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. :)

Better than a Hallelujah

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

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

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

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

God just hears a melody

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

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

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

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

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

Anxiety

I struggle with anxiety.

Ironically, I am able to say this because most of the time I win this struggle, these days. 

In fact, anxiety used to be so much a part of my life that I only noticed it for the first time about twelve years ago, when I began to have fleeting moments of freedom from it. Before that time, I had an anxiety baseline which was pretty high all the time. I recall a medical check-up about twenty years ago, when my doctor was trying to test the reflexes in my arm. He asked me to hold out my arm to the side. I held it in a tensed 90 degree angle. When he told me, "just relax," I was mystified, because I was as relaxed as I knew how to be.

Sometime happened to me when I started singing in my parish choir. There was a lot going on there. For one, I had singing-induced dopamine flowing in my brain. For another, I had a spiritual awakening going on where I found courage to step out of being self-contained and into being self-giving. Also, for the first time as a Catholic, I had a tremendous sense of belonging that was both social and spiritual. I was moving forward. It was anxiety-provoking, really, but of the sort that stretched me and which left me feeling regularly "leveled up" in terms of how much anxiety I could handle. I was growing.

It was also about that time that a Naturopathic doctor introduced me to ashwagandha. That was a really good thing, because right about then all of that stretching left me revving on so much cortisol that I never could mellow out. 

In those days I took a supplement called Cortisol Manager, whose main ingredient was ashwagandha. But I kept it on hand only in case of "really bad days," and on normal days I just coped with, you know, an acceptable level of anxiety. The type that seemed like normal life. Still.

Fast forward several years, and it came onto my radar screen again as I began exercising and trying to find my metabolism again, and learned how cortisol makes you store belly fat. Then I came across Goli gummies, and oh my, they are just so yummy. So I began taking both a capsule and gummies -- which actually brought me up to the recommended daily dose. Wow! I felt great! 

Recently I made a silly decision, and honestly I've done this same kind of thing so many times. I just decided to not take the full dose. I always use the logic that since I'm feeling great, I must not really need it. 

Lo and behold, anxiety started slapping me in the face again. And it didn't quite occur to me right away what was happening, because it isn't like my hands turn blue or I start sneezing, or some objectively noticeable thing like that. Anxiety is noticed from within. Even after I noticed it, my first thought wasn't, gee, take the pill. It was more like, "Oh, hi, anxiety; you've come to visit. Well, let me move my life out of the way so you can come in and sit down...."

It is one thing to not beat myself up, or spiritually shame myself, or self-medicate in other negative ways. Not doing all that is a big step forward for me. But I still have to work on realizing what's happening, and giving my body the care it needs to usher out the unwelcomed guest. 

And you know what? Recently I realized that for me, doing this is part of keeping the commandment "Honor your father and your mother." My father had absolutely debilitating anxiety. Both of my parents suffered from depression. This is probably one reason why I had a hard time recognizing these struggles in myself; this way of being seemed so "normal." Both of my parents also became alcoholics. From childhood, I've really struggled with what honoring my parents was supposed to mean, supposed to look like. Recently it just kind of clicked in my mind, that I don't honor my parents by erasing their struggles. I honor them by facing the things they struggled with with grace; especially where I face the same things in me. There is no shame in having a struggle. My honor of them, in part, involves accepting that I struggle with some things because I share their genes, and treating their memory in myself gently and honorably.

Then I can simply be the me God created me to be, and be at peace. It's hard interior work, that's for sure. It is worth it, though.

Epiphany 2018

I'm going to try to write part two, following on from the Encounter Ministries conference.

I decided in advance to leave the conference early because I knew that today is Epiphany, and I felt it important to be back in my parish, and dutifully in my choir spot for this feast.

It was Epiphany Sunday in 2009 when I first sang with this choir, and it suffices to say that I captured an authentic experience of God in that blog post. In fact, next to the Christmas Eve Midnight Mass which sparked my conversion to Catholicism, that Epiphany Sunday was one of the single most significant moments in my Catholic life.

Just like Christmas coming around yearly was a true and dramatic re-meeting of the grace I experienced on the night of my conversion for years and years, I have found that Epiphany has been the same for this other experience of God. I didn't want to miss being where God could reveal something more to me.

Snapshots:

I remember the moment in Japan when I was at a parish Bible study, unable to understand much of what was going on, but having a burning sense that God's call to me had to do with parish life.

I remember despondantly watching people go up to recieve communion when I was not yet confirmed as a Catholic. I wanted so much to do what they were doing, but I also judged them for not loving God as much as I did. God impressed on me: "These are the people I have called you to love."

I recall hearing at Christmas that the shepherds who watched their flocks were those who were raising sacrificial lambs for the temple, as we sang "The First Nowell" as a prelude. Suddenly, I felt like I was filling in the blank form I saw last year at Epiphany, about how Advent, Christmas, Lent, Easter, and Pentecost all lead from one into the next. As we sang the opening hymn, We Three Kings, it made complete sense that the gifts the Kings brought spoke of Jesus' death, and burial. Epiphany does announce the whole Paschal Mystery.

And in this grace that the Lord has led me into, I have had the cycle of joyful mysteries, the cycle of sorrowful mysteries, and the cycle of luminous mysteries. I heard the bells ringing years ago, announcing Pentecost. I heard them ringing again months ago, announcing Pentecost. I saw it happening over the weekend. It is dawning; it has dawned. The glorious mysteries. God is not done.

And where it happens, the glorious, mysterious, unfolding of my very own vocation, is right there, right here, in my normal life, and in my parish. That which leads is mysterious, but my need is daily to seek and ask and look for Jesus, to plead to see Him more clearly, to plead for clear revelation. The glory is Jesus, and only Jesus. It is a perilous, dangerous moment, when Herod seeks to destroy, and utter discretion, mature wisdom, complete mistrust of evil intent must prevail.

I suppose none of this makes a shred of sense, but this is because it is alive.

I came back from the conference early because the place where God speaks powerfully into my life is in my own parish, and in the ministry I'm a part of there. That part is easy. What God speaks and how I respond... that part has never been easy, and it is always simple, because it is about one thing: Seek Jesus, Follow Jesus, Trust Jesus, and Only Jesus.

One thing the conference reminded me of is to constantly seek more. I think this was hard for me, because I can habitually ask more of myself always, and it wears me out. In fact, I've been learning not to ask so much of myself. I need to put into practice the reality that asking more of God is not to push myself into work mode, or to expect more "output" from me. It is to desire Him. Maybe I am a bit afraid of, as Teresa put it, "I die because I do not die." To desire -- ah, it can be so painful. And to desire without picturing how God is supposed to answer. Oy!

I think there is something here. I think I fear the pain of desiring, of longing. But this really was what Fr. Riccardo spoke of. I also intuit that there is more purification to be had.

"More, Lord. More." How many times did someone pray that over the weekend. At one point, I think it was Fr. Matthias who asked everyone to pray that, like a small child. Praying from the place is a purifying thing, too.

I think all this is another reason why I feel frightened to be losing my spiritual director, even if I never really sought his help as one to show me where to go. But I knew I had a safe port, and accountability, and someone knew.

What the Lord showed me was that running into the Lord's embrace, I drop the worries, even the fear of the pain, because the embrace of the Lord dwarfs all that.

And, that really is what Epiphany tells me today, too. It is all about pointing out Jesus, and going full throttle to seek Him.  Sometimes I get stuck standing with amazement staring up at the star.

Just like I was getting grumpy at those folks for being to amazed and excited and all that, I see that it is really that I need to deal with my own over-amazement, or having mercy on myself in it.

Or just bring it to Jesus like everything else.

How in the World Did I Get Here?

Do you ever have one of those moments where reality flashes before you (in a good way) and you ask yourself "How in the world did I get here?"

I had one of those this morning.

The question is rhetorical, because of course I know how I got there. I was standing in a packed church, about to lead a team of several instruments and singers and the entire congregation in worship of God at Mass. I had a late start to the early morning, wasn't as practiced as I'd like to have been, was using a new-to-me guitar and a sound system, and normally I lead at less complicated daily Masses. That moment, as my pastor announced the end of greetings and beginning of Mass, was not the moment to ponder my rhetorical question! It was the time to trust that everything the Lord had worked into me over the last several years would be extractable by the same Lord, despite my feelings of the moment.

But the question is really a moment of awe at God's work. Later I was remembering how one Sunday seven years ago I stood at the podium, nervously preparing simply to cantor for the first time at my parish. And how Joe the organist told me, "You seem nervous. Well, don't be." And how I thought to myself, "Who do you think you are, the Son of God, that you can just tell me to be calm and expect it to happen?!"

That was really the first of several prophetic messages (words from God mediated through human speech and experiences) that began to shape my inner being according to a call from God to learn how to teach people to worship, that was itself a prophetic message to me several decades ago.

Nervousness and insecurity are parts of expecting something from one's own natural ability. I imagine that everyone needs to work through that stuff; I know for sure I have. Time, practice, and experience can reduce some of that, but there also needs to be the spiritual progress of submitting one's natural abilities to God for Him to work through -- or to completely set aside! I went through a short time (for complicated "people" reasons) of being barred from music ministry. It ripped my heart out, but it also drove home right quick that I had no "right" to serve. After that burp of my life passed, each time I approached the ambo to cantor and I bowed before the tabernacle, my heart offered sincere thanks for this gift of being able to lead the congregation in praising God.

And you know what else is funny? When I lead worship, I play guitar. I do believe and accept what the Church says about organ having pride of place, and that is also my preference. And I am not what you would call an excellent guitarist. I have one, very narrow strip of expertise, and that is playing rhythm guitar for church music. When I do that, I can truly worship God and more importantly I can rouse others to worship God. Before leading any music for Mass I always pray that God would draw all hearts present to enter into true, self-giving worship of Him. It humbles me to realize that I am really a second string church musician, and that many Catholics would turn up their noses at the music I play. But when a woman approached us after Mass today to comment that a song we played lifted the congregation's hearts right up to God, I was pleased, knowing our mission was successful.

God has called me, formed me, trained me, tested me. And that's how in the world I got there. Thanks be to God. It's kinda awesome.

God Gives me the Desire of my Heart; I Whine a Little

It seems that God knows better than to talk to me about prices when we are out shopping.

Ok, yes, that's a bit weird. I don't mean shopping, I mean praying. When I'm expressing my desires to Him. He is wiser than to let me know what the cost is of anything I want. Really, though, He knows (because I've told Him over and over again) that I'm carte blanc-willing towards Him. He can have, ask, require anything of me. He knows what I'm made of, and I'm not worried about Him asking for something He's not able to get from me, since it sorta all comes from Him in the first place, right?

But even with the carte blanc thing, I realize that when I go to wanting something, He doesn't generally let on about how much it will cost.

And I've noticed another funny thing. I can really, sorely, desperately want certain things from God, like achingly so, and then when He gives them to me, I'm not really sure I want them. Or at best, I go gee, thanks. At first at least. I barely know the value of anything. At first at least.

I was thinking of all this in the context of a memory of one of those sorely desperate prayers to God, in which for emphasis, I banged a book on my knee and said it all out loud. Way back when, I wrote a blog post about it called In Which She Admits That Which Brings Freedom. The thing that I yelled out as I prayed was "I want this freedom! I need this freedom! I have got to have this freedom!"

Read the blog post to get the context. In classic me style, it took me tons of paragraphs to say that my freedom comes in admitting that I love my friends.

But I tell you what: Today was the day. Today was the day that I found this reality in me. I have that freedom I longed for and over which banged the book on my lap.

The love I am talking about comes with detachment. A love not rooted in possessiveness, and all the anxiety and fear that comes with it. Detachment was the price tag I was clueless about at the time. I struggled to even mouth the word love; you could forget any hope of me loving freely. God knew that I wanted this more than I wanted comfort, even though I sure didn't know how much discomfort I was in for. The good thing is, what I failed to grasp in the days I was kicking and screaming, He allowed me to take a second shot at with a more willing and trusting heart later on. God is patient and awesome like that.

I'm writing about this to formulate thankful thoughts and to remember my earnestness, because I admit that my response today was, you know Lord, is this really going to be good? I mean, peace and freedom are great, but wasn't there something actually pleasant about anxious bondage? See, sometimes I need to put these things into words to catch myself being ridiculous.

The more graces God gives me, the more I realize that His gifts are really cool and they are absolutely not connatural to me!

And This is Why I Love Epiphany

God frequently seems to use the liturgy and liturgical feasts to teach me personal things. Sometimes the nature of how this works is that something significant will happen in conjunction with a liturgical celebration of a feast day, but the significance of it will only dawn on me several years down the road. My initial conversion to Catholicism at a Christmas Eve midnight Mass is the most obvious example.

And another such thing is connected to the Epiphany.

The liturgy of the hours for Epiphany preserves the tradition that it has, in the past, encompassed the Visit of the Magi, the Baptism of Jesus, and the Wedding at Cana: the Illuminatio, Manifestatio, and Declaratio. The message is clear: Jesus is on the scene with power and He's changing things.

It took me quite a long time to realize how that applied to this thing that happened to me six years ago tomorrow, on Epiphany Sunday.

That would have been one of those moments that if I had been able to see into the future, I probably would have turned and run away as fast as I could.

I'm glad I didn't. I think.

No, no: I'm sure. And I have the scars to prove it. 

It had been a quiet life for Jesus, Mary and Joseph (as long has he lasted) until the time of Jesus' public manifestation and His first miracle. I can only imagine Mary's heart at the moment when she knew it was time for Him to move on. We make a lot of her request that moved Him to His first public miracle. I'm convinced it was not a giddy moment for her, but one of surrender to the Father. Her statement "Do whatever He tells you," besides the other volumes it speaks, I believe was her fiat to the Messiah's mission which any student of the prophecies must have known would lead to His death.


The rest of us see these glory moments and think Cool! Dude, I want in on this! She realizes that the glory of God comes at the price of suffering and death. Which hearkens back to celebrating martyrs right smack after Christmas Day. Did the Church make some awful blunder in scheduling St. Stephen and the Holy Innocents? Of course not. We make the blunder in forgetting that Christmas flows into Epiphany which flows into Lent which flows into Holy Week, Easter, Ascension and Pentecost. Jesus' birth is the beginning of the pascal mystery.

Christmas is often presented as a sugar-coated fairy tale. But God is born into a world where there is also a great deal of suffering and misery. -- Pope Francis 

And God came to live that suffering and misery with us, as one of us.

And, you know, in my book, when there's suffering and misery and God shows up, that suffering and misery suddenly get changed. Where God is, there is delight. Even when the glory points to a cross, which points to glory.

Funny. Seems like I wandered far away from the purpose I started writing with, which was to remember that Epiphany six years ago when God used the liturgy to show me something I didn't understand yet.

But this is how it works. And that's all I've been talking about.

A Feast Day Gift (Or, When Things Make Sense)

Today is the feast of St. Teresa of Avila, reformer of the Carmelites, my spiritual mother, mi Madre. I use that term with deep affection and a tremendous conviction which is far beyond my ability to simply drum up from myself. I have been called. Though I am still four years away from my definitive profession, there is probably nothing of which I am more sure than this: I am called to be a daughter of St. Teresa.

Several days ago I met some Carmelite nuns who happened to give me a prayer card with the official prayer of the Centenary (we are celebrating St. Teresa's 500th birthday beginning today and for a year). I had read the prayer several times before today, but in typical feast day fashion I read it today and it blew me away. Here is the text:

Saint Teresa of Jesus, holy mother,
wholehearted servant of love,
teach us to walk with determined fidelity
along the path of interior prayer,
attentive to the presence
of the Blessed Trinity,
God dwelling deep within us.
At the school of Mary our Mother
strengthen within us these foundations:
a genuine humility,
a heart free from attachment,
and an unconditional love for others.
Share with us your intense
apostolic love for the Church.
May Jesus be our joy,
our hope and our energy,
an unquenchable fountain
and our most intimate Friend.
Bless our Carmelite family.
Teach us to make your prayer our own:
"I am yours, I was born for you.
What is your will for me?"
Amen.

God weaves the weird bits of our lives into a tapestry that eventually makes sense. And this morning after Mass was one of those breath-catching and tear-spilling moments when I saw, instead of the random chaos of threads, God's weaving work.



Here's what I see now, clearly.

God has been calling me to Carmel since I was a Protestant. That I know, and I've written about that stuff here. And even in that post I had a strongly inkling about the rest of what I'll write now.

A few years ago I went through a horrendously difficult spiritual season, that followed directly after a gloriously powerful spiritual season. Both stemmed from a relationship that had no real reason (other than God's design) not to be average and mundane. But instead of mundane, it was mystical. No, actually, it was both. At the same time. God did lots of unusual things in conjunction with this person, through him, but completely without his knowledge. I knew all along it was God who was communicating with me, acting in me. These seasons have occurred to me in the past in smaller or greater degrees, but they hadn't for about 20 years at that time. I rather thought I'd outgrown that sort of thing.

The Lord even told me towards the beginning of all this that this man was like St. John the Baptist for me. I remember saying, "Gee, Lord, I hope he's not going to die in three years." Well, he did not die, but after three years there was a sudden death-knell to the glory of what had been our friendship. And one of the final kicks in my gut came on the Feast of the Beheading of John the Baptist. Nice touch, Lord.

And what set the death-knell in process was also a mystical thing, an action God required of me. It was a firm call, with a set time. It left me wide-open vulnerable to far more than I realized at the time, even though I had no goal other than obedience. I knew God was launching me forth, but I had no idea where -- I didn't even think about that sort of thing.

The image that time evokes is St. Bernadette hearing the Blessed Mother say to her, "Drink from the spring, wash in the spring" when there wasn't any spring. The Song of Bernadette depicts her scratching in the dirt, wiping mud on her face and eating weeds. People carried her off presuming her to be crazy. And then the water flowed, and the healings started.

What happened as the upshot of that obedience I carried out, that wiping of mud all over my face, was the most spiritually painful thing I have ever endured. It was a solid 18 months, with several extra bonus periods dribbling over, of soul-searing pain. I've used this analogy before, but it was like God spent those first three years gently caressing my head, and gathering back all of my (very long and thick) hair into His hands. But then in one movement, He cut it off. I had to decide who that was with His hands in my hair: were we like St. Francis and St. Claire -- was God responding to my loving entreaties to belong entirely to Him? Or was it like the WWII movie I once saw -- where I was a Jewess and God a Nazi barber, shearing away my hair and my dignity. What pained me the most was that in the deepest part of my feeling, I wasn't sure.

But.

Here's what I know now.

During this long searing process, I gained three things, had three new foundations laid in me (check out that prayer again):

Humility. Oy vey. Pride and self-righteousness underwent mass destruction. God wanted me to see clearly everything I'm made of, the good, the bad and the ugly. And the beautiful.

A heart free from attachment: Oy vey again. Yes, I became very attached to this man, like a little child gets attached to, say, a puppy that it loves dearly but also relies on for comfort. God gives us comfort to heal our wounds, but He also knows that if we rely too long on comfort, we stay childish when we should be growing strong. To everything there is a season. And to really learn detachment, we have to really experience an attachment that can safely be broken.

An unconditional love for others: Oy, oy, oy vey. You see, after things blew apart and St. John got his head lopped off, there were many, many facets of what happened that angered me deeply. But God would not let me turn to bitterness and hatred. In fact, He insisted that I use this as a means to learn to keep loving, sans the good feelings. In fact, I tried refusing to love this man, and I found I could not love anyone. The Lord showed me that if I want to to try loving the way He loves, it's going to hurt. But it frees.

This season of my life hurt so badly primarily because love, detachment, and humility were so terribly foreign to me. I felt like I was dying. And in fact, I was. I was dying to myself.

And I was having the stage set for my being called to Carmel. It was a huge gift. It was a mystical gift and an intense trial of faith. And today mi Madre sat me down to show me how it makes sense.

Oh, and there's one more thing. A month ago, on retreat, the Lord gave me this one phrase that captured what had remained ineffable to me for years, this thing I knew and longed for: Apostolic Love. And there it is in that prayer: "Share with us your intense apostolic love for the Church." Of course St. Teresa had apostolic love: she went all over Spain making new foundations of the new reform of the Carmelites. She was entirely fueled by love and she worked as hard as she prayed.

I'm nothing original. I'm just called to be a daughter of St. Teresa. It all makes sense. Ha!

The Gift of Vulnerability

"[God] will not find us at the center of our certainties. That is not where the Lord looks. He will find us on the margins, in our sins, in our mistakes, in our need for spiritual healing, for salvation; that is where the Lord will find us”.

This quote from Pope Francis is one to which the preacher on my recent silent retreat referred several times.

The "margins" of our hearts are the places where we stand in need of God's mercy, and we know it, but dang, we don't really like it.

Ironically, these are the places most people expend enormous energy in order to hide from others, from their own meditation, or hope they can hide from God. Our sorry stock of shame is exactly where God is attracted, exactly where He is hoping most to be admitted. It's where we are most painfully in need.

The margins of our hearts are where we are vulnerable.

I've had an interesting and varied relationship with vulnerability in my almost-47 years. But currently I realize that I have both a natural propensity for it, and I've also exercised it to the point where I am OK with being vulnerable. What is most interesting to me is that I have only now realized that this not something to hate about myself; is a gift, and something to be desired for growth in the spiritual life.


I've certainly spent a lot of time hating myself for getting in vulnerable situations and feeling needy. Of course, it hasn't helped that a lot of normal things make me feel that way! I have beaten myself up over how much it seems everything in my life has required courage. Everything! It has always seemed that things that came so easily to everyone else made me feel so terribly vulnerable.

A few decades ago I lived in an old apartment building that grew gigantic icicles in the winter. One day I watched one of these glisten on my fire escape: snow, melting from heat escaping from the poorly insulated roof, dripped down the icicle's side and hovered at the tip and froze there. I mused that its point of greatest vulnerability to breaking was also where it was growing and becoming what it was.

We are people, though, not icicles. The only way vulnerability can become a moment of growth is when you choose to step forward into that vulnerable state and find that not only are you not crushed, but you are safe. Completely safe. And the only way to step forward, I have found, is a combination of trust or faith in God (more-or-less specifically) or in the goodness inherent in the unknown factors involved. There is also something to be said simply for cumulative experiences of risk-taking. You leap across a rickety bridge, and each sure step gives you the courage to take another that you hope will also support you long enough to keep hopping.

And you know what? There are times when one steps out in faith into a vulnerable position and you free fall for a little bit. It doesn't feel safe at all. You have to seriously consider whether you just made a terrible, awful mistake. There is no immediate reward of a sense of safety. There is only faith, and the assurance faith gives you can be like a vaguely flickering light. This might last for weeks, months, or years. It kinda sucks.

But then the pieces come together, the lights come on, and you see all the risk and faith was perfectly reasonable.

I think if I were to watch my life like a movie running from God's perspective, I might see the action  differently. I think I would see the Holy Spirit orchestrating opportunity after opportunity to answer my desire to be drawn close to God. To God, the lights are always on. And He constantly sends the message: Trust Me. Be brave. Step forward. Yes, you feel all a mess because, in places, you are a mess. But I madly love you, and want to enter all that mess, all those margins, with My mercy. And then you can go and be My mercy to others so they might receive it, too.

When we feel accompanied in a place of our vulnerability, our hearts open wide. God's mercy is able to enter, and tremendous things result. Old pains are healed. We realize we are lovable and we can start to bask in being loved. Our thinking and our actions change as a result. We experience conversion.

But something else can happen when third parties witness experiences of vulnerability in others. This stirs up their own sense of vulnerability, from which they are busy hiding themselves. When these people start to feel their vulnerability, instead of feeling accompanied by witnessing God's mercy to a soul, they feel alone and left out. They shut down. They harden. They hunker down in their position of rejecting God's mercy and love or snap themselves out of any faint stirrings they felt towards openness and receiving. They push others away with layers of whatever they protect themselves with. They may resort to expressions of hatred, ridicule, and violence, or more respectable responses like indifference, eye-rolling, or the pursuit of distractions. Anything but the courage to believe that God's mercy is for them, too.

Sometimes I struggle to respect the delicate space where others hide their vulnerability. I have exercised so much courage, sometimes rather gruffly, for myself, that I forget that I cannot come ramming at full steam into the heart and life of another. And perhaps more often than not, fear of my own "full steam" will cause me to stall out before I get to the place where I can actually be of help to someone who desires it from me.

Because surely God has not tutored me with this bizarre gift that I railed against and rejected for so long just for the fun of it. Everything God gives to each one is for everyone.

So show me, Lord, how you gave me this for someone else. Or, at least make it a benefit for someone else, whether I see it or not.

My Word in Silence: Apostolic Love

This last weekend I was on a silent retreat whose theme was mercy. This was a genuine experience of God's grace for everyone I spoke with (and there were about 60 of us there). There is much that I will be able to bask in and meditate on and practice with for months to come. But I also came away with a word, a phrase really, that wasn't so much a part of the theme or the preaching, but it was simply from God for me. Really, yes, it has everything to do with God's mercy for me.

There is a reality that I have experienced and grown in for years, and have been able to identify, to feel, to mourn the lack of, to long for, to be called to -- and yet I never had a word for it. It wasn't, I think, because I lacked the creativity or the intelligence to know what to call it. It was more like God wanted it to stay in the realm of the ineffable for me. So it could do its work in me without my being able to communicate about it with any precision. But now He has given me the word.

And the word is this: apostolic love.

No, not Christian love; not spiritual love; not spiritual friendship; not apostolic zeal.

But apostolic love.

This is a love that is born from the cross of Christ in the hearts of those who share in it. It is a love that wants to stand shoulder-to-shoulder and move out into the world to bring Christ's love to those who do not know Christ's love. It inspires risk and work and joy and pain. It creates a bond that is not about cementing people to each other, but about a common drawing to the cross of Christ, which is the freeing unity of becoming His bond-slaves. It means giving one's life for Christ by giving it to Christ's people. It is the bond of unity in the Holy Spirit -- the person's unity with Christ and unity with fellow-Christian.

It takes incredible faith to move into this, because there is tremendous personal cost involved. This experience of unity with Christ and other souls requires the experience of Christ's cross.

It is what the Bishop-martyrs testify to: St. Ignatius of Antioch, St. John Chrysostom, St. Paul with the Ephesians in Acts 20.

When Christian life is calculated on the basis of intellectual assent to dogmatic or moral norms and lame "moral choices" made while ensconced on the comfortable couch of one's luxuries, all this zealous vigor of apostolic love gets drained and we are left with lifeless, fruitless, motionless religiosity that, I believe, is the essence of what made Jesus want to spew the Laodiceans out of his mouth.

Remembering My First Love

I went to Mass for about 18 months before I received Confirmation and entered the Church. All that time I already knew I would become a Catholic. All that time I had a lot going on inside of me. I really had no human being to accompany me; those who had been instrumental in my conversion lived far away from me and I saw them very infrequently. Letters were our contact. God gave me a lot of graces in those days that I realize now were a little unusual. I also had heaps of pride and prejudice to work through, and no, there's no oblique Jane Austen reference there.

After I decided to become a Catholic, God really had only one directive for me: "Be going to Mass." I understood the Lord meant I should go to daily Mass, and I did, though it took me several months before I moved beyond Sundays only.

But even when it was just Sundays, I began to discover my first love. Liturgy.

There's that first kiss or first touch or embrace from someone you love that makes every nerve involved stand on end for a couple days. The physical memory seems indelible. I had those moments with the liturgy in those, my early Mass-going days. I remember how profoundly struck I was by the prophetic power present in the liturgical dialogue between priest and people. I was struck by how immanent heaven and all its treasures felt, and that I was being drawn up into it. I was amazed at how much work God could do in my soul in such a quick, efficient way, day after day. I realized that I had found my home and my family for the first time ever. I would come in sight of the tabernacle after my day at work and feel God's peace wrapping me up and drawing my weariness out of me.

But much of this mystical sensation was lifted from me quickly. The memory stayed, but my more regular experience was of my frustration over my own dullness and the lifeless way that seemed demanded of me, by general consensus, as this new Catholic family of mine celebrated liturgy. I had very serious struggles accepting the flesh and blood people next to me in the pews, and it seemed just as important to God that I learn to love them as Him. He always knows what He is doing as He leads His children.

I have come to a completely different place in my life now. I really have learned to love people. I have had some mighty lessons in that department.

And now the Lord calls me to remember my first love in the way He first introduced me. Maturity makes love make more sense, and there is always so much more room to grow both in understanding and in the actual action of loving.

I love the fact that no matter how long I have walked with Jesus, He is always doing something new with me, and I always feel I am just beginning to know Him.

Epiphany and Mission

Lutherans have two things over Catholics when it comes to liturgy: 1) The Sundays Catholics call "ordinary time" after Christmas and before Lent Lutherans call "1st, 2nd, etc. Sunday of Epiphany." 2) The Sundays Catholics call "ordinary time after Easter and before Advent, Lutherans call "nth Sunday of Pentecost" (or actually Whitsunday in my old Lutheran hymnal, which loses the effect somewhat.

I like that so much better. Another way to deal with this is to realize (as I wrote once before) that Pentecost is our ordinary. I would also add of course that Epiphany is our ordinary. And in the last few years I am coming to a growing appreciation of what that means.

It took me awhile to realize that the feast of Epiphany has been trying to get my attention for years. I wrote this last year, this in 2010 (as well as this, apparently before I learned to spell the word), and then of course there was that whole "joining the choir" story which happened on Epiphany Sunday of 2009 that I feel like I have told to death. Well, I see that the Church would have us reflect on Epiphany as Jesus' entering into his earthly ministry, and therefore we should think of our entering into His ministry also. Hence, the connection with Pentecost/ordinary time. The "ordinary" thing is that we live the supernatural ministry of Christ on earth in time and space in and through the power of the Holy Spirit.

Living the liturgical year makes me want to stagger with the beauty of it all. We grow; it moves us onward. It moves us onward; we grow. We don't cycle through "the same old thing" every year any more than lovers experience "the same old thing" in being together day after day.

Epiphany, like Pentecost, needs to be understood and experienced subjectively. God personally empowers because He personally calls. He calls me to fulfill a certain mission that is mine within Christ's all encompassing mission of the salvation of souls. Serving Christ means serving His mission to bring His love home to roost in more and more souls. His love is the power of salvation, the power to heal, to make whole, to make right, to restore, to raise up in royal splendor, to share His own life. To bring people into union with Him.

How does anyone really do that? I mean, try as I might, there ain't nothin' I can do to make another person love God or know God. Only God can really do that.

I see that my call is to love God with all my heart, which doesn't so much mean having a certain set of feelings or going through a checklist of behaviors. It means giving myself to Him as a gift. For me, it seems to mean saying, "Here I am, Lord" and then simply remaining there. It's that whole Carmelite idea of emptying oneself, making room for the God who fills. I can't fill myself; I can make nothing of the sort happen. But I can offer myself. I can die to myself by giving myself in love and service to the people in my life. I can desire God, and love others to demonstrate that desire. I can long. The longing, the giving, the being-open, the emptying -- these are all really evidences of the God Who is there, making all of that possible. No human could do these things merely hoping the universe is not an empty, heartless mechanistic cipher.

That's a weird mission. Maybe. But it really is only the presence of God that draws souls into union with Him, and therefore it is only through souls who know this surrender that God can draw souls into union with Him, because that whole Church thing is God's plan. Oh, I would also say that simply by baptismal grace God is present through us; we don't need to be some weird mystic freak to draw people (though it seems to help). No, I take that back. In reality, the definition of a Christian actually is "weird mystic freak," if one must put it that way. God's divine life present in a human being by grace brings the mystery of God into human experience, and that is the essence of Christianity. Without that dimension we just have a set of moral guidelines and good people trying to carry them out.

Epiphany is not through with me yet. I'm sure we've only just begun...

John the Baptist and The Sign

Sometimes, a picture is just worth a thousand words:

The Mass readings of today held many layers of personal meaning for me. But they are all summed up in the figure of St. John the Baptist.

This passage from St. Augustine in the Office of Readings also blew me away today:

From a sermon by Saint Augustine

John is the voice, and Christ is the Word

John is the voice, but the Lord is the Word who was in the beginning. John is the voice that lasts for a time; from the beginning Christ is the Word who lives for ever.

  Take away the word, the meaning, and what is the voice? Where there is no understanding, there is only a meaningless sound. The voice without the word strikes the ear but does not build up the heart.

  However, let us observe what happens when we first seek to build up our hearts. When I think about what I am going to say, the word or message is already in my heart. When I want to speak to you, I look for a way to share with your heart what is already in mine.

  In my search for a way to let this message reach you, so that the word already in my heart may find place also in yours, I use my voice to speak to you. The sound of my voice brings the meaning of the word to you and then passes away. The word which the sound has brought to you is now in your heart, and yet it is still also in mine.

  When the word has been conveyed to you, does not the sound seem to say: The word ought to grow, and I should diminish? The sound of the voice has made itself heard in the service of the word, and has gone away, as though it were saying: My joy is complete. Let us hold on to the word; we must not lose the word conceived inwardly in our hearts.

  Do you need proof that the voice passes away but the divine Word remains? Where is John’s baptism today? It served its purpose, and it went away. Now it is Christ’s baptism that we celebrate. It is in Christ that we all believe; we hope for salvation in him. This is the message the voice cried out.

  Because it is hard to distinguish word from voice, even John himself was thought to be the Christ. The voice was thought to be the word. But the voice acknowledged what it was, anxious not to give offence to the word. I am not the Christ, he said, nor Elijah, nor the prophet. And the question came: Who are you, then? He replied: I am the voice of one crying in the wilderness: Prepare the way for the Lord. The voice of one crying in the wilderness is the voice of one breaking the silence. Prepare the way for the Lord, he says, as though he were saying: “I speak out in order to lead him into your hearts, but he does not choose to come where I lead him unless you prepare the way for him.”

  What does prepare the way mean, if not “pray well”? What does prepare the way mean, if not “be humble in your thoughts”? We should take our lesson from John the Baptist. He is thought to be the Christ; he declares he is not what they think. He does not take advantage of their mistake to further his own glory.

  If he had said, “I am the Christ,” you can imagine how readily he would have been believed, since they believed he was the Christ even before he spoke. But he did not say it; he acknowledged what he was. He pointed out clearly who he was; he humbled himself.

  He saw where his salvation lay. He understood that he was a lamp, and his fear was that it might be blown out by the wind of pride.

Here's my take-home pondering. A few years back, God placed someone in my life and a little bit later gave me to understand that this person had a John-the-Baptist-like role in my life. I really didn't understand at the time what that meant. But today I see with greater clarity. John the Baptist signaled the end of the old covenant and the beginning of the new. His role was limited; he pointed to Christ, and then he was beheaded. And yet he was the greatest of prophets because he literally pointed not centuries ahead (see yesterday's post) but feet ahead to the present Messiah.

Now, it seems a little tricky for a person to be put in my life as a prophetic sign, but I think that's what I'm saying has happened. This person has been more than a prophetic sign, though. There have been other aspects ranging from the good to the bad to the very, very difficult in our relationship with each other. Today, though, it seems that the important thing for me to pay attention to is the meaning of the prophetic sign. Because of this person, God dug through some very old things in my life, pre-Catholic, even pre-conversion to Christ, and did away with them. Boom, gone. Well, that "boom" took a few years, but still. And also through this person, God has ushered me in to a new era of my life. As I look back now, it is clear-as-day undeniable. God has used this person to call me to a new and deeper life in Christ and the Church, which has a concrete name: the Secular Carmelites. My personal relationship with the Lord has been utterly transformed. And there's even been something like a beheading. Fortunately it has not been literal, but the whole ordeal was painful enough that it feels like it should have been. Just to drive the point home that it was a non-coincidental move of God, a certain division landed smack on the feast of the beheading of John the Baptist a couple years ago.

I can get really caught up looking at signs. It reminds me of the gospel scene of Jesus having ascended to heaven, and the disciples stand there staring up into the sky, probably with their mouths open, gaping and dumbfounded. The angel has to come and say "Yo, dudes. What are you doing? Close your mouths, and then go do what He just got done telling you. Shoo, go, make disciples!"

I have stood gaping at the sign God gave me. Signs are precious gifts. But signs exist so that we put our faith in the power of the One who has revealed Himself to us, not so that we can build booths and stay on the mountain top forever with the sign.

God is calling me onward. Onward, for me, usually means something interior. I have sensed this for at least one solid year, but "senses" never come just once; they build in layers of prayer and experience. But I know that this "onward" means this understanding: Love means giving myself for the other. Which other? Any and every other God puts in my path. It means loving and giving for the sake of the other, not for what I get out of the loving or the giving. My life is a blank check. Absolutely all of it is put at God's disposal for His purposes, which means it is at the disposal of the people in my life: "my neighbor." I am reminded how Bl. Teresa of Calcutta said that God does not command us to love the world because "the world" is an abstraction. He calls us to love our neighbor. That means the concrete person sharing our life.

But that person, those people, do not become my security. I do not lay claim to any person. Love with detachment, as the Father does and Jesus reveals to us. This does not mean God is aloof; it means that He does not love with self-seeking. He loves with complete self-giving, to the point of death.

My security, my attachment is to Christ on the cross: the sign of God's eternal love which becomes mine. May I love Him and come to imitate Him.

What it Means to Worship God

I feel like I have been hanging on every word coming from Pope Francis in the month since his election. Just about everything I read intensifies a heavy, sweet, throbbing, bursting longing in my heart. As is common for me when this intensity hits, at the moment I can't really explain how I know this ... but this Pope means something for my life's moving forward. It's not just his nice words that grip me. This is about moving my life forward, or it has to be about that, "or I will die." I think I've come to know by now that when this phrase spontaneously erupts from me it is because God is leading me somewhere, and, yeah, eventually there is some form of death involved. Well, heck, that's Christianity. So yeah, somehow God is calling me.

What I read this morning (a papal tweet of all things!) was this: "Worshiping God means learning to be with him, stripping away our hidden idols and placing him at the centre of our lives." It struck me at once that this was both profound and obvious, once it was said.

But it also struck me that I have spent a lot of time in the last four years blogging my little heart out trying to discern in my own life and define just as pithily what "worshiping God" means for me. And so Pope Francis has given me a tremendous, monumental insight into my own life. Profound, and obvious. In other words, naru hodo. Big fat naru hodo.

Ok, brain, let's put these thoughts in order.

Chronology. 

Way back when, back in my 20s in my pentecostal days, twice I received a prophetic message (meaning people prophesied to me) that God had called me to teach people to worship. "Worship" in those days meant (on my radar screen) mostly to sing to God in church. I was sometimes a Sunday night worship leader, and also a home fellowship worship leader, so in the context that I understood what it meant to lead worship, I was already doing that. But it always sort of stuck out of my heart like a nail out of wood that you catch stuff on when you go past it that the phrase was "teach people to worship" not "lead worship."

But after I became a Catholic, a lot of my pentecostal experiences sort of went to one side in a "yes, but I'm not really sure anymore what that was about" pile. 

Starting about six years ago, I started rediscovering, shall we say, communal music. Then one Sunday after Mass it occurred to me that I should become a cantor. About a year later there was that Epiphany day that I fell backwards into my parish choir. Strange and powerful things started happening to me. I'm frankly used to powerful and strange things happening in my life, but that doesn't mean that each new thing isn't a complete shock to me. What I realize now is that God was teaching me to worship Him, even while I was learning how to lead in worship in a Catholic liturgical setting.

Learning to be with God. I knew how to be silent. I knew how to be introspective. I knew how to be alone and have my relationship with God. But I did not really, really know how to experience God in the midst of His people. Being in the midst of people was always kind of hard for me, a big risk, something I didn't know well how to do without bartering away my soul. And to be honest, I was always afraid that I would discover that it just wasn't true -- that God could not be found in the lives of normal Catholics. That's why I went 16 years as a Catholic without joining a choir. I was afraid that I would knock and find nobody home. 

But instead, God inundated, walloped, overwhelmed, flooded my soul with a knowledge of His Church being my family. My real and only place of belonging. And how? Because I couldn't sing random harmonies as I felt like it. Mundane concrete detail; profound, life-altering spiritual exchange.

Stripping away our hidden idols. Ok, ouch. Idols are things we give ourselves to because we believe they will make us happy, but instead they ensnare us. And they basically hide within the recesses of our unexamined minds, souls, and lives. I learned quickly in this process that a big idol for me was certain friendships where I did not, or felt I could not, exercise the freedom to be myself. To be the person God created me to be. It was this nasty trap of sabotaging my own dignity, and again, in this choir context God quickly showed me that respect of personal dignity was not only what God demanded of people in relationship with each other, but also what He expected me to accord myself.

I also had a gargantuan hidden idol of my own self-estimation as a wonderful, upright and holy Catholic woman. Well that one sure got shot all to hell. God probably expended most of his energy on this lesson right here. For one thing, in this whole ordeal I went through no less than three periods of temptation to atheism, seriously questioning whether this God I struggled against even existed. Probably the only commandment that didn't get a serious temptation workout was the honoring your father and mother bit, but probably only because I had trashed that one so much as a child I didn't need to go over it any more. Stinking, reeking pride cannot worship God.

Placing Him at the center of our lives.  This part was interesting. I've written a lot about a spiritual ordeal of the last year, and now I see that this was what that part was all about. It was connected to what I've written above, and so much that I haven't written. After all the powerful and strange, the blessing, the healing, the peace that came after wrestling free of hidden idols, the Lord wanted to see who I would choose Lord of this new place He was opening up in my life, this deeper-than-before center of all. Would it be Him? Or would it be me? It's easy to assent to the Lord with one's words and one's will, but it is another thing entirely when that cross starts messing with you. Because the real Lord Jesus always comes with His real cross. Therefore real worship means a surrender of one's life, a dying to oneself. Jesus at the center means the Lord is the one with the power, not me. It means being anawim. It means dying and being buried and knowing that I, in my person, do not have the power of resurrection. Only God can do that. He will, but I must wait and trust. 

So, in reflecting one little papal tweet, I can summarize the most dramatic spiritual odyssey of my life to date. Pretty powerful stuff. Yet another gift God has given me. God's gifts always have such interesting timing, too...




 

P.S.  From the Holy Father's April 14 homily, here's the expansion on that tweet:

You, I, do we worship the Lord? Do we turn to God only to ask him for things, to thank him, or do we also turn to him to worship him? What does it mean, then, to worship God? It means learning to be with him, it means that we stop trying to dialogue with him, and it means sensing that his presence is the most true, the most good, the most important thing of all. All of us, in our own lives, consciously and perhaps sometimes unconsciously, have a very clear order of priority concerning the things we consider important. Worshiping the Lord means giving him the place that he must have; worshiping the Lord means stating, believing – not only by our words – that he alone truly guides our lives; worshiping the Lord means that we are convinced before him that he is the only God, the God of our lives, the God of our history.

This has a consequence in our lives: we have to empty ourselves of the many small or great idols that we have and in which we take refuge, on which we often seek to base our security. They are idols that we sometimes keep well hidden; they can be ambition, a taste for success, placing ourselves at the centre, the tendency to dominate others, the claim to be the sole masters of our lives, some sins to which we are bound, and many others. This evening I would like a question to resound in the heart of each one of you, and I would like you to answer it honestly: Have I considered which idol lies hidden in my life that prevents me from worshiping the Lord? Worshiping is stripping ourselves of our idols, even the most hidden ones, and choosing the Lord as the centre, as the highway of our lives. Dear brothers and sisters, each day the Lord calls us to follow him with courage and fidelity; he has made us the great gift of choosing us as his disciples; he sends us to proclaim him with joy as the Risen one, but he asks us to do so by word and by the witness of our lives, in daily life. The Lord is the only God of our lives, and he invites us to strip ourselves of our many idols and to worship him alone. May the Blessed Virgin Mary and Saint Paul help us on this journey and intercede for us.

Personal Epiphany

Faith seeking understanding: that, I learned early on, is the Catholic definition of theology. I realize it is also pretty much how I approach my life. I have a nearly bothersome need to make sense of my life and to understand where I am and where I am going. The longer I do this, the more I realize that Wisdom, that Love, is a real person Who desires to make Himself known. Wisdom is not the result of my cleverly balancing all the spinning plates in the air and having none crash down. Wisdom is seeing that life is about being called by God, and the adventure of the response I give.

The voice through which God calls is the liturgy. The liturgy is Scripture, it is sacrament, it is the Holy Spirit active in real time, and it is one continuous action handed down from Jesus to the present day through the Church. It is the Mass; it is the Liturgy of the Hours. It is miraculous.

The way I respond to the liturgy is varied. It has varied wildly throughout my life, and yet there has always been something absolutely magnetic that has drawn me. Even as a child going to a Lutheran church, I always felt a tremendous sense of anticipation every time we pulled in the driveway. I had extremely high expectations, even though I didn't understand this at all. I think it was a craving for the glory of God. When I was very new in my journey into the Catholic Church, like less than one month, the Lord told me clearly, "I want the glorious to become common-place in your life." And I dare say this is true now. We are surrounded by God's presence always, and God constantly calls everyone. But the key is in a consistent response. The glory is there; we but need new eyes to see it.

What I'm driving at is this: I understand something today. And I'm kind of shaking my head as I write this, because I know that "understand" really means "don't understand."

My conversion to Catholicism took place during the Midnight Mass of Christmas in 1991. It took me a few days to catch my breath and come into agreement, all of me, on that, but that was the moment where God made Himself known to me. At first I thought it was nice, and then I thought it was kind of interesting, but finally I realized it was absolutely sign-value, intentional-on-God's-part meaning-filled that it happened that day. I have literally spent decades meditating on the truth of the Incarnation and its meaning for my life.

But today is the Epiphany. Four years ago today, something else happened at a Mass. It too has profoundly changed me. Stepping into my parish choir seemed innocuous enough, but from the very beginning I knew it wasn't. I knew that God was up to something. I knew He was calling. But it has only been with time that I have come to "understand" that one doesn't say "God calls me" without awe, fear, and trembling.

I look at what this feast day is. Epiphany essentially fulfills Christmas in its universal, missionary dimension. Jesus is here: heaven and earth start to shake and move in response. "All kings see His glory."

There is something in this for my life, too. The last four years have shifted the orientation of my life from pretty much minding my own business and living in my own private family hobbit-hole, to stretching my heart out and constantly pleading for the conversion of the world.

I understand very little, but I know that this is the work of God in me. I know that He has an intention with this Epiphany calling. I see His hand, and I trust His purposes. And at the same time there are so many, many things I don't understand that require me to walk by faith through the dark.

Yeah, that's it. Epiphany this year is like a light, shining out through what has become very dark. The light is Christ. I go towards Him. It matters not where I exit, what I leave behind, or where I go. I see the Light, and again, He calls.

And I tremble.

I Hate it When I Wake up in the Morning and I'm Not the Center of the Universe

The other day I was washing our fruit bowl and this caused me to realize how tremendously patient, merciful and humble God is in His relationship to me. I am quite slow to have things really sink in. He is masterful at teaching, though.

The fruit bowl was a wedding present. I was 31 when we married, so I'd already lived on my own for a decade. Unwrapping all those gifts, I noticed a sharp difference between all this fancy stuff we got and the old, random junk I was used to using for daily living. Somehow, because of these gifts, an arrow of intuition shot through me that told me marriage was ultimately about being called to serve others. Not just my husband and presumed family, but the great social beyond. I didn't really have any social beyond at the time. So this intuition was like a nudge, telling me a different life was ahead.

Looking back I see that I treated this nudge at the time sort of like one treats a waitress who comes by after dinner and says "Would you like dessert, or maybe an after-dinner drink?" It's an interesting prospect, and maybe it makes me feel momentarily enthused, and maybe I even respond positively, but the bottom line is, it's all about whether I want extra goodies added on to my goodie-laden experience or not. What will please me?

The other day I held this bowl and I realized how much my life has revolved around that question: What will please me?


Oh. So that's where all of my unhappiness has come from.

God is not opposed to our happiness -- that's a stupid notion, though one I wrestled with for years. God absolutely is all about our being happy. (Here's proof.) In fact, He's really the only one who knows how we get there. It makes lots of sense for us to pay heed to His direction if we are serious about wanting happiness.

But we have this stubborn thing, this intentness on staying attached to our own plans for our own happiness. It's a sort of entitlement sense, I suppose, this cry, however buried, that insists that we have the right to our own happiness, our own way. We're sort of right, except for that last part. If we don't surrender to God and His way, well, we can kiss that chance at happiness goodbye as we get all the more frantic at trying to make it happen ourselves. It's that whole "He who loses his life will find it, and he who saves his life will lose it" thing. Heads, you lose; tails, you lose.

Here's an illustration from my life. Shortly after we got married, I really wanted to become an RCIA catechist. I had my almost-finished Masters in Theology degree and my plan that I entered grad school with -- I was going to go teach people and save the world. What better thing to do than to serve God and His Church, right? We even changed parishes so that I could do this. I slogged at it for five years. I made a lasting friendship with the then-director, but for the most part I was a lousy catechist. I mean, I tried my best, and didn't teach anyone heresy, but my efforts were like a lot of chaff flying around.

There was some value to trying to serve God the way I wanted, but the value was mostly in me seeing how ineffective it was. I thought it would please me to live out this vision of me "serving God."

A few years later, I actually felt called by God to step up for music ministry in my parish. This was not my vision for myself, and I was hesitant at first. But later, ohmygosh, I was so happy. Amazing things happened. God started blessing me so much it was almost like being high. It pleased me very much.

Just over a year ago, the Lord asked me in no uncertain terms to put it all back in His hands. And I did. This was all an interior experience of prayer. It was actually like another degree of high. But nothing changed on the outside. This year, God has broken in again far more profoundly in ways only He can with this most disturbing question: What pleases you more? Spiritual consolations, insights, revelations, favor, healing.... or obedient service to Me?

Who is this about?

Who is the One all worthy to be pleased? 

Who do you love more: yourself, or Me?

You know that it is God posing choices like this to your soul when you need to actually stop and consider it. And really, really wrestle with the desire to yell, "Me! I really only care about me! What about meeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee?"

That's a good time to revisit the facts about God being the author of all that is, and the only one who really knows our path to happiness.

There is a losing that is gaining. You gain everything. All the good stuff. You just have to trust Him enough to die.

That's all.

To die to the question What will please me? and instead ask, What pleases You, Lord?

With Divine Recompense He Comes to Save You

I originally wrote this post in September of 2009 but left it unpublished because at the time it was too soul-scraping for me to share it. As I read it through tonight and edited it a bit, it still brought tears to my eyes -- tears of joy. I want to let it be known that God is the Author of my hope.

Thus says the LORD: Say to those whose hearts are frightened: Be strong, fear not! Here is your God, he comes with vindication; with divine recompense he comes to save you. Then will the eyes of the blind be opened, the ears of the deaf be cleared; then will the lame leap like a stag, then the tongue of the mute will sing. Streams will burst forth in the desert, and rivers in the steppe. The burning sands will become pools, and the thirsty ground, springs of water. Isaiah 35:4-7

This was the first reading this last Sunday, and when I heard it, I found myself gripped and shaken. I find myself gripped and shaken quite a bit lately, and frankly there is only so much of this I can take before I have to pay serious and often trembling attention to the heart that is trying to tell me something by its resonance.

So, I'm just going to say that this is a very challenging post for me to write.

That reading from Isaiah is not a new one to me. The images in Isaiah of the burning sands becoming pools, of streams in the desert, and of the blind, deaf and lame being healed have always caught my attention and set off a longing in my soul, like seeing a promised Beauty towards which I have long been traveling.

But this Sunday when I heard it, what struck me was not a wonderful Something that was somewhere else. It was a Someone here, now. That word, recompense, jumped out at me with great force.

For what could God possibly come with recompense to me? Does that concept even make sense?

....How can I dive into telling this story? Maybe head-first is the only way.

My father was very strange. I have few memories of him before my parents divorced; I was so young and he spent a lot of time commuting to distant towns and even distant states trying to stay employed as a teacher. He taught academic stuff when and because he had to, but at heart he was a band teacher and a choir director. Actually, that's not quite right. He loved music (trumpet and piano) but he hated teaching. He could not handle interacting with students, or anyone else for that matter. He was an alcoholic, but I'm not exactly sure what the chicken/egg progression was with the drinking and the social skills.

When I was 23 and had worked out forgiving him for what I had mistakenly understood as his attempt to ruin my life by his alcoholism, I took him out for his birthday. It was the only time, minus once when I was four, that I can remember being alone with him, without my brother. I arrived at his house, and presented him with a recording of some music I'd written. I remember him standing with his back to me for several minutes as we tried to carry on a conversation. He wasn't doing anything, he simply literally could not face me. He insisted we go to Denny's, because birthday people got free meals. It seemed he couldn't bear the thought of me wasting money on him. Later, we sat in his car and he told me things about himself I'd never known, including that he had been diagnosed with the same mental illness as my sister.

Just imagine for a moment being 23 years old and never realizing that your father is mentally ill. It didn't even hit me like a sudden flash of insight and realization, as if all the pieces of his strangeness suddenly made sense. All I can say is I had come to accept him, with great begrudgingness of course, in the way all children somehow look to their parents and accept them as the standard of normal. My "normal" seemed to require a confusing disconnect from what my senses told me.

My father's core belief, as communicated to me at least, seemed to be of his own worthlessness. He did his best to say he believed better of me, and in fact as a follower of the Twelve Steps, he occasionally would honor me with an apology for his drunken disruptions of my life. He in fact told me he loved me, and those words were otherwise never voiced in my family. Ever. I am sure now that his distancing himself from me was a way of wishing me "better than him" for my life. But I was left with an enormous sense of guilt for being intelligent, having friends, and achieving any sort of success, because I intuited these things would make him feel worse. Our mutual love of music was one of the only shards of commonality that lent itself to "conversation," if you can use that term for my one-word answers to the couple predictable questions he asked each week at our weird, scheduled visitations. It was a rickety bridge that never really succeeded in connecting us.

When my father died in 2001, I cried not because I would miss him as much as because I had always missed him. Potential for a positive relationship with him disappeared like a tiny round blue flame whose going out is only noticed by one who had hopes for it.

Life goes on. God has done wonderful things in my life for many years. But lately I am very struck by something new God is doing.

When I was a kid I started finding refuge for my life in God. But I also learned to use religious stuff as bricks from which to build a fortress to protect myself. God was faithful and patient, and kept watching for chinks in my fortress walls to try to bring me peace. I will never forget a comment my husband made to me before we were married, when I was a graduate Theology student. He called my study of Theology a "hobby." Hobby? I snorted with lightning bolts flashing from my eyes. These ideas, these truths about God are the most important things in the world, and I am giving myself to study them! How dare you think this is just something I amuse myself with! But in my heart I knew he was right, and it was like a stinging slap into a reality I barely knew. I played with ideas for comfort. Religious ideas, and sophisticated comfort, but, all the same...

I was very much like Simon and Garfunkel's rock. You know, a fortress deep and mighty who could not countenance much talk of friendship and who identified people with devastation. I truly loved God, but I wrapped myself tight in ideas about Him in an effort to make contact with His love for me in return. And of course, I did not succeed, because that isn't how it works.

The most basic Bible verses tells how it does work: Beloved, let us love one another. For love is of God, and everyone that loves is born of God and knows God. To encounter God's love we must encounter God's people. I've spent a lot of time acting like my father, standing in the room with my back towards everyone, for lack of knowing that one should turn around.

The shocker for me this year has been to experience this encounter with Christ afresh, and to be challenged by it in the deep parts of my personal history, so deep that after weeks or months I am still trying to catch my breath and allow myself to take it in.

I've been learning that Christ comes to us now in the same mode He did when He was born: the Incarnation. This physical world has a sacramental nature to it now, because Christ has entered it. The Church is the first sacrament, because it is the continuation of Christ's presence in time and space. We don't encounter God's love through ideas, we encounter it through people and events. This is what sacraments, what the Church, are all about.

A whole string of people have brought me to the experience of Christ I have today. My husband provides my baseline, enabling me to face out into the world. My son and daughter have each stretched my capacity for being human. But the Lord has also placed in my path a man who, like my father, is a musician.  It is actually in the light of his face, so to speak, that I have been forced to take another look at what aspects of my past need to stop informing my present. I almost imagine my father looking down on me from the next life and saying, "Marie, I asked the Lord to find someone who would remind you enough of me so you'd know I was thinking about you, but who was able to show you a way of humanity I simply couldn't." Joe's ability to lead, to pull confidence out of us (ok, out of me), and his orientation towards people as the whole point of living just exude from him like leaves grow on trees. Or like streams and rivers flow... from the desert... making pools appear in the burning sands. It's an awful lot like how bread and wine are normal things until God gets hold of them. Actually, it's exactly like that. What is perfectly natural to him becomes a call, a sign, a promise of conversion to me.

This is what I call evidence. Evidence that God sees, that He knows, that He counts all of our hairs, saves each of our tears, and that He builds from dismantled fortress walls something completely different. A highway, I think, for our God (Is. 40:3). It is evidence that He is the Redeemer.

Thank you, Jesus, that you are my Redeemer.


P.S. The Father's Day after I wrote this post (June, 2010) was the first time I was able to feel happy, peaceful emotions for that celebration. I realized I am so much my father's daughter! Being able to accept him and understand how in fact he loved me, under all the weight and pain he carried, freed me to respect him and to sort of re-write my understanding of his place in my life. Thanks be to God.

Overture to Carmel?

It's been a little shocking to me to realize how intricately my life has been wound around working on my CD. In one way or another, either the question or the reality of this project has been etching itself into my heart and soul for over a year. I suppose etching is one of those things one might not notice is actually happening while it happens. I mean, I did, but... It's like a sound that is constant, and all of a sudden there is silence. There's a little bit something death-like to having that part of this process be complete. And yet it is not so much a grieving type of death. It feels maybe more like the end of one movement of something and the silence before the next movement starts.

It just feels weird.

I feel like I have done everything I need to do. Yes, I have 1,000 of these puppies coming my way in a few weeks, and I will need to do what I can to sell them and reassure my husband that I have not wasted a couple thousand dollars. But already I know the money is not wasted. I did not make this CD because I think I have this amazing, stellar talent that needs attention and showcasing. Gag. I did not make this CD because of a desire to "minister to people." God does that. Really, I made this CD out of a sense of obedience to God, and out of a sense -- now I see how accurate that sense was -- that I needed this process for the salvation of my own soul.

I have no idea what happens next, and frankly if nothing much happens next other than a few people buying CDs and saying "oh, that's nice," I'm perfectly fine with that. But I know that God is doing something interiorly in me. I know it is good. So many times I get this aching sense of God doing something, I usually can't say what, but I want to say something about it. And I usually can't, so why do I try? Why? I guess because I want to understand! I want to know where I am and where I am going.

That's reasonable, right?

All I know is that my heart is very drawn to Carmel. This is not strange. The Carmelite saints have made my heart burn since the first time I met them. I was writing a paper for my Medieval and Renaissance Philosophy class on Christian Mysticism, and as I read St. Theresa of Avila, St. John of the Cross, as well as Hugh of St. Victor and others, I was bowled over. My heart had longed for a place it felt at home spiritually, and even though I was in a Lutheran college and attending a non-denom fellowship, I remember dropping the book on the table and praying emphatically, "Lord, if there is anyone left on the face of the earth who lives and believes like these folks, these are the people I want to be with."

A couple of years later when I first started talking with my friend who had returned to his Catholic faith and upset my whole life by it, I asked him, "are there people around still like St. Theresa of Avila?" I expected him to say no, of course not, but he not only assured me there were but later provided me with a little book about Teresian prayer. I spent lots of time at Holy Hill during my conversion process and afterwards.

And then a couple years ago, after my parish choir started messing with my life in divine ways, St. John of the Cross seemed to start resounding in my life powerfully again, especially through the book Impact of God, which I wrote about here. And on it has gone from there. I've been in touch with the local Carmelite community. It makes sense.

Being drawn to Carmel isn't about playing around, though. I discovered, for example, that recording is hard work. It is not only singing and deciding and doing musical things, there was a lot of emotional investment and a lot of working out being free interiorly so that the music could come out. It is hard work of every sort, body, soul and spirit. And I saw my weaknesses, for example in playing guitar -- I wished I'd spent more of the last 20 years playing guitar and not getting so dreadfully rusty. (God supplied the help I needed, thankfully, for I don't need to have all abilities myself!) But hard work demonstrates the need for hard work. If one doesn't work hard, one believes it doesn't matter, and the doors that could open otherwise stay shut. I have the same sense about being drawn to the commitment of prayer. Prayer can't be about giving me warm fuzzies of one sort or another. I don't, I mustn't love God nor people in order to please myself or get happy.

Really, being drawn to Carmel is really being drawn to Christ. He has so many ways to call to us and draw us and teach us and lead us on, but the goal is all the same: union with the Blessed Trinity in Christ. Part and parcel of that is being the frail, weak and sinful human beings we are and opening ourselves to the grace which infills and transforms.

I don't know what comes tomorrow. But this is what I see today.

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.