Whether Paul or Apollos, or Charismatic or Latin

In 1991, when I first responded to the Lord's call to enter the Catholic Church, I belonged to an interdenominational charismatic fellowship. My first bridge into Catholic life was through a charismatic prayer group which was led by the parents of the worship leader at my fellowship (who was an ex-Catholic). The members of that prayer group befriended me and walked with me through my 18 month journey into the Church, and celebrated my Confirmation with me. 

But what formed me the most deeply during that time was my attendance at daily Mass. Going to daily Mass was something the Lord impressed on me within days of my saying yes to Him. As I recall, though, it took me the better part of a year to be obedient on that point. I finally began when I realized I could go to Mass after work. Most of the time I went to Gesu parish on the Marquette University campus, but sometimes, when I got off work early, I went to St. Bernard's in Wauwatosa. From the time I began this practice until I moved to Japan in September of 1994 I was stunned over and over again by how much grace the Lord could pour forth in a 25-30 minute Mass with no music, no fanfare, no lector, especially in the very plain basement church at Gesu. Time and time again, the Lord met me powerfully from the moment I entered the door. He met my miserable heart and began a radical transformation of my soul and mind. 

When I planned to leave Japan and had no idea of what to do next, I came to Steubenville in part because of its reputation as a focal point of Catholic charismatic renewal (and in part because I didn't know of any options for graduate school.) And while I mentally associated the charismatic renewal as something that led me to the Catholic Church, I knew full well that the destination of my soul was... the Catholic Church, or rather the kingdom of God through her. I did not like to label myself as a charismatic Catholic because this is redundant. Being Catholic is the fullness. As John Michael Talbot says, to be Catholic is to be "full gospel."

These days I see a trend that reminds me a lot of the charistmatic renewal in both its good and bad aspects, and that is the Latin liturgical movement. I believe that it is an authentic prompting of the Holy Spirit to draw Christians closer into conformity with Jesus Christ, to purify them for belonging to each other in the Church and bringing the lost to salvation. 

But I hope that these won't become "Latin Mass advocates." I hope that they will become disciples and apostles of the Lord Jesus Christ and of his gospel. I have always cringed hard when I hear people equate the charismatic renewal with a certain style of music, of worship, of prayer, or of anything external. It is about the person of the Holy Spirit, the one who overshadowed the Virign Mary, the one who guides us into all truth, the one sent by the Father and who establishes our identity in His Son. We can and do have our aesthetic tastes, and we do have documents from the Church guiding us in valid celebration of the liturgy. But earthly spiritual attachments form us in beginning stages of growth. St. John of the Cross teaches us that even these need to be surrendered. We long for our senses to be richly engaged in worship, and that is right and good, but we also must eventually leave the world of the senses and die to this to rise to deeper delights directly from God. 

I loved, and was deeply attached to, the powerful way we worshipped in my charismatic fellowship. But God called me to surrender that and to trust He could meet me in liturgy. I grew up with Lutheran liturgy and thought I was entering greener pastures when I left it -- and in some ways I was. All I knew of it was lifelessness. One form of worship or another is not, ultimately, where we find life. Liturgical or free, Extraordinary or Novus Ordo -- it isn't about that. It is about following Jesus Christ in obedience.  

Let us all, together, enter into life.

Ego and Conversion

I'm probably not the only one.

As I was sorting out adulthood, faith, and what it meant to hear God's call, I regularly got tripped up over Scripture passages like "deny yourself and follow Me [Jesus]." (Mt. 16:24, Mk. 8:34, Lk. 9:23, Jn. 3:30)

In looking back at that, I believe it was because of having a strong yet unconscious formation in annihilation as a positive value. (Is that what nihilism is all about?) What I mean of this is I had an underlying diabolical belief that my personal existence is a fault, an error, the bad element in the equation of what is. That it would be better if I were not.

And there were reasons for that, but this post isn't aimed there. This is aimed at how this affects the workings of ego.

And by ego, I mean the self. Self at the center. Self as Lord. Self as master.

As a young Christian, I knew that self wasn't supposed to be master. Literally, the essence of the gospel invitation had been presented to me as a promise of Jesus sitting on the throne (the place of determining courses of action and thinking) when the self gets off the throne and invites Him there. These gospel passages of self-denial mentioned above seemed to take this dethronement even further, into a kind of required self-death or self-hatred. I figured, what else would it mean to "deny yourself" or to "hate your life" in this world to keep it for eternal life?

Because I already had this latent self-annihilation wish gnawing at me, I found myself pretty good at self-hatred. This became a twisted religiously-decorated ego-delight: how much I could castigate and hate my selfish self. And when I came up for a breather from self-loathing, I smiled up into an imagined face of God who clearly took delight in me for doing this.

In reality, however, I was stuck. I thought I was deeply religious, but I was not making significant spiritual progress, even to the minimal extent I understood spiritual progress could or should be made. While I lived a normal looking life, in my interiority I mostly hardened out a path between these two points: feeling deeply unloved, and trying to impress God with how hard I was on myself. And being rather an intense sort, that path was trodden down rather firmly.

When I encountered Jesus on my way into the Catholic Church, He beckoned me off in a completely new direction. Significantly, the first big episode here happened at a Christmas Eve Midnight Mass. The message came through loud and clear: I, Jesus, entered your human reality. If it shocks you that becoming a human being was good enough for Me, it is because you are grossly mistaken about the value of your own human creation. You are not an error. You are not a mistake. You are not a problem or a curse. Your being is not a blight on this world. You are loved. You are here on purpose, and it's My purpose.

Allowing myself to be loved, all the way down into my depths, took a long time. But knowing that Love was the trajectory of reality helped tremendously in reshaping my thinking about God, about myself, and about everything in between. I came to realize that having Jesus seated on the throne of my heart does not start with a hateful kicking and beating of myself, like so much evil garbage. The pleased face I sought out in my attempts at self-annihilation was not the face of God, but of the father of lies. Bowing in worship before the Lord Jesus Christ is an act that brings right order. I, a beloved creation, limited by nature, bow before the Creator who gives Himself to his creation. This is not a relationship of domination and subjegation, of conqueror and conquered, of the All and the obliterated. God is Love; Love gives Itself. I open; He infills. I become a son, I share the divine nature, I am brought into union (2 Pet. 1:4; Jn. 17:23; Eph. 1:23).

This is the sense in which one must understand the self-emptying, the self-denying. As St. John of the Cross would put it, the nada, nada, nada we embrace as God becomes all for us. By faith I can move out to receive from this supernatural transcendant reality.

Singing, Vulnerability, and Conversion

So, I mentioned in my catch-up post that I'm involved in ChristLife. I've been in several different roles, including administration, music ministry, and prayer teams, and I've also visited a few different parishes that have been running the program. I always have my antennae up and I'm running a future-looking analysis app in the background of all of these experiences.

Music is a hot topic in post-course evaluation discussions. And as a music minister my antennae twitch vibrantly when the topic comes up anywhere. At least in my community, nothing sparks intensity of opinion quite like the type of music used to lead people in worship and the way in which that music is executed.

But the ping pong match of "freedom in the Spirit" vs "comfort of tradition" and all the ways in which one can imperceptibly move into the other is predictable and boring after hearing out the personal views of particular individuals. A more fundamental question emerges from the strongly held stances.

Why do Christians sing? What does it have to do with being human? What does it have to do with prayer, and does anything about it lend itself to the life of conversion? And specifically how can singing together help propel our parish's ChristLife to its intended goal?

Why do Christians sing?

Ok, Scripture. Just in the book of Psalms we are enjoined to sing to God a bazillion times. We've been doing it forever, and our Jewish forefathers in faith have been doing it forever. So it isn't something that those who are raised in the church even think about, because it is so much a part of us. When I lived in Japan, though, it was pointed out to me, "Christianity is the religion where people sing together." Of all of the things that characterize religions, it never dawned on me that this would be striking for someone to whom Christianity was completely foreign. "They sing together." Japanese people sing together. We even use a Japanese word for one way to do that: karaoke. They have corporate songs and school songs, but not really any religious songs.

Being corporate

And Japanese singing tells us something about how music functions for human beings. Singing together requires an experience of corporateness. Many parts make up one body, one song-singing mass. We think or read the same words, the same timing, the same feeling, and we express these together. We speak one thing as one group.

Bump that up to the liturgical responses of Mass, or a Scriptural song where we are acclaiming God's word back to Him. Here, we are focus our words, our minds, our voices on the action of God or on the thoughts of God, and together with Him, we sing the words. We are corporate, with God. Singing, in this way, is one of the clearest human manifestations of being Church.

But at what cost?

There is something very vulnerable about being Church like this. This is not an accident. In order to actually sing, you have to let your voice be heard. But it's not your normal, daily voice. It's not your business voice. It's not your negotiating voice. For most of us, it isn't our most trained voice, the one we feel in control of. Singing denotes a revealing of a secret voice, one for sacred or intimate use. Scientists tell us that singing releases endorphins and bonds us to those we sing with. Human beings are designed to grow and thrive through this experience of giving into the vulnerability of singing together.

It sounds beautiful and poetic, and those of us who love music can be cheerleaders for this point. But those who have any experience of performing music for others will tell you there is a side to this beautiful and poetic experience that is terrifying. If you are performing a new piece or in a new context or it is especially important to you for whatever reason to do a certain thing very well, the adrenaline flows. You get nervous. Fight or flight instincts activate. Alertness levels peak. Doing this in community is actually part of what bonds people as they sing or perform.

So what about prayer?

Not everyone loves to sing. Singing in any context, let alone public performance, can evoke anxiety for some people, and therefore some simply don't sing, perhaps claiming that they actually cannot. I wonder how many of these would also feel they cannot pray. That they do not know how to make their voice or their heart heard to God. The hint I'd like to give them is that singing, in one way of understanding it, is unavoidably essential to prayer.

Oh, you can say prayers, recite them. You can pray silently. I do both of these every day. But in reality if the heart does not sing, the prayer does not rise.

And specifically, ChristLife

Let's look at a specific ChristLife context now. The fourth talk in Following Christ is all about forgiving those who have wronged us. The concept of forgiving someone is beautiful and poetic. Right? We are inspired by stories of people who do it. But the act of forgiving can be terrifying. It requires our energy, our focus. The experience is likely to dredge up what happened and lots of feelings. It takes courage to forgive.

And as we venture out into this fray of Following Christ session four, we sing a few songs. Why? Why throw songs in here, or in any Mass or any Christian context? It is not filler, it is not entertainment, it is not custom, it is no mere artistic segue. We sing to acknowledge our vulnerability before the God who made us, but loves us. We acknowledge that as God, he has every right to direct our lives. We acknowledge that we need and desire His grace. 

So what is this worship music for?

We sing to open our hearts, to be real, to assent to our vulnerability, and to declare truth.  I do not sing just for myself, but in singing for myself I am simultaneously singing to support the one next to me with the same truth. We sing to belong to each other.

To worship God is to lay our lives and hearts bare before the Lord, to allow His loving gaze to fall upon us, and to respond to His creative gaze with the love His Holy Spirit births into our hearts as we are there. And that's true whether we are singing, speaking, silent, acting, or crying: it is all a song. To worship God is an experience of emotion, but not only emotion. It is an experience of will, but not only will. It is a personal and private experience, and yet it is not only personal and private. Worship is to be the place of corporate authenticity of our deepest hearts, before God. Worship, expressed in song, is a place of faith and vulnerability. I believe this is the essense of the "new territory" that my community is learning to experience through ChristLife. And to navigate it well, it helps to state it explicitly.

Is Anybody Thirsty for This?

Would that all God's people were prophets! (Num. 11:29)

Catholics who find it normal to invoke the Holy Spirit to activate spiritual gifts in them, to move in power, to be real, also seem to find it normal to incorporate a musical setting that looks like this: 

Or maybe this:

Or, if they are high-budget and not in church, this:

I play guitar. Guitars transport easily and this one instrument can support a soloist or a whole group or congregation of singers easily. I relate the guy in the first picture, and in fact I lead a group that is not too terribly different from the second picture.

But I'm so, so tired of the spiritual cliche that those who are actively seeking the presence of the Lord have guitar music. I'm tired of it from two directions: from those whose spiritual hunger makes them gravitate toward the guitarists, and from those who seemingly wouldn't know the Holy Spirit if He bit them on the nose, but see a guitarist in church and think: that's a charismatic. Charismatic is, after all, a term to define a certain musical style. Isn't it?

My heart longs to see worship groups who have a fresh fire in their hearts to seek the Lord to fill their freshly activated wineskins that have a look something like this:

Or this:

Or this:

Or maybe even this:

And this isn't a rant about musical style. I play guitar in church every week and I wouldn't do that if I didn't think one could worship well this way.

This is about a thirst in my heart for New Wine. I want all God's people to prophesy, and I want God to encounter people, open up the dormant gifts within them they received in baptism, and I want the Holy Spirit to rush upon them with power for them, the Church, and the world to be made new.

Is anybody else thirsty for this?

The Brokenness of Jesus

We hear it at every Mass

He broke it and gave it to them, saying, "Take this, all of you, and eat of it, for this is my body..."

What struck me today in a fresh and new way was this reality that Jesus intentionally gave his disciples that which He had broken. And what He had broken, sacramentally, was Himself.

He wanted the bread into which He would speak Himself to be broken.

He later became broken on the cross because He wanted to be broken on the cross. Or, rather, he became broken as an act of love. He didn't desire brokenness, He desired to act in love.

I am broken because of sin. I am broken because of my own sin and because I was born into a sinful world with sinful forebears and sin-in-action and sin-in-residence. Somehow it is part of this world.

He is broken not because of sin. He was born through the new order of grace, through her who was herself immaculately conceived.

I don't understand all that. But I know it means that when we are grafted into Him, we receive the capacity to be healed of sin and for it to dry up, that sin-in-action. Sin-in-residence loses its power.

But we remain broken, so that we can be like He became, for the salvation of the world. We remain broken so that we grow love.

I have thought that my brokenness meant that I was still so far away from God, from goodness, from change, from grace. I thought my brokenness meant disqualification for being with God. I thought it meant being not as valuable as I would be if I were not broken. Apparently I also thought it was something one could overcome, now, in this life.

But what struck me today was that Jesus broke the bread.

It was no act of malice. It was no act of blame. He saw us broken, and became like us, so that we could become like Him. Accepting the broken piece is that turning point in receiving transformation and transmitting it.

When I can accept the reality that I am broken at the same time that I receive this tremendous outpouring of love and grace and transformation, a corner has been turned. Ironically, it is in accepting utter weakness and helplessness in the presence of Love that we become agents of healing. We become one with Jesus in His self-offering, in His bread, in His body.

There's no earning of a better condition, and there's no striving to fix myself.

There is a two-way total self-gift.

Pulling Down Strongholds

There is a type of injury that happens in religious formation that can, so to speak, blow out the bridge between a person and the truth. As I see it, this happens when truths or half-truths are communicated via an environment that lacks virtue, thereby creating internal dissonance in those taught by it. For example, I grew up in a church which was emphatic about the authority and sacredness of Scripture, but demonstrated a lackadaisical attitude towards living in obedience to what Scripture says. Scripture in this way became for me an instrument of ideology, not light and truth leading me to know, love, and worship God. But if you challenged me on the importance of the Bible, boy, I'd give you an earful.

I've heard others speak of their own disconnects, such as being told to "offer up" their suffering, but without any accompanying sense of God's tender love from those so instructing them. For them, the doctrine of redemptive suffering might then be reduced to, "Shut up, you unworthy irritation, and suffer like everyone else." And they might resent anyone who speaks of spiritual experience that suggests rising out of this cowed position is even possible: who does she think she is that God would love her so specially?

Unchecked, these disconnects foment in our souls, attract darkness, and grow into sick, lying thought patterns which we believe, but rarely think about, or challenge. Or if we do think about them, we find a way to fight about them, and they make us sick with misery and despair, or lead us to degrade and destroy ourselves and others. These thoughts become what St. Paul calls a "stronghold." He teaches us to destroy them:

For though we live in the world we are not carrying on a worldly war, for the weapons of our warfare are not worldly but have divine power to destroy strongholds. We destroy arguments and every proud obstacle to the knowledge of God, and take every thought captive to obey Christ, (2 Cor. 10:3-5)

Ironically enough, I experienced one of these disconnects I mentioned above when learning about this spiritual practice of destroying, or "pulling down" strongholds. This is not a phrase a lot of Catholics use regularly, but my pre-Catholic environment sometimes bandied this term about. I came away with a vague sense that it meant getting angry at wrong ideas, and prayer-yelling at spirits who took up habitation in people who thought incorrectly. It also seemed the single most popular "stronghold" was a "religious stronghold," which meant people who practiced a Christianity that looked different than the prayer-yellers'. And when you boiled that down, it meant non-charismatic Protestants, and, of course, Catholics of all stripes.

So eventually when I heard someone talk about pulling down strongholds, I loosely translated it "become a self-righteous religious bigot." And since I had enough of that going for me without help, I just tuned it all out. And then I became a Catholic, and my new people didn't use that lingo.

But recently, like digging up the garden for spring planting and finding something accidentally buried there, I came across this Scripture with fresh eyes. And I realize I have come to a completely different understanding of it than the caricature of it I gave up on years ago.

The truth is, we do have spiritual power, and it comes in speaking and living with integrity the truth and the light, which is Jesus. We will encounter lies believed, both in our own hearts and in the hearts of others. No heart can bear to see all of its darkness at once, so daily we pray to be brought into the union of light and love which yields to truth in thought and action. And our power to confront and destroy falsehood does not come from how strenuously we can yell. Our power is in love. There is the moment when love blazes forth in anger at evil, but the motivation of that anger is to proclaim God the supreme power in that contest. In most cases, actual listening and entry with the other into the place where the falsehood first got lodged, with patient truth speaking, light shining, and firmness of integrity, will be the most effective in ushering in God's light.

We have to go to the heart of the mess with truth and light.

We need to always speak and act in truth and light. And integrity means, when we mess up, we fess up. Every time. Ask God daily to correct all of your ways, renew your mind, and to cleanse you for worship of Him. And then trust Him to do it!

And when you aren't invited in but fought against, don't argue; pray for the entrance of light, for darkness to be exposed, and for truth to reign.

This is love for another person, to enfold them in truth, which makes them free.

Life-Changing Holy Week

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What Just Happened Here?: Onething 2016 and the Catholic Ecumenical Track

What I'm writing here is a spiritual first draft. That means that while thoughts and inspirations have passed through my heart and soul about my topic, I haven't explored them yet. This is writing of discovery.

If you don't know what the Onething conference is, look at this, and if you don't know about the little history of the Catholic Track and MajorChange, then go here. I'm not going to spend time explaining the event from a technical perspective.

And suddenly, just as I sat down to write, my clear entry into my thoughts is not clear any more. But this is part of the process.

I remember the spot where I stood, in a kitchen in Japan about 20 years ago, when I realized that to evangelize means to tell someone the reality of who they are. To be evangelized means to have revealed to one the truth of who they are. And in this regard, we need to be regularly evangelized. It simply means to have God's truth about us spoken over us. God's truth is incredibly good news, and it is also a call, and it is also a challenge.

This, I think, strikes at the core of how I experienced the last several days at Onething. On a simple level, we spent a lot of time meditating in various ways over what is contained in the chorus:

You're a good, good Father -- it's who You are, it's who You are, it's who You are
And I'm loved by You -- it's who I am, it's who I am, it's who I am

This is meditation on truth. This is healing to our minds and souls, and doing this, especially in the wide context of Scripture meditation, prayer, praise, Eucharist, and fellowship with the saints, this meditation becomes a river of revelation through which we invite and "free" the Holy Spirit to bring all sorts of goods to us. Our attention, heart, and desire, focused on God, tunes us in to that which He has patiently waited to pour out to us. Part, I think, is our lack of interest (reason for not otherwise receiving his outpouring), but part of it is that God does this sort of thing when His people gather. And when they gather to seek Him. St. Teresa of Avila knew that "God withholds Himself from no one who perseveres," and if we want God to move among us as a Church, we need to persevere together, which involves gathering and seeking. We also spur one another on to love and good deeds. Yes, we need to encourage our own hearts in God (this is actually incredibly vital), but we can't do without gathering for mutual encouragement.

Ok, so. During the 18 months that I spent post-conversion, on my way into the Catholic Church, God spoke to me a lot about the importance of being myself. This is another way of saying, about knowing who I am in Him. And not just about the category of self-knowledge in the spiritual life. I mean, about me being me. Because all these great principles have to get applied and lived in each one of us. I believe it takes incredible faith and courage, and grace, to do this. The Christian life in totality is supernatural, you see. This was another central message. From many corners the message came that now is a time that God wants signs and wonders carried out by His people, in order to reach the lost and dying with salvation and hope. People need to see Christ. Christ healed, delivered, raised the dead, and miraculously provided. People need to see Christ. This is not about anything but love, obedience, and purity, and responding to God. Because that is Who Christ is, and it is what He came to earth to do.

The daily supernatural activity I am called to is to be myself. This is also about love, obedience, purity, and responding to God. Of course, to respond to God, I need to be in constant contact with God by prayer, Scriptural meditation, Eucharist, and the fellowship with the saints. And, I need to live in reality, because this is where God is ALWAYS found.

Personal observations.
During the first segment of the Catholic Track, people from Columbus, Ohio talked about how God is leading them to start seeing supernatural manifestations in ministry of praying for healing and words of knowledge, and they led us in practicing this. (They are doing some kind of something-school-of-this in the fall, and I am already there in my heart.) As I prayed with a woman, I could see immediately how normal this is and I could identify the interior issues I need to address: namely that I put myself under pressure, feeling a need to rush along instead of staying comfortable with God at God's pace when another person is in the mix. Also, I realize I have a tremendous need for physical silence, which may not be a problem at all, just something I personally need to learn how to address.

And then folks prayed for folks for an impartation of grace. I indentified myself to the man who prayed for me as a Carmelite, and told him I sensed God wanting more for me to give, basically. He said he saw me walking up Mount Carmel with a backpack, but God wanted to trade what I want in that pack for His pack and the more He wants in it. Completely agreed, we prayed. Well, a few nights later, when Bill Johnson was speaking and again praying prayers of impartation and commissioning for this very thing of bringing God's signs and wonders, and I prayed, offering myself for those I always pray and offer myself, I felt my back burning -- burning -- essentially in the shape of a backpack.

The next morning (I hadn't really seen this chronology before), during the Catholic Track, we gathered for worship and prayer. We had done this one other time (truly, the days and events blur together when so much happens), when some folks were asking for prayer, and Iwona was inviting people to come and pray for others, if they felt like they should pray for others. And here is where this practical stuff about being myself came into play. I have a very strong pull to be a dutiful person. I also have a strong sense of submission and response to what is asked. But this, I realize, is where discernment is needed between the difference of what God asks of me, and what someone asks of me, even if it is someone I know and love and generally would always want to respond to. I knew that one of the big but general differences for me this year from Onething 2015 is that last year, I felt that I had to dutifully stay with every single last thing from every single last speaker, every last worship song, keep my heart attuned to them, respond with my energy to the people involved. And for that reason, I think I felt more dragged out. I did not feel the freedom (or the wisdom) to simply say, "What's going on here right now, that's not for me. It's not my duty." So. There I was at the aforementioned time of prayer in the Catholic Track, and while I am a prayerful type, and I don't have a problem praying with or over other people, I simply felt that wasn't for me. And I didn't. I felt the need to pray for the whole room.

So now, let's make our way back to where I started the last paragraph, that Saturday morning of worship and prayer. I settled into the worship, again, not doing exactly what other people were doing. I wasn't singing what other people were singing. I can't always put my mind into meditation mode, because God takes me somewhere else. And at first, where He took me was a meditation on my Carmelite name, the name I chose back a few years ago. We were singing John 1, and my name is Elijah Benedicta of the Incarnate Word. I chose this, in part (there are many parts) because for years I have known that God is after my mouth. He is after my use of words. God was dealing with my heart about who I am. How I am Elijah Benedicta of the Incarnate Word. In part, the profound impact here was that, I know that as a Carmelite and as an intercessor I am basically a hidden part of the Body. And a huge part of my story, personally and in terms of my theological and mental formation, has been countering the lie that my life and my actions essentially have no significance and no importance at all. And essentially God showed me my significance and my importance. And then, in this communion, I began to pray. This is something I cannot explain apart from faith and the experience, but as I prayed things forth, I saw them happen. Again, and again, and again. It is all essentially about living the reality of God being with me.

And then I stood up and gave a 40 minute talk on intercession that was supposed to be some vague plan of a conversation with a group and a priest who ended up not showing up because of illness. I had nothing planned (zip!) but I asked God on my way to the bathroom what it was I should lead with, and two things came immediately to mind, and there it was. And afterwards a woman who heard me asked if she could talk with me, and we talked for hours and she found hope, we prayed, and we understood each other very well.

And the biggest problem in the Church at large is that we are not in love with Jesus. We don't need to be emotionally hyped; that is largely an attempt to hide and cover, I think. Being in love is something else. It makes you want to study, to discover, to spend time, to think about, to be with, to work with, to give to. It absolutely absorbs all of your emotions, but it makes you more yourself, not less. Is there a love potion to make people fall in love? I need that answer.
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People who see other people who are in love can feel deeply judged, rejected, and hated, and it can make them come out swinging, and/or plunge them into depression. It sometimes surfaces nasty crap in others because they start to feel what they lack. But the healing is in the revealing.

Still I think seeing people who are in love can melt hearts who don't even know they are isolated from love. Love is a call to self-giving. First, to awakening.

I want the Grand Theater in my town to become a place where people gather to pray and worship something like they do at IHOP.

I also want people to understand Mary's prophetic role.

Mostly I want more people to fall in love with Jesus.

I want to be myself and clearly recognize what choices I need to be get firm about to walk that way. I want to live every day with Jesus, with prayer, meditating on Scripture, the Eucharist, and the fellowship of the saints.

Yep.

Sunday is for Heaven

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

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

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

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

A god who loves me

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

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

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

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

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

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

That is uniquely Christian.

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

A god who loves me.

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

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

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

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

Easter Frustrations

Perhaps because I am perennially optimistic, I think this is a good sign. Almost everywhere I look, everything I listen to within my Catholic circles (in which I include the inclinations of my own soul) I find frustrating and frustrated cries of cluelessness, for lack of a better way to phrase it. Oh, maybe it all boils down to my having eaten too much contraband food as we celebrate Easter and so my mood is all wonky, but on the other hand, maybe there actually is something out there that is groaning. Let me try to pull out a few examples.

This matter of celebration, for example. I've read a few comments about people wanting to celebrate the whole Easter season, or wanting other people to want to celebrate the whole season, but there goes that whole frustration thing. It's either "I don't know how" or "Why doesn't anyone get it?"

To this I say: mystagogy. It's what Easter is for. Today's gospel seemed to get right to the point. When we have real conversion and because of it, experience real joy, we need to drill down through it to understand more deeply our place in the story of salvation history and the meaning of what we have received. (Hint: it isn't about possession of warm fuzzies.) We also need to listen to Acts during Easter like an apprentice watches the work of the master. From this we learn what to expect as we move out into that meaning. But the liturgical cycle is all about appreciation of what we have and preparing for what is to come. And Pentecost comes later. And yes, of course we live all of it all the time, but the "cycle" part of it means we are always moving through, moving deeper.

And all of that is an aside, a really important aside, and I should probably put it in a different blog post, but this is really about frustrations, and I'm working out my own frustrations by writing, and WHOSE BLOG IS IT, anyway.

Did I mention that too much sugar and wheat aren't always good for my physio-emotional health?

Another thing I am aware of is Christians obsessing over liturgical details in various ways. Worship is super-duper important. But if we reduce Christian worship to liturgical style and rubrics, we are in big trouble. If we lose sight of Romans 12:1 worship, offering our bodies as living sacrifices, we are in trouble. We cannot offer worship to a God who is essentially a cultural icon or ideology.

And to this I say: kerygma! I have been studying the book of Acts with my daughter and yesterday was struck hard by Peter's preaching in Acts 10. I've read it who knows how many times, but when I read it yesterday I thought to myself, if one were to ask 95% of practicing Catholics what the core of the gospel is, how many, including myself, would be at a loss for exactly what to say? Love God and love people? Jesus died for you, so be nice? Obey the Church?

I know lots of Catholics who sincerely want to "tell the good news," but if we can't figure out what that is, well, no wonder we are as frustrated as hell. Are altar girls and communion in the hand really draining the Church of power? Do we need 20 new courses in how to do everything better? Frustration.

And if I want it to really get bad, all I have to do is look in my own life. From childhood I have sensed a yearning that if I was going to be a Christian, I would not be a play-Christian or a Mickey Mouse Christian. At one point I realized that I had sat in a church for some time without living faith, and I wondered if maybe there were others like that, and I felt deeply called to love this sort of person to life. If, you know, there were one or two others. The more I grow the more I realize I have nothing to give anyone that might spiritually help them, but God does, and He can give stuff through me. In fact, that's how He gives everything, just about. So now I'm becoming a Carmelite and I learn that the way I participate in this is by praying. Recently I had to answer a question about whether I am faithfully fulfilling my 30 minutes of prayer daily. I struggled with answering this question far more than I needed to, because I realized I was addressing it subjectively, as if the question were whether I feel I am praying 30 minutes a day. On the first hand, sometimes prayer really works and time flies and it hardly feels I am doing anything, so how can I count that? On the second hand, sometimes prayer walks or plods and feels so effort-laden, and how can I count that? And on the third hand, there are plenty of times that I simply sit before God and tell Him I haven't the foggiest idea what it means to pray, so how can I know if I'm doing it or not? I have a talent for making simple things very complicated. Frustration.

But other than not stressing and over-burdening my physio-emotional self with sugar, wheat, and caffeine, I guess it boils down to setting one's foot firmly on the path of faith, on the revelation of God, on the teachings of the spiritual masters I follow, and disregarding, sometimes, what it all feels like. And all those folks out there and their feelings. I mean, yes, we all get to have our feelings, and we all have to acknowledge them, but woe to us who are led by them. They do not determine how faithful we should be, how diligent we should be, how loving we should be, or what path we should take. Perseverance means that we keep going, regardless of what is going the other way or blowing in our faces.

Sometimes, frustration really is just a cry of "God, I want you!!" If frustration becomes an acknowledgment of our need and a cry for mercy that seeks contact with the God who is mercy, then fine. With patient endurance and openness to God, there's nothing to fear in frustration.

And now I suppose I'll go dig up my garden...

The Little Charismatic Way

This is a thinking post, not a thought-out post. I'm writing so that I understand.

Yesterday I posted about having finished the book Everything Is Grace. It helped me grasp not only the spirituality of Therese, but also the spiritual culture that was dominant at the time, for which her spirituality was a corrective. Her Little Way emphasizes simple, empty, confident trust in God's boundless love and mercy with which He longs to embrace sinners in their misery and lift them up. It emphasizes willingness -- God's willingness calling forth our own -- rather than human efforts to go through great labors to be heroic, to embrace harsh ascetic practices, and thereby to attempt spiritual self-perfection. (That was the Jansenistic flavor that religious, even Carmelite, life had in Therese's time.)

Schmidt's book made me see the connection others have pointed out to me between Therese's spirituality and the "nada" of St. John of the Cross. St. Therese went through plenty of dying to self, as she chronicles in Story of a Soul. It had been hard for me to relate to her saintly family and her exceptionally pious and religious formation as a child, but I can relate to her emotional attachments and her need to let go of the dynamism that drove her, which in her case was her need to please other people in order to feel secure. Schmidt recounts that even as she was dying she apologized in advance to her blood sisters with her in Carmel that she would cast her dying glance toward the superior and not one of them (she apologized because she did not wish them to feel hurt). Even to the moment of her death she was aware of the feelings of others, but free of the violence of a less-than-genuine love that is more about establishing one's own security than simply giving love.

The "nada" means one renounces everything from which one seeks to establish one's own security. Complete detachment. This is not even something we can produce for ourselves. This kind of deep detachment is something we can only be open to, willing for, and receive from God who gives it in trial. Or rather, maybe it is not so much that we have to be in suffering to receive it as receiving it is a suffering, because it brings light where we have darkness, but it feels like darkness where once was light.

Back to the post title: The Little Charismatic Way. What does Therese have to do with the modern charismatic movement?

I have considered myself a charismatic since 1987. I wrote some of my testimony about that here. I've had different thoughts and anti-thoughts about what that means to me now, as a Catholic. And to be honest, I have not in these 20 Catholic years had much in the way of intimate contact with other charismatics, living out and discussing what this dimension of faith means, although every year or two I have gone through a season of asking questions along these lines either of others or of myself or of Church documents.

And now St. Therese steps into these questions. Maybe it simply is my current moment in Carmelite formation, but I'll be danged if she doesn't seem to simply speak clarity both into my questions and into my experiences.

Here's what's helpful:

1. God is love. Be open, completely open to Him.
2. God is big. I am little. I never control or determine what He does. That's not only silly, it's warped.
3. God has a mission. He wants souls to be with Him in heaven, but with heaven starting now. He can do that.
4. God chooses and graces His children to work with Him. He makes it happen, with our willingness.

And since the Holy Spirit is God, all of these things are true specifically of the charismatic graces of the Holy Spirit. Maybe I could call living according to these points to be the Little Charismatic Way.

There are some issues, of course.

1. The charismatic graces of the Holy Spirit as described in the New Testament and lived since that time are not always taught about, and people have difficulty responding to something about which they have no teaching or exposure.
2. The way people initially get exposure to operating charismatic graces often stirs up all manner of things we need "nada"ed out of us. And this is true both of the one who receives and operates in these graces as well as those who witness it or hear about it.

Right now I'm particularly thinking about this latter point as regards any action of God that prompts us to decision, change, or a deeper conversion. People seem OK with God as long as they can control the relationship. I can pay as much attention to Him as I want or don't want. I can keep it in the realm of either the intellect or the feeling, whichever keeps me comfortable. I can accept all of His basic rules that make no significant demands on me to stand out, or I can console myself with being better than others who don't want to stand out in the ways I want to. And really, I don't have to bother so much with God Himself. I'll just stay in the company of those I consider His people.

But all of this is religion on a human level, and none of it strikes me as being of worship. There's no death here; there's no abandonment, there's no giving it all away. There's no love affair. It is all very controlled.

But we are designed as humans to worship God.

So being religious in this way can really get in the way of meeting God in the Little Way, and encountering the working of the Holy Spirit in the Church in what I'm calling the Little Charismatic Way. (I'm sorry, Therese. I'm really just turning this around in my mind. Forgive my presumption, here!)

The book of Acts gives lots of fascinating insights into how people react to this experience of the new covenant in Christ as it began to be lived in Jerusalem. We see, for example that the religious leaders were jealous of the apostles. For some, this went well and brought them to seek and enter into faith in the Messiah for themselves. For others, it moved them to violence and sins because they really couldn't overcome the irritation of being less significant than the apostles to the people.

This makes me think about those things that get stirred up in people when they experience something supernatural. It can make them curious and simply move them to want God. I've seen people have that response. It can also kick up feelings of rivalry (they have that; I'll have to prove myself to God to get something better, since I don't really believe He loves me), competitiveness (who do those jack-asses think they are, since they obviously are claiming to be better than me?), defeat (I'm less-than. God might love me, but obviously not as much as He loves them), deprivation (I can't trust God to give me good things like that), despair (God has forgotten me. I'm doomed.), or people pleasing (Wow! That's great for you! I on the other hand don't really exist. Don't mind me.) All of these problems are essentially ways that we do not believe in God's love and as a result we close ourselves off from Him.

The opposite of our littleness is the vast array of pride that comes with associating with experiences of power. Pride is so insidious and pervasive that one can hardly begin to list all the ways it poisons both the human exercise of religion and the experience of the supernatural. Essentially, pride is connected to "having." And this is why, when we "have" our experiences of God, we are so prone to being obnoxious to others. And this is exactly why God's work in us is to detach us from everything, even, in Therese's case, any consolation of the thought of heaven. He brings us to utter darkness so that we cling to him purely in faith, and not through delight and consolation. It is ironic to say that God wants souls in heaven with Him, starting now, and that the way there is through this bleak, forsaken-feeling darkness. But this is exactly what St. John of the Cross teaches. We need to be thoroughly purged from not only sin, but also attachment to everything that is not God.

God's mission of redemption was fully accomplished in Christ, but His mission for the rescue of souls continues in space and time through the Body of Christ, the Church, and through each one called to join that Body. As we are open, humble, and purified, God accomplishes His purposes through us, through our willingness, through our small actions rendered to Him in worship. I say small actions... certainly Therese's months of gradually suffocating from tuberculosis without pain medication and with so much serenity and sweet concern for others that many of her Sisters in Carmel doubted she was seriously ill, all that in the midst of a dark night that left her with zero feelings of assurance that there was any heaven after death at all -- surely all that is not a small action.

I am reminded of an experience I wrote about here, about a teaching from the mystic Anne to the effect that God can move graces through us even if all we have to offer him is cleaning the house and making peanut butter sandwiches all day. It truly is not the things we offer God as the love with which we offer them. Different actions call us to exercise different virtues, but all these are grace. The worship we offer God is truly God crowning His own gifts in us. God gives to us; we give back to Him. This is to remain constant regardless of how it feels to us.

Yes, this is a long post! But I am seeing how, if we can simply grasp and follow these principles, understanding what God's way is and allowing Him to have it with us, not getting sidetracked by our wounded, unbelieving hearts, our pride, and especially understanding detachment from sin and self, and grasping that Christ's mission continues through faithfulness in His Body, the Church... All of these things put us in the position where God can accomplish His will through us.

The glorification of Therese in the life of the church, particularly among the little ones longing for God, as well as among all those seeking enlightenment, peace, and love, is the resounding affirmation of the truth that the measureless desires of the human heart are ultimately from God and for God. That glorification is also but a shadow of Therese's full glory and of what awaits all the poor in spirit who desire God and are willing to reciprocate divine love in their lives through works of peace and charity. The respect and honor extended to Therese from within the church and beyond are a testimony to the truth that union with God is possible to anyone who is open to the Holy Spirit, always available in the ordinary experiences of human life.

-- Everything is Grace, p. 330, italics in the original

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.

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.

The Redemption of Fantasy Addiction

Here is another quote that struck me recently:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

Loneliness and Christian Emptiness

Earlier this week, I came across this quote which speaks volumes to me:

God looked over the world for an empty heart -- but not a lonely heart -- a heart that was empty like a flute on which He might pipe a tune -- not lonely like an empty abyss, which is filled by death. And the emptiest heart He could find was the heart of a Lady. Since there was no self there, He filled it with His very Self.
~ Fulton Sheen, The World's First Love: Mary Mother of God

In a manner of speaking, one of God's goals for us is for us to become empty. This emptiness, of course, has to be understood, as Sheen's sense has it, in the Carmelite way. Empty means ready. Empty implies availability, and it implies purpose and community. One is available for something, or rather for Someone.

It speaks, of course, to the scene of Joseph and Mary journeying to Bethlehem, looking for available space where Jesus might be born. Is my house, am I, available? Not much is made of this in Scripture, but much has been made of it in meditations such as the custom of Las Posadas. 

The enemy of this kind of emptiness is loneliness. When I read this, the naru hodo alarm rang within me as my personal history instantly shot up multiple instances of proof of this. Oh my goodness how my nature has recoiled from self-emptying for fear of loneliness, of that sense of being left out of the life-stream that certainly everyone else was deeply enjoying. The voices that speak contrary to truth: the world, the flesh and the devil, scream that I must have things, people, experiences that fill me, things I can possess, things I must hold on to to stay afloat. For certainly life revolves around something I don't have but need, or something I don't have enough of, or something I might lose, or something someone else controls and I have to posture myself in order to receive. Certainly without having, I am nothing.

Right?

Um, no.

In the midst of frantic craving I lose sight of reality. Reality is that the God of the universe, the Blessed Trinity, created me for a purpose. My purpose is to love and worship God in a holy communion of persons. I worship God as I lay down my life, as I empty myself and empty from myself all lesser pursuits.

I do this not because I am a masochist and don't believe in or want good things for myself. It is not Christian to understand "empty" in the sense of "denude." I do this out of great faith in the One who reciprocates my emptiness with Himself. The availability we offer to God is always for communion. God's ultimate goal for us is union with Him, not for us to become simply a great void. As I relinquish my obsessive self-factor I see that God loves, gives, and is deeply merciful in response to enter into human misery and to be, literally, God-with-us.

To break it down and make it real simple: faith in Jesus calls me to abandon everything to Him in love. I long to be empty, I agree to be emptied, I move towards emptiness because I know, love, and trust in the One who fills. And that infilling is what every smidgeon of my being longs for.

Oh yeah, there might be long, painful gaps where there are no blissful feelings. Stuff of earth feels useless and the bliss of heaven is nowhere. You experience loss, dependencies will be broken, and temporal security will be shaken.

But I believe and trust in the promise -- no, in the One who made the promise. He is faithful. He is true. I love Him; He calls me. To wait for such a One in emptiness is not the death-filled abyss of loneliness. It is the strengthening and deepening of love. It is worth giving your life for. In fact, it is the only thing worth giving your life for.

Graces, Math, Practice and Delight

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sigh.

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

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

Wait. What?

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

Crap. It's not fun anymore.

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

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

God the Servant

Jesus said to his disciples:
“Gird your loins and light your lamps
and be like servants who await their master’s return from a wedding,
ready to open immediately when he comes and knocks.
Blessed are those servants
whom the master finds vigilant on his arrival.
Amen, I say to you, he will gird himself,
have them recline at table, and proceed to wait on them.
And should he come in the second or third watch
and find them prepared in this way,
blessed are those servants.”  Luke 12:35-38

Maybe it is because I've been doing a lot of reading about the early Roman Empire lately, but one word from this passage struck me today: servant. Jesus was appealing to his followers to learn to emulate those of the lowest class. I find this striking because of what it says about Jesus' attention versus the typical attention focus.

Those who want to become somebody typically look to those they consider to be somebody. We look to the powerful, the influential, those with money, those with what we want. And then either we hate them, or we get in camps behind them, or beat ourselves up over how we aren't them, or we try to figure out how to be them. But however we respond, our attention is focused.

Jesus' attention is focused on the most lowly. He shows his disciples his own pursuit, and so reveals something terribly profound about God.

Jesus tells us to wait with vigilance for the presence of the Master. We have been charged with a responsibility to carry out what the Master desires. We know what He desires both because He tells us but even more so simply because of living with Him.

But while his listeners are still trying to digest the directive to set aside their pride and become lowly in their own eyes, Jesus says something that surely would have made their heads spin: the Master Himself will become their servant! This is life in union with God! Just when we thought we have given everything and have laid our lives out as an offering, the Master comes with mercy that meets our needs, fills us, and humbles us even further, inflaming our hearts with love for Him and spurring us on to long for some opportunity for service.

The longer and the more sacrificial the wait, the deeper the blessing.

Our Father wants nothing to interrupt the flow of His giving to us and our giving back to Him. That is life with God.

Detachment and the Prophetic Vocation

Several months ago I started to feel sort of spiritually stalked by the prophets of Scripture. Actually, truth be told, I've always felt an affinity to them, especially to Elijah. But roughly a year ago it was like they were closing in on me, tugging on me and speaking to my heart.

At first this made me feel self-conscious and strange, mostly because prophets seem weird and awesome. Whenever I've heard a reading proclaimed at Mass from a prophet or about a prophet, I've always been intrigued more about how the message impacted the prophet than the impact of the message on the people. My fascination always took that shape. So, this tugging I felt troubled me a bit.

Slowly I have realized the obvious: God has called me to be a Carmelite. The Carmelite vocation is prophetic. Well, duh.

Actually, the Christian vocation is prophetic. But the Christian vocation is everything. It used to scandalize me that within the Catholic Church there were unique paths for individuals. I was scandalized because I only knew how to think in terms of being "right." How could both Franciscans and Jesuits be "right" about their spirituality?! One may as well ask how blue and yellow can both be "right." "Blue is blue and must be that, but yellow is none the worse for it" the poem goes.

And I have learned, am learning, that to follow in the footsteps of our holy father Elijah, I need all this stuff that God has been investing Himself into teaching me in these last years: courage, detachment, obedience, detachment, a listening heart, detachment, freedom of tongue, detachment, fearlessness, detachment. And detachment. Did I mention detachment?

Detachment is not about aloofness. It is about having my whole orientation governed by dependence on and union with God, and not by my own preferences and tastes, fears or obsessions. It is learning to go when God says go, to stop when God says stop, to speak and be silent whenever God says speak or be silent. It seems also to mean not to put my expectations in myself, and to accept my own limitations and frailty. But it also means to never, ever excuse myself from following through on what my conscience tells me to do, even though I'm aware my conscience is fallible. God throws His voice sometimes. He might very well plant a directive that, at the time, seems to have no use at all. But faith responds and the light comes later.

Mostly, I guess, detachment teaches me that I belong to Christ and His Body, which are much bigger than I am. When I do what is mine, others can function. And yet, I'm not a cog. I also grow in freedom and self-possession when I give myself to God and others. I give, and I become more, not less.

Inside me, being prophetic seems to be about asking the Lord to speak, move, live, love, minister and be present through me. Sometimes the Lord does that in ways that feel a bit freaky. But mostly the Lord works quietly, peacefully, and humbly, and this is the part I struggle to master. So much to let go of. So much truth to welcome in and allow to penetrate. Such a great Mystery to adore.

Habitual Desperation

Michael W. Smith's song Breathe was somewhat popular as a worship song in circles I moved in a few years ago. In the chorus the soul sings to God, "And I...I'm desperate for you./And I.. I'm lost without you"

I won't even go into how after hearing this song once or twice in my life, I find it boring and incapable of carrying my prayer. There's something deeper that bothers me about it, something that probably did at one point stir me up enough to sing it as a worship song with some feeling.
It is very true that the soul is lost without God. It is also a common experience to feel lost when we don't feel God.

But a good worship song really should not have us rehearsing thoughts that don't build virtues. And while we need to initially identify our desperate need for God, we need to build up our faith in God's reality and presence and our hope for His action in our world, not our own experience of a need.

I've noticed this tendency within myself. I can think of my desire for God, my longing for God, my longing for God's action, my longing to see His kingdom come and His will be done, and I can find myself in this mode: "I------ I'm desperate for you......" It's all about my tremendous feeling of need. Now, I'm not anti-emotion (although I do favor rational thinking). Emotions are good, and our sense of need for God is very good. But it's not all about me. At some point I really need to move off my experience of my desire and look at the God who has inspired that desire. We don't really take our desires seriously if we do not recognize that the God who puts them there is present to fulfill them. Oh, it won't be instantaneously, and it probably won't even a be painless and wonderful process. But we long for God because He causes that. And if we don't shut up about our desires, and turn to look upon the God we desire so He can fill us, all we are really doing is wallowing in a sensual, emotional experience. And we run the risk of walling God off in the very process of singing about our desperation for Him.

We're talking fine lines here.  And I think this is one of the limitations of modern "worship music." I firmly believe that worship is meant to form us. This is why parish music directors need to have a pastoral sense and an evangelizing sense along with musical capacity and basic awareness of who it is s/he is serving. Good worship music allows a congregation to reach out to God and to experience Him drawing them to Himself. There needs to be that exchange, facilitated at least. And if we spend 10-15 minutes simply meditating on our own habit of feeling desperate without ever looking up to see the God who fulfills our need, we are becoming deformed, not formed.


May 12, 2014

A post-script:
St. John of the Cross writes in the Ascent of Mount Carmel: "Though the intention of these persons is directed to God, the effect they receive is recreation of the senses, from which they obtain weakness and imperfection more than the quickening of their will and its surrender to God." (III, 24 [4])

This seems straight to the point I was trying to make about how worship music sometimes runs the risk of being "recreation of the senses," but it also reminds me to bring out my main point in this that I realized what I had written earlier really failed to do. I do not mean by "recreation" in this case the enjoyment of the melody of this particular song (or of any). What I means is the perverted pleasure one can feel in the comfort of being stuck in desperation. I'm sure someone has a word for this. Maybe if I keep reading St. John I'll find his. But it has to do with coming to a certain spiritual plateau that one recognizes as such -- a leveling off place in traveling where there is still higher ground somewhere -- but getting content to stay right there and simply keep asking for help that one no longer believes is really forth-coming. 

To keep with this recreation, the will is weakened -- the will to look for a way out of that plateau.

I know it is not our wills that make things happen, apart from the grace of God working on and through that will. And yet there is that moment I've experienced many times -- maybe it is exactly the grace of God activating my will -- where suddenly I *really* want something, and the skids are greased and what has remained immobile moves.