Fulcrum and Lever

Currently I have the luxury of quite a bit of time which I can give to reflective writing. So I am cashing in on it. I spent the morning meditating on several things that lept out at me during this morning's Mass: a prayer and several scriptures, which then, during that meditation, all fell within an analogy which St. Therese mentions in Story of a Soul. It was actually among the very last lines that she ever wrote -- in pencil because she could no longer wield a pen. The reference is this: 

A scholar has said: "Give me a lever and a fulcrum and I will lift the world." What Archimedes was not able to obtain...the saints have obtained in all its fullness. The Almighty as given them as fulcrum: HIMSELF ALONE; as lever: PRAYER which burns with a fire of love. And it is in this way that they have lifted the world; it is in this way that the saints still militant life it, and that, until the end of time, the saints to come will lift it.  (Story of a Soul, chapter XI, 36r-36v, italics and caps in original)

This is so important to me right now that I am going to edit what I have already written elsewhere and have another go-over of it all.

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This morning I woke early with the sensible feeling of a certain kind of sweet weight to offer up to the Lord. In other words, I can receive the heaviness of late as a grace and a gift to turn into powerful prayer. It reminds me of what Therese wrote about God being the fulcrum and our prayer being the lever that can lift the world. I'm watching this video which states "without a fulcrum, a lever has nothing to support or balance it, so no work can be done." This deserves a moment of meditation. To allow God to be God is to allow Him to be that which supports my movement, my work, and our point of contact is the only thing that gives my freedom power. Otherwise, it isn't so much freedom that I have as total disconnection from reality. Within God I can rise up, within God I can bear down. Within God I have my full range of motion, my total potential, even though I might see potential beyond my potential -- if that makes sense. The oar can "see" up into the sky, where the rocket can launch, but if the oar is launched into the sky, it is not free, it is disconnected. To use a literally more human analogy, towards the end of the video there's a person lifting weights, and the question is, what part of the body is acting as the fulcrum. It seems the answer is the shoulders. And in this analogy, there is a different, less mechanical relationship between the fulcrum and the lever -- and I wonder now if this is connected to why St. Paul talks about the Body of Christ. Because as the arms rise up and the shoulder fulcrum strengthens, more potential is being created for both the arms and the shoulders. In this analogy, God's potential in us increases as we exercise that lever. He builds up strength within us. And this strength also builds grace, stamina, flexibility, beauty, potential for movement, dance, expression, inspiration, health -- everything. This really gives me an insight and a motivation for bodily movement, making it actual prayer. 

But now on to those Scriptures and phrases that popped out to me at Mass this morning. The first thing was from the collect: "Enable us, we pray, almighty God, to proclaim the power of the risen Lord, that we, who have received the pledge of his gift, may come to possess all he gives when it is fully revealed." The italicized part is what stood out to me in the moment. But as I look now at the opening phrase, I see it connected to the power to proclaim Jesus risen. It seems a bit like a wheel. We pray for the power to proclaim the power of the risen Lord so that we can move from having received a pledge to full possession of all he gives, when "it" is fully revealed. Again the fulcrum idea. The fulcrum being the center of a wheel, and the wheel turning around the fulcrum gives the movement. That's the power. We have received the power in our sacraments. That's the pledge (Eph. 1:13-14). Then comes the enabling to proclaim the risen Lord, which is the gospel preached by faith. As we speak forth in faith, we exercise our connection, we exercise our pledge, we turn that wheel around the fulcrum. And in doing that, God gives -- He gives abundantly. What He gives flows over, spilling everywhere. I have sensed this in the past. Gems and jewels way more than I am capable of carrying in my arms, dropping them left and right, but still having more than I can handle. We then pray for possessing all he gives. Not just stumbling with full arms, but making all of this mine. Taking it all in. Like Joseph in Egypt, managing, stewarding it all very well, not just so that I can be well taken care of, but so that many others will be safe and saved from famine. Then we have the full revelation. So this is an ongoing wheel turning. We travel farther and wider. The power of God will be fully revealed, and this is for the praise and glory of God. This is eternity, and this is the culmination and full purpose of our earthly lives. My earthly life. It is to be found in the praise and glory of God. This is the focus on union. It is going to look different for each person. For St. Elizabeth of the Trinity and St. Therese, this was manifested in death at an early age and terrible physical suffering, which then rocketed them into an eternity of sainthood, ministry, and intercession, personal glory of the sort that belongs to the canonized saint. This is not my path. But my path will be mine just as much as their paths were theirs. And I come to it the same way. I have received the sacraments, I proclaim faith in the risen Lord -- for me, it's what it means to believe and trust despite my human obstacles involving trauma. I receive what God pours out, and I steward it. The orientation of my life shifts away from the initial struggle to get the wheels to work together, and onto the terrain I traverse because of the movement God gives. This reminds me of the little girl I saw last night when I was out walking -- her father was helping her master riding her bike. I cheered her on every time we crossed paths. I have known certain people in my life to be my support, like training wheels are supports. We need this support from others, this witness, to get over the initial struggle of getting the wheels to work. And we need those who cheer us on when they do. And we need those who ride beside us, delighting in the mastery of movement together. Is there anything more beautiful than delighting in the unfolding of the glory of God with another person? This is the communion of saints for which we were created. 

Then from the Psalm: 93:1 "And he has made the world firm, not to be moved." Again with the fulcrum idea. This depiction of the world shows it in the image of God. God is the firm fulcrum. He does not move, but enables movement. Here the world does not move, but enables movement. Terra firma. In other words, God graces nature to reflect Himself, to be solid, trustworthy, predictable. That which enables us to have a solid foundation. We can rely on matter as it images God. In this way, reality is sacramental. He has done this. It is his gift, his reality. It is solid, stable. This is what makes sense out of things like Isaiah 54:10, that though the mountains be shaken -- this solid, trustworthy, God-imaging nature, God's covenant of love with me will never be shaken. With me, not just in general. "My love shall never fall away from you, nor my covenant of peace be shaken, says the Lord, who has mercy on you." Immovable stability is not something I have been able to presume upon psychologically. It is something I receive by faith and have come to trust in. 

Next verse was the communion antiphon, which combined Luke 24:46 and 24:26: "The Christ had to suffer and rise from the dead, and so enter into his glory, alleluia." I had been asking the Lord last night, or telling him that I was having a hard time believing that what is happening right now is for my good. This speaks into that. And it also fits with the reflection on the collect. If Christ had not died and been raised, we would still be in our tresspasses and sins (1 Cor. 15:16-17). If he had not died and risen again, we would have no faith in the risen Christ to preach. I would have nothing to say about trust and hope of moving through trauma because release from it would not be a thing. There would be no jewels and gems to gather up; it could only be imaginary effort, only psyching myself out. It is hard to wrap my brain around "the Messiah had to suffer these things." It was prophecied. It was God's plan. It was where the fulcrum located itself, and Jesus as fulcrum and lever moved the impossible thing. Maybe He could have done it differently, but He didn't, for whatever unfathomable reason, something having to do with the human design. Something having to do with Love, with the being-with in suffering that the Incarnation entails, as St. John of the Cross says in the Romances on the Incarnation. So the Christ had to do this to enter into His glory. That is the path. That was the path for Him, so that is the path for me. Or maybe it is because that is the path for me, that was the path for Him. He destroyed death by death. He opened up the path to life for us who lived in the shadow of death. He saw me in my trauma, and entered into trauma to destroy my trauma. To make that lever turn which would have been immovable otherwise. Thus the most holy thing we can do is to encourage someone to faith. To proclaim the wonderful deeds God has done and move someone else to faith so that they too pull the lever on the fulcrum presented before them, God-with-them-in-their-need.

 Two other verses came to mind as I received holy communion. First: 2 Peter 1:19 "Moreover, we possess the prophetic message that is altogether reliable. You will do well to be attentive to it, as to a lamp shining in a dark place, until day dawns and the morning star rises in your hearts" (morning star, an OT reference to the Messiah). This, I believe, was an encouragement to do exactly what I'm doing right now, to sit down and really meditate on these things that struck me. I realize that I have often let things like this slid, thinking "oh, that was nice. yep, I'm sure it's important" but not realizing how much this is exactly what I live on. What I need to survive, more than money, more than food, more than any tangible provision. More than oxytocin. I need to soak in and meditate on these truths, because this is what will give my life the solid foundation that I need and crave. And not just write about it here or think about it for an hour, but come back and review it, open it up and unpack it further. Continue to ask the Lord about it. Continue to reflect on it. And continue to even do the physical fulcrum/lever work to experience this somatically.

Second verse: 1 John 3:2, which I will expand to include verses 1 and 3: "See what love the Father has bestowed on us that we may be called the children of God. Yet so we are. The reason the world does not know us it that it did not know him. Beloved, we are God's children now; what we shall be has not yet been revealed. We do know that when it is revealed, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is. Everyone who has this hope based on him makes himself pure, as he is pure." The kernel that struck is me "what we shall be has not yet been revealed." In other words, God is in the midst of a work. He is the fulcrum, and that lever is in motion. My lever may have been both operating and screaming as of late. I can get funny ideas, like maybe the point of this is to shove my hand into the spot where the lever and fulcrum meet, because the goal is to crush myself to death. Maybe the spinning of the wheel is for me to stick my hand in there and get my fingers amputated. Maybe that's the goal here. (These would be lies, coming from one who loves to kill, steal, and destroy.) But no. What we will be, what this is all about, has not yet been revealed, and that verb tense implies that it will be. The revealing is not my work, it is something I will receive. And whatever it is, the work God is about is his fatherly love. His fatherly love is to make himself known, and as we see him and know him, we become like him. Again with the lever and fulcrum. We do our lever work, attached, properly attached to the fulcrum, and there is this strength of God Himself which is built up in us. As He gives to me, I give back to him with my movement of faith, and so He gives himself more, enabling me to give myself more. It is a beautiful progression of love, one that also recognizes and accepts both my limits and my aspirations. Love is eternal, and I can never outgive God. I am freed from the overgiving I am tempted to do when I see myself just an oar, a thing, disconnected from its mount, its fulcrum. I "give myself fully to the water" -- I drown. I "give myself fully to the wall" -- I'm never in the boat, in my potential. But when I am secure within that which holds me in existence, I am ready for developing that skill, that employment of grace and virtue that moves me along. The oar does not row itself. But the body can move itself, as it is given life from the head. 

Fulcrum and lever. It says everything I need to meditate on right now. 

Trauma-Informed Lent

I'm not trying to be trendy with this title; I'm trying to share my heart. 

For roughly the last nine months, I've been seeing a therapist who has a specialty in trauma work. Why, you say? Well, as I progressed through my Spiritual Direction Formation Program, I realized I had both childhood and adult trauma that I needed help addressing. Now I only wish I had started this process decades ago. It  has been incredibly freeing, like it would be freeing for someone to get rid of sciatica pain, but who had somehow spent so long with it they no longer recognized it wasn't the body's intended function. 

Both trauma and its resolution has impacted a lot in me, but for right now I want to look at how trauma had distorted Lent in my mind for a long time.

St. Paul reminds us that our thoughts are vital to our spiritual life. "Take every thought captive" and make it obedient to Christ (2 Cor. 10:5); "set your mind on things above," (Col. 3:2) and "whatever is true, noble, right, lovely... think upon these things" (Phil. 4:8) are examples written to three different cities' communities of believers. In other words, this was standard in his instruction of how to be a Christian. It does make a presumption, though. It presumes that people had already learned to seperate which thoughts were obedient to Christ, true, good, and from heaven -- from those that came from and led to disobedience, lies, bad, and from hell. 

Experience tells me that we life long Christians can make serious mistakes here. If I think it all the time, it must be true and good. Right? Right? 

Enter trauma to seriously mess with your mind. If the wheat your life long Christianity has mixed with the weeds of childhood trauma, you might just be clinging with all your religious might to things that definitely are not true and good. But they are so familiar, so worn in, so me that, certainly I must be understanding this correctly. After all, I'm a Christian. 

This is why we have the famous saying "anyone who takes himself for his own spiritual director is the disciple of a fool." We need to receive input from others to know ourselves.

I want to share a prayer we hear at daily Mass during Lent to illustrate how we can twist truth around our trauma, and believe we hear God confirming us in our dysfunction. From Preface II for Lent (italics mine):

...For you have given your children a sacred time
for the renewing and purifying of their hearts,
that, freed from disordered affections,
they may so deal with the things of this passing world
as to hold rather to the things that eternally endure.

Now, I have nearly a Master's degree in theology, but I'm telling you that my trauma did not care about that. I also have a BA in English, and I understand words well, but my trauma also did not care about that. My trauma latched on to emotional content, especially anything that struck fear of loss or demand for a certain kind of herculean  moral performance.

Disordered affections? This meant affection, attachment, and human feeling were ultimately bad news, and being a good Christian meant being willing to live without these, ready to rip them out, trample them underfoot. Yes, I know the prayer really means that a good, created thing like affection needs grace to raise it from the natural level (by that purification mentioned above it). But in the past as I prayed this, I baptized the voice of trauma and practiced steeling myself against my own humanity.

Dealing with the things of this passing world? Ok, what passes away. Voice of trauma says: the reliability of others. A sense of safety. A sense of others acknowledging I have intrinsic worth. What things eternally endure? I have to be the responsible one. The buck stops here. Maybe if I hold my breath long enough I will finally be able to escape.

Yeah, no. 

If you would have asked me for an analysis of these prayers in any recent year, I would have been able to theologically parse exactly what they really mean. But deep down, I would have found it hard to believe or connect the explanation to my experience. 

But today when I heard this at Mass, I heard it differently. I heard that the Lenten observance purifies my mind from clinging to lies and fears. I heard that the lost little one within who clung in fear to herself can in fact open more deeply to love and to life. God is love, love is eternal, and Jesus is right here with me all the time! His love fills me, and of course I'm going to love all the things He made; they're His! For me! And all the people He made -- they eternally endure, too. Some are harder to love, because they are curled up, clinging in fear to themselves, too. But just like trauma shapes us, love shapes us, too. It renews and purifies. We deal with the world by loving. So we already live in what eternally endures. Disordered affection means we don't love like Jesus. He puts things right so that we can. His love went to the cross, that place of ultimate shame and pain, taking our sin.

Freedom from disordered affection is when we allow Jesus to meet us right there: in our shame and our pain, and our sin. Jesus has been there the whole time. We are the ones who really can't bear to look up at Him, as long as we are curled up on ourselves. Sometimes tying ourselves down tighter with ropes made from religious words. 

God Himself will set me free from the hunter's snare.
   From those who would trap me with lying words  (Lenten responsory, Morning Prayer)

Yes, I've Changed Parishes

On the morning of the feast of St. Martha (and Mary, and Lazarus), a friend who regularly prays Morning Prayer with our group asked me about my parish status. This became an interior prompt throughout the day (and, ok, it stretched out over a week or so) to finally address the matter of officially changing parish registration. And while I realize that I don't owe anyone an explanation as to why I've done this, for several reasons I think it is worthy of sharing some reflections about this whole thing.

Last September when I began my Spiritual Direction Formation Program with our first in-person intensive, I immediately, and much to my surprise (but totally consonant with the thrust of the program) began to grappling with questions about my identity. I remembered it as arising after meeting the others in my cohort, who are mostly professional people with professional identities. But as I reviewed my journal, I found that this started bubbling up even before I left home. How do I introduce myself? Who am I, and is it based on what I do? This bothered me a lot more than I thought it would. At home, I rarely was in this kind of setting where these things mattered. And before I left the intensive six days later, I found myself telling people "I'm a Church Lady." 

Although I'd been working my way towards that ever since initially becoming a cantor at Holy Family in 2008, since 2017 I had been on turbo boost in this identity. How I got there had its own history, including about six years of formation in community building with a youth/young adult ministry, and my formation as a Secular Carmelite. But at that point I began pouring out with all that was within me, and most of this landed in my parish. By this time last year, I was a serious right hand of my pastor, on parish council, involved up to my shoulders in music ministry, and in fact I was a regular go-to person for any number of parish friends if they either needed to know some detail about what was happening in the parish, or if they needed to connect with the pastor, because they thought I could facilitate that. I also felt interiorly, with alternating senses of self-satisfaction and weight, that when I walked into church, I had a deep responsibility there. 

After I applied for the SDFP, and especially after I came back from that September intensive, I began to notice a small hint of something else. I was weary. My Saturday morning Mass music ministry which I'd carried out since 2013 was starting to feel like I was belly crawling through gravel. This was strange to me, and disconcerting.

Then, as everyone in the parish knows, around Christmas our pastor announced a reorganization of music ministry. Even though it wasn't a complete surprise, it did hit me like a bombshell, and it was something I had to grieve, almost like a death. I say almost, because other factors interior and exterior began developing concurrently, to the point that the first quarter or more of this year was a huge round of reprocessing my entire life and... identity. (And this, concurrent with studying St. Teresa of Avila and the necessity of self-knowledge and humility!)

I think it is important for me to say, for the sake of community life, that I did not leave the parish because I was upset with our pastor. We had lots of open communication about the difficulties involved for both of us, but there was no picking up my marbles and storming off home moment for me. It was much more a moment of hearing "Martha, Martha, you are upset and anxious about many things. Only one thing is needed." I realized that even though my path of discipleship and growth for a season took me through a Martha role of service, now I am being called to something different. It felt like the death of one person, but I know it is really the emergence of a new and deeper identity. 

In the year or two previous to this, I would occasionally take a mini retreat day for myself and go to pray at Blessed Sacrament, where I have just joined. I did this knowing I craved a place I could go for both exterior and interior quiet -- one where I did not feel like I was going to work, and that every glance revealed something that needed to be done. In fact, I had driven to Holy Family so often that my phone identified it as my workplace!

I landed there because the whole choir decided seperately but at the same time to go join Blessed Sacrament's choir. There was no way I could erase from my heart, life, or history the community that I formed by singing together at Holy Family since 2009, even though it is true that we were limping by the time we sang our last for the feast of the Holy Family in 2024. We are now the core of a larger, fluctuating number of singers at BLS, and according to my most severe critic (my daughter) we sing as with one voice, and are actually good. I cantored for my first time there in July, and as I arrived early to set up, I heard two different women whisper loudly to their husbands, "She's going to sing!" That made me chuckle, but it is also interesting that parish communities are fluid enough in this town that I already know a large number of people there, and clearly a lot of people know me from my years of standing in front at Holy Family.

My parish family has always been the closest thing my heart as known as extended family, and so this is not something I chose lightly. I just feel that I'm extending my extended family now, and connecting from a deeper place in my heart. God is good, but the way is weird. Blessed be God forever.

PS: For those who wonder, my husband independently decided that he is going to join the Melkite rite, so he actually removed himself from the Holy Family rolls some time ago. 

You can also still find me every weekday morning at Holy Family praying Morning Prayer. :)

Embodied

"New year, new me" came with a jolt this year. It was as if the Lord woke me at midnight and said: Ok dear, buckle up. We're going for a ride right now, and you are going to need a few things for this trip -- here. 

And we were off, while I was still blinking and not even at the point where I could say I wasn't prepared for this. 

So I have a list of about 11 things that I've been incorporating into my weeks (has it been weeks already?), and one of these is from a website called EmbodiedCatholicWoman.com, called the Heart Safety Toolkit. God bless the Facebook ad that knew I was looking at resolving trauma on a somatic level. Sometimes intrusive marketing is helpful. 

At several turns in my adult life, people have told me that I need to get in touch with my feelings. My response was generally a raised eyebrow and an "ok..." because honestly I knew I had feelings. I felt them all the time, often to an overwhelming degree. I couldn't deny that I'm of an intellectual bent. Most of me shrugged off this entreaty, while the rest of me squirmed a bit, wondering if I'm just not really woman enough. 

Honestly, I had no idea how to do get into this "touch" they talked about. No one ever explained it to me. And though I am deeply intuitive, sometimes I need things spelled out super clearly before I get it, because I just don't have the ability to leap into whatever assumption the speaker is making.

Claudine at Embodied Catholic Woman spells it out, scientifically. Essentially, our bodies can go into different "gears" in response to trauma or chronic stress. These gears hang between our psychology and our physical bodies, and the effects go both ways. The key to resolving what trauma triggers is to become observers of thoughts, feelings, sensations that happen inside our bodies, and do certain physical things that can reset us over time physically and psychologically, to be better able to navigate the challenges that life brings. When we don't reset but stay in a gear where we are either unable to deal, or are hyper-dealing, we are left less and less capable of that kind of navigation, and we instead develop all kinds of unhealthy coping mechanisms, and we become knotty, and maybe even sick, people. 

So it hasn't been so much that I have needed to become more emotional as it is I have needed to become more embodied. By that, I mean to observe: this is what I feel happening in my body right now and eventually move to this is what I can do in response. In the past it was more like I feel x; I am x and it was as if there was no escape. So I would just avoid feeling x, by force, if necessary. Like that link I shared above about the "threat" of the women's Bible study at church. The only solution I could come up with was to guilt myself into not feeling what I felt. Or, one better, to accept, with some sadness, the way I am. What these somatic exercises have taught me (and the Lord, throwing this at me as we left on this trip) is that there's a stopping point between what I feel and who I am. And I can go there and actually accept what I feel into the fuller picture of who God made me. What a concept. I'm 57 years old, but it's better late than never to figure this out. 

This need became screamingly evident as I sat writing an email to a friend one evening, quite in a panic. I put my head in my hands and said out loud, "I'm becoming my father." What I heard was someone in a high state of anxiety, doing the social equivalent of desperately reaching for numbing alcohol to erase the pain, instead of taking courage to face it. (I'm currently reading The Shining as an exploration of the psyche of the dry drunk; more on that after I finish it, maybe.) This state of mind was, frankly, modeled to me by the adults in my life throughout my childhood, and had come to be somewhat emotionally normal for me, though I had not experienced it myself in decades. That was the moment I realized I needed what I was about to find in Claudine a few days later. 

Ok, so none of this was what I came here to even write about, but there we have it. Between Claudine and Manuela Mitevova and her somatic practices I am learning how to be whole. Now we give it time, work, and continued prayer.

Confessions of a Closet Gnostic

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

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

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

And I think I am still a recovering gnostic. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He is, however, incredibly patient with me. 

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

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

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

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

The Lord's voice flashes flames of fire.

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

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

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

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

Hiking, Love, and Transformation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And then there's today. 

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

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

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

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

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

Ponderings from Dear Master, Part Two

Fortunately I marked for myself the second piece that struck me as I was reading Ponderings from Dear Master, which I had intended to write about. I'm forgetful that way. In fact, one of my primary purposes for writing is to be sure that I return to things that I know I have more to glean from, like marking an unmined vein of gold. 

Here is the line, from page 15 of Susa Muto's book:

My faults were at war with God's faith in me, but God was the victor on this battlefield. His perfect virtues gained the upper hand over my imperfections.

This quote captures something simple but central to my experience. 

In January, I tried to write about the moment I had a revelation about this phrase: "[m]y faults were at war with God's faith in me." With God's faith in me.  Here's what I wrote then: 

You know that plastic thing that holds a turkey's legs together? (I had to Google it; apparently it is called a hock lock.) I feel like I had one of those taken off me. But instead of locking poultry legs, this thing held something in me to a way I -- or it -- wanted God to be, that He just isn't. A way I unconsciously was tempted to believe God is, and which subsequently kicked up a fight within me. What I could not see was it was the Holy Spirit fighting to get me out of the lock, and so I put up immense resistence. I was partnering with the wrong side of the struggle. 

My faults were at war with God's faith in me. 

Galatians chapter 3 says this:

Now before faith came, we were confined under the law, kept under restraint until faith should be revealed. So that the law was our custodian until Christ came, that we might be justified by faith. But now that faith has come, we are no longer under a custodian; for in Christ Jesus you are all sons of God, through faith. (Gal. 3:23-26, RSV-SCE)

 What Paul was saying about the point in salvation history when the Jesus entered it seems also to have application to the path of spiritual development. Maybe a better way of putting that is that we go through stages of purification of our interiority after baptism; it doesn't all happen at once. That's actually the whole basis of purgatory and of "growth" in the spiritual life. God has a schedule, and our job in partnering with Him is to continue to say yes, intelligently, to His designs for our transformation. And the "intelligently" part requires that we have accurate information about who God is and what He wants. His goal is that we become partakers in the divine nature (2 Peter 1:4). He is our loving Father (Mt. 6:9). We can need decades of meditation on these truths before they break through into our experience of them with God Himself. Or, He can communicate them to us in an instant, or by any combination of means. 

"Faith" in an incorrect understanding of God clearly is never going to be born of and fueled by the Holy Spirit. I will always be "trying to believe." Say for example that underneath my formal training in catechism, I hold a rather primal belief that God is secretly disappointed that I'm a human woman with physical senses, intellect, and desires. Say further that my religious training left me linking that which is intrinsically human with that which is intrinsically evil. What I'm left with, as an adult, then is that at best, God tolerates me, even though I'm bombarded with homilies about God's love for me. I will be "trying to behave" according to standards of a God who finds my humanity rather disgusting, all the while I'm "trying to believe" that He actually loves me. Or, maybe I will completely buy that God does hate transgressors and they deserve fierce condemnation. They'll just always be someone who's not me, because if I can prop myself up to look better than some vile sinner, that will help me "try to believe" in my faith.

The Holy Spirit will always and only lead us to embrace the truth. The more deeply we are able to tell Him, "I don't care what the truth is or what it costs; I want You" then the easier time He will have in leading us. 

False beliefs, lies about the image of God or His will for us, can in fact twine themselves so closely around good things that we cannot see them. We simply cannot save ourselves. We will have blind spots. Such a blind spot I encountered in January.

And I found that I was fighting against God's faith in me. Wow. That almost sounds audacious. I was trying to believe that needed me to be restrained, like by law, like a criminal in handcuffs, like a woman in a burqa, like the toughest Bill Gothard devotee. This was all humming at a level far below my conscious thought. But when I had the experience of going to confession, and then coming across that one line in the Catechism as directed by my penace, I encountered the living power of God. BAM! "God does not want to impose the good, but wants free beings."

In other words, faith has come. You are a son [daughter] of God by faith in Christ Jesus. To the core. Or at least to the deeper core than yesterday. 

The battle was what I was trying to do because I believed it was my Christian duty, my Christian battle even, vs what the Holy Spirit wanted for me. 

And as I intuited then, that exchange has brought tremendous peace, happiness, stability, certainty, and freedom to my heart. And has stripped away so much overgrowth of "should," or self-imposed obligation, that I didn't even realize I had. 

I remember writing to a friend in the 80s that my life on the outside always looks about the same, but inside, my life is like a three ring circus. I've realized that is because God calls me to be a contemplative, and He's been wrecking and building and renovating and designing in me for years. It is actually an exciting, adventurous life. 

Traveling Retreat

I just returned from just under a week of travel, so it's time to unpack. My suitcases were emptied yesterday, but this unpacking is for the interior experience.

This trip really wasn't supposed to be a retreat, in the sense that a retreat is a thing you go to with others who are seeking God, and you listen to conferences and process the information you hear. To be honest, several of the formal retreats I've been on in the last several years have felt more frustrating than fruitful. Like I was always waiting for something to happen, trying to engage my interiority but not finding the connecting point in my changed surroundings, or talks, etc. On this recent trip I did in fact have that occasion to go to another place interiorly as well as exteriorly. And I was able to spend most of one day at the Shrine of Mary Help of Christians, better known as Holy Hill, the Carmelite basilica and the heart of my Carmelite Province. 

I had a mixture of facing anxiety and nostalgia. And for once, these met and gave me a practical take-away. I realized that I cannot always take away my anxiety or grow away from it by myself. Really, the thought that I can or should is a cause for anxiety in and of itself. The realization that Mary is the Help of Christians, and therefore my help, too, is a relief. We disciples of the Lord are here to help each other. And Mary can steer me in such a way that suddenly the grace of the Lord is close at hand. Because she knows how to take my hand and draw me through the crowding thoughts in my mind and make it all seem easy.

I realize that God has my needs at heart, and He wants me to have His needs at heart. Anxiety clogs that with so many other things, taking up so many other jobs, pressures, concerns, frustations, imaginary scenarios, etc etc... I am faced regularly with things I can't control, and I can believe that because I am not in control, that horrible things are going to happen. Case in point: yesterday, the Mass I attended got a late start because they were waiting on a pilgrim bus at the shrine. I had picked that location because it was going to be feasible for me to reach home before the post office would close for the day, and I had books to ship. I noticed the moment I was in, and instead of frothing over with frustration, I entrusted my need to the Lord and offered the difficulty for the spiritual good of all those present. It was a little bit of a battle, but I realized that right there was The Point of why I pray for growth in virtue. It all turned out fine, and I was at the post office with time to spare. It made me see how entrusting my needs to the Lord keeps me free to focus on the needs of the people around me instead of on myself, and keeps me from adding to the misery in the world by my attitude, grumbling, harsh words, rage, etc.

God is working on freeing my heart for the bigger picture of life, too. In my parish, I am like a big fish in a very little fishbowl. The fishbowl is to a great degree being created by my own attitude, but I realize it isn't healthy for me or anyone. An attitude adjustment is in order, giving me more room to breathe, and allowing my environment also to change without internalizing some kind of threat from it all. Growth and change are both necessary and inevitable, and God is called a gardener for good reason. I'll let Him carry on with general management of my universe. 

I also spent a good chunk of one day with my Mom's cousin Jane. Jane's parents were both deaf, and she spent a good deal of her life interpreting for them whenever there was a family function, since none of the extended family learned ASL. I recognized from my youngest days that there was a totally different way of communication in her family than, say, with my grandparents, aunt and uncle, and my Mom. They were outgoing and made great efforts to communicate with everyone. Spending the afternoon with Jane and her husband this time made me realize how much they are both story-tellers. They love to share details, and love to hear details, but not in the way I have experienced with some people. They do not tell stories to wall themselves off or to cling to the chance to be heard or exit isolation. They speak to build community. I happened to see a thing on Facebook right after I spent time with them, and it hit the nail on the head. Of course I cannot find it now, but I believe it was a quote from Henri Nouwen that talked about speaking to build relationships, to form community, to welcome others. Like laying down a path from the heart and then encouraging, asking questions, showing interest, that welcomes the conversation partners to do the same. It's like verbal hospitality. Boundaries kept and respect shown, but openness that creates a place for peace, like seats around a campfire. I want to grow in doing this myself. It was lovely.

I decided I never want to live in a big city again. I also love summer nights and summer mornings, and daylight in general. Streets where I live are unbelievably narrow. When did it become socially acceptable for an employee to use the phrase "f***ing stupid" with a customer as a way of commiserating? Travel is good for the soul. Solitude is like oxygen to me. Quiet country roads are so beautiful. I treat my dead ancestors like stars in one of my favorite dramas, and it is enjoyable to me to visit where they are buried and learn details about their lives that even they themselves probably found boring. Rushing is a symptom of anxiety. 

These things and more I have thought.

And now, to live accordingly. 

PS: The photo shows an open field which used to hold the old apartment house where I lived for five years, and the building in which I worked from 1989-1990. 19th and Wisconsin, in Milwaukee.

Joy Comes in the Morning

This morning as I enter into prayer, I find a strange gratitude welling up inside of me. Gratitude in general is unusual enough for me. But I review scenes of my past and find them a wellspring of gratitude that I wasn't expecting.

Let me be clear. I'm not grateful that these things happened. Bad things happen to everyone, and God is not some ogre who gets his jollies from this. 

When bad things happen, I at least (and I'm guessing this is rather true of everyone) become an expert wall builder. I don't want to feel the bad thing, so I wall it off. I snip the nerves that connect me to the experience. When you lay on your arm or leg and it goes numb, it feels heavy and useless, but it doesn't really hurt. It is after you free it that it starts to hurt. So a common and maybe subconscious reaction to emotional pain is to numb it, one way or the other. I have always done this with my mind. Some people do this with addictions. It's all the same mechanism, I think.

So part of the wonder is that all of this is now out of anesthesia. What was master is becoming servant.

I can trace through a whole list:
My father's mental illness and alcoholism, apparently in full swing already when I was born. His absence, in turn with my parents' fighting. My parents' divorce and my mother's stress and an utterly tumultuous relationship with my dad (for all of us). Feeling like a piece of furniture in a house rather than a member of a family. Gut-wrenching desperation and fear over chronic singleness, concurrent with toxic and sometimes abusive relationships with men who proverbially had red flags tattooed all over their faces. Anger and desperation over infertility. Spiritual confusion all along the way over what God's love actually is and layers upon layers of deception that I embraced. And the terror of trusting through actually being healed.

I am not grateful that a single bit of that happened. Except that last word, of course.

I am grateful to realize that God, by His Spirit, was closer to me than I to myself, through all of that. He never abandoned me. He never gave up on me. He never lost patience with me. 

Why didn't He stop it all? In answer to that, I'll invite you to watch Season 4 of The Chosen. In this world, things are unleashed. It's the way things are. Jesus did not come to stop the bad things; He came to go through them with us. He gave me the dose of grace I could handle, and infinitely more than I deserved as I consistently rejected and resisted His efforts to draw me closer sooner.

The end, the telos, of humankind is not a happy life on earth. We are made for something much more profound than that. We are made for union with God, forever in eternity, and with eternity starting now and entered into now. And as I see my past and see Jesus with me (which I absolutely, totally and completely, could never see in real time) I see the capacity I have within me now to receive the life of God into me. If I'm a thimble, God will fill me and I'll be a full thimble. If I'm a bowl, God will fill me and I'll be a full bowl. Swimming pool, crater, canyon. We don't have to make hollowing ourselves out a project; life does that. God will always, always, pour out Himself more abundantly than we can hold, because His love is always beyond our power to hold. Our work is to receive from Him and believe what He says.

And I know that whatever may come, this is the reality. I don't like pain and suffering. But I also don't have to fear it or dread it. Because God is faithful. 

Weeping may endure for a night, but joy comes in the morning. (Psalm 30:5)

My Body Will Rest in Safety

I've pretty much always had a social circle of people older than I am. One such friend mentioned his uncomfortable awareness that everyone's chatter now gravitates towards aches and pains and doctor visits. It makes sense. Pain makes us vulnerable and we need to know we aren't alone with our fears of losing ourselves. 

When I briefly cared for my Mom while she was dying in hospice, I made a mental note to change my relationship with my body. I had always softly scoffed at the idea of going to the gym and doing exercises. My farmwoman epigenetics sang a distant song, to the tune that the goal was the work hard rather than sectioning off body movement away from normal daily activities. Eventually I had to admit that I was not chopping wood, plowing fields or drawing water from wells on any regular basis, and I was, in fact, a cushy modern. Through trial and error (and a lot of back pain) I figured out which kind of exercises I needed, and I've gradually worked towards actually doing them. 

Lately I've been doing a program called Hips Like Honey which focuses on strength and flexibility. It doesn't do much for cardio stamina, but even though it is rather gentle, it has really done its job. I love the feeling of waking up in the morning and doing that huge reach across to the other side of the bed to turn off my alarm, and lay down again, and not only not throw my back out, but to feel solid. 

So today I had my monthly chiropractic visit. I am still actively learning to stop tensing my body all the time, and the doc was showing me an exercise to help me out with that. The moment gave me something to ponder. Essentially he said that the tension in my sacrum comes from my back muscles trying to do the work that my core muscles are designed to handle. It's like two siblings going around together, and the loud, overbearing one is always doing all the talking, leaving the quiet, reserved one unskilled in initiating and carrying out a conversation. The overbearing one is tired and overused, and the quiet one needs focused, gentle attention. As he showed me the exercise, I realized, I don't do gentle very well. Farmwoman is out there, hoisting bales of hay overhead and throwing them. I need to find my interior delicate crystal goblet, or.... something like that. I guess when I find it I'll know what it is.

Something significant happened last month, and it is still settling in. Speaking of tension, lately I feel my mouth relaxing in just an incredibly unusual way. In my experience, I feel tension only after letting go of it, and my jaw and my teeth are apparently not clenched anymore. The other amazing thing is that as I read Scripture, or pray it, or hear it read, I feel like it is all about joy, peace, and God's incredible goodness. And safety. And rest. 

If there's a way to tie together these rambly thoughts, maybe it is this realization. Somewhere in my soul, a pre-verbal baby Marie has, for more than five decades, beheld a fear: that joy, and peace, and safety, and rest, and love, and important people, all disappear. And that little girl is powerless to stop it. Using all my might, and tensing myself silly isn't going to stop it. Like aging, like dying, it's a point of incredible vulnerability. But into that moment of vulnerability, someone has come. And He is Love. And Love is eternal. And I realized I will never lose Him. And more than that, every day I live in Him, I will never lose, either. Part of how I do that is I share my woes with others, and they share theirs with me, and the Lord is there (Mal. 3:16). We live our lives together, and even though we grow weak and die, this is where we find joy.

And in the meantime, the exercises that remind me that I'm weak -- I'll do those. Maybe I'll even become friends with gentle and vulnerable and make a soft nook for Farmwoman to rest in. 

Snipping off the Hock Lock

Something happened this week that I can't describe. But I have a feeling I will look back on this as a deeply significant moment. 

Words escape me, so of course I come to try to write about it (lol). I think words fail me because the grace I met hit in a pre-verbal place in my soul. But I am curious, by way of pursuing integration, to see if I can in fact build a word bridge to help me grasp more of what happened (rather than obscure it with a lot of cerebralizing).

I also stop and ask myself why I write these things about my interior life. Sure, my premise for this blog is that I write to understand. Fine. I don't have to publish it all, though. (Here's a secret -- I write more than I publish.) The Constitutions of the Secular Carmelites say we are "witnesses to the experience of God." Specifically it says this:

...The Secular Carmleites are called to strive to make prayer penetrate their whole existence, in order to walk in the presence of the living God (cf. 1 Kings 18:14), through the constant exercise of faith, hope and love, in such a way that the whole of their life is a prayer, a search for union with God. The goal will be to achieve the integration of experience of God with the experience of life: to be contemplatives in prayer and the fulfillment of their own mission.

So, I don't write about my interior life, bearing witness to the experience of God, because I am a Carmelite. I'm a Carmelite because I bear witness to the experience of God. This is how I know I am in the right place in my life and in the Church. This is how I fit, how I belong. This feels quite validating.

So, what happened this week? I wish I could tell a narrative, but instead I need to do kind of what the blind man in John 9 did. ("All I know is, I was blind, and now I see.") You know that plastic thing that holds a turkey's legs together? (I had to Google it; apparently it is called a hock lock.) I feel like I had one of those taken off me. But instead of locking poultry legs, this thing held something in me to a way I -- or it -- wanted God to be, that He just isn't. A way I unconsciously was tempted to believe God is, and which subsequently kicked up a fight within me. What I could not see was it was the Holy Spirit fighting to get me out of the lock, and so I put up immense resistence. I was partnering with the wrong side of the struggle. 

At one point I went to early morning confession, not under any feeling of constraint or even the slightest angst. I had learned a lesson again recently that confession gives grace that helps, and I was looking for help. Did the confession; again, no bells or whistles. Received my penance, which was to meditatively pray one Our Father, and ask the Lord to show me which petition of it He wanted to show me something from. Again, the answer was clear, but no peals of thunder or choirs of angels singing. A bit later, I looked up the said petition in the Catechism, and, among other things, read this:

God does not want to impose the good, but wants free beings.

And I think right there, God took His cable cutter and snipped off that hock lock. 

Yeah, that pretty well sums it up.

And now I'm back to not having words, because it is just such a flood of peace. I didn't until now actually see how much drama I have carried around inside of me all my life, and occasionally sprayed others with. (Mea culpa.) I am sure this is at the heart of a lot of my habitual stress and tension, trying too hard, my proverbial driving with one foot on the gas and one foot on the brake at the same time. 

But, like a plant that rehydrates at the rate the roots can handle, I want to just be with this. I know that my "integration of the experience of God with the experience of life" is not just about me. I know this has affected my relationships, and that integration means receiving  deeply so that I may give what God has given me, just from the sheer joyful overflow of new habits. 

We are made up of so many layers and facets, and God really does want to take every one of them up into Himself and fill us with His glory. He does really want us to be resplendent with life. I used to find it a little depressing that I had so much need for healing, as if I was infinitely broken. But I think it is that God is infinite love, and He will continue to transform us and fill us more and more for as long as we live. We are made for union with God. There is literally no end to the love we can receive from Him. 

St. Ivo

 I don't even remember how long I've been claiming a patron saint every year, on the Saturday before the first Sunday of Advent, but it has been a good long time. I use Jen Fulweiler's Random Saint Generator. The nature of a saint is that we all have something to learn from them, something to gain from them in terms of the riches of God's love. But there have been many, many times when either immediately or as the year went on, my random saint's involvement in my life proved very fitting and helpful. A few times, they were people who left writings. Usually it was something about their lives that I reflected on, or that frankly came to do a jump-scare on me. 

This year my selected saint is St. Ivo of Kermartin. I had never heard of him, but a perusal of his biography has me just a bit up in my feels, as they say. 

Patronage: Abandoned People; Advocates; Attorneys; Bailiffs; Barristers; Canon Lawyers; Judges; Jurists; Notaries; Orphans. That's what came up on Jen's site.

Lately my prayer, formed by listening to the fourth pillar of the Catechism in the Catechism in a Year podcast, formed by a lesson in Becoming Who I am, formed by a blink-and-refocus look at my Carmelite vocation -- all these point me to my need to be authentic, real, raw with God. To try to do something else is futile and a waste of my life, and to be otherwise through laziness is reason to throw open the windows as I carreen down the highway of life and let in the blast of cold wintery air that sets me right again. 

This entails being honest with myself first about my felt needs. 

And I have felt such a need for an advocate. It's hard to put into words. There's a psalm that says, "Though I constantly take my life in my hands..," or another translation says, "Though I constantly put my life at risk.." My feeling of what an advocate does (or THE Advocate, the Holy Spirit) is to take my life in His hands. The Advocate knows me, knows all the ins and outs, understands it all, and is for me, to plead my case against the Adversary who comes to try to ruin my life with his claims. When I just let that scene sink in, I let out a huge sigh. The weight of things falls off. Without a doubt, I can trust the Holy Spirit. But so often I act like I have to defend myself against Him. It really is more like I need to humble myself before Him. 

Parts of me can relate to feeling like an abandoned child. If not because of actual life events, definitely because I abandon my own self regularly. I recognize in me the anxiety that makes it hard to relax, hard to enjoy things. It's an imbalanced overvaluing of my work and an impoverished eye toward the granduer, majesty, and love of God that actually holds me in life and, in fact, shows a feeling of having been abandoned as the utter lie that it is. 

My sense is that St. Ivo would say to me, "Nope, you aren't abandoned, and you don't have to do everything for yourself. Let me remind you to how the Holy Spirit actually operates for you."

Cleaning, Anxiety, and Magical Thinking

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Real-time photo of my "office"

Good Morning, and Welcome to my Anxiety

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Seven Sorrows Prayer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Amen.