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."

Good Morning, and Welcome to my Anxiety

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Seven Sorrows Prayer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Amen.

St. Joseph and the Desperation for Consolation

I was chatting with a priest friend recently about praying the Liturgy of the Hours, and I found that something poked at me like when a metal bra underwire cuts through the fabric and jabs you in the tender underside. So let's draw that out a bit and see what that was all about.

We were discussing the obligatory nature of praying the hours (for priests, same as for Secular Carmelites such as myself), and how he rarely or never finds priests remotely interested in or planning for praying the Office in common. Apparently he finds the norm to be priests always pray this privately, individually. He also mentioned how it takes time to pray this everyday, especially if one is to do so prayerfully, reflectively, with the freedom to pause and ponder, to take it in contemplatively, etc. I know he had mentioned in another conversation having been given the advice to prayerfully pray at least one section of the hours daily, and to be content with recitation of the other hours. The thought of praying all seven hours, for someone who is busy with apostolic life, is just nuts, basically.

Granted. Obviously the Church changed the structure of the Hours at the Council precisely because of the onerosity of an obligation to "make it through" huge chunks of Scripture daily, and how it became a burden to crank it out and plow through it all. Prayer, clearly, it not to be about merely cranking through.

What I found myself taking umbrage with, as one who daily drags myself out of bed to lead public chanting of Morning Prayer, at a consistent hour that I KNOW I would never keep up with, were I not committed to this small group who meets, is the notion that prayerful is consonant with comfortable. Something occurs to my mind, and I want to stop and nest on it, sucking the sweetness out, delighting in my mind, allowing it to speak to me. Vibe: suck it up, buttercup. Sometimes I am delighting in my rest, my thoughts, my privacy, and I don't want to discomfort myself by driving in the morning to meet people at church. Sometimes I'm physically not ready. Sometimes I don't want to sing. I switch it on so that other people can enter into prayer, and to help others with the discipline.

Sometimes a beautiful contemplative thought has struck me during the day, and then a child yells for homework help. Or the doorbell rings. Or there is no lovely thought, but there are whiny children who have required me to step out of the worship space during Mass and I have to set my will like a diamond stylus to engage in what is happening in the consecration -- and this happens more often than not for months or years. I learn prayer ain't all about me and my thoughts and feelings. Sometimes I can't access either of them. It is an act of my will, and it is joining to something larger than myself. Sometimes every step forward for years feels like a sheer act of will against tremendous pressure pushing me the other way.

The Liturgy of the Hours definitely is not mere private prayer. It is the public prayer of the Church. Yes, it can validly be prayed privately, but ultimately participating in it is giving voice to Christ present in His Church, for His Church, as a vehicle of salvation for the world. Ok, objective subject covered.

Ok, then screaming interior stuff. I'm tired. I'm tired of chronic responsibility, and I'm tired of feeling alone in it. I'm tired from a sense of trauma as a child, sensing the adults were falling apart, and I should step up to put them back together. I'm tired from having such a keen eye for every problem in the room and working out how I could solve it before other people are aware of it. I'm tired from being good at things and jumping into serving, and thereby training others to expect me to do things. I'm tired from taking a break and then finding the problems growing weightier and weightier when I step away from them. I'm tired from feeling like it is impossible for me to stop being responsible.

As a Carmelite, I'm called to pray for priests. I've got some anger stuck in there somewhere. I don't feel sorry for someone looking for a few seconds of mental or spiritual consolation. Maybe that's because I am desperate for a few seconds of mental or spiritual consolation. Maybe it is because I would really appreciate someone seeing my need, anticipating my need, and taking up my need as his own. 

I had this meditation the other day about St. Joseph, at the Presentation. The rite of purification was for the mother of the child. But the NAB mentions "when the days were completed for their purification," "they took him to Jerusalem." The law required it of Mary, but Joseph made it his. And it wasn't only because he was a wonderful husband and cared about Mary; he did, but more than that, he understood that this was God's will. It was an act of worship, an act of consecration to God. How he treated Mary was about how he obeyed God. Everything about St. Joseph is not just gratuitous fru-fru care, a nice but technically unnecesary extra, even though it strikes me like that. St. Joseph is absolutely necessary for Jesus' humanity, and for Mary's life, even though she is the sinless Virgin and the Queen of Heaven. God provided Mary and Jesus with Joseph. But Joseph had a human will of his own; he obeyed. He gave his own fiat. 

St. Teresa was of course an ardent devotee of St. Joseph, and taught her nuns to be rooted in, focused on, the humanity of Jesus. I'm seeing those two as inseparable. I don't think you can separate the humanity of Jesus from the person of St. Joseph. All I know right now is that is the antidote to the anger I've felt poking me. 

And maybe I want priests especially to see themselves like St. Joseph. 

Birthing Grace

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Unless you Forgive

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When Evil Overwhelms

My heart is aching. My spirit is troubled, and my prayer is heavy. News of the war in Ukraine, Putin's relentless barrage that seems very unlikely to stop at the boarders of Ukraine draws my heart out in solidarity with especially with women and children fleeing, or staying. Even amidst so many accounts of beauty, of love, like so many Poles opening their homes and welcoming refugees, reports of divine interventions, and demonstrations of faithfulness of believers turning to God in earnest -- even amidst all these, there are the other stories, the other cries:war, hatred, lies, destruction, death, accusations, greed, arguments, blame, complaint, pride, fear, evil, disregard. 

And then locally there was another priest sentanced in a horrible case of sexual battery and spiritual abuse. It stikes close to home, because it is close to home, literally. This is a priest I was acquainted with and at one time thought well of. I read the victim's horrific statement. The psychological, physical, and sexual abuse was bad enough, but the abuse of spiritual authority was perhaps the most devastating. It left me gazing into my own abyss.

So it is from this place that I am trying to write and pray today, to find a coherent thread.

To be honest, when I read of the sentencing of that priest (five years' probation), I was left with a feeling of responsibility to fix this horror. There was such a failure of human formation, such a mistaking of what is human, what is spiritual. Such an ignorant and evil response to human brokenness. My husband had to remind me that brokenness is the human condition. And I recognized in myself the "trigger" if you will of seeing the failings of those I don't want to have failings, and scrambling -- for the sake of my own sanity -- to figure out how to fix their failings. It's "I need you to not have failings so that I can be at peace." And that simply can never be. It is a perverted longing for "holiness."

Jesus on the cross sure looked like a failure, a scandal. He sure as hell did not look like someone one desires union with. He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief. (Is. 53:3). We know that God is love. Love was despised. Love was rejected. Love was acquainted with grief. Why? Because of how deeply those whom He had created turned away from what they were made for. "Yet it was our pain He bore, our sufferings He endured. He was pierced for our sins, crushed for our iniquity. He bore the punishment that made us whole, by his wounds we were healed."

Where is God in all of the suffering? Somehow, He is the one who is suffering; that's how close. 

We have a grave responsibility to the vulnerable. Because the pain in this world is so exhausting, and we humans are so limited, this must include in a primary way our own vulnerable hearts and souls. We must not forge new armor of hard hearts; we must turn these hearts to the Lord in His own agony. Look closely and weep with Him, and He with us. Then our first duty is to weep with those other people who weep, stepping into the Lord's own love and strength and not hesitating to hear and listen, and feel, all the while handing it all back to the Lord. 

At the end of the day, being the Lord's good servant means that He is in charge. It is a relief not to be God. To make our home in God means that we have an eternal refuge, a place of rest to which all are invited. We become the message: there is a place of rest and healing for you. Do not grow deaf to your own heart, and do not fear, but turn with trust to Love. 

While You are Dealing With Your Issues

This is an exercise in "I write, therefore I understand."

Recently I caught a clear view of something inside me in the process of being "triggered," to use the popular expression. By that, I mean I felt a strong, unpleasant emotional reaction to the behavior of another, which used to leave me feeling turned loose into a chaos-spiral. But this time, I was able to see more clearly the launch, the pre-launch, and the space where I could mentally re-position myself so as to not feel out of control.

Specifically, I had been watching a person in my life deal with a mental health struggle. When someone is far enough away from me, relationally, I have been fairly good at observing boundaries that kept their situation firmly in their court, with my well-wishes that it would go well for them. This time, though, that wasn't so fitting, nor so natural to do.

Soon there were these triggered feelings springing to life. I could not remember concrete situations, experiences, days when such and such happened which elicited these past feelings. But I could tell you well enough that as a child, I experienced both of my parents manifesting what I now recognize as depression, anxiety, or both. I myself lived in this territory for decades. It is well-traveled land.

But I found myself in a very different place in relation to these emotions. I have learned how to re-wire my thinking processes, as well as what my body needs in terms of nutrients and rest, to support a healthy functioning brain. I have not developed as many relational skills, other than boundaries which don't tend to draw in.... or... really it is probably true to say, that repel people who are habitually depressed. 

So suddenly I see I am faced with speaking and acting in the face of one of the biggest drains of my life: someone else's mental health challenge. When I was a child, I felt obligated, without realizing it, to bear my parents' troubles, to solve them by virtue of being me. I am called to love my parents, love heals, therefore I must heal my parents' troubles. This is something of the logic of a child. It is not only a bit faulty, it is all wrong. It buys into the idea that I myself am God, I am the Savior, I am the Almighty. And if I'm not, I'm guilty. Not good enough. A failure.

But while none of that is true, I also realize that I cannot resort to the kind of prayer that feels like, "If I just pray enough, the person will get healthy." While I believe in supernatural healing, I also believe that God is after our hearts. He wants us to entrust them to Him. And a big part of that is looking smack into the reality of our own pain, which we then realize is actually held in the crucified Jesus.

I had a dream about Mary doing that, and calling me to do it with her. 

Just turn, and look at Jesus on the cross. In my dream, she had a very, very difficult time trying to encourage people to do it. She was crying. She was in pain.

What else does that say?

How do I belong to people who are struggling with their issues? What I've learned is that embodying hope myself tells them that hope is possible and stability exists. I know that their issues give me something else to hand over to the Lord (Ps. 130: like a child at rest on his mother's knee, not setting my eyes on things beyond me). I think St. Paul testifies to feeling within himself the struggle of Christians being formed. So, I need to be open to feel what I feel, even while recognizing that life of said other person belongs to them. I can speak in faith about the good God holds out for them. I can throw out practical ideas. I can speak up when the frustration of another person comes out towards me in hurtful ways. I can entrust them to the Lord who knows all of what they need in every way.

Life-Changing Holy Week

Five years ago, I experienced a Holy Week that changed my life. If I had known at the time what lay ahead of me, I probably would have bolted and run.

Now that it is Holy Week again, I cannot help but think back to those days. In many ways, the pain of those days is gone, and the fruit of those days is with me. For example, without that experience I doubt very much if I would have recognized my call to Carmel.

In another way of thinking about it, what God gave me during that time is so deeply etched into my heart that I don't think I would recognize myself without it, and everything still continues to flow in my life as of one piece with it.

My deacon friend who preached today's homily mentioned how we hear the Passion story so often that we can be dull to it; that it strikes as so much "ho hum." As he said this, I was wiping tears from my face because of the force with which I heard even the abbreviated version we had of the reading. Something about that experience five years ago has moved the Passion from something that happened to Jesus 2000 years ago to something that I have participated in. Even as a kid, I was one to cry while watching Jesus of Nazareth or other movies about the crucifixion. But there is something of Holy Week that strikes fear in me. Not in the sense that fails to understand God as Love, but in the sense that the end game for which all penultimate loves, all loves of creatures, is destined, is death. Loves of things are to be purged from us; loves of people will all go through the separation of death. We will all stand before the judgment seat of Christ alone, and we do not know when this will be. Those in Egypt who went to worship today and were killed probably did not expect to die during the liturgy. They would not have anticipated worship of God costing them their lives.

As I waved my palm branch this morning, and reflected on the words of St. Andrew of Crete from the Office of Readings ("Let our souls take the place of the welcoming branches"), and as I went forward to receive communion, I was deeply aware of the price those new martyrs of Egypt paid, and the price many around the world pay for simply going into a church to worship on a feast day. Here I am, here is my whole life, I hand it all over. I don't know what will come as I do this. I do it because you bid me to do it by your great and awesome love. 

And so it was five years ago. God had a purifying trial that I could not have imagined, and from which I would have run. So, what exactly have I learned?

• God is always to be trusted. 
• Understanding what is happening is not most important.
• The cross of suffering like this is like a royal scepter extended to the soul. It is favor.
• God desires far, far better for me than I desire for myself.
• God never belittles me in my woundedness, but meets my wretchedness with elevating grace.
• Trustworthy people exist. 
• He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose.
• St. Teresa of Avila knows what she is talking about when she says courage is an essential component of a life of prayer. 
• God loves me; He knows every pain I've ever felt, and He is concerned to heal my wounds.
• It is so powerfully tempting to throw away everything good for what offers pleasure.
• God's mercy reaches the full extent of all of my folly.
• God is real. His love is real. His desire for me is for good, but this does not mean I will not feel the pain of my folly burning off. 
• Folly burning off is extremely painful, especially the tighter you hug it to yourself.

Ultimately, following the Lord Jesus Christ is worth the total surrender of oneself. God is immeasurably good.

And yet, I tremble when it is Holy Week. Because there is always the walking through it part.

Buy Gold

For you say, ‘I am rich and affluent and have no need of anything,’ and yet do not realize that you are wretched, pitiable, poor, blind, and naked. I advise you to buy from me gold refined by fire so that you may be rich, and white garments to put on so that your shameful nakedness may not be exposed, and buy ointment to smear on your eyes so that you may see. Those whom I love, I reprove and chastise. Be earnest, therefore, and repent.

This word from the book of Revelation chapter 3 has been echoing inside me all morning. Every bit of commenting I read about the presumptive Republican nominee sends it echoing again.

But our need in this country is for something much greater than a statesman or a decent politician. I'm going to look the professing Christians in the eye and issue this challenge, the same one that Jesus gave the Laodiceans: Buy Gold.

And what does it mean? How do you do it? For that's the first thing: if Christians don't even know what makes the Christian life distinctive from human attempts at being morally upright, it is no wonder that we are spiritually bankrupt.

Jesus has the gold. We buy it from Him by picking up the cross that is ours and following Him. As we do this, we give ourselves over to conformity to Him by the Holy Spirit. (Fear not, little freedom lover, conformity is not a dirty word when you are conforming to the infinite God.) As we follow Him, taking His concerns as ours, He takes our concerns as His. They are transformed. We are changed. And He compensates us with gold.

Then we exchange that gold for the transformation of souls and the world around us through love, grace and peace.

If we don't follow, we don't gain gold. Without gold, we are left deeply poor, too poor to even cover ourselves. If we don't grasp the futility of human work to accomplish divine things, we are blind fools. The only thing that we can offer to God for the transformation of souls is the good He has given us through our personal share in His cross.

d

Time to Stop Being a Baby

I don't generally make big penitential plans for myself during Lent. It seems the Lord likes to introduce His own program for me, and for my part I try to enter that. Right now it seems a big theme is to examine why I interact with people the way I do. This post is not a report; it is a dive. I'm going to dive into it and see where I end up.

Recently I heard a news report about the rising percentage of kids who show up in college and have significant difficulty dealing with stresses. Everything just seems to be "too much" and they don't have the coping skills to handle things and they come unglued.

Since my son has entered high school, I have thought to myself repeatedly how stress and anxiety became my motivators. When I didn't understand Algebra-Trig, it actually kept me awake at night with worry. I remember getting tears in my eyes with anxiety over my first physics test. It was enough to energize me to struggle and try hard, and it also taught me the joy of doing classwork that came easy to me and allowed me to express myself, like literature and writing. Anxiety would push me over the hump of Impossible to at least fall on my face on the other side.

Academic work was not the origin of my anxiety. I was a good student and for the most part got good grades without putting in much effort (which is a seperate problem). My anxiety was more a response to my sense that my world had gotten ripped to shreds through my parents' divorce and the alcoholism and mental illness in my family. Talking these things through was not yet fashionable when I was young, so in a terrible anti-Marian sense I kept all these sadnesses and pondered them in my heart. And I quickly learned that one of the less destructive ways I could deal with anxiety was to go about trying to solve all the problems I saw, especially the ones that weren't mine. I would take on more and more responsibility for things as a way of keeping chaos at bay.

This made me popular with employers, because when I finished my work, I would go looking for other unfinished work to help with. I would use spare time brainstorming contributions to others' projects. As a child, I would clean the house instead of worrying that the visitor my mom was expecting would have to see it as it was. When I wasn't sure she would be home on time to take me to my school concert, I would throw myself into a flurry of activity to make the time go faster.

(The interesting thing is that even though doctors pointed out to me that I was extremely tense and didn't seem to know what "relax this muscle" meant, it wasn't until I started cantoring for Masses that I realized I had any issues with anxiety. That's how natural it was to me.)

So, back to the kids in schools. Lots of them have Gen X parents. Lots of Gen Xers have stories like mine: lives ripped apart, coping skills often had to be on steroids. What is the natural expression of "love" in this environment? Here, let me do that for you. I'll take care of it.

Guilt says that kind of stuff. One feels at fault, so one tries to make amends -- for everything. And the offspring of such over-carers remain infantile, unable to cope with stressors.

Recently I found myself with a pain I didn't expect. I've been struggling with one of my kid's morning rising patterns, but have set a deadline by which time a goal has to be reached for a desired outcome to be possible for him. And to work towards it, I recently announced I would only issue at maximum one wake up call to him, and then if he was late to his classes, it would be on his head. My first day of working with this, I suddenly saw that even though I hate repeatedly nagging him, pledging to stop filled me with great anxiety. Somehow, my personal sense of safety and peace was shaken when I just left his responsibility to him and let him bear the weight of it.

But you know what? He did it. I had to sweat for awhile, but he hasn't been late yet. Oh, it's only been two days, but, you know...

Facing this in myself does not make me happy, that's for sure.

I've been thinking about all the references all over Paul's letters where he talks about Christians' need to grow up, to stop being mere babies, to go on to maturity. And for me, yeah, I'm down with that. I want to be super-Christian. Sure. But I realize that no one is ever super-Christian off in their own private world. Not even a hermit. By penance and by teaching and by interacting with people, Christians are to exhort others to grow up and stop being babies. And you know what? That provokes tantrums and hurt and accusations and bad feelings, and just a whole lot of loud complaints that growing up just is too much to ask. Provoking that is about as much fun as a room of noisy, crying toddlers. The good thing about toddlers is that you know in 20 years they'll be chronological adults. We have no such guarantee about Christians.

Love does not mean swallowing up all hurt so that other people can be indulged. I could swallow until I burst and it would never please or satisfy another person, and I'm left with an aching, hurting belly. Love means speaking the truth and letting Jesus fill both of us, even if it hurts both of us.

Well, I guess all that Scripture is the next thing I need to dive into.

Sunday is for Heaven

In my mind, the Sunday or feast day celebration is about two things, or two sides of this coin:

First, we unite ourselves as deeply as we can, body, soul and spirit, to the Blessed Trinity in the worship of Christ to the Father in the Holy Spirit. This is carried out in space and time through His Church in the Liturgy of the Hours and especially in the holy sacrifice of the Mass.

And then, believers console each other as best they can that we don't live in heaven yet, but still on earth. We search out and offer each other the best we can find by way of traces of heaven in our souls, in our communion, in God's creation, and in the poor.

And then we move back into our work with a blessed but wistful heart that this earth is not our lasting city.

A god who loves me

My life has been full of service lately, keeping me busy. More church music than I can shake a stick at. Add to that I've felt out of kilter all week since I did a bit of a complicated face plant onto my bathtub early one morning. I managed to just hit the bridge of my nose; how, I don't know. But I knocked my neck out of alignment and rattled my brain enough to not exactly be my normal self for a few days.

So really, really busy, and not feeling 100%.

This after coming off some other intense moments with my Carmelite retreat, the funeral of a community member, and other things that constitute my normal self in all her grand intensity.

Part of me being normal is that I have a constant undercurrent of thought and awareness going on, seemingly unbidden. This week I noticed many times I simply was unable to do that or "live there." That undercurrent also feeds my prayer life, even though now I realize it is certainly the function of my active soul. (It is strange but good to be able to dissect one's interior life this way. Bumps on the head do a great service.) What I've learned this week is that I have to have a prayer life that is not dependent on my ability to think straight or feel good. I have to have that space where I just put myself before God, knowing He is within me, and just be there. Maybe it isn't that this is new to me, but it has been as if I could hardly do anything else.

In the midst of that, this morning, during down time at a music practice I happened to pick up a children's book (I was in the church library) about a martyr of the early church. She was a Greek girl of the first century, born to a non-believing family. My daughter and I have been reading The Roman Mysteries, so we've gotten pretty familiar with the time period and what worship of the Greek and Roman gods felt like. The book had her praying like this: "Oh mysterious God, if there is a god who loves me, tell me. Show me who you are."

Something about this struck me right between the eyes. A god who loves me. Everything is in those words. The Greek and Roman gods were to be respected, honored, sacrificed to, shown piety, but they did not love people. They were forces, or powers, and they could grant favors or inflict punishment, but they did not form relationships. They did not love. Philosophers embraced ideas and ideals and lived by virtues. But they did not speak of being loved by a God who personally loves.

That is uniquely Christian.

And that struck me, hard. If God loves, if the One God loves me, and that love reaches me, then the only reasonable response to this love is to give my all and everything in return, to love Him in return. Love compels love in return; it is the strongest force in the universe.

A god who loves me.

A mighty rushing wind, an enormous fire, an all-consuming response. That's the only way the reality of a god who loves me can be met.

It would be so easy if I could just turn into a ball of flame. Sometimes the way that fire has to ignite is through virtues like patience, long-suffering, kindness, perseverance, faithfulness, constancy, watching, and waiting. Love actually forms these in the soul. Balls of flame sometimes do intricate little hidden works.

But the God who loves me can create in me anything and everything He desires. That's all I desire.

Because it is true. He is a God who loves me.

Reporting from the Bottom of the Pit

So, it's true: I've been feeling the tug of depression lately, and yesterday pretty much the tug-of-war rope snapped and I fell over. It happens. It happens to some people a lot, and it happens to me often enough for me to remember very well exactly how it goes.

But here's how my life works: while I am sitting where I have fallen, I am also analyzing the experience. So I have this thing going on where I have feelings of depression just like I might have feelings of fever or sinus infection. And at the same time I have a slightly delighted appreciation for what is going on, too.

I'm not quite able to put these in any logical order. But here are some pieces of the realization.

Communion with other people and with all of creation, in Christ, is pretty much what heaven is about. Our earthly sojourn is about recognizing the difference between the goods of earth and the higher goods of eternity, and choosing. God always presents us with choice, and He's constantly upgrading. The good things of this earth are by no means contemptible, but the more we recognize the infinite goodness of heaven, the more we are drawn to choose that in everything and in every way. That's what dying to self and dying to sin are really about. I look at how beautiful something is here, and even so, by grace, I am willing to say yes to something higher, like loving Jesus in His distressing disguise.

I can't expect ultimate help from penultimate sources. My husband, my best friend, can't give me what I need because they don't have it. What I need is from God. God always provides what we need, but sometimes He doesn't give it to the people we want it from. The solution is to turn to God alone. That's not a problem; it's God's design.

God makes Scripture come alive as we live with Him and live in His Word. His Word is alive, but maybe it is like a virus: it needs a host body to live in.

The most obvious thing to do when in need is to ask for help, specifically to ask for prayer.

The devil will do everything he can to harass, submerge, irritate, discourage and lie to me. And to end my life. The devil is not a gentleman.

Purgation is the greatest gift God can give on this earth, but it sucks. But it's worth it. The sucky feelings don't last.

Depression takes all of one's power and turns it into jello. That's why in these moments it is vital to surround oneself with prayerful people. Thank you, God, for Mark Zuckerberg because I'd be in danger without Facebook.

And that's just it: the Christian call is all about being faithful with the graces God gives to each one each day. I can't stop disaster in Syria or North Korea or change the course of history by some great plan I devise, but I can be faithful to whatever grace God gives me, offering my joys, sorrows, labors and prayers for the salvation and conversion of the world. That's what God wants and needs from us so that His mission can go forward.

Graces, Math, Practice and Delight

I'm not one given to sentimentality, particularly not about things like thankfulness on Thanksgiving. Reality is good, but I often find sentimentality is more in touch with creativity than reality.

So here's my take on what I am thankful for today.

The other day I experienced something that I could recognize as clearly a gift of grace. There was a situation that was not unlike other situations I've been in in past months and years that has caused me grief, bitterness, pain and turmoil. But on this recent occasion, it came and I was ok. I greeted it with acceptance, and there wasn't the slightest bit of pain involved. In fact, I had a smiling feeling of delight precisely because I recognized the grace involved in this. I was happy in facing this difficulty.

A day or so passed, and I admired this little experience. Ah, how good God is to me. I'm making progress. Indeed.

And then out of the blue, in a setting I didn't at all expect, there were comments innocently made to me that cut me down to the heart. Ouch.

Oh, wait. This is just like that other thing I was just so happy about. Ok, take a deep breath, and go to the same place. I managed.

Then there was another situation where I was already prepared for it to be rough. I was not disappointed. But dang, all of a sudden I realize that the same principle is in play here as in that graced victory the other day. No wonder I've never liked it. The pummel came like a slow, swinging pendulum. Again. Again. Again.

Sigh.

There's nothing at all wrong with delighting in evidence of grace working, because it is the gift of God. But there's everything wrong with sucking on the sweetness of being a location of God's grace working. Yay me. It's going so well for me now. I'm so, you know... where it's at.

It reminds me of my daughter's approach to learning math. She will dutifully sit with me, attend, and while I work with her, she will grasp a concept. Her face will beam. "Ok, now you do this same thing on this two-page exercise, all in different ways."

Wait. What?

"Oh, and this is a skill that you'll be using over and over and in combination with much more complicated skills for the rest of your life."

Crap. It's not fun anymore.

Well, guess what my dear. It's lovely for you to find it fun, but the need really is that it becomes second nature to you, so that you have the skill to do this automatically and use it in situations where math, or virtue, is actually called for and needed. Because that's the whole point of learning. It forms you, and you master it. And so you are more fully human in this one little way. Oh, and there are hundreds and hundreds of these little bits for you to learn. Some will come easily and stay with you, and some you'll probably have to do some little mental gymnastic to accomplish for the rest of your life.

Let the delight of your soul simply be looking at your Lord and loving Him. Let everything bring you back to Him, lest you get stuck in even the most lovely bit of creation or the most wonderful effect of grace.

An INTP Contemplates a Social Invitation

This morning I received an invitation from a friend to a get-together. The invitation was extended to a group of women who make up pretty much the closest friends I have. We would pray, we would eat, we would chat and spend a few hours soaking up each others' friendship to heal our souls.

I read it and I felt the cold chill go down my back. My muscles tensed. I breathed deeply.

I was just about to email the friend back with a question, not exactly a commitment, but trying to work my way there, when I read it again. Carpooling strongly suggested? Escape routes blocked! I put my phone down. Ok. Calm down. You can do this.

Had to stop for a moment of self-awareness. It helps me to step back and look at personal situations objectively. I imagined myself explaining what I felt at the moment to someone else. I imagined what contrast I could paint to put someone into my shoes.

Suppose I orchestrated an event that would foster bonds of friendship, something that would bring a deep sense of value and meaning to me and help me look at those other women as comrades-in-arms. What would it look like?

Marie invites you to a prayer solidarity gathering. We will gather from 2-4 am in the garden beside the Cathedral downtown. We will kneel on the ground outside, mostly in silence, with the exception of perhaps chanting a psalm or two together. We will pray silently for each other's needs, but especially in reparation for sins committed in the downtown at night and for the conversion of the town.

As I ran that over in my head, my first thought was "They would think I was being sarcastic." But I knew I wasn't. I imagined what words would spring forth from people to describe such a thing.

Dangerous. Difficult. Painful. Brave. Sacrificial. Unreasonable. (unvoiced: Weird)

So I kind of smiled inside. Yes, Imaginary Voice of my friend. You understand. You understand what it feels like for me to go to a women's chitchat lunch.

But no, I thought, I couldn't really take myself seriously, so why should anyone else, unless I was really prepared to do such a thing. I mulled this over in my head awhile.

And then it struck me. I already do this. Except I don't pray outside at the Cathedral. (Yet. I like this idea.) I pray in a Eucharistic chapel once a week at 2am. And it is only for an hour, an hour that always seems to go by way too fast. And it dawned on me that I could invite people to join me, and we could indeed work on growing this type of bond as we intercede for mutual needs and for conversion.

This would totally work for me as "friendship that heals the soul." To me, bonds really form through sacrifice, and good bonds form through mutual sacrifice. Ironically, it doesn't feel like quite as much of a sacrifice to pray in the middle of the night as it does to do the chitchat thing, and this probably has something to do with why I have a sense of a bond with some of these women in the first place, regardless of whether it is reciprocated, because it costs me something to "chat".

But there's something about that sacrifice. It needs to be an act freely chosen and carried out, not just an act I survive because I can't avoid it. That doesn't build up love. And sometimes I treat social settings like things I survive, because it feels like I imagine people would feel about kneeling outside in the middle of the night in silence. I can easily think of 300 things I'd rather do!

An act of love really has to come from inside me. There's no use any of us pretending, and there's no use any of us being afraid to love in the ways peculiar to us.

So, maybe I will go to the chatfest. (I haven't firmly decided yet.) After all, I can study how it all works. But maybe I will invite them to join my holy hour once a month, too. And who knows; someone might even seriously think about it.

Handing Over That Friendship

A faithful friend is a sturdy shelter; / he who finds one finds a treasure. / A faithful friend is beyond price, no sum can balance his worth. / A faithful friend is a life-saving remedy, such as he who fears God finds; / for he who fears God behaves accordingly, / and his friend will be like himself.
(Sirach 6:14-17)

Two years ago, liturgically speaking, I handed over my life in a way I did not and could not have comprehended at the time. I acted in obedience to what I discerned was a prompting of the Holy Spirit -- an important one -- and it has been one crazy ride.

Mostly the crazy has subsided. But when I mash that with the Scripture above, well, I recognize important things.

It is true that a faithful friend is a life-saving remedy. It is also true that friendship gone wonky is probably the most Good Friday-esque thing I know. There are many, many things about which I have sort of a natural detachment. I just can't get too bothered by certain things at all. But I have rich potential for bother when it comes to relationships with people. I think that is why God has taught me, has been trying to teach me for decades, that I need to see all people in my life as coming from Him and all relationships belonging to Him. Not to me.

The treasure of friendship I can embrace, but I acknowledge that it comes from God. He proves Himself faithful, though, because never ever has He left me high and dry. He knows exactly which people to introduce into my life. And yet, at the same time, I have to acknowledge that the very, very real relationship that God wants as my top priority is the one I have with Him. That really is the only way anything works smoothly with other people. Well, perhaps that is a deceptive statement. Sometimes for things to go right with others there needs to be a degree of bumpiness. It is needed to the degree that sin and self clog the way and need to be purged. I had so much junk that had to go, in reference to two years ago. We all do, and we seem to grow new crops of it all the time. Sometimes the desire to "keep peace" and to ignore our junk and that of others is exactly what destroys holiness in relationships.

For me to trust God with this handing over of myself to Him, which involved an irrevocable change in a friendship I treasured, has also irrevocably changed my life and my relationship with God. I would be a blind fool to not realize it has been a change for the better, precisely because it has been so Good Friday-esque. The power of the resurrection already percolates, and I believe God intends more than just my interior life to be affected as a result. All I know for sure is I can never accurately anticipate what God decides to do.

But I don't have to have anything figured out ahead of time. I just need to be ready with my Yes when He beckons.

The Lent that Would Not End

If you have kids, you might have had the, uh, pleasure of learning this song:



(If you really want punishment, you can go here and listen to it for 10 hours straight!)

Well, a few years ago I had a Lent that remind me of this song.

"This is the Lent that does not end/ It just goes on and on my friend
Some people/Started praying it not knowing what it was
And they'll continue praying it forever just because...."

In fact, the whole year felt like a Lent, and then it was followed up by another Lent and almost another whole year of a similar feeling. Just back up a couple years' worth of posts and you'll get the feeling of it.

I look back now and I see it has been a time of intense purification. When I started I had a true but purely theoretical understanding of what needed to be purified in me. I had no idea what the process I knew I was headed for felt like, and I didn't really understand in any experiential way God's purposes in bringing me through it. As Soren Kierkkegard famously said, life can only be understood backwards but has to be lived forwards. So I was left in a place for a long time where I was devoid of understanding. That is an extremely difficult place for me to be. I thrive on being able to understand and figure stuff out.

I announced to myself and others a few times during this process that everything was "all done." And I was wrong each time. So I am not now saying that all of that is done, and I know for a fact it is not. When I touch that spot in me that knows that, I still experience the struggle and the desire for complete resolution. There is a very real possibility that it will not be in this life. And that's ok.

What I have gained and learned in this time is all the gift of God. He knows how much I have fought against and resisted Him every step along the way of His trying to bless me. He knows how tenderly and respectfully and gently He prepared me for very difficult moments.

I realize that while God is deeply concerned with the healing of our souls and the wholeness of our personhood, He has a purpose that is higher than all that. He doesn't heal us just so that we can live peaceful, happy lives on this earth for the rest of our years. He heals us so that we are whole, so that we possess ourselves, and so that in possessing ourselves we can make of ourselves an oblation to Him. With St. Teresa of Avila we can then say, "I am yours; I was born for you. What is your will for me?"  There is absolutely nothing this world can offer that is worth exchanging for the delight of being the Lord's in this way.

Humiliation, anguish of heart, the pressing down of the cross, experiences of rejection, of relationship being repudiated, calumny, conflict.... This is the way the Lover brings His beloved deeper into intimacy with Him. This was His experience. To have it offered to any soul is like a golden crown being extended. How often we go chasing after our favorite pretty trinket instead of bowing to receive the great honor of such a crown.

God's ways simply are amazing. Recently I was looking at a sculpture I own, of Jesus embracing His cross on the via dolorosa. It occurred to me that I was, quite literally, Jesus' cross. My sin caused His suffering, caused His cross, and His embrace of His cross was His embrace of me. His embrace of His cross bore the fruit of the Eucharist, which now brings healing to the entire universe and transforms me into Him, makes us one. And yet still today, that Eucharist, that grace, that healing, that transformation, that union, can be rejected by me and by anyone. But Jesus loved anyway. That love is my salvation.

And He calls me to live His very life, in imitation, in union.

Let us praise God now and forever. He alone is worthy of our worship. To Him be glory forever.