The Lent that Would Not End

If you have kids, you might have had the, uh, pleasure of learning this song:



(If you really want punishment, you can go here and listen to it for 10 hours straight!)

Well, a few years ago I had a Lent that remind me of this song.

"This is the Lent that does not end/ It just goes on and on my friend
Some people/Started praying it not knowing what it was
And they'll continue praying it forever just because...."

In fact, the whole year felt like a Lent, and then it was followed up by another Lent and almost another whole year of a similar feeling. Just back up a couple years' worth of posts and you'll get the feeling of it.

I look back now and I see it has been a time of intense purification. When I started I had a true but purely theoretical understanding of what needed to be purified in me. I had no idea what the process I knew I was headed for felt like, and I didn't really understand in any experiential way God's purposes in bringing me through it. As Soren Kierkkegard famously said, life can only be understood backwards but has to be lived forwards. So I was left in a place for a long time where I was devoid of understanding. That is an extremely difficult place for me to be. I thrive on being able to understand and figure stuff out.

I announced to myself and others a few times during this process that everything was "all done." And I was wrong each time. So I am not now saying that all of that is done, and I know for a fact it is not. When I touch that spot in me that knows that, I still experience the struggle and the desire for complete resolution. There is a very real possibility that it will not be in this life. And that's ok.

What I have gained and learned in this time is all the gift of God. He knows how much I have fought against and resisted Him every step along the way of His trying to bless me. He knows how tenderly and respectfully and gently He prepared me for very difficult moments.

I realize that while God is deeply concerned with the healing of our souls and the wholeness of our personhood, He has a purpose that is higher than all that. He doesn't heal us just so that we can live peaceful, happy lives on this earth for the rest of our years. He heals us so that we are whole, so that we possess ourselves, and so that in possessing ourselves we can make of ourselves an oblation to Him. With St. Teresa of Avila we can then say, "I am yours; I was born for you. What is your will for me?"  There is absolutely nothing this world can offer that is worth exchanging for the delight of being the Lord's in this way.

Humiliation, anguish of heart, the pressing down of the cross, experiences of rejection, of relationship being repudiated, calumny, conflict.... This is the way the Lover brings His beloved deeper into intimacy with Him. This was His experience. To have it offered to any soul is like a golden crown being extended. How often we go chasing after our favorite pretty trinket instead of bowing to receive the great honor of such a crown.

God's ways simply are amazing. Recently I was looking at a sculpture I own, of Jesus embracing His cross on the via dolorosa. It occurred to me that I was, quite literally, Jesus' cross. My sin caused His suffering, caused His cross, and His embrace of His cross was His embrace of me. His embrace of His cross bore the fruit of the Eucharist, which now brings healing to the entire universe and transforms me into Him, makes us one. And yet still today, that Eucharist, that grace, that healing, that transformation, that union, can be rejected by me and by anyone. But Jesus loved anyway. That love is my salvation.

And He calls me to live His very life, in imitation, in union.

Let us praise God now and forever. He alone is worthy of our worship. To Him be glory forever.

When Understanding is Folly

For a long time I've had the phrase "I write, therefore I understand" in the header of this blog. The title is all about that because naru hodo is like "oh, now I get it" in Japanese.

But I've learned that there is something more important than that. In fact, I can think of at least three things that are more important to have than understanding.

Faith. The only way that we can really function in this world that we did not create as persons who have not created ourselves is to acknowledge that we came from somewhere else. Faith is completely reasonable, although it does take us beyond what reason can deduce. And faith is really the only thing that gives me solid grounding under my feet, the only thing that can assure me of things I can't see. Faith in God is a supernatural gift that is available to every human being. When that supernatural gift functions in our lives it often requires one to do things that are reasonable, and yet beyond our understanding. So understanding bows before faith.

Hope.  God relates to us. He is relational, or rather we are relational and can begin to grasp what that means because He is relational and we are made in His image. Relationships are opened out beyond this moment. We don't know the what, but in knowing the who, or better, being in relationship with the who, we also have solid footing. We cannot understand things that haven't even come to be yet. But we can be in peace when the who is free to take us anywhere. So understanding bows before hope.

Love.  This is what God is. This is what comes to live in the heart of a human who is covenanted with God by baptism. This is the Holy Spirit alive and at work within us and through us. This is also the purifying fire of God. And this hurts -- like the dickens -- to the degree that we are open to God and yet embracing attachments that are not God. That hurt just flat out squashes understanding to bewildered smithereens sometimes. So understanding bows before love.

It is fine and good to seek understanding. But it is not fine and good to seek one's security in it. It is good, right and necessary to be at peace without understanding at times, especially when one is seeking answers that are personal and not in reference to specifically revealed truths, like the morality of ending life, or other questions that can be presented in catechism format.

When understanding it not available to rest in, one must realize the call is to rest in God Himself. God deeply respects our minds (He created them, after all!). He will give us to understand what we truly need. But the beauty of the understanding He gives is that it is the fruit of receiving His love into our hearts and allowing His love to shape us. Love gives understanding on that personal level. So without embracing God, without embracing love (with faith and hope -- they travel together), we never really reach the potential we could in human understanding.

"I Have Come not to Abolish but to Fulfill"

"Do not think that I have come to abolish the law and the prophets. I have come, not to abolish them, but to fulfill them." (Mt. 5:17, NAB)

This is the first line of today's gospel reading.

Jesus wants us to think about him correctly. He wants us not to misunderstand His intentions, and mostly I think He doesn't want us meditating on ourselves, imagining God in our own image, but leaving the realm of our thoughts and entering into His.

And so He tells us not to think He's come to abolish the law and the prophets. Scripture is full of admonitions not to add to or subtract from God's word, specifically the directives He gives, and the prophetic messages He gives. He wants them just the way He gives them.

And yet... He gives them in such a way that they have an aspect of "emptiness" to them -- of lack of fulfillment. This is on purpose. The law, the prophetic messages, are given in such a way that they cause us to look deeper, to look beyond, to look for what they really hold. They are designed to cause even a certain dissatisfaction. It is when we want mastery over the mystery of God that we add our own embellishments or take away the more onerous or confusing bits from the law and prophets. But then we've made God over into our image, and made Him more manageable and palatable, suiting our current whim.

Christ is the fulfillment. What is more, Ephesians 1:23 tells us that the Christ is the head of the church, which is His body, the fullness of Him who fills everything in every way. Christ comes not only to personally keep the law and be the promised Messiah the prophets foretold. He comes to form the perfected people that the old covenant was never able to produce. This must be why He goes on (after the verse I quoted above) to talk about those who will be called greatest and least in the kingdom of God.

Still now, in the new covenant, we know in part and we prophesy in part. We too have that which causes a yearning in our souls. This also is by God's design, to draw us more deeply into the experience of His life, and to direct our gaze heavenward.

When God Promises to Kill

"You shall not wrong any widow or orphan. If ever you wrong them and they cry out to me, I will surely hear their cry. My wrath will flare up, and I will kill you with the sword; then your own wives will be widows, and your children orphans."

The word of the Lord.

Thanks be to God.

No, really.

This is from today's Office of Readings, from Exodus 22. I know that Christians (not to mention non-Christians) can read stuff like this and feel compelled to go into significant contortions to try to get comfortable with words like this. We can end up with interesting theological positions, like the undoing of the inerrancy of Scripture, or the creation of an "Old Testament God" that is different from the God of the New Testament.

The Church and her liturgy teach us how to read Scripture, and one key to that is understanding both the old and new covenants in light of each other. The Fathers teach us by their example to read the Old Testament in light of how the Holy Spirit works in our hearts in the new covenant.

So when I read this piece from Exodus this morning, I was moved to tears in two directions at once.

There are aspects in which I am like the "widow and orphan" of early Israel. There are ways in which I am utterly helpless and at the mercy of others. There is that aspect of me in which God is my only defense.

And yet there is also the aspect in me through which I am the wronger of the vulnerable. I have the propensity to sin, and I do. And God promises, what? To kill me with the sword. Am I to shrink from this? No, this is exactly what I signed on for in baptism.

God puts His life into me in baptism, and when I live it out, living in the Holy Spirit, I am called to put to death all sin, because that is what contact with God does to us. Each day we get to choose -- God, or not God?

The most merciful thing God can do for us is to convict us of sin and place the cross in our lives so that our choice for sin gets crushed out of us. God never crushes our humanity. We get confused and lose clarity about what is our humanity and what is our idolatry. The love of God burns as a strong fire, and He bids us toss our idols into it to repudiate them. His fire destroys them. His fire does not destroy us. His fire, His love, envelops us. But we have to not shrink from Him in fear. We can be so accustomed to living without the experience of God's love, wrapped in serving our own idols, that we see God's love as our enemy.

The God who comes to save and protect me is exactly the same God who comes to refine the dross right out of me by the fiery furnace. This is truly one and the same act.

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.

Wanna See Me Make the Golden Rule Complicated?

Today's gospel reading had the golden rule in it: Do to others what you would have them do to you.

For a long time now, I've had a hunch about that golden rule. It has always struck me that perhaps in the original stating, it was descriptive and not prescriptive. "You do to other people what you would have them do to you."

The truth is more likely that the average person over the millenia has been far more practical than I. So, it's more like I don't cheat you, you don't cheat me.

But I generally think in terms like this: I want someone to challenge me, to love me enough to say hard things to me. I want someone to see where I'm stuck, especially where I can't see it, and to uncoercively coach me beyond that stuck point.

That's what I want. (Well, that and someone to cook for me.) But sometimes I "golden rule" people, doing to them what I want for me, and it just doesn't go over.

Or do people with complicated brains get an exemption here?

But let's face it. Some people really love to avoid conflict. They don't want anyone getting into conflict with them, so they don't get into conflict with others. Some people like their egos massaged, so they massage the egos of others. People want all sorts of things from others that aren't so good.

Is this the definition of thinking too much?

Miracle of Love

I'm not done with that 54-day novena yet. But let me tell you, I've prayed novenas that were mostly about remembering, checklist style, to say prayers. But this novena has, I dunno, gotten in my face like a personal trainer and pushed me, sometimes, like I didn't exactly feel like being pushed.

I don't know about you, but I am finding that no matter how selfless I intend to be in praying for other people, there is always something that comes back to "and here's how what's good for them will feel great for me." That just sneaks in there, all the time. Even if I pray for miracles for people I don't even know, some part of me would just like the satisfaction that my prayers could make a difference. That would feel good.

There's nothing grossly wrong with that, because my happiness is made up in part by the good of others. But. There's this other part. This is what started breaking into my consciousness today about this novena.

Miraculous breakthroughs of grace -- I guess that about summarizes what I have been praying for. And today I realized that the biggest miracle of grace I could ever personally witness is for me to love unconditionally, with no hint of personal gain or benefit. Like God loves us. Willing to love despite being ignored, avoided, taken for granted, even disdained and rejected. Me, love. That's a miracle!

But I don't say that sardonically. It simply is true. I offer my life to God for Him to make an outpost of His kingdom of love through which He can access those in my life directly. I offer Him my heart that His love may flow through me. I may very well never realize how He works or when He works, but I know He does this sort of thing even when people are unaware and unconscious of their offering. Supernatural things happen in lives when God's love is made manifest. That is really my only wish for my life, that divine love may flow through me to reach someone else.

So, instead of thinking what miracles and changes I would like to witness in someone else's life (especially when those changes would make me happy!) I can live in the graces I have prayed for by loving, regardless of how I am treated. As St. John of the Cross stated: "Think nothing else but that God ordains all, and where there is no love, put love, and there you will draw out love." As one commentator on this famous quote concluded, instead of "waiting for love to happen" one can put love to work in order to harvest the fruits later. If even St. John of the Cross can say this, certainly one can wish in an unselfish manner for love to be reciprocated. God certainly wishes that! I'm quite limited in things I can actually do to demonstrate love, in general and especially in the particular instance at hand, but I can always pray. In that I have great freedom.

A Sigh, A Complaint

I want to complain a little bit. I'm not very good at that, so we'll see how it goes.

Way back long ago when I first discovered how hard it was for me to talk, I blamed it on the fact that all I knew how to do, all I wanted to do, was to reach down into other people's guts, and basically no one appreciated that.

It's amazing how accurate that still strikes me today, even though I've gone through layers of dismantling the untruths in that. I struggled to talk because of other reasons too: and the two biggest were my pride and the degree to which I suppressed my emotions. There's probably no separating those two things, at least not for me.

As I look back through mental snapshots of my spiritual formation, I see things like learning to chit chat, realizing the value of a trip to the mall or a museum for the sake of passing time among people, the joy of understanding movie references, and other little signs of love I picked up from being part of the human race. Silent retreats and the profundity of discovering prayer? Yeah, sure, but that's the easy stuff. To really open my heart to people in a group of people: that stuff was downright miraculous, transformative and healing.

Ok, wait. I'm supposed to be complaining.

I'm still the person who really only feels designed to reach down into people's guts and pull up. Maybe the way I want to complain is to God for designing me this way. I get myself into this wanting-to-complain spot not infrequently. First of all, if I do something, I want to be good at it. But I've learned this is not a something that I get to direct, or a talent I can choose to hone. Other people's guts, after all, are holy ground. One may not go there by the force of one's own will. There's obviously quite a bit about this I don't get yet.

However, secondly, I do sometimes find that I am in the midst of someone's guts when I didn't realize I had gotten there. And I have learned that it is really, really hard for people to respond to this sort of thing without a strong emotion. People's strong emotions tend to freak me out, mostly because I'm always so surprised and bewildered by the experience. I'm learning I have this ability to make people really upset. It's not even, I think, so much that *I* upset them as they are upset by what is getting pulled out of them. Subsequently, people seem to get to feeling either angry, guilty, impotent, or (perhaps scariest of all) deeply moved, all of which does not make people rush to embrace me and cry: "Please! Pull more of my guts out cuz I love feeling all of this confusing inner turmoil!"

But you know what? I'm just a normal person, and I'd love to have normal friendships that go beyond stupid fluff, though I respect the value of stupid fluff. I mean, like everyone, I just want to be natural and at ease and be so with others where that works.

Just got a teeny, tiny hint of despair wafting up in that department. Hope is wearing thin.

But here are a few things I'm learning: God is calling me to a prophetic life. It's the normal call of a Christian, but there's something else there, too. That explains why God has been after my mouth since my young adulthood. Also, God is calling me to live in faith. This faith is not the intellectual thing about a list beliefs. This is about seeing and speaking forth that which is not yet seen with physical eyes. This has a lot to do with invisible realities.

A little aside on this point: This morning as I was praying I was presenting some stuff to God, some struggles, and admitting that I couldn't tell what the source of the struggle was. I laid out the options I could think of. I prayed on, and it came to my mind that I recently had a very small business interaction with someone I discovered was quite involved in the occult. This was via computer, and in this business I have an avatar of Pope Francis for my account. The way it occurred to me was this: I say little prayers of blessing on people randomly throughout my day, true. Well, people who are dedicated to evil are going to do the same, especially when they see the Pope smiling at them. So I prayed against any hexes or curses that may have come my way, and suddenly the struggle I had presented to God became so easy to understand, and was wiped away as easily as dust.

Inside, this kind of thing gives me a sense of understanding and confidence. Socially, it is just one more thing I scratch off my list of casual conversation over non-existent tea with my non-existent friends.

So I blog instead, since writing is what I have always done.

C'est la vie.

I know I am not stuck in a bleak spot. I know I am before, in time, something good and significant. I know these things by faith. I just don't really know how to like being here. (There, I think that sounds like a complaint, now. And now I will tell myself to buck up, because being able to like things is not all that important.)

Lent is Not a Starting Point

Where I live, Ash Wednesday is unbelievably popular, even among non-practicing Catholics or those who have left long ago for other ecclesial communities. People whom I vaguely know to be cradle Catholics (like the woman who cuts my hair) find it perfectly normal to ask me "What are you giving up for Lent?" even though if I were to ask them, "So, what did you think of last gospel last Sunday?!" they'd probably think I was some kind of religious nut.

A lot of people think Lent is about a bunch of religious rules, and depending on how strongly they feel about belonging to their religion, they may feel roughly that favorably disposed to keeping these rules. Maybe it's kinda like how the Irish want to eat corned beef and cabbage on St. Patrick's day. It's about feeling an identity.

Some people have natural spartan tendencies towards self-challenge. They may face Lent with grim determination to reach a goal that involves giving up something they enjoy. If they fail, they realize they are only human, and if they succeed, they feel accomplished. They may even feel God appreciates their efforts, and that somehow those efforts may contribute to a better world.


The first time I avoided meat on Friday because I was becoming a Catholic, it was a big deal to me. And when I got dizzy because I fasted all day on Good Friday, I felt somehow I accomplished what I was supposed to. To be honest, I felt too disoriented to feel proud of myself. But if this kind of stuff is all Lent is about, it is dissatisfying and confusing.

I think Catholics get confused because Lent is the first moment where we feel like we are supposed to respond to God and "do something." But Lent is not a starting point. We can't look at Lent as our place from which we will go meet God by our efforts and sacrifices.  Our starting point is the Advent/Christmas/Epiphany cycle. This is all about God's promises and their fulfillment, His tremendous gift of love given into our world and our very flesh, and the supernatural call in Him for this gift of love to go through Christ (read: Church in this time and space) to all the world. Then we get a few weeks for the normality of this all to soak in, and THEN we have the season of penance, preparing for the other magnificent move of God that no human effort could ever imagine or accomplish: Christ rising from the dead and destroying sin, death, and the power of hell. Then we hear all about the supernatural works of God which are normal for us, more time to soak in normal, and then we start over again. Lent is far more about culmination than a starting point.

It is the power of the love of God, demonstrated in His coming to live among us as a human, that has to be our starting point. We have to see that His love offered to us and say yes to it, receive it, and allow ourselves to feel it, experience it, and be shaped by it to whatever degree we are capable.

Then it will make sense when we hear Jesus calling us to follow Him up to Jerusalem to His passion. Love calls "come and be with me." And we answer "draw me after you and let us run together."

There is some endurance and perseverance called for in penance to be sure. But Lent is not about how hard I can grit my teeth. I like to see it as an emptying. I make room. I take the concrete steps in prayer, fasting and almsgiving to make room in my heart, in my schedule, in my house, in my way of living. I make room as an act of faith. My faith is in the One whom I know loves me, the One whom I wish to invite, the One with full rights to all that I am and have. I do not stipulate if or how He must fill what I empty. It is only available to Him. I am available to Him. I become free to hear Him say "go here, say this, give that," or "wait there."

Because He has a will, a desire. He loves and cares for me so fully and completely, and I desire in return that what He desires is also fulfilled. This is peace for me.

We are like onions. And we need cyclical rhythms. The process of living and growing continually makes for stuff that can stand to be pruned back and for ripe fruits that are ready to be shared. During Lent we all become a prophetic sign that life is about more than this earth. We live here with our eyes and hearts fixed on the glory that follows. "For when Christ our life appears, you also shall be revealed with him in glory" (Col. 3:4).

I Am Coming to Move Among Them

This morning as Jesus was exposed upon our church altar for adoration, this is what occurred to me.

I am this girl:

I am a beggar before God.
And I live among beggars.

There is no shame in this. It is simply our status before God the creator of all. He is incredibly good.

Beggars are not always incredibly good. Mostly we are incredibly needy. And most of us don't like that at all.

Some of us don't like it so much that we start to hurt each other and become very bad. Our need and pain makes us merciless.

I know Jesus loves us so much. I come and tell Him, "Lord, they don't know You, and they are hurting each other!"

And suddenly I am overwhelmed by the compassion erupting in Jesus' heart in answer to this summons. "I am coming to move among them."

That, my friends, is His promise to the world and His call to the Church.

Well, DUH!

Here's what I've learned recently: People like to read posts by me when I use words like "pissed off." I suppose I like to write posts where I use words like "pissed off" too, because then I'm writing raw which sometimes means I don't bury my thoughts in 5,000 pounds of words.

Admitting pissed-offed-ness is healthy for me in many ways, or it can be. The best thing, I suppose, is when it is quickly followed by a "well, duh!" moment as I start to see what my problem is, or what I can learn out of it.

So, yeah. Here's my "well, duh!" moment.

God is teaching me to pray. It is as simple as that. And as mind-blowing as that.

Cuz what have I just said, anyway? I've said God is real, He is a person, relational, and He has initiated a relationship with me in which He interacts inside my personal life without my sometimes recognizing it right away, and He is guiding me, instructing me, working with me in a back-and-forth as I walk through my particular life circumstances. One can extrapolate from this that because God is purposeful and not random, He is doing all of this for reasons, purposes that He knows all about and I don't, and I'm coming to understand bit by bit.

Yowza. That is actually spine-tinglingly amazing and makes getting out of bed in the morning a freaking adventure.

Prayer is not a sort of "I'll be good and let everyone walk on me while I put up with it" stance. It's not "I'll persist in the irrational thought that good wins if I just endure enough self-flagellation." Prayer's goal is union with God. And God is awesome merciful power, love and justice. I forgot that. I lost sight of a lot of things.

Like I forgot about a post I wrote during Advent where I wrote about my need for greater gratitude. Here's something about gratitude: it explodes when you thank God in faith, in advance, for things that haven't chronologically happened yet. Long, long ago I read the book Prison to Praise that basically goes on and on about this principle. Getting too into "principles" can produce strange Christianity in many different directions. But let's take this novena that I'm praying right now, the one that was the spark under my last pissed-off post. The practice here is that for 27 days you ask God for the desired graces and then for another 27 you thank God for the graces He is pouring out. I have always struggled with this part. Start thanking God when you don't even see the astounding things taking flesh?! Well guess what?! I have a hard enough time giving thanks for the things I do see, let alone what I don't see! But as I was able to admit I was getting mad over praying for this person (and see the last paragraph for why) and I purposefully picked up my two prayer feet, stood them up and started walking them forward, thanking God, well, things have changed. In fact, all of a sudden I realize that life is really completely made up of billions of things for which God deserves all thanks and praise and which I spend a great deal of time taking for granted, or whining that I don't have it better.

There's something else I learned. God seems to like to use (I'll put it this way) this certain subset of persons with whom I get annoyed to introduce new things to my spiritual life. I should get that by now. But I suppose the nature of new things is that they spring up without being able to anticipate them.

Then there is Elijah. Even though I knew this on one factual level, it is hitting me on deeper levels that part of my Carmelite vocation is as a prophet. Like Elijah. I can't say I grasp all that that means, but I do realize a greater depth of its truth. And the life of a prophet is a little weird. (Check.) And prophets do their bit, and it's done and that's all. Let it go. But then pick up and move at the slightest nudge. There's a heck of a lot of interior detachment required here. But God knows when to send a raven with some bread...

So,  yeah. I shall not fear becoming pissed off, only getting stuck there.

A Pissed Off, Cranky Post (which makes me feel better)

I am cranky. I feel like I need to shoot from the hip just now, verbally, if nothing else to just try to loosen my crankihood out.

Honestly, sometimes understanding things is worse than not understanding things. I mean, I have a certain comfort level with the anguish of wondering. That's weird in and of itself. But there are times, like I feel right now, where it is the things I understand that make life less pleasant.

I'm feeling a very high level of frustration with my way of social interaction. I feel like God is bound and determined to sequester me in certain ways. Lately, about the only time I feel deeply and profoundly accompanied is when I am immersed in reading the lives or works of the Carmelite saints. I feel more certain of my Carmelite vocation than I am of my name or my desire for my next breath. But when it comes to dealing with flesh and blood human beings, it seems the more I try to put myself into it, the more I feel myself cocooning. Reflexively. Then there are the people who seem to be to my life like a stick in my eye. Then, I see people turning to me for a comfort, a refuge, and I clunkily am about as comforting and refuge-like as a chain link fence. I am so bad at faking "consoling."

Faking is not something I want to get good at. But it seems clear to me that I must exude something like porcupine bristles to people. Maybe it is just my perception, but I feel like I propel people away from me.

Humor and happiness attract people, and you know what, I usually am filled with these, visibly. I don't feel particularly depressed or upset or angry. I just feel.... sequestered. It seems my efforts at moving towards people just don't work, and haven't worked. I know that I am called to pray. I'm still in the midst of that novena that I started January 1. I have to say, if there is anything that makes me mad right now, it is praying for that person. Maybe that is the source of all my upset. I am now in the stage of thanking God for all the graces He has poured out -- and I know they are many -- but man, I have just never felt so upset about praying for someone. This someone doesn't know it, of course.

Just yesterday, and the day before as well, I was at meetings where I heard Dr. Mary Healy talk about the coming "tsunami of the Spirit" in the Church, and about her experiences of miracles of healing, as well as a prophetic convocation she attended where leaders in the Catholic charismatic renewal came together simply to listen to God speak to them. Again and again as she spoke I knew God was giving me nods of confirmation about things I've been hearing and experiencing over the last couple years. This novena prayer is not disconnected from all that. On the one hand, I've heard "it is coming" (in reference to some move of God) all my adult life as a charismatic. On the other hand, I do get the feeling this is different, because God has found ways to hook my own personal life into this "it". I think my problem is that I am lousy at waiting for God.

Just remembering now something that happened this morning. My son and daughter were getting ready for Mass, and on my instruction one was in the shower while the other was taking a bath. Well, drawing two things of water at once caused a bad situation for my son in the shower. And, since I have trained him well in how to completely freak out and be intolerant of momentary discomfort, he was screaming at the top of his lungs for us to turn the water off. Repeatedly. To be heard clearly up two flights of stairs. I saw myself in his reaction, and realized that when I encounter something that could be handled by some patient endurance of unpleasantness, I tend to respond with pouring out all my energy, and then when that doesn't work, I pour out even more, and then even more until I am completely and totally exhausted, drained, and hurting.

Maybe this is what I am doing. I am facing something that does cause me significant discomfort. I have every reason to believe that God will change it, and I know the only thing I can do is pray. So maybe instead of pray AND drain myself AND exhaust and hurt myself, I can pray and ask God to heal me and to give me joy or at least diverting occupation while I wait for Him to do what only He can do.

Sometimes it's just a pisser to not be the one in control, to not be able to make people respond to me in what seems like nice ways. To not be able to surround myself with the friendship I need but don't even know what it looks like.

The Shocking Penance

A few days ago I had an opportunity for the sacrament of confession in a venue that isn't typical for me. It was one of those situations where a specific prompting and a specific opportunity coincided and then along came a specific priest to whom I confessed.


Grace is just so cool, ya know?

I don't know about you, but I often meet a lot of internal resistance when I set out to go to confession. Because who really likes it? I don't. My most tempting tangle is to start telling myself I don't need to go. I can get legalistic and figure since I haven't killed anyone in the last month, it isn't strictly necessary for me.

But love doesn't operate that way. Love sees all sorts of things that have stood in the way of being totally with the one who is loved.

There have been so many times that I've driven to confession and felt like I was driving to my own execution. Because it is a death.

Well, anyway. This kind of rumination probably gives a good backdrop for what I wanted to say about this particular recent exchange.

The priest actually did a mock "Oh my! That is so shocking!" to me, just to get me to lighten up and laugh at myself a little bit. He stopped me dead in my verbal tracks from drilling down deeper into a certain issue. He made me see that confessing can be a very simple matter. I confess, I'm sorry, that's it.

And then came this shocking penance that actually made me burst into tears: He told me that for a whole week I was to be nice to me. I suppose that could be misunderstood, but when you consider that I can be morbidly serious and carry the weight of many on myself without it necessarily being God's way of doing things -- this penance has really struck me. Especially because it has been a time-release one, causing me to pray daily that I can see how to do it.

The marvel is that I realize when I show myself more mercy, I am suddenly far more merciful to those around me. Far less stressed, far less intense, and with more openness to the joys life brings. More openness to heaven. I remember that it doesn't all depend on me -- at all. In the midst of all of my very adult responsibilities, I can be a little child.

"Men in Sandals" Or, Boy Howdy, We Sure Did Need that New Evangelization

Another book review type post.

Ok, I'll make a quick break for a confession here. I recently went through the public library resources and requested everything that came up with the keyword "Carmelite." So, yeah, I have more books to read now than I can shake a stick at. I hope to slog through most of them, though.

This book I'm commenting on was one of those. I've already returned it to the library, so I can't make physical reference to it, but I don't have that much to say about it, really. It is called Men in Sandals by a Carmelite priest named Richard Madden. It was written in the 1950s, and was supposed to be the sort of book that gets young men interested in becoming Carmelite priests.

If it proved one thing to me, it is that those pre-Vatican II days were decidedly NOT the Church's glory days.

The book saddened me in many ways. In a book supposedly about the life of man discovering a vocation to Carmel, there was only one reference to "loving Christ," and that was in the chapter called "No Wife." It was along the lines of "You see, as priests we love Christ, and so we don't get married." The rest of the progress through formation all sounded like "well, we grit our teeth and pretty much hate the hard stuff, and we don't even really know why it is necessary, but obedience tells us it is better that other people make these choices for us, because that's the path we've chosen to holiness." Any concept of conversion to or personal relationship with Christ was quite foreign to the whole discussion.

All I can say is "egad." No wonder vocations dropped like flies and when Vatican II did hit, scores of religious fled the scene. If there's no flavor of love affair in a vocation, then how can it even be possible? All that is left is a cultural attraction to personal effort in religious practice.

I happened to google the book just for fun before I started writing and I discovered that this priest passed away about 18 months ago and that he lived about an hour north of me. One obituary that I read made a passing reference to his being "dismissed" from the Carmelites in the late 80s on a matter of disobedience. (Other obituaries made no reference to any such incident.) It seems not a surprise to me, and perhaps whatever this dismissal amounted to was, for him personally, really making right the experience of "obedience" he wrote about. At least, I hope so.

I did cringe a bit to read that the book had been a national best seller in its day.

But the next book that I've started is already significantly more edifying. More on that in a post to come.

Detachment and Happiness; Heaven and Purpose

It seems there is something the Lord is quite intent on me getting: to wit, heaven is the goal.

There are lots of things I don't mean by that. I don't mean that this life is inconsequential. (I believed that at one point.) I don't mean that the only point in life is being super-spiritual (I lived that way for a time, too.) I don't mean that all one can do is wishfully and vaguely hope for better times ahead in "some heaven light years away."

I mean that right now, in my concrete circumstances and relationships, the meaning, the divine intent of every last bit of it (and yes, this implies that there is divine intent in every last bit of it) is to bring me, right now, into union with heaven. I define heaven as the Blessed Trinity, the souls of the just who abide with Him in eternity, and the life of grace at work in souls and through souls in this world.

Last January I wrote a few posts about detachment. God was doing some work in me at the time that felt like a slow-mo explosion. It's pretty obvious to me now that there's a standard pattern when it comes to this whole matter. First, there is something I perceive as good. I am designed to want goods, and so I set myself to go after this good I perceive. The trick is that I am not born with a fully developed (let alone sanctified) understanding of what "good" is. Good, ultimately, is God. I will never fully comprehend God with my intellect. So I can go through life wanting, mostly, "my god." I want whatever satisfies me in the moment (however base or nobly refined that satisfaction may be). My only option out is to be sanctified, to be made holy. And this comes about through the process of surrender to the God Whom I cannot control. This results in struggles for me, and lots of times that I just don't get satisfaction the way I think I want it, even when I think (and truly am) wanting in the holiest fashion known to me.

In other words, sometimes, the more I tell God I want His way, the more often I will have little but real pains over not being happy with my thing, until He is the only Thing.

Because God wants us to know that our only happiness lies in Him, and to follow His lead into the fullness of happiness.

In my Protestant/pentecostal days when I thought it was fine to take liberties with Scripture, I used to re-translate 1 Cor. 15:19 which says "If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are to be pitied above all men." In one of my early Bibles I actually bracketed the word "this" and wrote above it "the next." In other words, if the only hope God holds out for us is heaven, well, forget Him. (In those days I was focused on God's redemptive power healing my circumstances and delivering me from the pain of the moment. That's not bad, God does that; but if I try to stay in that place I morph into a prosperity-gospel heretic where I employ God as a means to a happy life.)

But the truth is, God longs to give us heaven, and He wants to start now, not when we die. Heaven is not about wish-fulfillment on earth. This is the nub of what God is driving home to me. I don't care about stuff very much, but I realize I actually need to care about it more so that I can be diligent in serving with it, whether that means giving it or selling it to have money to do good with, or using it myself to bring good to others. I do care about relationships, and although I've had the snot beaten out of me over this in the last couple of years, I realize that valuing relationships for what they are for is something I also need to care about more. The point of my relationships here is not for me to hold them tight or enshrine them or try to make them stay one certain way, but to allow each person to draw me to love heaven, and to love each person in their being drawn to heaven, too. One thing heaven is is perfect communion, through Christ, with all who belong to Him. That God has taught me. Nothing on this earth is worth clinging to in light of that union, not even the sense of "my god" in the midst of my relationships with those loved ones.

I can't sort it all out in theory, in a blog post, only in living. I can continue to pray, reaffirming that God, the All-Wise, All-Loving, the All-Powerful, Who encompasses me, draws me, leads me, sustains me, and is all to me, is completely allowed to arrange the people in my life exactly as He wants them, and that I desire to learn to allow His love to flow through me to everyone as He desires it. I can learn not to fight Him or reality where I find His work. When I want to hold on tight to something of this earth, I can turn to Him instead and ask to be held tight.

And He will do that. Sometimes I will feel it and sometimes I won't. But He will always leave evidence of His presence, calling me on to Himself.