Sorrow is Not Lord

If I am to take in the lessons of the Seven Sorrows that I have been learning lately, here's the main thing: I need to hold both the reality of the sorrow and the goodness of God. Hold both, together. I picture this like holding one reality in each hand.

Interiorly, though I think I've done this, I have given sorrow the first place, keeping it the most visible, as if the goodness of God as a reality has to be covered over or buried a bit. But sorrow is not Lord. I think this is the crux of Christian life. Sorrow is not Lord. 

I can't drum up -- in any kind of healthy way -- chipperness that allows me to bear (or ignore) sorrows. Something in my soul will give way, break, die, become deformed, become false when I do that. And I can't stuff the void sorrow creates with religious platitudes or mere observance. No, the antidote is not with me drumming up, putting forth effort, trying hard enough, to make sorrow dissipate, either in my own heart or in the world at large. Isn't this why people get either so angry or frustrated or overwhelmed or resort to escapism or addiction in the face of so much pain in the world? How do you cope with it all?

Christians say the answer is Emmanuel. Jesus Christ has shown His face on earth.

But how does that historical fact turn into access to something that makes a change in me? I'm baptized, I receive sacraments, I'm part of the community of the Church.... But I can still be this person who is proclaiming that Sorrow is Lord, and religious practices can feel empty. How do I move forward?

Here's the good news: The Lord knows my heart so much better than I do. The key is to go into that secret place (my heart), because the Lord is there, waiting for me. Our own hearts can be intimidating: deep, interior, cavernous places. What fears, hopes, desires -- sorrows -- are there? Does it make any sense that the path to regime change (Sorrow is Lord to Jesus is Lord) happens by way of stepping back into sorrow's territory again? Won't I just get sucked in to be its slave again?

Ah, but right there is the lie. The truth is, child of God, that the King of Love resides there. He waits for you there, eagerly. Sorrow as Lord has been trying to starve you off of the love and glory that is yours by right of your rebirth. 

Jesus is a man of sorrows, aquainted with bitterest grief. He knows this territory. He's lived it. He's not afraid of it. He's faced it, felt it, endured it, was killed by it, and then conquered it by getting up again, as it simply not possible by nature alone. And what it means to be baptized is that He has united you to Himself in that supernatural resurrection power. This absolutely does not mean that we will escape suffering. No. It is the human condition: Everyone Suffers. It means that when we suffer, not if, we have access to the same "juice" flowing through us. Grace: the very life of God. This is precisely how we share in His glory. We stand in the very real sorrows, we allow them to touch us (that is, we don't bolt and run, but neither do we chain ourselves to every sorrow that presents itself) and we turn to Jesus with our wills, with our interior selves. Where His love is. We pour out the sorrow to His loving heart, and we draw into ourselves the life He pours out to us in return. This exchange forms a bond of love, and as many times as we do this, with as many sorrows as we remember from the past or live through in the present, His love opens up a highway to flow through us. As St. Elizabeth of the Trinity says, we become His "supplemental humanity" through which He lives His life here, on earth. His love that conquers death flows through us into the world. This is prayer.

And in the process, yes, we continue to know sorrow, but we learn not to camp there. The hope of glory -- this marvelous exchange of our sorrow for His power -- enables us to keep moving forward, and to daily dethrone Sorrow as Lord, and to pledge our allegiance to the Good God.

Sadness, and Love

Photo by Jan Axelson
Cherokee Marsh, Madison, WI

Yesterday, we buried our pastor. There is still a tinge of the surreal to it for me. I'd really only known him for fifteen years, but I am a completely different person today than I was fifteen years ago. And so much of that change happened in the context of the community which he lead. It's going to take awhile for me to wrap my mind and heart around the new day that it is. 

The last two weeks were intense. They were intense on a social level, because my parish community has been grieving together. Our daily Mass community has been grieving together. Several people randomly spoke to me or got in touch with me to tell me their experiences, and several of us who see each other more often were able to check in with each other, sometimes several times a day as we gathered for our prayer vigil. It struck me how several years ago I would have thought it stupid to ask a grieving person "How are you doing?" because I knew how they were doing -- they were sad. But that was the old me, the person who stood outside, away from my emotions, and observed other people -- with significant awkward discomfort -- experiencing their emotions. Hoping they wouldn't splash up on me. Because I would look at them like they were rocks. Or rather, like I was a rock.

But there was none of that for me in these two weeks. My parish is my family. I was going to say it is more a family than my extended family has ever been, but really, it is just my family. I'm realizing as I write that the only reason I can feel that word at all is because of my parish. I mean, yes, it's because of the grace of God. But the grace of God doesn't come wafting down invisibly as I sit cross-legged and vocalize in an empty room with my eyes closed. It comes through the Incarnation, extended in time and space: the Church. And the Church comes to us through our local parish.

So even though I have been sad, the sadness I feel shows me the measure of the love that is normal to me. Without love, sadness becomes depression, despair, hopelessness. Been there, done that. So one thing these intense weeks have been is a surprise inspection of my heart. 

Before all this developed, my primary meditation had been revolving around the Seven Sorrows rosary. This theme came up for me: Do not camp in your sorrow. Now I see this is a coin, and on the other side it says: Do not run from your sorrow. Be with it. Right now there seems incredible peace and wisdom in this, and I see that it means that my life really is not my own. I was bought with the precious blood of Jesus Christ (1 Pet. 1:9), and God lives in me. And He is Lord. So when sorrow comes, be with it. When joy comes, be with it. Our Bishop's homily at the funeral made this statement: "Jesus instructs us that to be credible Christians is to have and to express human emotion, not taking a stoic stance." Old me really wasn't a credible Christian, for this reason. I was so stuck, emotionally. Despair and hopelessness froze me. I did not know myself held by one stronger than myself, free to feel things that passed. Free. 

To be free, one has to know oneself to be loved. And more than I ever have before, I do.

I am Sad

Yesterday, I told a friend, "If grief comes in waves, my waters are pretty choppy right now." 

On Saturday evening, the pastor of my parish passed away after just over a week in hospice care. He had been battling health problems for just about 18 months, but eschewed retirement (though he came of age to do so) and every report he gave on his health condition was that he was feeling better all the time. The last time he was present at church for the after-morning-Mass coffee gatherings [about a month ago] he was famous for having started, he was telling stories and passing on information in such an oddly intentional way that I commented to my daughter on the way home, "He was telling stories like someone who knows he is going to die." 

After he went into hospice I was compelled to organize a week-long prayer vigil. First, it struck me that when he was ordained a deacon, he made a promise to pray the Liturgy of the Hours daily. If he was no longer able to pray the hours, I wanted the parish family to be able to pray the hours "for" him. I've been told we've always been a bit of a pastor's dream parish, because there are lots of people in place to take care of many aspects of parish life, freeing the pastor for his actual ministry (instead of maintenance and such). There's a lot I can't do, but as a Carmelite, at least I can pray, and lead people in chanting. 

Also, I realized that sometimes people need to physically move their bodies into church and produce words with other people, in order to process difficult news. When my mother died and my sister did not hold a funeral until six weeks later, it was extremely hard for me to not have anyone to gather with. 

Another also, last week meshed with a very free week for me at home since I was home alone (or far more alone than usual) most of the time. And while I knew the schedule would get a little intense, I need things to be a little intense in order for me to match the intensity going on inside me emotionally.

And still when I got the phone call, and in the hours that have followed, I'm bouncing from disbelief, shock, tears, joy, gratitude, anger, more tears, and, well, blogging.

What I realized throughout the week is that it is one thing to lose a person you love. It is another thing to lose a person you love who has been with you at and through your life's most difficult moments and most joyful moments. Because there is not only the sadness of losing their presence, their very felt presence. There is also the re-opening of both the gratitude and the entire drama of pretty much everything you've ever felt deeply in their company.

Maybe that's obvious to some, but I think this is the first time in my life for such an experience.

There's more to say on this in connection with my Seven Sorrows rosary journey, but I'll save that for later.

St. Joseph and the Desperation for Consolation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Disturbing Feast Day

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Anawim of Advent: Infertility

I remembered it this morning during Mass.

"If you struggle with infertility and are already depressed, it's not a good idea to go to daily Mass the week before Christmas."

We discussed it in my infertility support group back in the day. Because, for several days, the Scriptures tell several stories of women who were infertile, and then got pregnant and had babies who grew up to be someone significant in salvation history.

And no one who is infertile and depressed about it so close to Christmas wants to hear yet another story about a baby.

My days of anguish are years behind me, ever since the positive pregnancy test I had in 2004. My daughter will be 12 next year. She was born the day after we finalized our son's adoption (when he was 3 1/2).

And I hear all those stories differently now, too. The problem is, we all need to learn to feel the anguish in them. What flies by in a few moments' reading needs to be something that hits us all in the gut.

An angel of the LORD appeared to the woman and said to her,

“Though you are barren and have had no children,yet you will conceive and bear a son. The woman went and told her husband,“A man of God came to me;he had the appearance of an angel of God, terrible indeed. I did not ask him where he came from, nor did he tell me his name. But he said to me,‘You will be with child and will bear a son.  (Judges 13)

Both were righteous in the eyes of God,observing all the commandmentsand ordinances of the Lord blamelessly. But they had no child, because Elizabeth was barrenand both were advanced in years. 
 “Do not be afraid, Zechariah,because your prayer has been heard. Your wife Elizabeth will bear you a son,and you shall name him John. And you will have joy and gladness,and many will rejoice at his birth,for he will be great in the sight of the Lord. 
“How shall I know this? For I am an old man, and my wife is advanced in years.” And the angel said to him in reply,“I am Gabriel, who stand before God.I was sent to speak to you and to announce to you this good news. But now you will be speechless and unable to talkuntil the day these things take place,because you did not believe my words,which will be fulfilled at their proper time.”

After this time his wife Elizabeth conceived,
and she went into seclusion for five months, saying,
“So has the Lord done for me at a time when he has seen fit
to take away my disgrace before others.” (Luke 1)

There is an awe, a fear, that descends upon the wife of Manoah, whose name we are not told. Zechariah, on the other hand, has grown old with the pain of barrenness, and the pain has gotten so crusty that he no longer has power to believe. His long pain needed a long rehabilitation -- even longer than Elizabeth's confinement. During that time, his fear of hoping is replaced by joyful faith, magnified in silence.

Longing for a child that cannot be conceived is the strange ache, not of a loss, but of something that has never been. It is a form of anguish, a sense of impotence, of deep inability, of powerlessness. In biblical times, if not now, it was the worst of social shames. One does not belong; one has no people, no future. The fact that God is "the Lord and giver of life" is of deep, distressing consternation. It seems one also has no standing with God.

And yet from the outside, no one can see this anguish. One carries on through a private, intimate humiliation, disappointment, and grief.

Spiritually, this is a place of incredible value, and it is the path along which God brought Israel, making it the anawim, "the poor who depend on the Lord for deliverance."

It is very difficult, especially for powerful, modern Americans, to be in the position of the anawim. It is painful. And like it did to Zechariah, the pain can make one crusty and quick to doubt.

To be brought to this place, and to cry out for strength and to cling in trust to God who is Good, is a priceless gift. We need to help others who are in this situation to persevere in hope and faith, not for the deliverance of their choice, but for their choice of Deliverer.

The message of Advent is: Our God will come and will not delay. He is the Deliverer.

Lord, grant us the grace to open our hearts and to receive You as You are.

Do Pregnancy Complaints Rip Your Heart Out?

I have written at length in the past about the unspoken pain many women carry due to infertility. I lived there for five years. Women who are in the grips of such pain rarely speak out about it, except perhaps to others they know who have experienced the same pain and therefore can understand. It can be an all-consuming pain, and all-consuming pains are very difficult to speak about at all, let alone objectively, to try to explain it to someone to whom it is foreign.

But the other day I startled myself a little by finding myself in a 180° situation while being party to a conversation about a certain pregnancy. In that moment I pictured right where I had been, in the Children's department of the library, with my toddler foster son. It was some "bring your kids to play and learn" gathering, and it was the two of us with two other women and their children. One of the women was pregnant. And she was complaining.

At the time I had never experienced pregnancy, and I wanted to with all my heart. Anyone who complained about giving life was branded in my book as an ungrateful, selfish lout.

So a decade later, seeing the scene in my mind, I was startled to realize I've learned a few things since then. I thought I should write a blog post to the misery-gripped infertile woman I was back then. And, to anyone else it might help.

You hear her say: "I've already gained so much weight."
What it hurts her too much to say: I've always felt so ugly. God, I hate myself.

You hear her say: "I'm gonna make my husband pay for doing this to me!"
What it hurts her too much to say: The last time I was pregnant he started going to a prostitute. He doesn't know I know, and I'm too devastated to bring it up.

You hear her say: "What am I gonna do with another baby?"
What it hurts her too much to say: Why should a horrible woman like me, that no one could really love, bring an innocent child into this world? I'll miss her up too badly.

You hear her say: "Ugh! All those doctor appointments."
What it hurts her too much to say: My last child miscarried/was stillborn/had a serious birth defect/was sick and I'm terrified it will happen again.

You hear her say: "I can't stand feeling sick!"
What it hurts her too much to say: I'm getting pressure to abort this baby, too.

My dear infertile sister, the next time you cringe or rage at the complaints of a woman about her pregnancy, consider that she, too, might just know pain that is too profound for her to face and to put into honest words. Yes, her words hurt and wound you. Just remember the maxim that hurting people hurt people. When you hear it, open your heart, even silently, and offer her your love. Ask God to offer His love to her through you. And guess what? When you do that, you do the maternal thing.

You exercise spiritual maternity.

Thoughts on Responding to Suffering

Sitting down to the keyboard to see if I can't sort through some thoughts.

I'm thinking about how I respond to the suffering of friends, particularly suffering that gets verbalized in conversation. I suppose my primary response is to listen. I do this because I tend to be a quieter person, and because I find consolation in someone listening to me. It seems the first right thing to do. However, even within that there might be a time where the listener intuits that, while the person could go on and on with the details of suffering, more talk might not be leading the speaker towards the light.

There is also the point of wanting to share something to help the person. For decades I have told God that I want to have the power to bring healing to people whose hearts are crushed with pain. Isn't that a normal reaction? You see someone in pain, and you wish for it to stop so that they will not suffer, because suffering is evil. Eliminate evil. Simple.

What isn't simple is the connection between desiring their peace and wanting to say or do something. I am faced with the fact that my best-intentioned words or actions might go far wide of the point of need. They might be rejected for a variety of valid reasons.

At this point, I realize that God calls me to share in His humility. I can't be so caught up in the rightness of my idea, the power of my own experience, my good intention that I miss honoring the person present to me and her pain. When Jesus healed someone, He focused on that someone. He didn't sit them down to a theological lecture about His divinity or about the pascal mystery. He said "Go in peace and be freed of your suffering," or "Go in peace, your faith has saved you," or "Go show yourselves to the priest." He saw and addressed their deepest need. He did not use the healing as a platform for meeting His own needs.

I also find myself, in conversation, how shall I say... being a little embarrassed for God. This is a call to share in His humility also. If I have no magic words to say, if I can't produce a bottle with the right fix-it stuff in it, and I am still faced with a person suffering, I have to say "It isn't in our power, but it is in God's. Ask Him, and He will come to you with what you need." Saying this to someone who has been praying the best they know how for years, and suffering only all the more does feel a bit like standing in front of an army tank that barrels down on you with only a daisy as your defense.

But that daisy, as I see it, is these truths: God is real, and God is good. There is much I don't know, and much I can't answer, but these things I know for sure. God is real, and God is good. The prayers I repeat a thousand times a day, if necessary, are "Jesus, I trust in You" and "Lord, have mercy."

I guess the other thing I have learned is that being brought to the end of yourself (which I don't believe is a one-time deal, since we are like onions) is a gift. A painful gift. A gift that feels like it should be fought against. A gift that can violate every fiber of religious feeling, every fiber of my estimation of myself as a good person, as a faithful person. Humility in suffering is, I think, powerful. Pride sucks any time. I think pride is essentially a response of the heart that says "There is not enough love to help me, so I won't be open." But pride can become a habit, too. A habitual way of seeing the world. And a habitual way of pushing God away, even when we think we aren't because we think we are as open to God as anyone can be. We need to constantly learn that God's love is always more than we think it is. It's like living at a precipice of trust and presumption, maybe...

Rambling thoughts....

The most exquisite moments of God breaking through my suffering have simply been when someone was there -- I knew I wasn't alone. But the power, the presence was definitely God's orchestration.

For me then, I guess the need is to be surrendered daily to God, and to act in love in the smallest things. My love, flawed as it is by being mine, originates from God, and as such is the connection with Him I can offer to the world. I can't "make" God do anything, heal, or be profoundly present. I can't bring about healing. God can, and most of the time He only needs an instrument. Better to focus on His love flowing through me than on my solutions to people's pain.

As my pastor always tells us, we can always pray. That's like turning from the suffering back to God, rendering the heart wide open, and asking for help. Lord, make my heart a busy highway for your graces and the needs of people to meet up.

Holy Darkness

This afternoon at the Mass for the Carmelite community's profession, we sang this as the communion hymn. In fact, it was these precise verses.



Talk about profoundly capturing my soul in words. I didn't sing much, but sat with tears streaming down my face.

I know that God is giving me a gift, and slowly I am able to bow my head to begin receiving. It is a gift of knowing that God is the giver of all that is good. When He gives, something is given. When He does not give, He does not give. There is no manipulating God with actions or desires or other attempts to posture just so because one thinks that will win something from God. There is no winning from God. There is need -- aching, dire need -- and there is receiving. And in between, there is need of trust and faith. And in the aching chasm of dire need, room opens up for virtue, like meekness, humility, and all manor of holy desire.

Jealousy and the Zero-Sum Game

Some years ago, a woman on an infertility forum I was in made a very profound point that makes more sense to me as time passes. You see, this was a group of faithful Catholic women who were both struggling with the desire to have children and struggling against the notion, broadcast so loudly in both the medical community and the infertility culture at large, that children are a commodity to be demanded and produced at will. This is an incredibly painful rock and hard place to be between. To truly entrust oneself to God and seek to do all that is humanly possible to open oneself to the most optimal health.... and to try to maintain this within a loving and patient relationship with one's spouse, all while yearning for children -- this is a very heavy cross.

And in that support group context, it would occasionally happen that a woman would get pregnant and stay pregnant. And that gave all of the rest of us the occasion to decide how we would react.

Some women were gracious and excited for one so blessed. Oh, we were all excited, but some had an easier time expressing it. Some, myself included, had a harder time with this. After reading through fifty emails of congratulations, and a few rounds of the amazed new mother responding how she is so grateful and thrilled at God's blessing, there would often be at least one honest soul who confessed to having a very hard time at watching someone else be blessed. I imagine there were others who simply quietly slunk off and had a good cry.

It's not that anyone would wish ill on someone who had struggled, but it was just so dang painful, and rejoicing with those who rejoice never seemed harder.

This whole scenario would replay itself every so often, and one of these times was the prompt for the insight that has stuck with me:  God's blessings are not a zero-sum game.

Meaning, of course, that just because God had blessed x person, nothing had been taken away from y person. Your blessing does not diminish me. My blessing does not threaten you.

And that is so, so hard to take in when you are in pain and are already feeling threatened by everything.

I think part of the way we get in pain in the first place is by getting stuck defining goodness in our own self-centered terms. We know we are limited. We know that if we, say, give our time to sewing wonderful outfits, we won't have time for cooking wonderful meals -- or at least not that same time. If we worship a god that we have created in our own image, we think of this god as being as limited as ourselves, probably without being aware of how silly such a god would be. If god has blessed you, that must mean there is less for me. If you didn't exist, I might be the one being blessed. This is why jealousy leads to hatred.

To truly rejoice with the one who rejoices, we need to grasp that the one who bestows blessings is infinite. God is good. It is His nature. He is not some idol like ourselves of our own making.

But again, trusting that God is good when one is in pain is difficult. There were plenty of times when I yelled at God, cried at God, got disgusted at God, and turned away from God in self-pity because of pain. It's that last one that is really the goal of the enemy of our souls. If the devil can get a soul to just poke a toe into the miry tar of self-pity, he will have little more work to do. By just rumpling around the slightest bit in self-pity, that soul will lose sight of God's goodness, love and mercy, and lose sight of its own identity as a child of God who is loved and as a creature of God who, by mere fact of one's existence, owes the Lord reverence and worship in justice.

So much is corrected by praying "Lord, You are God; I am not."

The answer to pain, jealousy, and every other sin and negative thing we experience is to bring them to God for a good long show-and-tell. Just make sure you are talking to the real God, and not navel gazing, or you are really just back in the trap of self-pity.

It is hard. But when you bring pain to God, He responds. He acts, He answers, He involves Himself. He is Almighty. He is not a gumball dispenser, though, so along with your pain, bring respect, honor and surrender.

Because you want out. You want the blessing this time.

Instead of cursing the candle which has shown you God's blessing is possible, extend your wick in faith and trust, and receive the light of Christ.

This, Too

This, too, is the face of my well-Beloved.

You called to me, oh Lord, and for three years I've followed you. Your words tugged at my heart; I could not help but follow. You taught me, and my heart was set ablaze. You healed me; I was made whole. You sent me, and I actually thought that was scary. I came back, only to be taught by you not to be so full of myself.

But now, what is happening? I know you told me plain enough this would be so, but I never thought it would be so... so like this. Everything is tumbling inside me. The last three years really did happen, didn't they? It wasn't one long self-deception, was it? Have I built my house on the sand, like you warned me not to? Lord, your words have become the bedrock of my life, but looking at you now, none of them make sense.

Wait. There's one thing that makes sense.

Mary is here. With John. And the other women. And there's St. Thérèse, catching the drops of blood that fall from your lacerations. She's bringing it to the souls of sinners, and they are being converted. Countless priests, feeding the nations with the food you provide. Countless suffering souls, who in you are not alone. Millions and millions and millions and billions of prayers ascending, ushering forth the mighty flood of mercy which you are unleashing for the life of souls in every corner of time and space.

No, I don't see all this with my eyes, just like I don't really behold your bloody body. But there you are. There they are. And here am I. Mary, and all you holy ones, and all you who at least show up -- stay with me, so that I can stay with you. And together we can see what happens next.

The Meaning Series: Holy Mary

I'm really in the habit of laying my heart on the line in this blog, and why stop now?! Doing so helps me try to be honest with myself -- to at least swing the bat in that direction.

So the other day at adoration I had an idea form that felt pretty meet, right and salutary (what, you don't speak Lutheran?), which was to write about the meaning of/testimony behind each of the songs I am in the process of recording for the CD to be entitled "Unleashed."

I'm going to start with the song I worked on most recently, called "Holy Mary."

I wrote this song on April 12, 1995 while I lived in Minoo, Japan. On the surface, I wrote it because each Friday evening I had dinner with one of the communities of Sisters who ran the school I taught in. I prayed evening prayer with them, which they did partially in English for my benefit. As evening prayer traditionally ends with a Marian hymn, they asked me to come up with a Marian song in English that had the word "Alleluia" in it, for the Easter season. It's quite rare for me to have written a song based on someone else's request, but this is one of them.

Of course, there is a much deeper story than that. My time in Japan had a huge impact in my life, as is reflected in the title of this blog, for example. But it is not an impact I write or talk about directly very often because frankly the experience was painful with a type of pain that is hard to work into a conversation. When I arrived in Japan, I had been a Catholic for about 18 months. I went with an idealistic notion of what it meant to be a missionary that was disconnected from the reality of the person I actually was at the time. I had very little sense of community, of belonging, in any tangible way to the Church, the Body of Christ, and more importantly I didn't think it mattered. I thought I'd be just fine not being able to communicate, having no friends or even acquaintances, and being rather alone -- and that I'd still be able to reach out effectively with Christ's love to the people around me. I was supposed to be a teacher. I was told I'd be teaching in a Junior College, and this appealed to my vain notions of discussing literature and having interested students excited about bookish ideas. The books would bond us, I presumed.

Reality: I was assigned to the elementary school. We used Sesame Street curriculum; no one understood me at all, and I was essentially there as a Caucasian sound-bite-offerer, managed by the native-speaking teacher, so that wealthy parents felt their daughters' English would sound impressive, if ever they decided to speak a word of it.

My spiritual reality was far worse. I was like an old table with layer after ugly layer of paint, and God was out to refinish me. It felt more like He was trying to finish me off. Slop on stripper. Scrape off gunk. Repeat liberally. The stuff that was getting purged and stripped from me was so much of the religious trappings and ideas I had clung to for my identity. It was confusing. I remember sitting in my tiny apartment and looking at the religious art on my walls and screaming in anger. Everything religious in my life felt empty, like so many meaningless shells. Reading my Bible left me tormented. My prayers while alone bounced off the ceiling back to me. Mass and prayer in common left me aching, because it was all in Japanese and it was so hard to engage my heart. I felt deeply unholy, because I had nothing that I had relied on to feel holy, either as a Protestant or a Catholic. And it didn't help that in my desperate loneliness I had gotten into a relationship with a man who, surprise, spoke English. He was a very interesting character, but given my state, the relationship was not healthy for me at all. I was not physically healthy, either. Stripped bare. This process lasted two and a half years.

But, God was not out to leave me like that. During all this time spiritually I kept bumping up against the Blessed Mother. Recall that I had not been a Catholic very long at this time. Even though I had intellectually accepted the truths of who Mary is, I can't say I had any experience of her at all. She was a doctrinal category, not a Mother for me.


This bumping up against Mary eventually required me to learn from Jesus how to contemplate who she is. It was in the midst of this that I wrote "Holy Mary." A statue of Our Lady of Sorrows compelled me so that I had a photo of it blown up. I thought of her as Our Lady of Utter Boredom, because when I looked at her

face, I felt divine empathy with the painful emptiness inside me. Several other experiences drew my heart to understand Jesus' words to John "behold your mother." One of these was a dream I had just before I left Japan. I'm not saying it was a dream of divine revelation, but it certainly summarized my "take home message" from the experience. In it, I saw Mary, and I fainted from the sheer radiance and power of her beauty and purity. She pointed out my window, showing me my place next to an unidentified person (whom I think of as simply "humanity" or human community) with whom I was to walk forward from there.

And that was exactly God's point in refinishing me. I had barnacled myself over with a do-it-yourself, me-and-Jesus spirituality where others were not necessary to my salvation, nor I to theirs. God employed His Mother to teach me that this is not His will. God saves us in community with everyone whom the Holy Spirit has called, and sends us to all whom He will call. This is the great communion of saints. This is our family as Church. This is our call as disciples and our mission as evangelists.

Mary is with the Redeemer at the cross, pointing out our Salvation. We do well to learn from her how to behold her Son.

www.mariehosdil.com

A Miscarriage Anniversary... Gift

Some days simply have so many joyful bits and deep important things happening in them that I feel like I go around with my arms full of jewels, dropping them all over as I go.

Today I had an experience that left me feeling God wrapping me in His strong arms, pulling me close to Him, and whispering in my ear, "It's OK. I understand." Even if I write it out sloppily I wanted to try to capture it in words before I drop it, too.

This morning I had about 25 minutes to work on learning some music we will sing in choir for Christmas. It's in Latin and sort of polyphonic, which is not the sort of thing I can just belt out at first sight-reading. It requires work. My attempts to work on it thus far have not gone well at all. While it is true that my brain does not learn music well when the piece is in Latin, in the past I have been able to learn such things by putting in a lot of effort. It just wasn't working for me, now nor did it last year when we practiced it (but ended up setting it aside as it wasn't coming together). Today, attacking the work with great determination, I realized the hurdle I wasn't clearing was precisely the memory of last year's effort. Though I tried then, I was simply too depressed last year to do this type of work because I was overwhelmed by the first anniversary of a baby we lost, two years ago tomorrow. And until I faced that haunting memory I emotionally associated with this piece, my attempts to work at learning it were futile. But face it I did, and I was finally able to make great strides in learning it today.

Right after this realization, I gathered my children and we were off to Mass. When we go to Franciscan University I always drop them off near the door of the chapel so that they don't have to walk with me up the big hill where I park. While I walked I thought of how I had struggled so hard against singing my alto part for this song. The tenor part sunk into my mind, but I just couldn't focus on my part. I thought to myself, part of my grief of losing this baby is this experience of my part as a woman, of my body becoming a graveyard. It felt even a bit too melodramatic as I thought it, but thought it I did, and I shed a few tears in the quick moment up the hill. I realize that sometimes when life hurts, I really don't want to be a woman!

I was seated as Mass, and heard the reading from Isaiah:

Raise a glad cry, you barren one who did not bear, break forth in jubilant song, you who were not in labor, For more numerous are the children of the deserted wife than the children of her who has a husband, says the LORD. Enlarge the space for your tent, spread out your tent cloths unsparingly; lengthen your ropes and make firm your stakes. For you shall spread abroad to the right and to the left; Your descendants shall dispossess the nations and shall people the desolate cities. Fear not, you shall not be put to shame; you need not blush, for you shall not be disgraced. The shame of your youth you shall forget, the reproach of your widowhood no longer remember. For he who has become your husband is your Maker; his name is the LORD of hosts; Your redeemer is the Holy One of Israel, called God of all the earth. The LORD calls you back, like a wife forsaken and grieved in spirit, A wife married in youth and then cast off, says your God. For a brief moment I abandoned you, but with great tenderness I will take you back. In an outburst of wrath, for a moment I hid my face from you; But with enduring love I take pity on you, says the LORD, your redeemer. This is for me like the days of Noah, when I swore that the waters of Noah should never again deluge the earth; So I have sworn not to be angry with you, or to rebuke you. Though the mountains leave their place and the hills be shaken, My love shall never leave you nor my covenant of peace be shaken, says the LORD, who has mercy on you.

The priest in his homily talked about how the kingdom of God belongs to the small, to the forgotten ones, and does not come in glitz and glamor. The all powerful one comes, how? As a baby. What could be more vulnerable, he asked, than a newborn baby. (I can tell you, I thought. A newly conceived baby.)
As I continued to pray in that Mass, I sensed small ways the Lord has been nudging at my heart, and just as had happened with the first baby I miscarried, I had a sudden insight into the significance of the name we had chosen for this baby. (It was really my children who chose the name; I could not bring myself to be involved.)

All of these things floating through the hour and a half I've talked about here were like one flowing conversation with the Lord. I was washed over again by the mystery of His presence with me, the tenderness of His love toward me, and His persistent yet mysterious leading.

THIS IS NOT THE WAY!

Notorious abortion provider shot dead.

This is really dreadful. I'm just speechless.

Lord, have mercy on us all.

Obama Overturns Mexico City Policy

President Obama today sign[ed] an order that will put hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars into the hands of organizations that aggressively promote abortion as a population-control tool in the developing world. The rest.

Blood Test Result

Negative.

What Can You Call a Post Like This...

A lot has happened since my last post.

Wednesday morning I figured I'd gulp deep and dip into my dwindling store of pregnancy tests I bought off ebay. Two lines! That means positive. Part of me, the intellectual, fact-based part, was not completely surprised. But the part that responds spontaneously to joyful news was completely shocked and unable to respond. I think my last go-around with two lines on a test had something to do with that. That and all the rest of my history of struggling with infertility.

By Wednesday afternoon I was starting to accept this reality, starting to really warm up to thinking about the personhood of this new life.

And then late in the afternoon I started bleeding. Just a bit.

So, blah blah blah, all that stuff about bleeding being common, no cause for alarm at least half the time, yada yada, all that again.

I woke up at 4:30 this morning, which gave me plenty of time to coordinate myself to get to my OB's for a blood draw. Of course, I don't get results until tomorrow, and they don't mean anything until I can compare them with another blood draw Saturday.

My children went to visit friends, and another friend arranged to bring dinner by. I napped. I woke up to cramping and a bit heavier bleeding.

An hour or so later, I finally started to believe that the test Wednesday morning had really been positive, and that I had been only lightly bleeding before that. I'm not sure what I believe now. Actually, to be honest of course I do. I believe that this baby too has died or will shortly.

At one point this afternoon, I asked Mary Olivia (baby previously lost) to pray for us. All at once I felt great peace, and I remembered: even though I had chosen the name Olivia after a relative who had recently died, I was later struck by its meaning -- peace. The olive branch of peace. And peace is what came into my life after the incredibly short sojourn of Mary Olivia. I had been very anxious to conceive again before that, but afterwards I began to know peace about it.

I told this baby about all the people longing to see her face, but that surely Mary Olivia would be willing to wait awhile to meet her.

But what can I do. I can state my desire, I can pray, but I can't know. Soon enough I will, and whether we keep the gift of sorrow or the gift of life, there's something there with great meaning, for what life is without it?

Just please pray for us so that for my children's sake we can celebrate the Nativity without me, or despite me being a hormonal mess.

Please pray for these families

Yesterday, my friend's 21 month old son was found face down in his aunt's pool.

Details. Please join in praying.

Yet Another Serious Reason to Avoid Socialized Medicine

Baroness Warnock: Dementia sufferers may have a "duty to die"

The veteran Government adviser said pensioners in mental decline are "wasting people's lives" because of the care they require and should be allowed to opt for euthanasia even if they are not in pain.

She insisted there was "nothing wrong" with people being helped to die for the sake of their loved ones or society.

The 84-year-old added that she hoped people will soon be "licensed to put others down" if they are unable to look after themselves.

Read the rest here

Antoinette Juliano, Requiescat in Pace

A friend of our family passed away this morning. Antoinette was a member of our parish. I met her about two years ago through a parish program to match visitors with those elderly in need visitors. I admit I was a bit nervous about it, seeing as how I'm not one to easily be chatty with strangers. But I needn't have worried; Antoinette did enough chatting for both of us. She was a relatively healthy 90 year old when we met, who needed the social environment of the nursing home. Over the last two years I (and sometimes my children) visited with her each week (including the time the above photo was taken, on Halloween of 2006).

Antoinette gave me so much. She immediately put me at ease about my children's active, or sometimes impatient behavior. She constantly demonstrated gratitude and a desire to offer something to make others happy, even when in her last months she was in a lot of pain after a fall and some broken bones. She had compassion for and did what she could to comfort other residents. Oh, she got ticked at people when she felt disrespected by them, but I never saw her act with the slightest bit of nastiness in return.

I will miss her, but she told me often in the last several months that death was what she longed for. She couldn't understand why God was putting her off.

The last time we talked, I felt compelled to tell her every happy detail of my life that I could come up with; how we would celebrate my son's birthday, how my husband brought me flowers on the anniversary of our engagement and how there had been fireworks that night ten years ago in Pittsburgh, little details of our lunch with my in-laws. She smiled at this connection with a world she had left behind, confined as she was to her bed or her wheelchair. She told me repeatedly, "I love you."

May her soul, and the souls of all the faithful departed, through the mercy of God rest in peace.