDS community or not. I don't remember which of my concerns I brought to this particular woman to pray over, but I remember crying copious tears, and I remember her telling me to continue to pour out my prayer to Jesus. She asked me, "Do you know where you can find Jesus?" Struggling as I was at that point to break through the entanglements of doubt and confusion and muck, while reaching out for the glory, I answered with a tremulous voice, "He's .. in my heart?" Yes, she affirmed. Jesus is with you, and lives in your heart.

I made about an 18-month sojourn until I received confirmation in 1993. And a few weeks later I went on pilgrimage to the Holy Land and Rome with a group led by John Michael Talbot and Dan O'Neill. One such mystical experience happened during that pilgrimage at the Church of the Tomb of Lazarus. I've written about it before. But it strikes me again. I was spending time in close quarters with Catholics for the first time in my life, and I was struggling hard with how physical everyone was making their prayer. To me, God was a spiritual being, and all this claptrap of touching holy objects or holding rosaries or wearing medals -- or even, really, bothering with all these physical places around Jerusalem -- was just getting under my skin. I was beginning to fear that I had entered a completely dead church where no one knew God and the religious people were following empty rituals. One night in the Garden of Gethsemane church, as we left, the priest with us suggested we might want to touch the rock on the way out. That was the last straw. I cried out in interior anguish, "Lord, I don't want to touch some stupid rock. I want to touch You!"

The next day I prayed an agnostic's prayer about these things. I told the Lord I didn't believe any of this stuff about grace coming through stuff or places, but that if He wanted to convince me otherwise, He could be my guest.

Later we had Mass at that church commemorating the spot where dead Lazarus had been buried, but Jesus raised him to life. As that Mass progressed, God gripped my heart with such power that I was shaken to the core. I barely had the strength to join the communion procession as I sobbed violently the whole time. I was hearing these words of the gospel roar like a hurricane through my soul: "He who believes in me, though he were dead, YET SHALL HE LIVE."

And I knew that I, small created entity that I was, was receiving into my body the very life of Jesus Christ. And that I was called right into the midst of the deadness that Jesus knew completely, to bring his life to the Church, that would yet live.

It was May of 1993.

I have come face to face with the dregs of my own sin and my own utterly worthless self-righteousness. I have come to know to my core that I am loved and graced not as a reward but because of who God is: a lover and a gracer, and because of who I am: His creature, His daughter, made in His likeness and for His life. I have learned to have compassion by being shown compassion, and I have also learned the sting and the difficulty and the utter necessity-for-life of forsaking the not-God in my life.

And now, this.

I'm not going to draw any conclusions because the words aren't here yet. I'm just looking, remembering, and taking up my daily position of calling down the transforming fire of the Holy Spirit to make me like Jesus, an offering to the Father in love, trust, praise, and joy.

With groans that words cannot express.

Year of Healing

The year isn't over with yet, I know. But I have been reflecting on the healing that has come to my life in 2017. It's been a year of surprises: both of the "Wow! I didn't expect that to happen" sort, and of the sort that is more like a realization of something I hadn't known that I hadn't known before.

All of these have involved relationships changing.

But the greatest fruit, the thing that got me reflecting on this, is the great increase of peace I've known. I've written in the past about how much pressure I have habitually put myself under, forcing myself to do things that I found difficult but necessary. There is good in being able to choose to do the hard thing, but there is a problem with habitual self-violence. The chief problem is why it originates, and for me it was due to relational isolation. To put it more plainly, I mourned that I had no one to help me, no one to mentor me, no one to disciple me, no one to teach me. No one to follow. I didn't know how to enter into that kind of relationship, or look for it, or ask for it. So I did what kids do who are left, in their play, to be bosses of themselves -- I was mercilessly hard on myself.

Then, my internal reward system was set up around how well I responded to merciless hardness. If I felt like I had busted my spiritual/mental/physical/relational butt, then I deserved some kind of applause, and I took whatever good was at hand as fitting payment, thank you very much. If I hadn't pushed enough, I was subpar, and had to go at it harder. Good things were not allowed to register interiorly, much.

Any system like this that we ourselves set up fails. We end up miserable, burnt out, resentful, prideful, self-loathing, etc. But it can get to be like a treadmill that we just can't step off of. Also, because it supports and is supported by the flesh, stuff hides in the darkness, and to some degree we perpetuate sin or our pet brokenness to which we become attached like an old comfort.

God in His grace threw some wrenches in my dance of self-violence of this sort. It started with needing to face and own truth, and then speak it. I thought it would kill me, but instead it dismantled some machinery I had going in me. It astonished me for some months. It is hard to explain, but it was like having some kind of fear of death and this habitual self-violence broken off of me. It was a work of God. Deo Gratias.

I have learned to enjoy my life and God's blessings. Gone (or going) are the feelings that if I rest and delight, if I let go of my whip to drive myself on, that I am failing in holiness, that I am failing as a person. The hardness has softened. In delight I find that God is present to me by His grace, and whether I feel great about my efforts and or I don't, His love and truth don't change. His love is far more fascinating to look at than my strained interior "muscles." And that which He feeds me by His love is so incredibly more nourishing than what I dig up by vigorously grubbing for love. And I don't have to waste energy in false expectation of return from sources of the flesh that just can't make the return that His love can.

I do have someone to follow. Concretely, it is the Carmelite saints, but ultimately it is the Lord Jesus, because He had to teach me, painstakingly, to trust Him before He could show me my Carmelite vocation. And it is never not by faith that we walk. So it isn't "clear," except to the eyes of faith. It requires practice to walk by faith, to learn to recognize God's leading, to know what to take seriously and when to just walk and trust like a child, knowing that the desires that fill my heart with yearning, will still need parsing between the Beautiful and Holy that are their cause, and the stuff that gets picked up in my flesh in the interpretation and/or expression of these desires. God can handle it. He is the one I live to please, not myself. So if I have uncertainty in my own mind, but give it to Him, then I can accept not knowing stuff all at once. I can be at peace in the work He is doing.

This has actually been a really great year. No, life isn't suddenly perfect of course, but if the fruit of the Spirit is peace, I am living more deeply in the Holy Spirit than I have been in the past. That can happen regardless of imperfection level. I am deeply grateful for this. God has such good ideas.

The Lying God of Comfort

Everyone knows my daughter loves crafting. Having a daughter who loves crafting requires me a few trips to craft stores now and then. Recently we were in one such store, where I noted with interest an array of feel-good spiritual-y, faith-y feeling decorations, lauding virtues of family, comfort, peace, comfort, being generally good, comfort, and comfort.

Among them, I saw this item:

What came to mind right away was a homily I recently heard at my parish by the inimitable Deacon Ralph Poyo. He aptly pointed out that we Americans tend to worship at the altar of hedonism. Oh, we might dress it up in conservative, or even religious garb. But essentially, if pushed to frame what we practice in reality, we worship a god who wants everything to be easy for us. Our god does not ask us to endure difficulties. Our god frees us from anxieties by keeping us comfortable. This god is a lot like a down blanket, hot chocolate, and a crackling fire on a beautiful snowy day.

This is a false god, and a demon.

This, brothers and sisters, is the Christian God:

And if this is too much of a leap for your theology of suffering to make all at once, consider that this, too, is the Christian God:

Jesus born in vulnerable poverty

And this:

Jesus and His parents flee the country as refugees

And this:

Jesus and the one who betrayed Him

Friends, this idea that God handles all our problems so that we can enjoy comfort and ease is a lie. 

It is entirely true that following Jesus by repenting of our sins, dying to ourselves, and allowing His love to transforms us in His Body heals us and frees us from the crap of this world that fills us with so much dis-ease, falsehood, and pain. It is completely true that where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom, and there is peace.

But this freedom and peace means that we are empowered to live as He did, IN the world full of pain, bringing love to it. Our God gives us the grace not to become comfort-loving marshmallows, but to go to the margins, to go where there is pain -- in our world as well as within our own hearts -- and to minister peace, as we get dirty, sweaty, and involved.

Let's face it. Sitting by that crackling fire under the cozy blanket sipping hot chocolate, what are we thinking about? What are we feeling? Do we have the peace that Pinterest promises? Or are we racked with regrets, with guilt, with pain, with self-loathing? Are we so numb that we can't feel anything anymore, and just flatly question whether anything is worth anything? 

In the end, don't we have to admit that the god who makes everything easy fails us all the time? 

The god of comfort lies.

See, part two of this lie is that Comfort God does, actually make everything easy for the ones he really loves. It just ain't you. Sorry. Try harder to get Him to favor you, maybe by being richer or better or less irritating, or something.

Lies. Lies. All lies.

The god of comfort lies.

“Christ did not promise an easy life. Those who desire comforts have dialed the wrong number. Rather, he shows us the way to great things, the good, towards an authentic human life.” -- Pope Benedict XVI