A Woman in a Woman's World

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*Everything in the spiritual life is always just beginning.

Work and Love

I've always been a mix of the melancholic and choleric personalities. As I've aged I think I've flipped dominant characteristics, though. I don't brood and analyze in the same ways, nor as much as I used to, and I love the challenge of hard work. I love to feel productive. And the easiest way for me to develop a closeness with someone is to work at something with them.

Part of the Christian reality is that no matter which are our dominant traits, we all struggle until virtue is formed in us. My love for work used to be fueled by and crippled by an overwhelming sense of exclusive personal responsibility -- that everything depended on me. Many years ago, a snow storm put my town in what we call a Level Three Emergency: so much snow had fallen that no one was supposed to drive. Not even the snow plows had made it out. There I was, with my little snow shovel. After I did our sidewalk and our driveway, I felt compelled to start shoveling the street. Sometime later, an acquaintance told me he had seen me outside, and he thought "Look at that poor person out there, shoveling the street!" To him, I looked pitiful and a bit silly. But I was answering some internal prompt that told me that because the authorities had failed to meet the needs of the city, it was somehow up to me. Personally. To clean the whole street.

I got tired, and I went in, but the illustration of my response to this difficulty stayed with me.

In reality, it was a response to fears I had felt as a child when the adults in my world did not provide me with feelings of security, and I felt I needed to be the caretaker, doing my best to provide security for myself and them. Basically, work for me in those days was panic in motion.

The Lord has patiently loved me, wooed me, calmed me, and showed me His strength. And he has taught me to work with Him as with a partner, and has given me other people to work with and to enjoy. This has been how I have learned to relax and find work as a joy.

I still have the tendency to love to take on big loads. I get bored if I don't have enough challenge, and sometimes collecting big challenges is exciting, to the point where I don't discern well and say yes to too much, or I get overwhelmed and intimidated at the size of the task before me. At these times, I can lose the focus that love gives, and instead of joyfully and gratefully and freely spending myself at my work (all of which puts love into action), I focus on finishing or accomplishing, or wondering how I ended up the only choleric in my family, or other such attitudes which are prone to breeding resentment of my own human limitations, or those of others. The work becomes the master instead of the means to love and prayer, and partnering with Jesus.

I want to expand and express my love, just like something in me really wanted to clean the whole street. I know that when I clean my kitchen or do laundry, I can do it as a concrete expression of love, and it is not out of place to see this love in union with Jesus' ultimate work of love in His passion. I also know that when I call and train my family to similar acts of love, I am calling them to the same kind of union, and I need to do it with patience, gentleness, and spiritual sensitivity, not just with irritation.

But on the other hand, when I expect infinity and the grace of God to spring from my own finite and very weak capacity (or anyone else's), I am doomed to be disappointed. Ain't gonna happen, and I'm only going to reinforce my resentments. Using my own energies will wear me out; drawing on Love and asking Jesus to live and work through me will build me up. Knowing the difference between human limitation and the grace of God is of basic importance.

The key to humility is these two Bible verses together: "Apart from Me, you can do nothing" and "I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me." I am nothing of myself. I give all that I have to Jesus, that He may live through me as He sees fit.

One Red Marble

I have certain memories that stand out like parables that I return to again and again. Recently I found myself thinking about this one.

It was the first semester of my Sophomore year in college, and I was enrolled in a psychology class for which one textbook was required and one study guide suggested. By the time I bought books, the study guide was out of stock. So of course I was driven to anxiety when the professor indicated that although the study guide was optional, when it came time for the exam those without it would be in deep trouble.

Anxiety over what I lacked inspired me to carefully study that textbook like I had never studied a textbook before. I carefully took notes from the text, highlighted, studied the vocabulary terms, used the study questions and basically applied myself full-steam to learning the material.

Then came the midterm. It was something like 500 multiple choice questions. I faced the challenge with serious, if still anxious, determination.

When the professor handed the exams back, he was visibly disappointed. He explained that the vast majority of the class either failed miserably or came close to it, and that a retake was being offered. After his all-class tongue-lashing he mentioned that one student got only four wrong.

That was me. I was so mad.

I was mad at the rest of the class for not using their precious study guides, at myself for studying so carefully and for being driven by anxiety to do so. I was angry at what felt like foolishly spent effort. I was mad at the professor for inspiring me with this anxiety. And at deepest I felt angry at myself for being the one oddball who was applying myself to learning as if there were something to be gained from it.

There is so much in this memory that epitomizes my basic struggles in life. But I am only just beginning to be able to look at this with a bit of humor. For one thing, anxiety has been such an unwaveringly normal engine in my life that only in recent years have I been aware of optional ways of functioning. For way too long I have faced my natural characteristics, like my tendency toward earnest seriousness about everything, as enemies to be subdued and problems to be stamped out instead of just the human package I am. I can appreciate that some anxiety is indeed helpful and can motivate good things, like attentiveness and thoroughness.

Another significant issue here is feeling like this:

a red marble in a sea of yellow marbles. For me, this is also about accepting the human package that I am and not being angry at myself or at others that we all are who we are. Accepting that God wishes me to be me, and that's why He made me as me. Accepting that I cannot find my way by trying to be like someone else. Accepting that my cues do not come from what I can see in others, and that my confidence is not born from conformity.

This also goes a long way to make sense of how much work God has had to do in my heart with regards to detachment in my relationships. Find a human soul that resonates with mine? Why, glom on with all my might down to the very cost of my soul, of course! Oddly missing from my memory of the exam is any real delight in doing well, or even a sense of boasting over the flunkers. Because the overwhelming value to me here was the sense of isolation that shoved delight off the stage before it could take one step out. In this, too, I have finally begun to find peace because I begin to realize that what I have thought of or felt as isolation is really a path towards union with God. Living in harmony with my design may make me unique, but it does not isolate me. Rather, it communicates God's glory and so offers real delight.

What is true of all creation in general is true of my creation as well, as the Catechism teaches:

St. Bonaventure explains that God created all things "not to increase his glory, but to show it forth and to communicate it", for God has no other reason for creating than his love and goodness: "Creatures came into existence when the key of love opened his hand."  
^{(Catechism of the Catholic Church 293)}

If I am a red marble in a sea of yellow, it is not because God is mean. His creation of me reveals to me and to others His love and goodness, because that's who He is.

St. Therese teaches that the power of the Holy Spirit is blocked in our lives when we cannot serenely accept ourselves as we are, inherent weaknesses and powerlessness, as well as gifts and graces lavished on us by our loving Father. When we are stuck in our willfulness, the "I want my way," we are bound up in our limitations.  When instead we open in ourselves willingness, the "Yes, Lord -- your love!" to all God intends for us, which includes of course the path of the cross and suffering, that is all it takes to please God and be in our full potential before Him.

The Redemption of Fantasy Addiction

Here is another quote that struck me recently:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

Insecurity, Conformity, Freedom

Our Lord has a way of coming on pretty strong sometimes. Don't know how else to put it. It's been one of those times of late. It is actually very much like having a rushing wind come blow through, because things that don't normally move or that I don't normally have to think about start fluttering and flying all over. Uncontrollable movement. And sometimes, all I can do is say, "Wow, look at that thing flying around!" It's one thing when it's a Styrofoam cup (like the one my daughter and I saw blow down the street today), and it's another thing altogether when it is something you thought your internal security was directly connected to.

But regardless, the net result is that stuff gets moved around and I'm left looking at it all.

And in this blowing, one of the more discussable things I have found tipped over is a blechy residue of conformity.

I think at heart I have always been a non-conformist in the sense that I have little natural inclination to look at others to figure out what I should do. I've never been one to try to blend in or match others, especially when the issue is the basic question "Who am I?".

Conformity, to me, seems to have roots in insecurity. I see insecurity working in two different dimensions: personal and social insecurity. My personal security is pretty strong by my temperament. I don't naturally have a lot of social security, but I have been through a lot of things the hard way and have developed my social security muscles that way.

It is, though, in social or relational settings that I am most vulnerable. And what this wind has made me realize is that I have areas where I have been controlled by my fear of others' judgments. I have felt there are certain things I must do because I want to be sure to be included on the right bandwagons: liturgical, fashion, intellectual, etc.

And in that blowing wind, I realize this is wrong and it is silly.

First of all, who wants to be on a bandwagon with a bunch of judgmental boors, anyway?

Second of all, I know myself well enough to realize that it isn't other people's standards that actually concern me; it is my own made-up standards of what I currently figure is the ideal that hamstring me. So many times I have gone through "if I do xyz, so-and-so will be hurt/upset/angry" and then I learn from the mouth of so-and-so that no such thing is actually true and that it was me keeping myself locked in a cage all along.

Some people have a natural tendency toward rebellion. I have a natural tendency toward submission. It sounds weird, but I have always longed to find someone to tell me how to live. Even though, with the non-conformist thing happening simultaneously, I often have the urge to do exactly the opposite of what a group is doing or what someone specifically instructs me to do. I realize what these seemingly opposite desires of mine mean: I have had all my life is a driving call from God for my innermost being to belong to Him alone. Only God is really able to show me how to live while actually bringing life. Any other person or system that is not in sync with God or His will for me will crush, abuse, or limit.

That is not to say that God will not bring the cross. Oh yes He certainly will! That's a clear sign of God's authentic presence. We may even use the word "crush" in connection with the cross, but the cross always brings life. Life is found in repentance from sin, in an amended life, in greater detachment from created goods and greater attachment to eternal goods.

And it's not that I want to thumb my nose at even my imaginary judgmental community and do "brash" things to prove a point. What God has always pointed me to is the glorious freedom to be myself. To choose for myself. Maybe that person who makes a bugaboo about how we all need to do X is really saying it vacantly, out of a need to say something, or some other need. Goodness knows that not every word that falls into public hearing is well discerned, chosen, or intended or actually worth listening to.

Freedom doesn't mean doing whatever the hell I feel like. Freedom means having the power to live in increasingly deeper union with God.

And that, my friends, is exactly what I desire.

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.

It Takes All Kinds

This morning as I was driving home from Mass I was musing on this thought: I wonder how many of life's difficulties, big or small, are created when we presume that other people have the same perspectives we do.

I had been chatting with a friend about an idea. He is practical and his first thoughts are about how difficult things are and everything that could go wrong. I am ambitious and willing to work extremely hard to make things go well. It's not that one of us is right and the other is wrong. He presumes no one will pitch in and he will be stuck with lots of work. I presume everyone will pitch in, and by now I should realize that not everyone is as die-hard as I am. But I've seen things that he thought were impossible yield good results because people did actually come together and pull it off. And yes, some people just really enjoy doing difficult things! And some don't!


So I'm back at that pesky reality again in this post about how God has created so many different types of people with varying temperaments, gifts, strengths, and weaknesses. I used to really think I was just extremely defective, instead of simply different from others. (Oh, I'm defective, too, but not in the way I was thinking.) It is very, very good that my friend has the ability to make practical plans, and it is good that I want to pour my heart into a giant challenge, and we both need lots of other types to provide several other perspectives to really do something good to build up the kingdom of God. And that's what it takes -- each person offering who they are with humility, being no more and no less than who God has gifted them to be. If we really believe that God builds us living stones into a dwelling place for His Spirit, then we have to be willing to say "here's what I've got, now you show me what you've got, and you, and you, and you" and then, through us together, God does what only He can. Pride probably hides things as much as it boasts about things. Both are means of trying to stand aloof and keeping oneself untouched.

It has always impressed me that one of the first thing an authentic conversion produces is movement towards other people. Jesus calls Matthew to follow Him, then Jesus follows Matthew back to his own house and his own people. Jesus explains our judgment will be based on how we treat "the least of these, his brothers." Even a cloistered monastic who seems far removed from everyone is in reality praying and wrestling for the salvation of all and is in close union with the suffering of the world, because Jesus is.

If we were all the same, how could we love without simply loving only what we find in our selves? Perhaps humanity requires diversity simply because we require the exercise of humility and charity for salvation.

Some People Mystify Me

There is much that surprises me about people, always. It is fascinating to me that God makes people with such variety, but frankly there's a big chunk of this variety I don't like much. Oh, I don't think God is really responsible for the bits I don't like; we have a way of mucking up who we are. But there are templates that still mystify me.

One such type of person is the one who truly believe s/he understands my thoughts, ideas, words, and intentions better than I do. I've known a couple of these people, and trying to communicate with them is maddening. If I say "The sky is blue," I might be told that I really mean the rabbit is brown. What can I really do in such an exchange but close my mouth and walk away. It is as if the other person wants to have a conversion with him/herself with another person as an observer.

I am also intrigued by the type of person who constantly tries to get things to be to their own advantage. And yes, this is intriguing to me, not maddening. Depending upon the age of the person, it seems there is something juvenile and selfish in this, and yet there is a "skill" here that stands in stark contrast to my own natural bent, which is to disregard my advantage or even not recognize it. I'm getting better at identifying what I actually need or want in a situation, which is good. But when I see someone truly wheedling their way through life, it is somewhat amazing to me. I would never survive as a street rat.

Everyone has their strengths, and I realize mine are somewhat unique. It is hard to have unique strengths, especially without a good understanding of how "normal" people operate. I have had a tendency to assume that others are motivated as I am (and have painfully learned otherwise) and also have gotten very frustrated when I meet people with weaknesses where I have strengths, because it just doesn't seem so hard for them to simply stop being so silly. I'm sure I appear similarly doltish to them. Sometimes I'm not sure my strengths are apparent at all, or if I just seem generally doltish. (I admit there are some people who appear generally doltish to me!)

Mostly I am glad that I am not the sort to give much concern at all to what other people think about me. Occasionally, I do need to purposely spend some energy thinking about what makes other people tick, especially if I'm struggling to get on with them. I believe in letting other people be other people without worrying about them or judging them. But then there are those mysteries, and I am forced to ponder them.

Review and Thoughts on "Teresa of Avila: The Progress of a Soul"

I've just finished reading Cathleen Medwick's book Teresa of Avila: The Progress of a Soul. I picked it up at my parish library, simply because it was about this foundress of the Discalced Carmelites, my spiritual madre.



When I read the first bit and realized that the author's perspective was as a secular non-believer, I briefly considered setting it aside, but quickly decided against that. I didn't at all perceive that this book disrespected the supernatural dimension of Teresa's life, nor was there a strong attempt to re-cast her as a New Age heroine or a raging feminist. In other words, it aimed at accurate  history, not a political re-writing of history. There were times when it seemed the author was mystified at what faith could have grasped, but perhaps that made her perspective all the more valuable to me as a reader.

But I was intrigued by her initial discussion of how mysticism, and particularly Teresa's mysticism, has been perceived by secular scholars. (This perhaps gave secular readers the chance to use these views as interpretive guides along the way.) It boils down to basically two views, or more likely a combination of them: Teresa was either somewhere between psychologically unhealthy and mentally ill, and/or she suffered from sexual repression that found its outlet in spiritual imaginings.

It's not that this perspective was news to me. I seem to remember encountering this reasoning when I studied mysticism way back when, before I was a Catholic. And even in Teresa's day she was accused of stuff like this to her face.

At one point in the book, as I inserted myself into the historical moment and pitted her experiences against the array of responses to her, I suddenly felt myself cast into the same moment of decision that her contemporaries must have felt (with the difference of historical finality being on her side). It seemed to me that believing Teresa was indeed a saint and worthy of the title Doctor of the Church was subjectively more of an act of faith than believing that Jesus rose from the dead.

It was simply interesting for me to bump up against this non-believing perspective right now because I've encountered my own taste of this reasoning in my own experience. It is simply good to be able to look at mi madre and know I'm not alone. To be able to feel like a miniature, a daughter, next to a great woman who suffered through worse makes me feel happy.

In fact, I'm realizing that for all the stuff I've experienced in the last couple of years that has felt like the end of the world, the most and the heaviest at the time that I could endure -- if this all was to lead me to this point where I am becoming a Secular Carmelite and can call myself a daughter of St. Teresa -- if all the rest of my life is simply quiet and pedestrian, it has all been worth it simply to have this great honor.

She was a busy woman, that's for sure. Personally, I still resonate a bit more with St. John of the Cross for his intensity, his scholarliness and his reserve, but St. Teresa gives me that assurance that hard work and even terseness in relationships (along with great tenderness, and complexity) is not foreign matter to a holy life.

Holy Mother Teresa, pray for me!

Edith Stein, and What's New

Last week I rather unexpectedly ended up spending a lot of solitary time in my parish hall, which is immediately connected to the church proper. In other words, I had about 20 times more "face time" with Jesus in the tabernacle than I normally have in a week.

Which was lovely.

And powerful, and just slightly weird.

Because that's the way my life works.

One of the things I did a lot of was reading this book on the life of Edith Stein:

The more I read by her and about her, the more I am stirred in my soul to the point of being stunned. I wrote about what happened in me on her feast day this year here. That was like a whole bunch of bells going off, alerting me to my need to read everything I can get my hands on by and about her. She resonates with me. But she also thoroughly "schools" me when it comes to moral conduct. Kowabunga! She is just exactly the woman I need walking with me right now. But, of course, the fact that she was a martyr of Auschwitz is more than sobering to me. I would almost say it is just a tad on the scary side.

Here's a quote from a letter she wrote to a fellow former student of her beloved phenomenology mentor,  Edmund Husserl:

I suppose it is good to be able to speak freely with him about ultimate questions. And yet, not only does it increase his own level of responsibility, it also heightens our responsibility for him. Prayer and sacrifice, in my opinion, are much more crucial than anything we can say ... It's very possible that he could be a "chosen instrument" without being in a state of grace. I don't mean that we should judge him, and of course we have every right to hope in God's unfathomable mercy. On the other hand, we have no right to conceal how serious the issues are. After every meeting with him, I come away convinced of my inability to influence him directly, and feeling the urgent necessity of offering some holocaust of my own for him.

I don't have someone in Husserl's exact circumstance in my life, but then again, I myself could write something similar to this in a certain circumstance I do have....

And besides having Edith Stein burrowing into my soul, I am sensing God's call to me to propose a few things in my parish. Hanging in the hall also gave me opportunities for people to strike up conversations with me that normally would not happen. (Yes, that's the way it goes with me; people sit down and start telling me everything, and I listen. Works for me.)

Which reminds me of some things I've learned recently. I realize I don't spend much time at all thinking about what other people must think, about me, about things we are involved in together. This is good to the extent that I don't spend time comparing or being jealous. It is not always so good to the extent that I don't always have a good grasp of others' needs, unless they spell it out to me. People assume a lot, and generally they assume that others think as they do. Which is probably not true, most of the time. I've also learned that I have a certain characteristic that most other people do not share: I regularly deal with deeply personal and even intimate things rather analytically. That doesn't mean that I am cold and distant from their reality. But it does mean just what I said. For, I guess, most people, deeply personal and even intimate things strike the emotions and not the head. I have a deep need to thrash through things, to wrestle with them, to understand (to seek truth, like Edith). For others, these things strike the emotions, and they react emotionally, and then they are done. If it is a "happy" emotion, that lingers, and if it is an uncomfortable emotion, that lingers. In my world, emotions have to be evaluated because of how they are connected to our passions, and it is the movement of the passions that determines the moral value and whether these emotions should be nurtured or whether reason has to step in and turn to soul in a new direction.

Yeah, and I've also had the clearest example yet in my life of what it is like to be hated.

Hah, I'm just thinking how every once in a while someone will ask me "What's new?" If I were honest, I'd read them this blog post. Sometimes I wonder why people ever ask me that. And I wonder what really would be holiest response for me to give when someone asks me that. I have absolutely no idea. Most of the time I am baffled about how best to be myself with others. At least in theory, like when I sit and write on my blog and no one is actually speaking to me.

Like a Fire In My Soul

There have been many times I've come to my blog wishing I could effectively scream with a keyboard or maybe write in tongues so that I could get something from the inside of me to the outside of me.

I'm not even sure what it would accomplish, or what I even want when I say that.

I say that I write so that I can understand. I think I also write to find some relief from what I hold inside.

Well, I've decided some things lately. For good or for ill, this is the way it goes:

I really don't care how I compare to other people. I've been reminded of late, verbally, that I'm not like other people. In the past, I've usually greeted that with a half of a smile and a thank you, but in this context it was clear that I was supposed to apologize for that. But you know what? I'm not going to. I may irritate you, I may challenge you, I may make you feel uncomfortable by not being like everyone else. That is your problem, not mine.

I don't believe in the word awkward. I was at a prayer meeting last night with a bunch of young people, and they talked about the viral picture of the Pope hugging the man with neurofibromatosis. They talked about how this would make them feel awkward, like they don't know what to do with themselves, and for that reason, they would shy away from someone with some deformity. And I kept thinking of a woman I used to work with who had NF. I'm sure she had her challenges, but to me she was another co-worker. When I think of feeling awkward, I think of a general life condition I faced for decades, and one which I  have exercised myself against adamantly for decades. I just don't believe in awkward. The feeling of being awkward is a call to conversion, and I say embrace it.

I confess that sometimes I don't know how to look at humanity without falling into despair. I know that there is another way, because God looks at us in all His perfection, and He does not despair. He looks at our poor, pitiful, wretched, blind and lame state and is filled with merciful love towards us. His heart must break sometimes with the desire for us to turn our stubborn wills and just open to Him a crack. Maybe I opt for despair because the option of aching with that much love just seems unbearable. Or maybe I just haven't found the way to splay my heart so that His love can love in me like that. I don't find it natively resident in me.

Spiritual battle is real. That I didn't decide, I realize it. Battle means there is something of value whose control is being determined. And it probably means a whole bunch of other things, too. I'm an intercessor, so I know it goes beyond my little world. And that goes with....

We can be connected with heaven now. In fact, it makes things make more sense. I first was wooed into being able to think this way through reading the writings of Anne, a Lay Apostle. And it makes so much sense. We say that eternity is what matters, and our life here is preparation for it, and that we work and pray for the salvation of eternal souls. But so often those words ring like meaningless religious platitudes. However, they are the deepest truths. And I think they are where I got my first two statements. When we are thinking in terms of eternity, who cares about comparisons, social niceties, and being cool?

I told someone recently that although I look like a quiet person, I am actually a volcano. But it is not anger that churns within me. I think it is words. In my younger days I prayed for years and years that my words would have the power to heal people. I don't know that lava is a healing force, but I keep experiencing results my words that show me there is a power there. It is actually not the delight I imagined, but rather scary. "The tongue has the power of life and death" (Prov. 18:21). Pray for me that I (and my tongue, and my words, and my voice, and my keyboard) may be all God's.

An Introvert Rants

I am in a mood, and I feel the need to vent this out of my soul.

I have a friend who simply will not believe that I am an introvert, no matter how many times I explain this to her. She recently countered my claim by telling me of a woman she met who was "so introverted" that when she accidentally bumped my friend's foot, she was agitated by it for the rest of that particular social gathering. And because I tend to laugh and be bubbly around my friend, there is no way in her mind that I am like that woman.

Here's the truth. Sometimes, that laughter and bubbliness is gas going through my social accelerator. I am doing a lot of hard work. Also, sometimes, I laugh so that I don't completely die of shame.

I came across this idea in a novel I'm reading. One character had spilled her heart out to a complete stranger, and then the narrator commented on how this often leads to an embarrassment that makes the person retreat. Color me the constant contrarian, but for me it is different. See, I can relate to this effect of wanting to hide away, but it comes to me not after I pour my heart out (I've gotten quite adept at that actually -- more on that later) but after I simply encounter other people. Twenty-five years ago, this debilitated me. I would cringe for hours upon walking into a new work setting or a new, crowded classroom, or any place where people were. My reason told me I couldn't simply hide from the world (though I did as much of that as I dared without becoming agoraphobic). But I repeatedly felt like I was dying of embarrassment, just to come into a room with people in it.

In Japan I learned a phrase that is always used when entering the house of a friend or acquaintance: ojama shimasu. The meaning is "I'm sorry for bothering you." (The Japanese have standard phrases for many, many situations; some adult students of mine were surprised to learn there are no American equivalents.) Literally, however, it translates "I am doing the demon." I always thought of this phrase as "ojama imasu." You change that one syllable just a bit and it means "I am a demon," or "I am a terrible bother to you." It fit perfectly my interior sentiment about my relationship with the rest of the world. But of course I hated this feeling.

This is, actually, my natural interior disposition. I don't need to step on someone's foot to feel awkward. I do it by existing.

But one can't go about chained to one's natural inclinations. Today's reading as Mass from 2 Corinthians 12 is the one where St. Paul says he will boast of his weaknesses, for power is perfected through those weaknesses. I guess that's me. I have developed actually a weird amount of courage simply by attempting social interactions that happen naturally to others, or even things seemingly so bizarre that an extrovert might have a hard time imagining them to be remotely scary. Somewhere I told my story about how, the first time I went to a daily Mass, I desperately begged God for help with my church door phobia. That's a good example.

Honestly, I can now recognize that there is truth in the stereotype that introverts are a bit snobbish, self-absorbed, and unfriendly. At least, I recognize that there is truth to that in me. I admit it. However, I also confess that it takes me a lot of dying to self, a lot of intentional exercise of my will, harnessing of God's grace, and focus on the needs of someone other than myself to engage in friendly banter and chit-chat with people. I need to set myself to it like other might set themselves to fasting or a long silent prayer vigil. It's expensive for me. It's God's grace I'm spending, and He's lavish with His supply, but I really have to hollow myself out to hold His grace to spend it.

The other thing I run into is that I can, in the right conditions, quite freely open my soul and hand it to another. In fact, sometimes I find it almost too easy. This happened in an exchange recently with someone I knew only as a passing acquaintance. It was one of those "gee, I just cut my vein open, and, I see you have a tourniquet there" moments. My addressing the situation, intense as it was, was not one whit embarrassing to me. I felt rather it was divinely appointed. But I also know it was very moving and surfaced some "upset" for the other person involved. Those moments always make me step back in my heart. I have to remind myself that others do not have the odd personality/interior formation path I've had, and that diving head-first into the depths of one's own soul with another person is very potent stuff. Sometimes I underestimate the potency I access, and I lose sight of how quickly others' vulnerability thresholds begin. I forget how hard it is for some people to reach deep inside themselves -- probably as difficult as it has been for me to walk into that room. I confess, too, that sometimes I lack sympathy for their difficulty because I have pushed myself so hard to be more "normal."

Sometimes I think God had a weird idea to make us all so very different. We all have strengths, we all have weaknesses. I just feel like I have really, really strange ones. But now my little vent has helped me to accept that that's just the way it is.

P. S. August 23, 2013:  I learned just a week ago that the above-mentioned exchange, the divine appointment I mentioned that transpired with that acquaintance, actually had a nearly-miraculous outcome for her. I thought that maybe I had frightened her, but in fact she proceeded on to be freed from a trouble she had carried for years. Deo Gratias!

He Passed the Trial by Fire

Last night I saw Michael Nesmith in concert in Pittsburgh. It was a surreal experience in many ways. My husband and I approached the venue (70 minutes before the concert started, with all the other fans with OCD. Well, there's only so long you can eat dinner, right?). The first thing I spotted was two ladies wearing green wool hats. They and another friend were loudly discussing the Video Ranch website (Mike's merch outlet) and Monkees aps. Another woman wore her First National Band t-shirt. I then realized I was not the only geek, as I was also wearing my (vintage 1986) Nez t-shirt. As we were split into ticket-haves and ticket-have-nots, a man in front of me commented on my t-shirt, and showed me his Headquarters CD he proudly carried with him. I was amused, and just a little freaked out, over these and other proofs of the sort of instant bonding geekdom creates. It didn't matter that none of us knew each other. We all smiled a bit at each other because we all knew him. And obviously some people wanted it really known just how much they belonged in this fellowship.

So we sat there (yes, mere spouses of fans stood out a bit) waiting for the concert, and I was a bit awash in the humanity of it all. That doesn't happen to me real often.

I admit that when he walked onto the stage, I cried. Not cried like those videos of screaming teens at Beatles concerts. I mean cried, like a breath of anticipation that you've held in for, oh, maybe 35 years and finally exhaled. There he is. He is real.

See, I was a Monkees fan as a kid, but something about Michael Nesmith pierced more deeply into my soul than being a fan. I'm a fan of Paul McCartney, too, but if I would happen to see him in a similar concert (and I'm not even sure I'd bother going), there would be no comparison to the meaning last night's event held for me. You could say that I had a crush on him as a kid, I guess, but (as is my constant refrain), it really was more complicated than that. It was more that I wanted to be him. Intensely.

Whatever I understood about that desire in the past, I have come to understand it better after last night.

It seems to me that the reality of purgatory means that everything must be tested by fire. Fire does not mean destruction; fire in this case means Love. I had more than a moment's trepidation about buying tickets for this concert because I think I was afraid that this soul-piercing meaning would not stand the test any better than when I went to a Monkees reunion concert in the 80s. That was when I realized that the childhood fun the Monkees provided me was rooted in nothing much. The three silly young men (Mike did not do that tour with them) had grown into three silly old men who were still trying to turn a buck based on the antics of their youth. So, without thinking it through rationally, my emotions braced themselves for being disappointed in what I would perceive when finally seeing this influential figure in person. I prepared myself for my childhood dream going up in smoke. Nope, there was nothing special there after all. Stop dreaming, and live in reality.

So when he walked on the stage and I cried, the tears were perhaps trying to figure out whether they were saying hello or goodbye.

He did a slew of songs, most of which I knew, though some were new to me. And he introduced each one with a story, painting a scene like a movie vignette so you could picture the "he" and "she" characters. He used correct grammar, complete sentences with no slang, and lots of big words. Yep, I knew it was him. His lyrics, and the stories he shared, communicated profound meanings, of people accepting loss, facing difficulty, being brave, kind, gentle, honest, spiritual. He respectfully honored the very talented musicians who were his band. During the show I found myself internally yelling: I still want to be Mike Nesmith!!

A three-second gesture at the close of his final encore made my eyes and heart go wide for a moment. For a moment it seemed maybe I was Mike Nesmith. Acknowledging his audience's applause, he did about a nose-high namaste hand gesture. I do that, but (I suddenly realized) in reference to only one person, now that I don't live in Japan, and usually only at the sign of peace at Mass. (Although that usual got pretty unusual in the last several months.) But I know from the inside out what that means when I do it. It was a little unique, to say the least, to see him do the same thing.

I came home saturated with the experience, and mulled it over in that highly sensitive state my brain is in when it is near either side of sleep. And then, early this morning like every other, I headed to my friend Iwona's home for Lauds. For our opening hymn we sang a new praise chorus she had introduced for the first time just the day before. When I heard it Tuesday, I thought, well, that's a banal, generic praise chorus. This morning, my humanity feeling far more absorbent than usual, the song soaked in quickly, went deep and forced out the tears, and my understanding. The part that bit was this:

Constant through the trial and the change
One thing… Remains [repeat]

[Chorus:]
Your love never fails, never gives up
Never runs out on me [3x]

On and on and on and on it goes
It overwhelms and satisfies my soul
And I never, ever, have to be afraid
One thing remains

There is one thing that has always been true, even when I didn't realize it: God loves. God loves me. I am loved, me, by Him.

It's personal. Persons love persons, if love is real, that is. I've had every factor in that simple equation wrong, but one of the hardest things for me to take in in my life is that God calls me to be myself. I have been aware of it since my 20s, when I started toward the Catholic Church. But now I realize that my fascination with Mike Nesmith was, in ways I didn't even understand, an inclination towards God's desire for me to be me. I'm not Mike, but there are things about who he really is that resonate with who I really am. Without being really aware of it, I see now that I recognized in him someone who was showing me how to aspire to be truly human in a way that befits me. Humanity is a beautiful creation of God. We all fall short of God's full glory, but there is something powerful that can happen when we honor the gifts God has given us, and take the risks that put those gifts at the disposal of others.

One of those things is that the real me, I, can experience love. The real thing. The One Thing that never changes. The One Thing that is more real than I am. When I'm faking, I'm also closing myself off from love, from God. But when I'm real, without fear I can reach to you and say, you know what? One Thing is true for you, too. You are loved. The real you is loved by the real me, because of the One Thing that is more real than any of us. A fellowship is born that is much bigger than what forms around a musician. There is a fellowship that is born around Love. It's where real happens.

Wasn't it St. Catherine of Siena who said "Be who God meant you to be and you will set the world on fire"? Mike is still honoring the gifts God has given him. Those gifts have resonated with me, and sparked a hope in our Creator before I could even put my finger on it.

So thank you, Lord, for your gift, and thank you, Michael, for your faithfulness to your gifts and for sharing them. Your special place in my heart is reasonable, and has passed the trial by the fire of love.




One Thing Remains

Detachment vs. Connection

We keep a garbage can right next to our mail slot, because a lot of what comes in the mail goes straight in there. Some of it sits on our mail table for days, weeks, or (ahem) months, until I get around to either pitching it or looking at it, and then pitching it.

But I picked up something today and read it, and two quotes contained therein hit me right between the eyes. First:

In the Child Jesus, God made Himself dependent, in need of human love. He put Himself in the position of asking for human love -- our love.  (from Pope Benedict's Christmas homily of 2011)

Then this from Edith Stein (St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross) -- words to a philosopher who had asked her advice:

You cannot be helped with arguments. If one could liberate you from all argumentation, that might indeed help you. And as for advice, I have already given you my advice: to become like a little child and lay your life, with all its pondering and probing, in the Father's hands. If you cannot manage to do this, then ask the unknown God, in whom you doubt, to help you to do so. Now you are staring at me in great astonishment, for daring to respond to you with such simple childish wisdom. It is wisdom, because it is simple, and all mysteries are contained within it. And it is a way that leads quite surely to its goal.

Today is the feast of St. Anthony of the Desert. He was a guy who simply gave up everything and went to the desert and sought God for the rest of his very long life. He's the origin of the Desert Fathers and pretty much the first monastic in the history of the Church.

So, I was praying early this morning with St. Anthony on my mind and really feeling this theme of detachment. Sometimes my most profound inspirations toward prayer come literally the instant I first wake up in the morning. (God has been on my case about rising early and giving that time to Him. For good reason. That's for another post.) And I say when I "first" wake up in the morning, because I often wake up more than once. ;) (Where do you put the punctuation mark when using an emoticon, anyway?) Anyway, when I first woke up this morning, my first thought was: What if right now is as good as God ever intends External Difficulty in Spiritual Trial to get? What would be my response to that?

I have a pretty standard knee-jerk reaction to questions like this. And it is, "Ok, Lord. If that's the way you wish it, then OK." That sounds great, I suppose. But time and experience has taught me that it is actually a problem for me. Because in giving this response, I am, in a way, hardening my heart. Steeling myself is perhaps a better way to say it. I steel myself a lot. Two things happen with this. First, I toss my heart out the door like a kitty that's being annoying and I try to relate to God without my heart, as if He is all about my productivity and not my person. So on the one hand, I get a modicum of emotional relief, because pain is not there to annoy me. But I simultaneously get spiritual confusion, because there is no honest prayer without one's heart in play. All the knee-jerk reaction is about is pain avoidance.

A while back I was discussing detachment with my confessor, and I stated that other than the inconvenience of it all, I don't get upset with the idea of losing things. But as soon as God puts His finger on the people in my life, I start losing it. I know that the generation that grew up in the Great Depression in the US, or in war in other countries, tended to horde and worry about material essentials, or be weirdly frugal, etc. Well, I'm a Gen-Xer. I came home from school in 2nd grade to an empty house, experienced the divorce of my parents and the diaspora of my siblings. We had no family friends, unless you count my mother's couple of boyfriends. (That never turned out well.) I had one best friend up through adulthood. I remember one day we were discussing the problems "normal" teenagers had (not like drug addiction and things like that that "they" wanted to tell us our problems were). I was shocked at her honest revelation when she said, immediately, "loneliness." Yes. That was the pain of our generation. Or, is.

So, my non-knee jerk reaction to that early morning question. At communion this morning and afterwards, I was meditating on connection. Yes, God wants this deep connection with me. And yet, He established this Church, this ecclesia, this people called out to be together, and this is where He meets us. Connection between Christians is His idea. I often commented that I don't like people. While I know why I've said it, it is actually because the opposite is true. I don't like people because I love them too much. I crave them. I crave connection, and maybe it is like the woman who keeps 150 cans of green beans in the pantry because she's afraid of starving to death. It boils down to a simple reality: I'm scared. Do I need 150 cans of beans (proverbially speaking)? No, of course not. But to be honest, I don't always know how to dial back my heart from those 150 cans of beans to anything but completely empty shelves and starvation. The two things I know how to know are: I love these people so much that they mean absolutely everything to me, or, I am an alone, forsaken wretch, dying inside.

But at least with this painful realization of the truth of my interior life, I can actually pray. I have my heart, mess that it is. And no pain avoidance. But the only prayer I can really offer, which I did this morning in so many words, was what Edith Stein counseled her friend: "like a little child ... lay your life, with all its pondering and probing, in the Father's hands." Man, am I good at pondering and probing. This morning I spent a good long time gathering myself up and telling God I couldn't make sense of any of it. I want His will, I choose His way over my own, I trust His power, but I have no idea how to even begin thinking about how to "not love people so much." Believe me, I've been through every nuance of good and evil that's buried in that phrase a million times. There is nothing left for me but laying my life in the Father's hands, and letting Him make of it His thing.

And then there was that quote from Ben XVI. In Jesus, God made Himself dependent on human love, needing and asking for our love. Oh, man. And I know the response He most frequently gets. I know it first hand. I've been the giver and the getter of it.

Detachment. Connection. The pain inherent in dependence and need. The dysfunction guaranteed by pain avoidance. All four of these press me like some kind of a mega-vise.

Ok, now I will say it: whatever you want, Lord. I cannot make my own way, because I don't know how. I'll choose to be the little child. You make it work the way you want it.

Coming to Peace with my Brain

So, here's something else I've learned lately. I'm learning about how to get along with my brain.

It is rather rare and unusual for me to get into conflicts with other people, but inside myself, I am very hard to get along with. For me, I mean. They say that self-knowledge is absolutely necessary for making progress in the spiritual path, and I think I'm seeing the truth of this more and more.

I am a cerebral person. I think a lot. If I'm stressed, I can get just a tad obsessive. I'm not necessarily emotionally sensitive; sometimes I'm a bit of a dolt that way. But I'm sensitive to everything I hear, and, as one woman once put it, I have extremely sensitive spiritual antennae.

What this has tended to amount to is that I have a lot of data coming in to me that I don't know how to process. Usually this confusing data comes from other people. I can use my own cerebralness to try to figure it out, but eventually it overwhelms me and causes me so much suffering that I am forced out of myself into the world of someone else in order to get understanding, to try to find peace. And for a once-self-professed misanthrope, that's significant.

I realize the importance of the people with whom I surround myself. I find that when I spend a significant chunk of time with someone, or when I've had a conversation with someone, the next day that experience or those words will replay in my head. If that person or that conversation draws me towards the Lord and His movement in my life, I am edified. If not, I can get drawn instead to anxious thoughts or get easily agitated. I am finding that sometimes movies or idle chit-chat that I needn't have been part of can really act like brain-pollution, like a bad smell I need to then air out of my thinking.

Something that has been a profound help to me is praying the Liturgy of the Hours. Some years ago the Lord started impressing on me, in a way that both respected and required the kicking into gear of my free will, my dire need to meditate more on Scripture. I thought maybe just trying to dwell on the Mass readings or theological thoughts in general would be enough. But it wasn't. Nor was it adequate to start randomly reading the Bible, as I started to do more of. As a Protestant, I thought of meditating on Scripture as reading through it, and stopping when something struck me. But choosing what to read was either an exercise in picking what I wanted to hear or simple dogged determination. Suddenly it started to dawn on me that I should meditate on Scripture the way the Church instructs us to: liturgically. I had prayed the Hours on and off since the first day I decided to become a Catholic. But I've been doing so regularly for the last few years, and lately I have endeavored to pray all seven hours. (Which, for the record, does not mean I pray for 420 minutes a day. It is just seven sessions of prayer sprinkled throughout the day.) This has been spectacular in terms of being a reset button for my thinking. It is not without reason that Scripture itself teaches us to actually pray Scripture out loud. To sing it. Chant it. Mutter it. To rub it into your thoughts like oil into dry skin.

Dipping in to Scripture often throughout the day, not to exercise my intellectualization, but to find my life reflected there, is hugely valuable. God becomes the One I think about all day long. My idle brain noise is His praise instead of my anxieties. I get used to realizing that He always has something to say to me, and that my need for Him is constant, like my need for air and love. It gets my hyper-sensitivity working for me instead of against me. I am focused on truth, on reality. And I refocus throughout the day.

And slowly, I begin to not fret as much about the perplexities of who I am. The more I know who He is, the more I understand and can be at peace with who I am. Because I know I am not the main attraction. Knowing the One who holds everything, who creates everything, who is all powerful and all loving, and has been for all of history, lets me settle in to my life of service with peace. It lets me learn spiritual childhood. I don't have to have it all figured out, because I am beholding right in front of me One who is mighty and can handle it all. Praise God -- it's all right to not understand! It's peaceful to realize I am not in charge of the universe. 

I am freed to be available for service to the One who is in charge, and who knows all.

Words out of Silence

This morning I had an interesting experience. It is the feast of St. Teresa of Avila, so some of the local Carmelite community met for Mass and a little reception later. There weren't that many of us, and after even a few of the few had to leave, the other few stayed to chat about our lives.

And I faced this scenario that seems to constantly repeat throughout my life.

One woman talked about how at the current stage in life, the Lord is showing her to retreat from a lot of activity and learn to be really, completely quiet inside. Others seemed to nod in sympathy.

And I felt like a salmon swimming upstream.

Silence has been co-natural to me my whole life to the point where it sometimes is my vice. I wrote about this in this post. There is a difference between being externally quiet and having interior silence, and I get that. However, interior silence has come really relatively easily for me because of my externally quiet nature. I'm not a woman who is at all likely to over-extend herself in care giving, or one to whom people flock to get their needs cared for. I don't get emotionally drawn into worrying over how people are faring. At almost any point, I tend to have a very good feel for where I am "at" interiorly (even if I don't understand why I'm there). I spend lots of time, and have for my whole life, in the cavernous regions of my soul, to the point that sometimes I haven't known how to interact socially. I've intuited that I couldn't just pull people in to one of the only things I felt personally well-versed at discussing -- interior life.

I shouldn't be bothered by this because it is simply who I am. And yet frankly sometimes it makes me feel abnormal as a woman.

What today's experience highlighted for me, however, is how God has led me since I was in my young 20s, and that is the fact that He wants my mouth. I have known that for years, and it has been a struggle. My mouth is symbolic, really, of my self-expression. I wonder why He hasn't put it to me that He wants my fingers, because I tend to write more than speak. But then again I needn't wonder that, because my mouth is what makes me feel my vulnerability more.

I knew a woman once who taught me that some people are made to feel extremely vulnerable when they are silent. We were in Japan, and she said she tried to make a one-day silent retreat, and after a few hours of the morning went by she had to walk down to the shopping district and meet someone, anyone, and talk. (I do know the feeling, although it literally took me 2.5 years of living alone in Japan before I started doing that sort of thing. And it lasted only a few weeks until I then left.) It is very difficult for me to grasp that some people are afraid of meeting themselves in silence, as, I suppose it might be hard for others to understand what have been my phobias.

But I get this sense that God's desire is for me to bring forth from my silence words that help bring others to silence. And I get this sense that this entails being able to face scary things with people. That means I probably need to learn a little sensitivity to people's fear of that intimate place of silence, of solitude, of the nakedness that leaves nothing to hide behind.

My song writing mentor friend said to me last year something about how every artist yearns to get to this place of soul-nakedness, to be able to really pour out his heart. I feel like that's what I've practiced in writing since I was 10 years old. And, yeah, I think the difficulty I have face all my life is figuring out how to insert myself in "normal society" when this is my bent. Without pretending to be someone else, without fear of being taken advantage of, and without fear of others' fear.


Maybe this is it. Maybe this is what I need to learn right now.

I Don't Do People Very Well

Some of the reasons I write this blog to begin with include helping me process and understand what happens in my life and thoughts, and having a place where I have the accountability of putting what I say "out there" for hypothetical readers, because I know this requires me to be honest with myself. But another reason I write is so that later I can go back and read what I said at a certain time, remembering what was going on at that certain time, and hopefully at that later point I can have a better understanding of all the pieces of living because, as Kierkegaard said, life must be lived forward but can only be understood backwards.

So, I write now in hopes of better understanding later. Or at least in hopes of chuckling to myself about how silly I used to be.

They say that when you draw close to the Lord you are able to see more clearly how much junk you have in your life. Well, it seems the Lord is busy drawing me close to Him. I am starting to realize that although I have certain kinds of sensitivity to spiritual things, to connections with truth, to seeing spiritual patterns, I am a dullard when it comes to people. To use a phrase that my husband over-uses to the point of irritation, I can be like a bull in a china shop. No wonder I make my daughter cry when we work on academic stuff, and no wonder I frustrate my fun-loving son to the point of tears sometimes. Sometimes I have all the finesse of an axe-wielder.

I have made my way through life by forcing myself up over obstacles, plowing ahead, clearing a path generally, not carefully. I suppose someone has to do that sort of thing, and to me it has been necessary, because I had debilitating passivity and depression standing in my way for years. But I realize now that many situations simply do not call for this approach. Many situations require delicate handling, patient endurance, a gentle hand and a calm approach. These are not characteristics that rush to mind when one would describe me, if one knew what one were talking about.

And so I see how much I need to learn from those who are not like me. And I see how much I need those who are not like me. And I see how I have to acknowledge that the entire world is not my nail to pound in my hammerness. And I see how much I need to go before the Lord each day and ask what He would have me do, and for His way of doing it, rather than presuming that just because I want it a certain way that it is wise to have it that way.

It is true that God has been teaching me for 20 years to be myself. But now I see that being myself means that I am needy, incomplete, a part of a whole, interdependent with others, and totally dependent upon God, who loves me despite my boorishness.

As I allow myself to soak in God's love, perhaps I will lose more boorish edges. I think that soaking really boils down not to an emotional experience but to a conscious awareness -- faith, in other words -- in God's love and mercy. If I stay aware of God's mercy towards me, then I will soften my approach to others, aware that it is His mercy flowing through me, not some emotional concoction I can whip up on my own. Because that's all I can bank on, really. The Lord, I am sure of. Me, I know I'm not reliable, except perhaps as a chaff dispenser. So each day I must pray, Jesus, love these people through me. Not my way with them, Lord, but yours.

Otherwise, what does it mean to belong to Him?

Faith Had Led the Way

Yesterday I was listening to a teaching by Mother Immaculata, a Carmelite nun, on St. John of the Cross. Good stuff. This is I think my third time through the CD set, and of course each time something new is what grabs me.

This morning as I thought about what I heard yesterday, I had a naru hodo moment. She was talking about the three theological virtues: faith, hope and charity, and how they grow and develop together. Actually, she was talking about what St. John has to say about faith, and how we fail in faith by not believing that God's mercy can apply to us, in our particular lives and circumstances. In that context, she made a comment, something along the lines of "thanks be to God, because all of the theological virtues hang together, our acts of love also build up our faith and our hope."

This morning, it struck me. Throughout my life, faith has led the way.

And then I could understand what Mother Immaculata was actually saying. In her experience, and maybe most people's experience, love is the virtue that we are called upon to exercise the most in most normal contexts of life. It is perhaps the most "natural" of the supernatural virtues to most people because of our constant need to use it. And she was grateful that it helps build up faith as well.

Well, ain't the case in my life. I have often thought of a song my friend Gail wrote when we were young adults. She grew up in a Buddhist household and was baptized at 19. The first line of this song was, "Where I grew up Jesus was a dirty word." I think of this because in my young life, "love" was a dirty word. Love was something illicit, something you didn't talk about, something from which you avert your gaze. And then there was "God is love," but that was mostly just words. The devil was pretty effective at snatching the concept and reality of love away from my mind and heart and making it appear as putrid as himself.

Then, there's hope. Oh my, what a laugh. My brooding, dark personality needed little help settling down into utter despair. I was so drawn to dwelling on the negatives of life that it was simply habitual to me to give up hope for anything good. Ugh. It's oppressive to even think about how easily I abandoned hope.

The one virtue left, the one little toe-hold of grace that was left to me, was faith. Perhaps it helped that my Lutheran formation emphasized the importance of faith almost to the exclusion of all else. I know that I didn't have a right intellectual understanding of faith, but one doesn't absolutely need right understanding to exercise a virtue (thank you, Lord!).

Looking back, I can see all the times the Lord called me to trust and take a step forward. I think I have gotten a lot of exercise in this primarily because of how frightened I was of everything. I see now how my timidity has been a gift. I think of a certain book bindery we now pass by every time we visit my Mom, because of where she lives now. I worked there as a temp during the last summer I lived at home, so when I was about 20 years old. The first day I walked in there I was so petrified. I felt like I was walking into the belly of the beast, like I would be killed. The truth is, I've felt that way about almost every new situation I've ever encountered!

And I think of how I used to write letters to my friend Keith when was a missionary in Africa. I wrote maybe three or four times a week. And every time I dropped a letter into the mailbox, I was stretching my heart out in trust. And I vividly remember at the time this image of a spider spinning a web. One tiny thread at a time, the web gets bigger, wider. I could feel how my heart slowly was expanding, and how I was able to say, "Yes, Lord," and step into life. And I see now, too, how true it is what Mother Immaculata said. As my faith, my ability to entrust my life to the Lord, grew, I had more hope and even more charity.

Then God called me to become a Catholic. Wow. That was a leap of faith. Then I went to Japan. Well, that felt like a leap of stupidity, but in the process God really restored my sense of hope and purpose. Then I got married and had children, and finally I began to learn that love means giving oneself.

And now, well, I feel like I'm finally firing on all cylinders. To be honest, on the occasions where the words "I love you" actually come out of my mouth, I am fully aware that this is a miracle. I'm sure this is why it has taken me so long to "get" that doing my daily duty is how I build up the kingdom. Faith is still my strongest cylinder. I don't scare nearly as easily as I used to, but God knows how to work me into situations that challenge my faith again and again. Maybe it is because I have such an intense need to understand that He often directs me to step out in faith at His call, without understanding. I don't know. I've made plenty of stupid mistakes with this faith business, but I guess that's why you call it "practicing" one's faith.

Anyway, I realized this today, and I'll just join in Mother Immaculata's sense of gratefulness with my own twist: Thanks be to God that the exercise of faith can also make one grow in hope and charity.

Living One Life

For over a week now, I've been away from home and in the midst of what I've come to think of as a spiritual palate cleanser. Once again I see that God my Father always knows exactly what I need. That whole omniscience thing is quite an advantage. And I, for my part, learn to say "Yes, Lord" on a daily basis, and that I don't have to understand the why of everything that happens at every moment.

A few months ago, I wrote a post called "Living Two Lives" in which I mulled over some issues of  how I handled my spiritual life as a child, and some difficulty I've had in carrying that over into adulthood. Oddly enough, I'm now back in my childhood hometown with my face smack in as much of the concreteness of my childhood as is left. I wasn't at all expecting this, but like I said, God has His ways.

When I wrote that post, I felt every bit of the intensity of it. The post is no lie. But life does flow onward. Two things seem much clearer and much calmer to me right now. One is this thing that God has been reminding me of again and again for at least twenty years: He calls me to be myself. And the only way I learn to be myself is by looking at Him. It seems a classic theme of dramas from Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer to Yentl that sometimes people need a lot of courage to strike off on a path to be true to themselves, to be who they are, despite the voices around them. I can tell you it is pretty terrifying when you sense this call but have no idea where it leads, or perhaps deep down you do, but it seems so contrary to everything that you've learned is right and good that you don't know how to proceed. So, you have to fake something somewhere along the line until such a time as you learn how to have all the pieces come together. For me, embracing the Catholic faith as someone with a contemplative, mystical bent has been this kind of journey. I see now that it wasn't only my rabid anti-Catholicism as a child that was a roadblock in the way. Self-rejection was a far larger roadblock and one that was much harder for me to see at work. I suppose it stands to reason that the whole point of God repeatedly telling me to be myself is that I always thought I had to be like someone else in order to please Him. Or at the very least, if I was going to be me, I had to make fun of myself for being so damn weird. I finally see that to think that way is to insult my Creator.

All I know is that there are a thousand and one ways for the heart to become a torture chamber. God's enemy is always ready to help the torture along, to be sure.

But the other thing that has become so clear to me is that God gives peace. Union with God's will simply gives peace and is worth any and every struggle that it calls for. The struggle is primarily that of overcoming sin and pride, because humility frees intimacy to happen, and only when we humble ourselves before God are we able to enjoy the intimacy of uniting our wills to His. Only when I can humble myself in my own estimation am I able to accept myself as I am. Only when I can do this can I accept others as they are. And all of this can only happen in the awareness that God's mercy comes first. His tsunami-like torrent of love for me makes it possible for me to face my sin, my pride, and to embrace humility and acceptance without fear of obliteration. I have to know how deeply I am loved, or there's no hope for me at all.

So, the one life I live is this: God deeply and profoundly loves me. In fact, He'd even die to prove it. (Oh, wait -- He did!) And into this infinitely deep and wide love I can fling myself, whole and entire, with no fear of harm, and I do every day, saying "Yes, Lord, whatever You want." Living this some days may thrill me, some days this may break me, some days this may seem dull and meaningless. God will always, always do what is best for me and He is always to be trusted.

That is my one life. Me, broken sinner that I am, living for God as He teaches me in His Church and under His mercy.

There is No Need to Fear

Somewhere on this blog I have the badge that goes with my Myers-Briggs profile. You can see that it has me as 100% Intuitive. I've taken this test many times, and it always comes up the same way. It makes me think that there is another way that people -- like the vast majority of people on earth -- process information (sensing capacity) that I simply don't relate to at all. I wonder if it is the same sort of thing as being color blind; like there's a whole world of blue-green out there that I know nothing about.

But I do know something about being intuitive. It means that I often know things, and know them completely, without being able to say what I know or say how I know it. But then there comes a time, sometimes, when pieces come together, ideas come together, experiences come together, understanding comes together, and all of a sudden I say "naru hodo"! Now I get it! And then I can actually say what I know.

Sometimes these moments are so profound that they strike me as far more than "understanding."  It's more like they envelop my soul and inevitably make me weep.

I was on the cusp of something like this this morning, and at Mass, right at the consecration, it hit me with full force. I'm not sure I have the words to do it justice, but I will try.

The last blog post I wrote, called "Learning to Trust," located the thread that I needed to pull on. My take-away idea there was that God is the "bigger than" that is involved in any event or circumstance in my life.

What I saw since writing that is something within my own heart. We don't trust as generic people; we trust out of our own unique history. It takes going back through that unique history to really hear God's word that speaks into our souls.

Fears are funny things. We know when we are afraid, but knowing exactly what we are afraid of and being able to say it are, well, hard, at least for me. I don't know if this goes back to an intuition versus sensing thing or not. I realize that some people are afraid of concrete things, like snakes, and figure out easily to say "I'm afraid of snakes!" It seems reasonable to other people for a person to fear snakes, so it isn't like admitting a fear of milk (like my friend Mr. Monk).

When a fear sounds like a betrayal of people in one's life, though, I think it becomes very hard to admit. Because it isn't nice for children or those with emerging maturity to sound like they are blaming those around them for failing them. And, apart from a good grounding in theology, that's all it could be....

What I'm talking about is this: I can now articulate the fear that I've had since childhood, which is fear of being the strongest person I've known. A fear of the utter incompetence I've picked up on in the people around me.

That's sounds incredibly arrogant. But, objectively, it makes sense, because nobody is perfect. I think I have always been extremely sensitive to that fact, but I didn't know what to do with it. What I did actually try to do with it, I also realized, was disregard my intuition on this point, sometimes when I sensed it the strongest. This helps me understand how I flung my trust into the hands of some completely unworthy people in my day. Sometimes I took horrible advice from people close to me, just because I was thrilled to be given advice by them. I could grind my intuition into the dust and trust their in words as in a magic potion. All because I desperately did not want to be disloyal and say "That's stupid." Or, at least to rationally process it that way, and act accordingly.

So, what I've found is that either I've been left to my own strength, which has terrified me, or I have leaned on what I perceived in someone else as the type of strength I've been looking for, and have ended up taken advantage of, treated harshly or shamefully, or something else that left me smarting.

But the Lord has been doing something in my heart for the last few years. It began with my becoming a parent, which did not happen in the customary way for me because of very slowly adopting my son out of the foster care system. One day, I suddenly had an 8-month-old baby to care for. It took some time before I developed any natural sense for what I was doing. It may have even taken until I was pregnant with my daughter. But here's the thing -- when one is a Mommy at home all day with children, one needs to no longer fear being the strongest one around! I learned though that strength does not equal domination, but that it entails showing respect and looking out for others' best interests and not just my own.  This was all a learning adventure for me, and it helped me that my son has an extremely strong will. He made sure I learned both about being firm and respectful.

But there was something else the Lord wanted to get to. And it was not just about not fearing my strength, but about experiencing strength through someone else, so that I could know that the "something" I have been looking for, and bemoaning not seeing in others all these years, was actually God Himself, deeply engaged in my life. I've known that God is deeply engaged in my life, but God has chosen to operate through His Church, which necessitates other human beings responding to the Holy Spirit's directives to them. Like it or not, these other people are just necessary! That's the norm.

A few years back, God sent a certain friend to my life with a sort of nonchalant directive, "Here. Trust this guy." At first I thought, "You're kidding me, right?" But as time went on, I saw God was very serious about teaching me something. Many things, actually. Things that had to do with me not being the strongest person I knew. Things that had to do with me being built up, not torn down or taken advantage of, or being treated shamefully. All along, I knew God was working, but of late it has been hot on God's agenda with me to sort of peel back my friend's tutelage so that I could truly see His work.

And today at the consecration, with tears running down my face, I realized: God is infinitely stronger than I am, and never, ever would He steer me wrong, take advantage of me, treat me harshly or shamefully, or do anything to harm me. I can be as strong as I can be, but I'll always be at heart like a little child to Him. He, however, does a great job at ordering the universe, and I don't need to worry about that. It is also no burden at all on Him for me to expect everything from Him. That's exactly what He's after. His strength is my freedom.

And, as for what I lack: as I drink in the reality of His strength that surrounds me, I can learn to be gentle and relaxed about this life, even if circumstances are dire. It doesn't all depend on me. I can respond to people yes, with strength, but also with peace that comes from knowing the One who is bigger than it all. Then His presence will be evident through me.

I'm not there, but at least I see where I need to go. That's a lot different than wandering aimlessly, crouching fearfully in a corner somewhere.