Inflating my Christmas Hope

I admit it; Christmas has been going flat for me. As a small child there was, I suppose, glitz that even I managed to be excited about, and as an older child, there was plenty to weigh down my soul with sadness, and later I brimmed with cynicism as we approached the celebration of the birth of Christ. No one could do it right enough for me.

But all of that changed for me on Christmas Eve of 1991 when I went to a Midnight Mass with a guy I was very interested in, though I managed to be even more interested in finally taking the step of personally experiencing something of Catholicism with as open a heart as I was able to muster. 

I was two years out of college. My grandmother had just died, I was emotionally paralyzed over remaining unpursued by any romantic interest, I constantly whined to God about how He didn't love me, my employment was purely survival-driven, and in many ways I was still waiting for my life to start. I plodded through life but dreamed, rather despairingly, of possibly having a future with meaning. 

It all seemed perfectly normal and relatively stable at the time, but when I look back, I realize I was in a rather dark place. 

This morning at Mass I began to recall the importance of keeping my personal journey fresh in my mind. I've written about that Mass many times in this blog; here's a link to the full story. Suffice it to say here that God stepped into my history as with a trumpet, announcing that He had come to save me -- me, not mankind. He showed up. He called to me: Here I am! This electrifying encounter shook my life for decades. 

Just like a little baby showing up in a poopy stable, He burst upon the scene and changed everything forever.

(Oh my goodness, I just realized I am coming up on this being 30 years ago! How did I suddenly get so old?)

It really was like being born again, in the sense that a brand new life started for me that night, and I also had much to grow into. When God again burst into my life within the last decade or so, which ended up with me entering the Secular Carmelites, I learned that a Christmas Eve conversion is something I had in common with St. Therese. I learned how Carmelite-y Advent is. I learned that my call is to be the intercessor that invites the same grace of conversion I have received to be present to souls who, like me, searched without hope of finding, whined after love with a cold, closed, cynical heart, and doubted the value of my own creation. And I realize how it makes me weep when I encounter souls like I was! Oh dear God, I can't stand to witness that pain! It makes me feel so helpless, so powerless, so... desperate! I could wish I had a magic wand to take away this pain, but in this moment I realize I have something that is real, and powerful: I have my own history of God's action in my life. Don't forget, Marie.

The proof of the power of the love of God is now in me. It is my life. It is in my reality. It is in my faith. 

For whoever is begotten by God conquers the world. And the victory that conquers our world is our faith. 1 John 5:4

Faith is the realization of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. Hebrews 11:1

Faith calls me, places me, into the community of believers. As a Carmelite, I know that my vocation is ecclesial; is of the Church and belongs to the Church. I also have long had the intuition that there were people of the Church praying for me -- I mean many more than the actually individuals who told me they were, or whom I experienced praying for me. Hidden people prayed for me. I know this.

And now I am one of the hidden people, and I pray for others. I have prayed for decades for the conversion of people's hearts. Some people "specialize" in praying for healing or praying long-term for those walking through difficult situations. My speciality has been to pray for the bottoms of people's hearts to open up to Love, and respond to Love's call to belong to Him. 

What I want most is to know that the people I love know and believe that God loves them, that they deeply respond to that love. This is my joy.

And I am going to keep on reminding myself that human pain is never the end of the story. Love is patient. The Lord Jesus Christ is powerful; He is present; He pursues our hearts and will never give up. Love is not desperate, nor whiny. Jesus is with us and is pursuing us for the long (or short) haul of our entire lives. His presence brings joy, life, peace, healing, truth, beauty. We have only to open to Him, and receive.

Doing Penance

 

Interior repentance is a radical reorientation of our whole life, a return, a conversion to God with all our heart, an end of sin, a turning away from evil, with repugnance toward the evil actions we have committed. At the same time it entails the desire and resolution to change one's life, with hope in God's mercy and trust in the help of his grace. This conversion of heart is accompanied by a salutary pain and sadness which the Fathers called animi cruciatus (affliction of spirit) and compunctio cordis (repentance of heart). Catechism of the Catholic Church, paragraph 1431

Why do penance? What benefit is there for a Christian to choose some act of mortification, of denying oneself of some good, of taking up some difficult or unpleasant work -- all this that we call penance? 

The Christian life is one of love. It starts in receiving God's love by faith, by knowing and believing in the love God has for us. Supernaturally, we are engrafted into Christ's own life of love in baptism, in confirmation, in receiving the Eucharist, in receiving cleansing in confession -- the whole sacramental life. 

Love, by its nature, is reciprocal. Love given to us draws love back out of ourselves, we return it, opening up an ongoing dialogue. God's love is infinite, and our souls are created for living in this infiinte love, but we ourselves are finite. Though we are given love, we leak. Though we are warmed by its perfection, we cool off. 

Love is an act of self-giving. When we love, we give ourselves to the one we love. God gives Himself to us and makes us able to give back to Him, giving us both the capacity and the love itself. 

Penance is like a stretch that helps us give more. It maintains the capacity God gave us and builds on it. It develops our human strength to love. With strength, we develop our capacity for more beautiful giving, more beautiful loving. And it isn't only about some aesthetic. It actually enables us to participate with God in extending His own love to other human beings, perhaps welcoming them in for the first time to this dialogue of love with God, perhaps helping them to become stronger. Perhaps keeping them literally warm and fed. Perhaps giving them courage. Could be any of the spiritual or corporal works of mercy.

If we don't physically exercise, eventually we start to lose our physical capacities. When we start to exercise, we extend them. The same might be said of penance. We can also observe that some ways of life have both physical and interior "penances" built in: manual laborers develop muscles, and those facing adversities might learn to choose great sacrifices. In both situations, we know that serious injury is also possible, so care and counsel are needed. Even the strongest human beings are fragile.

We must never attempt penance in order to deny we have a fragile nature, or because we are ashamed of ourselves. We must always start at square one, which is receiving God's love for and in our brokenness. It is best to start, then, with being still before God and allowing Him to love us. 

Just go and sit in front of Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament and allow Him to love you. Ask Him to make this love real to you from His Word. 

And let the exchange of love begin.

Anxiety

I struggle with anxiety.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

While You are Dealing With Your Issues

This is an exercise in "I write, therefore I understand."

Recently I caught a clear view of something inside me in the process of being "triggered," to use the popular expression. By that, I mean I felt a strong, unpleasant emotional reaction to the behavior of another, which used to leave me feeling turned loose into a chaos-spiral. But this time, I was able to see more clearly the launch, the pre-launch, and the space where I could mentally re-position myself so as to not feel out of control.

Specifically, I had been watching a person in my life deal with a mental health struggle. When someone is far enough away from me, relationally, I have been fairly good at observing boundaries that kept their situation firmly in their court, with my well-wishes that it would go well for them. This time, though, that wasn't so fitting, nor so natural to do.

Soon there were these triggered feelings springing to life. I could not remember concrete situations, experiences, days when such and such happened which elicited these past feelings. But I could tell you well enough that as a child, I experienced both of my parents manifesting what I now recognize as depression, anxiety, or both. I myself lived in this territory for decades. It is well-traveled land.

But I found myself in a very different place in relation to these emotions. I have learned how to re-wire my thinking processes, as well as what my body needs in terms of nutrients and rest, to support a healthy functioning brain. I have not developed as many relational skills, other than boundaries which don't tend to draw in.... or... really it is probably true to say, that repel people who are habitually depressed. 

So suddenly I see I am faced with speaking and acting in the face of one of the biggest drains of my life: someone else's mental health challenge. When I was a child, I felt obligated, without realizing it, to bear my parents' troubles, to solve them by virtue of being me. I am called to love my parents, love heals, therefore I must heal my parents' troubles. This is something of the logic of a child. It is not only a bit faulty, it is all wrong. It buys into the idea that I myself am God, I am the Savior, I am the Almighty. And if I'm not, I'm guilty. Not good enough. A failure.

But while none of that is true, I also realize that I cannot resort to the kind of prayer that feels like, "If I just pray enough, the person will get healthy." While I believe in supernatural healing, I also believe that God is after our hearts. He wants us to entrust them to Him. And a big part of that is looking smack into the reality of our own pain, which we then realize is actually held in the crucified Jesus.

I had a dream about Mary doing that, and calling me to do it with her. 

Just turn, and look at Jesus on the cross. In my dream, she had a very, very difficult time trying to encourage people to do it. She was crying. She was in pain.

What else does that say?

How do I belong to people who are struggling with their issues? What I've learned is that embodying hope myself tells them that hope is possible and stability exists. I know that their issues give me something else to hand over to the Lord (Ps. 130: like a child at rest on his mother's knee, not setting my eyes on things beyond me). I think St. Paul testifies to feeling within himself the struggle of Christians being formed. So, I need to be open to feel what I feel, even while recognizing that life of said other person belongs to them. I can speak in faith about the good God holds out for them. I can throw out practical ideas. I can speak up when the frustration of another person comes out towards me in hurtful ways. I can entrust them to the Lord who knows all of what they need in every way.

Integration

 I became a Catholic when I was 25. (I shared my conversion story here, if you haven't read it.) In my first fifteen or so years as a Catholic, I would occasionally catch a glimpse of a flickering and deeply attractive beauty in the heart of another Catholic. I didn't have a word for it. Whenever I encountered it, I felt like a dry sponge encountering something that I wanted to immediately sop up and take into myself. It felt like quality humanity. I always got the sense that the person who manifested it had no idea they were manifesting it. I sensed, especially early on, that this was something that had been fairly foreign in my experience of Christians in my pre-Catholic days. When I encountered this flickering beauty, I felt instinctively I could trust the person who possessed it.

And now I think I finally have a word for it: integration. The beauty I perceived in such a person was the beauty of being a well-integrated person.

Lately I've been listening to a podcast called Interior Integration for Catholics, which is all about the psychology of the interior life. I highly recommend it. I also listened to the audiobook Boundaries for Your Soul over Holy Week, which is a practical look at how to get all the warring parts of yourself to both work together and to come before the Lord. How to make the bossy bits of you calm down and listen, and how to draw out the parts of you that hide in shame, and how to give your overworked bits a break. It's good.

It is interesting to me that the Catechism says this in paragraph 2114: 

The commandment to worship the Lord alone integrates man and saves him from an endless disintegration.

 And then there is this, in paragraph 2338:

The chaste person maintains the integrity of the powers of life and love placed in him. This integrity ensures the unity of the person; it is opposed to any behavior that would impair it. It tolerates neither a double life nor duplicity in speech.

When I think about these two things:  worship, and loving with all one's power, I basically see my vocation in life, especially as a Carmelite. It makes me understand why, when I would encounter this grace present in another person, that my antennae would stand up and twitch. 

It seems to me that God calls us not so much according to our great ability, but according to our great wounds. At least, that's how it seems to me with my Carmelite eyes. We are to be the Great Empty before the God who is present to In-Fill. 

I mean, I just think of my college-age self, and I just have to shake my head in amazement at God. Even though I considered myself a devout Christian -- and I was, to the extent I was -- I was also an avowed misanthrope. Chastity, a commitment to Christian love, to create community? Like, what are you smoking? No, I was completely incapable. Nada. 

So for all of those years, slowly, I encountered grace, and God fed me by placing a longing in me. He broke me apart to put me together -- all of the pieces. He put my pieces together, to make me whole. At least now I am on the other side, where I can know what it is I long for. And I know that He will complete what He has begun. 

Ascension, the Kingdom, and Scampering off, Stage-Right

The Feast of the Ascension penetrated my mind in a new-feeling way today. God was gracing me to take things in. I can actually share with you the homily I heard, how about that:

The Kingdom of God is Jesus reigning in heaven, through the Church, the continuation of his ministry throughout time and space, the fullness of Him who fills everything in every way. We live now in the kingdom, because Jesus has ascended into heaven in his human body, opening it to us, going there ahead of us, promising us all we need for Him to pull the rest of his mystical body through. When we say yes to Him, yes to his church, we are agreeing to all of the purgation and purification necessary. We basically have no idea what we are really saying yes to (gee, kinda like marriage...) but we say yes, and we keep saying yes, and he brings us through. That's the promise of the Ascension for the believer. When we pray "Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as in heaven," we say yes again to the whole mess. Yes, Lord, come and rearrange anything you want; you are the Lord; I will adjust. 

It makes me think of all the brokenness we have and continue to live in, even while we also have the power of the Holy Spirit resident in us, but it might not look like it, hardly ever. Or maybe it does. We still have the brokenness, and this is what Jesus continually heals and refines (gee, kinda like marriage).

But then there was this beautiful moment at the end of Mass (not pictured in the video). We did our May Crowning right before the end of Mass. The little children brought their flowers, tried to stuff them into a vase, while the music ministry, perhaps not knowing this was going to happen, did an early rendition of the closing hymn (which then got repeated moments later). What caught my attention was the last two little girls. The younger of the two sisters went first, directed by her slightly older sister. She shoved her flower in, but then went running in little tittering steps back to her seat. The slightly older girl (I'm guessing maybe 5 or 6) suddenly became aware that she was the last child in line, and was now all alone. She shoved the flower in and ran back to her parents also. 

What struck me was what it takes to be one little person, alone, publicly rendering honor or publicly giving testimony. I thought of my tiny little mystical self, apart from Carmel. When you are the only one, and you do not consciously know yourself as part of something bigger, caught up in something that is not about you, when you suddenly lose your nerve. You feel your lack of your people. You feel away from where you belong. You run for cover. And I realized that being part of Carmel is, for me, and has been, this knowledge not only that I'm not alone, and that there are other people called just as I am, but that my life truly is not about me. My life is part of something bigger, and that is to bear witness, sometimes in a very solitary and odd-feeling way, to the experience of God. And that if I do "walk alone," I am only alone in one perspective. Personally, I know I am walking with Teresa. I know I am walking with Elijah. But seeing that little girl scamper off also made me realize this isn't just a psychological reality, it is a spiritual reality. 

The Day to Say Yes

Twenty-four years ago today, I set out on a journey home. I had been in Japan for two and a half soul-crushing years, and even though that Spring was the anticipated end date of that time, I had been strongly entertaining the possibility of either staying in Japan for the long term and entering a marriage that would have been a disaster, or returning home long enough to earn a degree to spend my life supporting both of us. I hadn't completely forsaken the latter possibility when my plane landed Stateside, but I did come eyeball to eyeball with the immensity of my brokenness which left me even open to this possibility. I felt very much like Jonah, transformed into a great heap of whale vomit. 

But I timed my return with the Feast of the Annunciation, because my return to the States was an act of saying yes to the Lord, saying yes to a new life, as the Blessed Mother had. Well, not exactly as she had, but in my attempt to imitate her faith that when we say Yes, God unfolds His graces.

His graces are still unfolding, and there's nothing magic about it. One false image of God that I grappled with a lot in those days was God as a Great Magician. I had learned to believe in the supernatural, but I had not so solidly experienced a good natural foundation on which grace was to build. So my prayer did sometimes unwittingly devolve into magical thinking, or just meditation on my own anxieties. In my early Catholic days, I often caught a glimpse of something I could barely identify, but for which my soul deeply hungered: it was this good, natural, human foundation. I heard it in how many priests spoke. I witnessed it comfortably being lived by some believers. It was a healing dew; I could never see it arrive and I could never preserve it to examine it, but when it fell it was so refreshing.

Today, I am chosing to continue to say yes. The history that was mine in 1997 is still mine today, and while I've grown, it isn't like we ever leave our brokenness behind. Jesus rose from the dead with His wounds in tact, oddly enough! No matter where we have "arrived" in relationship with Jesus and life on earth, we can never exhaust the degrees and measures of Love that God has ready to pour out, if only we have emptiness in us for Him. 

When Mary said yes, the Word became flesh. Jesus entered our disorderd, broken, sinful world to love, heal, redeem. He comes to bring glory, grace, sonship, belonging. This is such a mind-boggling truth to me that it is part of my name in Carmel: Elijah Benedicta of the Incarnate Word.

Even so, Lord Jesus, Come.

The Prodigal, The Fatherless, and St. Joseph

This morning's Mass has shaken loose quite a bit of useful thought fodder, so here I am to sort it all out.

The gospel reading was the parable of the Prodigal Son, famous of course for the son who squanders wealth, the father who compassionately welcomes him back after long expectation, and the brother who resents both of them. 

The homily I heard, though, was one of those ripping the needle off the record moments that backhandedly spoke into my personal situation and also has me pondering this year of St. Joseph.

Father mentioned, reminiscent of the writer to the Hebrews, that "we have all had that moment where we did something wrong, and we awaited that moment of how our fathers were going to deal with us about it." As Hebrews 12:9-10 puts it, "we have all had earthly fathers to discipline us and we respect them...they disciplined us for a short time at their pleasure, but [God] disciplines us for our good..."

The needle ripped off the record because, no, I don't have any childhood memories like that. In fact, the first thing I thought of was my experience of being corrected for singing harmonies out of turn when I joined our parish choir. I was ... 41 at the time. 

What felt so odd was to have this discussed as a universal human experience from which we all learned something about God. I went to that same category interiorly, and came up empty. That's not to say that God hasn't abundantly compensated that emptiness for me, because He has.

 My second thought went to the 23% of American households with children that are currently headed by single parents. And the divorce rate in the era of the childhoods of my generation (1970s and 1980s) that was at nearly 50%. And the trend, also prevalent within my generation of what Dr. Jonice Webb calls Childhood Emotional Neglect, where even physically present parents can be emotionally absent to their children. All of this is so much a given in my awareness of life around me that frankly Father's comments struck me like data from a different planet.

But my concern is not really with sociological trends, nor with Family Privilege, my personal experience or anyone else's per se. The direction these thoughts have taken me have been about human formation, and how that impacts spiritual formation.

I love what my Secular Carmelite Constitutions have to say about this: 

Both initial and ongoing formation in the teachings of Teresa and John of the Cross, help to develop in the Carmelite Secular a human, Christian and spiritual maturity for service to the Church. Human formation develops the ability for interpersonal dialogue, mutual respect and tolerance, the possibility of being corrected and correcting with serenity, and the capacity to persevere commitments. (OCDS Constitutions, No. 34)

Pope Francis has been insistent on reminding us that God meets us with His great spiritual riches on the peripheries of society and on the peripheries of our own hearts. The more clearly we see our poverty, our need, our lack, our misery, the more immediately God bestows His abundant grace. This is exactly why I say God has abundantly compensated me for the empty category I have felt in my human formation; though it did not always feel a blessing, I realize I have been tremendously blessed in being solidly in touch with my misery and crying out to God over it. It has taken me a few decades, but here I am!

I am now vigorously curious to learn how to help others in their human formation in this regard. Human formation happens when my human experience butts up against your human experience, and we both act with the graces God has given us. There is plentious room for correction and being corrected, for learning respect, to learn to tolerate persons and accept them as they are, not as we want them to be. The end result is to be that we both learn to persevere in our baptismal commitments, having been refined by the other. Multiply this by many people, many human experiences, much grace. This is an element that dare not be missing from spiritual formation (entailing learning Scriptural, doctrinal and spiritual truths). For dry bones to live we need both spirit and flesh to take part in resurrection.

And then my thoughts went to Our Lord Jesus. At the beginning of his life, he went straight for our vulnerable edges, in the persons of Mary and Joseph. Biblical scholars still debate over the nature of their legal and moral status at the time of Jesus' conception. They were betrothed but had not lived together as husband and wife; did this mean that Jesus' birth was legitimate or illegitimate? Regardless of how the eyes of the law looked upon them, or what people thought of Mary and Joseph, I can't imagine that Joseph avoided a dark night of faith. He knew that Jesus was not his child. Scripture clearly says he was of a mind to divorce Mary quietly. Some scholars say this was only because Joseph knew he was not worthy to be the father of the Son of God, and not that he doubted Mary or didn't know or believe that she was the mother of the Messiah until this was revealed by the angel (as if human Joseph having merely human thoughts somehow detracts from his holiness or vocation.) Mary also had to have needed to exercise dark faith in what the angel told her. I remember those early weeks of pregnancy where, in my case, I was sure I had lost my baby because I felt absolutely nothing. Mary had no advantage of seeing the blue line show up on her pregnancy test. In this very intimate, unprecidented and singular event of the pregnancy with the Son of God, both Mary and Joseph were pressed to the human limits of faith that God's word is to be believed above all else, including the entire natural order. I highly doubt that there were not intense conversations during that time that shaped and prepared them to live in their society in a radically, profoundly different way from anyone else. Their bond had to be a profound solitude that God transformed with every manner of compassion, wisdom, worship, and strength.

Jesus did not come to remove troubles by sanitizing humanity. He came to sanctify us by redeeming our broken humanity, and making sons of those whom sin had completely alienated. He entered into our human experience, sharing everything but sin, in order to drink the dregs and fill all with his healing and powerful presence, to make of us a people who witness to his presence in a broken world. As he raises us up to share in his divine nature, he fulfills through human beings what he promised in Psalm 10:18, "to vindicate the fatherless and the oppressed, that the men of the earth may strike terror no more."

Interiority, Psychology, and Several Recommendations

For as long as I can remember, I have had an attaction for the personal depths of human beings. Just like some people love symphonies or nature hikes or bright colors or fast-paced cities with lots of culture, I have always been fascinated by the interior depths of individuals. I suppose it is telling that I majored in English, with a literature and writing focus, but that I had originally thought of Psychology instead. Sifting through character motivation and pulling out my own reactions in the face of various world views was my chosen path into my own educational formation.

But I quickly learned that most people don't like mucking around inside of themselves, that I didn't have the tools to actually deal with the stuff I found in myself or others, and that modern life can be seen as an endless variety of ways to avoid interior realities. Also, that without grace, interior dwellers can become morose, delusional, and/or weird.

We aren't made to be strictly interior dwellers of course, any more than we are created to be exterior dwellers. St. Teresa of Avila's famous image of the Interior Castle makes it clear that the interior life is about union with the King, with God who dwells in the soul. Union with God entails loving neighbor as God loves. So interior life is no place for escapists who just want to snap judgmentally at others for being shallow. The interior life is a place from which life springs up and flows forth, for the good of all.

So what do we do when the spring isn't springing? When channels are blocked up? Do we simply and only need to pray more? 

If "pray more" means "keep trying to get God to fix what's wrong with me," I think we now stumble upon a key problem. Prayer is about communion with God. When prayer becomes focused on my problems and not on God, it might be a sign that we are not so much dealing with a spiritual problem as a psychological problem. If we stay in that place, what we call prayer and our relationship with God is laid open to a lot of undue stress and deformation, and it can become a barrier against reality instead of the doorway into it.

I heard this point articulated recently in a podcast I heard on Souls & Hearts, a unique platform dedicated to helping Catholics overcome pyschological barriers towards intimacy with God. I recommend it. 

And while I'm making recommendations, here's another. A few years ago I was hired to edit the English translation of a Polish book on this very topic. The English version is called Personal Development: How to Cooperate with Grace? The authors are Monika and Marcin Gajda, who have had years of clinical and Catholic ministerial practice in Poland, helping people to develop a true, contemplative life of prayer, to die to a false self, and live a new life of love, focused on the pursuit of the true good. The paperback book is now in print. (Hey, if you get a copy and read it, leave a review on Amazon, ok?)

It's been said that St. John of the Cross was an extremely astute psychologist, before psychology was even developed. He was, of course, operating with a 16th century scholastic understanding of the human person, and to a large extent this is so unfamiliar to modern readers as to make him almost unintelligble. So, one more recommendation. I have to give one more round of applause to Fr. Iain Matthew's book The Impact of God. In January I listened to three seminars Fr. Iain gave on faith, hope, and charity, and I was once again blown away by his presentation of St. John. If ever you've wished you could grasp him but his writings were just too scary, please get a copy of Fr. Iain's book. He makes St. John of the Cross and his teachings come to life in such a life-giving way.

Let  us not get stuck in mucking around in interiority as an end in itself. Let us not flee from the thought of self-confrontation for fear of the beasts we shall encounter! Let us be drawn to the King, the Lover, dwelling in the center of the castle, and finding Him, be empowered to bring His love and that taste of freedom to others who will set out on this same journey.

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.

Salvation Is From The Jews

When the pandemic was just getting into full swing in the United States, I joined a now-closed theological discussion forum on Facebook. Can anything good come from a Facebook discussion group? you ask. And I answer, yes, it can. 

The exchanges were fascinating. For one thing, my sense that true unity and acceptance among Christians is growing and deepening received two charlie horses and fell over, frantically moaning in pain and rubbing its legs for relief. There are plenty of people who at all costs avoid conflict or disagreement over anything. There are plenty of people who will lock and load their theology and let you have it. But, there are also plenty of people who, given enough time on their hands due to a pandemic, will pull up a chair, present a position, and pick it apart with others who may have varying degrees of agreement. I find that kind of discussion fruitful, enjoyable, and edifying.

One challenging discussion I had was with a Messianic believer who took strong issue with St. John Chrysostom and his rantings against Jews. I happened to share a glowing quote from SJC, supporting some completely disconnected point, and this man in the forum upbraided me and found it easy grounds to dismiss my Catholic theology. 

In the ensuing discussion, I shared extensive quotes from the documents of Vatican II on the Catholic teaching regarding the role of Judiam. My interlocutor was somewhat shocked, because he could find nothing at all objectionable in it. He couldn't believe it came from a Catholic document.

There was much we still disagreed on, but he challenged me to read and dig deeper. I messaged a Jewish Catholic friend of mine, asked for her input about St. John Chrysostom and some of the discussions we were having, and asked her for a suggestion for how I could educate myself. She recommended Roy H. Schoeman's book Salvation is From the Jews. 

I had other books to finish, I'm slow, and it's 350+ pages, so I just finally finished it recently. I highly recommend it to my fellow Catholics.

Judism and Jewish people were never on my radar screen in my younger days; I grew up in Wisconsin where the debate was Lutheran vs. Catholic. For five years I belonged to a non-denominational charismatic fellowship whose strongest institutional connection was with the Christ For the Nations Bible school in Texas, which flies the flag of Israel on its campus. While it was in the order of a minor footnote, escatology that touched on the political state of Israel got an occasional mention. But my biggest take away (like so much of helpful religious formation) was a subliminal, intuitive, and delicate sense of awe about the Jewish people, because obviously Jesus was Jewish. I vividly recall the first time (well into my 20s) I ever saw men dressed in the style of Orthodox Jews. We were in the post office. I gave a little interior gasp like one would at suddenly finding a huge diamond. 

But I had never really grappled with questions theological or social about Jews, Judaism, or the intersection of Christianity or modernity with them. Oh, I knew the Shoah was a deeply repulsive moment in history and that antisemitism was wrong. Right after I became a Catholic, I did ask John Michael Talbot, during the pilgrimage to the Holy Land for which he was a guide, to elaborate on what the Church taught about Israel. He asked, "theologically, or politically?" to which I replied, "Yes." I don't recall what he said about the theology, but what did stick with me was his statement that Evangelical Christianity's political embrace of modern Israel was theologically in error, and stemmed from a lack of understanding of the Church. Since most of what I had ever heard regarding theology and Israel had to do with unconditional support for Israel militarily, I thought I had a grasp on all there was to know there.

Enter Roy Schoeman's book. To begin with, he does an overview of Scripture, and the Messianic claims of the Old Testament which was all thoroughly familiar territory to me. A big chunk of his book covers the historical and spiritual roots of antisemitism, the roots of Nazism, anti-semitism after World War II, and the impact all of this has had on Judaism. 

Let me stop right there a second.

We are not made in such a way as to be able to gain a view of pain and suffering and walk away unchanged. Right here was the place of change for me.

During the time I was reading this section, I was engaged in a days-long process of recording all seven sections of the Liturgy of the Hours for Advent. I spent a few whole days listening to the Psalms being prayed. With this view into pain and suffering that I had gained, I listened to the Word of God cry out the pain, anguish, confusion, terror, the hope and praise, of God's people. The pleading for the Messiah to come. 

Later I recounted this tectonic movement within my soul to my spiritual director with tears. There is something very deep going on here. 

St. John of the Cross teaches us about the dark nights, how we move forward only by faith, having lost all supports. The Catechism teaches us that there is a movement like this through which the entire Church must pass.

He also writes about the mystical life. The dark nights aren't designed to grind us to nothing. They capacitate us for living in union with God.

Schoeman's final sections include discussion of the mystical revelation to many Jews of Jesus the Messiah. Of how Catholicism was viewed by them not as a new religion, but as the completion of Judaism. (As an aside here, I am shocked to learn that in the Evangelical world, Jews are told they need to "break the chains of Judaism" and renounce it in order to become Christians.) 

He also discusses his views, based on Scripture and Church teaching, how the second coming of Christ will be preceded by an influx of Jews believing in the Messiah. And there I am, back with my Messianic believer Facebook aquaintance. One of his chief complaints was the lack of evangelistic outreach to ethnic or believing Jews. Why does no one care?

This Carmelite right here has a strong sense of connection to both the prophet Elijah and St. Edith Stein, also to St. John of the Cross, and the call to meditate on the law of the Lord day and night. The landscape of my heart shifted here. 

More than that I cannot now say.

But, this is why I write.   

My Testimony of Asking in Faith for the Holy Spirit

In the summer of 1987, when I was about to enter my Junior year of college, I met two people who had a significant impact on my spiritual life. One was Mary, mother of two pre-school children, a member of my hometown Lutheran church. The other was a middle-aged man named Jim. Mary had a prayer gathering for women that met occasionally in her home; I had seen it advertised in the bulletin. Within maybe 48 hours of my first conversation with Jim, he was in a crisis state which both landed him him jail and brought about, in his words, his trying to come back to the Lord. Going from my quiet, solitary life as a fast food employee to being caught up in the whirlwind of this stranger's "reversion" shook me pretty hard, and I felt an urgent need to pray, both on my own and with other people. So I cold-called Mary, asked her about her prayer group, and she invited me over and befriended me. 

At this point in my life, I was serious about reading Scripture, serious about evangelizing, serious about writing music through which I poured out my heart to God. I had graduated from a Lutheran high school and was in a Lutheran college and considered myself a committed Christian, although I felt somewhat restless. I was very, very good at knowing the Lutheran catechism answers, and I asked adult-level questions of my church. The intellectual quest invigorated me and took the edge of not being satisfied with the answers I was given.

But then Jim started challenging me about the person of the Holy Spirit. Over the phone, he walked me through a study of the book of Acts, pointing out how things changed when the Holy Spirit showed up on the scene. 

I knew about people who believed that, and I knew that my church had an official position that actual manifestations of the Holy Spirit where "things happened" no longer happened. As a high school student at a youth rally I had even witnessed pastors telling jokes to the whole assembly that made fun of people who said they were speaking in tongues and who raised their hands in the air. 

But then one day, Mary also asked me if I believed that God still filled people with the Holy Spirit as in the book of Acts. "Maybe He does," I responded. It was actually a radical openness that flew in the face of my Lutheran identity.

I studied those passages of Scripture again and again that summer. Mary even prayed with me that I would be filled with the Holy Spirit. I didn't notice anything happen. 

By the time my fall semester started and I was back at school, I was doctrinally convinced that there was no reason to believe God didn't pour out His Holy Spirit on people today, like in the Bible. I had changed my mind.

But changing my doctrinal position did nothing for me, personally. I was like a person who got an A in her nutrition class, but was suffering from an eating disorder. This came to a head when another mutual friend of Jim's, Mary's and mine, who had also been studying about the Holy Spirit with us, actually asked the Lord to fill her with the Holy Spirit, and she experienced a transformative encounter with the love of God. She was changed.

I remember hanging up the phone on my dorm floor after hearing this news. I was depressed for two days. So, God loved her so much that something real actually happened for her. The lies that had suffocated me for my whole life blew up again. I'm not loved. I'll never be loved. God does things for other people, not for me. It's hopeless. I'm hopeless. Forget it. I'll just stay here, alone, like always.

I tried to pray, but this sadness (and all these lies) kept pulling me down. But I had this nagging thought that we always talked about "receiving" the Holy Spirit. There was something I actually had to do. I never actually had gone to God to ask or receive. Literally, I had NEVER thought to ask God for any spiritual good, believing that he would give it. I doctrinally believed God gave things to people; I just didn't at all believe He'd do it for me. 

After the two depressed days were done, I decided I was going to pursue asking God. But I couldn't just ask. I had to go buy a book, and read it first. I spent all night reviewing all the theology again. Then finally I prayed the prayer that was in the book, thanking Jesus for saving me, asking Him to be the Lord of the my life and to fill me with the Holy Spirit. 

It was like a lightning bolt struck me. I was washed over with the most profound sense of love and cleansing and acceptance. My hopelessness was replaced with ecstatic joy. The next day I went down to breakfast in my best dress, and a professor, seeing my smile, said, "My, you look.... radiant ... this morning!"

It wasn't an instant fix of everything in my life, but it was the equivalent of going from standing in line for a rollar coaster, and riding it.

And it all boiled down to asking.

Turning Hardness of Heart into Purity of Heart

Recently I was called upon to teach a formation session for my Carmelite community, a task that doesn't typically fall to me. Given the circumstances, I essentially listened to a teaching on CD by one of the Carmelite friars, digested it, followed his outline, and presented his talk myself. The subject of this talk was the sixth beatitude from St. Matthew's gospel: "Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God."

It is one thing to read a teaching, and another to hear a teaching. It is an entirely different animal to give a teaching, and to really meditate on it. It was a gift to be able to do so.

And now, several days later, something is jumping out at me from the teaching that I think has application to the current social turmoil which Christians are not immune from. 

Fr. Kevin Culligan, OCD, taught that there are two things about the heart that are involved in becoming pure of heart. First, there are the matters of impurities which arise from the heart, such as those Jesus enumerates in Matthew 15: fornication, theft, murder, adultery, avarice, malice, deceit, indecency, envy, slander, pride, folly. These things which come from the heart, and not the ritual purity and obedience, is what makes a person impure, because the "heart" in Scripture is the center of all that we are: our emotional, spiritual, moral life, our desires, passions, our thoughts, will and choices. 

So part of having a pure heart is our own choices, flowing from all this stuff going on inside us.

But the other part of having a pure heart has to do with that which Fr. Culligan states is that which Jesus laments the most: hardness of heart. If our hearts are hard, they will not be pure. Why? Because having a hard heart closes one off from the Word of God. Hardness of heart isolates you from love/Love. And how does hardness of heart develop? Through becoming overly absorbed in one's own agenda. The beatitudes, after all, are, if you will, Jesus'  plan of blessedness, of happiness, and not that of uninformed human striving to fill itself. 

Religious people know not to pursue big commandment-breaking matter. But religious people can get hot and heavy over their own agendas without necessarily realizing it.

This is why St. John of the Cross's teaching on detachment is so vital for us. He presumes that someone pursuing the Christian life will leave behind attachments involved with breaking the Ten Commandments. He teaches us, though, the dangers entailed in remaining attached to anything, even good things, even spiritual things. He is relentless.

And the point is not austerity for the sake of austerity, or detachment out of some kind of psychological aberation that leaves one wanting to grind one's own self into powder to win some divine approval. 

The point is that the beloved longs to see her lover, and God longs for us. To see Him, we must have soft hearts. We must not be overly absorbed with our own agenda, even if our own agenda is something we think is great: service to the Church, loving my family, prayer, being holy, speaking the truth. If it is mine, if I grasp it tightly, if it becomes my identity, if I've forgotten God in the midst of trying to serve Him, then we risk hardening our hearts. We risk what we perceive as our own steadfastness, our own faithfulness becoming that which actually closes us off from the Word and isolates us from Love.

But a beautiful thing happens then. God meets us then with a gift that St. John calls the Dark Night. The Dark Night of the Senses (very generally speaking) is when we are left without the external helps and supports that once held us up. The Dark Night of the Spirit is when we are left without the internal and interior helps that once held us up. This is the time when God is at work within us in a mysterious way. It hurts like the dickens. It is God's purifying action in us, which we cannot produce ourselves, and in which the only way to move forward is in faith. We don't tend to get to understand much of anything or feel like we can see where He leads. 

What might it look like practically? It might entail facing having our doctrinal or religious certainty shaken deeply. It might involve a public humiliation, or someone close to us embracing something which we deeply oppose, thereby challenging how we love them. Losing a job or having a business or a venture fail could trigger this. Facing a sudden and drastic health change... anything that throws our hearts open in a way we could not have anticipated, that leaves us thinking, "How did I get here," and where nothing we knew before quite fits. And these things might all be interior so that no one else would even know anything is going on. 

But what God does in this is call us to have faith in His goodness with us, His presence with us, and His leading, even though we may feel nothing, or animosity, or even doubt that He exists, because we thought the things we lost were where He was. It is here that God softens our hearts, takes our agendas, and gives us His.

But we can't make the Dark Nights happen. They are a gift. We can't give ourselves this kind of purification, but when we have tastes of it, we can say yes. We can ask the Lord to soften our hearts, to take away our hearts of stone and give us hearts of flesh.

When we have soft hearts, the Word of God speaks to us easily. When we have a soft heart, love flows to us and through us easily. When we see Jesus hanging on the cross (in the person of the least, here with us) we can look on with sorrow. We can empathize. We can feel His pain. Our love is not cold. We are not caught up in the thinking that standards must be met before love is given. We are also not caught up in the thinking that evil in any form can be winked at, because all that matters is that everyone feel comfortable. Primarily we experience God's love flowing to us, and then through us as He would give it, without bitterness, unforgiveness, resentment and other corrosive elements. 

Having that in which we trusted shaken is messy business, and it is painful. Broken bits fly. But we need not lose everything. We can tell the Lord, "not my self-righteousness, but Yours; not my understanding, but Yours; not my will, but Yours. And I'll leave behind all my acts of uncleanness." Our trust that He is good will be rewarded, and like the men in the fiery furnace (Daniel 3) we will lose only that which was bondage for us.

A Few Thoughts on Fear

It seems the first stage of corona virus infection is the spread of fear. If you spend any time on Facebook or other social media, or even any humans at all, you've already probably witnessed people taking up positions. I've seen people emote, learn, educate, change, grow, plan... and mostly try really hard to keep laughing.

This is new territory for us. That alone can be enough to make people afraid.

This morning as I prayed Office of Readings, I read from Exodus about Moses receiving the covenant from God on Mout Sinai. There was some fear built into this process for the People of God. The threat God told Moses to pass on to the people was that no one should approach the mountain, and if they did, they were to be stoned to death or shot with arrows. Their signal was to be the ram's horn. When they heard that ram's horn, and then only, they could approach.

Think of it: we hear that God purposefully struck fear into the hearts of his people.

St. Irenaeus explains why this was the case: "He made them afraid as they listened, to warn them not to hold their Creator in contempt."

con·tempt

/kənˈtem(p)t/

Learn to pronounce

noun

1. the feeling that a person or a thing is beneath consideration, worthless, or deserving scorn.

As Irenaeus sees it, God was training his people to give him the consideration he deserves. Why? because God is an insecure egomaniac? Of course not. We need to give God due consideration because he is our origin, our Creator. Without giving him his proper due, his proper worship, we are serious out of tune with ourselves and we fall short of that for which we were created. If we don't worship, we are dysfunctional. It's for our good.

Fear, therefore, like all things we can feel, should be our servant. In this case of the corona virus, it is not a bad thing for fear to move us to prepare, if not for ourselves, then to be able to serve the vulnerable around us who don't have means, who won't necessarily be able to care for themselves, and who will suffer. Use the precautions that scientists advise to flatten the curve. Become more aware of the needs people have, if we tend to be on the dull side of thinking about others.

Fear, however, should not be our master, nor our enemy that we desperately try to beat away from us. Allow fear to do its necessary work, then bring it to Jesus, to Perfect Love, who casts it out. Pushing down fear, refusing to feel it, will create the panic that harms. Don't refuse God's servant. Don't forget it is ONLY God's servant. God is the master. Let him be that. Trust him, and entrust all of your concerns to him.

Therefore, put on the armor of God, that you may be able to resist on the evil day and, having done everything, to stand. Ephesians 6:13

Silence

Recently I had a revelation about how much I both need and love silence.

The silence I love and need is more than the lack of sounds reverberating around me, although that is a good start. Silence, or within the silence I am drawn to and crave, there is a presence. The French OCDS talk about it a bit here. This silence is primarily a meeting place. It is a place where I meet God, or at least I am available to be met, should He desire to make his constant presence with me felt and sensible. It is me tuned in, tuned away from distraction, setting all the clatter aside.

Some people surround themselves with clatter, hug it to themselves, and panic if they are without it for a moment. This wearies me, saddens me, drains me.

But it isn't only about sounds: music, TV, radio, talking, "white noise," and so forth.

Thoughts make noise. My thoughts aren't as noisy as they used to be, and I don't find them demanding or deserving of the same attention they once did. It probably is why I don't blog as much as I used to.

But speaking of blogging, I have also known the state where I have to say something in order to enter into this silence. It's like another presence will stand in the middle of my heart and clear its throat until I pay attention to it, say or write the words to the one I need to say or write them to, thereby dismissing or rather dispatching this presence to go where it needs to go. And then I also can go where I need to go, which is into silence.

This silence is also linked to solitude. And since I am re-working this clunky English language to be able to express the state of my soul, I will also re-work the word solitude. I don't necessarily mean by solitude a state of being alone. I definitely do not mean by it a state of being lonely. I think of it more as a state of there being one present. Only one being is present. It is more of an idea of union, or communion, than of isolation. If I am in solitude with you, I am at complete peace, and your presence speaks and ministers peace to me, and I to you. In this peace, we are united, one, and more importantly it is a communion with the One who fills the silence. It is actually the most heavy, profound presence rather than some kind of lonely state. In this way, I think heaven would actually be perfect solitude (communion) and perfect silence (presence).

So I need and love heaven. Yeah, it always comes down to that, doesn't it.

But be practical. I'm on earth. I'm talking about an earthly experience. Our earthly experiences of divine communion must pale to the real thing. But you know what, I'll take pale experiences of heaven on earth any old day.

I experience this at times when I am home alone, and my heart is peacefully pouring outwards. I experience this at times in prayer at church when suddenly I am aware of God's presence, and I'm there, too. I experience this at times with another person, even without saying anything. Peace. Presence.

And the other day it struck me that this is real need of my soul. I could throw my husband's TV out the window, but that would not be the entire solution. I also need to throw out the things that make me feel rushed and therefore not peaceful -- like a disordered sense of responsibility for situations real, imagined, or unconsciously triggered.

And I suppose like the spiritual life often goes, entering into this silence is something one needs to practice, seek after, and pour energy into. It is both gift and task, as the trite, hippy-flavored saying goes.

My Beloved is the mountains,

The solitary wooded valleys,

The strange islands,

The roaring torrents,

The whisper of the amorous gales;

The tranquil night

At the approaches of the dawn,

The silent music,

The murmuring solitude,

The supper which revives, and enkindles love.