I Need to Trust my WHAT?!

Recently as I was talking with a priest friend, he said something that really stunned me. He said, "Marie, you need to learn to trust your feelings." I think I physically jerked my neck back. I repeated the words out loud. It was as if he'd told me I'd look great with a rose bush blooming out of my nose.

I have done a lot of things with my feelings over the years, but it struck me then that using the verb "trust" in relation to them is completely foreign to me. Doesn't trusting one's feelings lead to irrational decisions? Doesn't it mean one is carrying around by whims of fancy, today going one way, tomorrow some other way? Don't feelings always lead us to baser desires, to laziness, to gluttony? Don't we have minds to free us from the tyranny of doing what we feel like doing by choosing what is right instead?

Thoughts like these sprang up immediately as I pondered his statement.

But I realized he was not speaking in general terms, he was speaking to me. Obviously he was not advising living based on emotion, only to allow emotions to stand on proverbial level ground with all of the other facets that make up my soul, and to no longer be made to sit crouching outside the back door, whimpering for table scraps and hoping for a chance to come in a get warm now and then.

This prospect is so fascinating that I can't help but write about it.

I am rather cerebral and logical. If I can see how a series of facts lines up in logical order, it gives me a sense of peace. But I do, I know, run the risk of shutting out my heart, my gut, my feelings from this process. And this makes my sense of peace, of completion, incomplete. I see that now.

Trust my feelings. I almost need to say this over and over to myself, just to get used to the feeling of the words in my mouth and the concept in my heart. They are not the final boss. They do not contradict reason. Jesus is far surer than my reason, my feelings or my heart. He is Certainty. I am finite, and shifting. But within my finite, shifting, growing, imperfect little heart, I need to trust my feelings, this capacity which Christ Himself created within me, so that the mechanism He has created for me to discern His will and follow it can function smoothly.

Fascinating.

St. Cecilia, I love you! Pray for us!

St. Cecilia at the Organ by Carlo Dolci.

I love this story so much that I have to tell it again.

Today is my birthday, and it is also the feast of St. Cecilia, a martyr who lived about two hundred years after Christ, and the patroness of musicians. I have a unique history with this woman, and with each passing year she grows dearer to me. The story I love to tell is the story of how we met.

On Christmas Eve of 1991 I attended Midnight Mass with my friend Keith, who was home from seminary in England. It was the first time I ever attended Mass with any openness to worship, although I was still very edgy and skeptical entering Catholic territory. We went to this Mass with two friends of Keith's, and other friends joined us later. I am quite sure they all prayed for me, because I had been trying to pick a fight with my friend Keith about his newly re-discovered Catholicism ever since he left the charismatic fellowship where I'd met him. Really, I was grilling him to hear his defense of his decision. But instead of arguing, he kept encouraging me to read and pray, and I had been doing just that for the better part of 1991.

So, there we were at Mass. One of his friends asked when my birthday was, and I told her: November 22. The group of them all tried to remember who was celebrated that day, but they couldn't. It really seemed to frustrate them.

The Mass that night completely changed my life. It deserves a post of its own, but the two intense movements in that Mass were the penitential rite and the distribution of Holy Communion. At the penitential rite, towards the beginning, what I saw was the priest leading his people, the Catholics, in confessing their sin. I was so convicted. My heart cried out "Lord, they are not the ones who need to repent -- I am. I have insulted them and belittled them for so long!" And at the distribution of Holy Communion I was suddenly struck with the reality that the One on the altar was none other than Jesus Christ. It was a complete shock to me. I never in my wildest dreams imagined meeting Jesus Christ in a Catholic church.

For three days I was too shocked to pray or touch what had happened with my mind. But finally it was as if the Lord was tapping me on the shoulder, saying "I'll be right over here on the couch when you're ready to talk." (That was my favorite prayer spot.) As soon as I tried to pray, the Lord challenged me to follow Him just where He had shown me He was, in the Catholic Church. I countered with my confusion about this one doctrine I just couldn't handle: intercession and veneration of the saints. I really didn't understand how honoring human beings and asking them to pray (they were dead, after all!) didn't detract from the worship of God. The Lord made it clear that His question to me was whether or not I would follow Him. And He knew the answer. As utterly weird as His proposal seemed, I knew I could not live without Him. That night I gave Him my heart in this completely new way.

The next day, now December 27th, was my grandmother's funeral, so I did not go to work. The first thing I did that morning was go to the Catholic bookstore to buy a breviary. As I looked around the store, I was drawn as by a magnet to the section where all of the saint stuff was. I suddenly remembered the consternation of Keith's friends several nights before when they couldn't remember who was the saint on November 22. I grabbed a book and paged through. I found the date, and I read "St. Cecilia, Patroness of Musicians." My eyes ran with tears. For the first time ever in my life, I knew a very real reassurance that my life was not a mistake, a goof, an unfortunate accident. I thought, "Maybe, just maybe, God has a plan and my life has a meaning." It was as if heaven held its breath, waiting for this moment when I, who couldn't handle the veneration of the saints, was met by not only the one honored on the day of my birth, but who prays for and assists those who have a passion for music, as I did then and do now. It was no small thing for me to give up the musical community I left to become Catholic. But when I "met" St. Cecilia on that December morning, she was like the advance runner of all the host of heaven and all believers on earth who came to embrace me and welcome me into the family of the Church, and to introduce me to so many others.

And I am so, so grateful.

St. Cecilia, I love you! Pray for us!

After Worshipping with the Presbyterians

I had an experience this morning that has the wheels of my interior processing going at full speed. For the first time in about 18-some-odd years I attended a Protestant Sunday worship service. My parish choir shares a director with a Presbyterian congregation in the area, and today we sang together at both their church and ours. Oh, I've been to ecumenical things here and there (where the service was kind of a no-man's land), but this was unique. I'm trying to grab some very powerful impressions and wrestle them into words.

The unity of all Christians is something I pray for every single day. My heart is all for acknowledging what is good and holy in every Christian communion, and for that matter in every religious or spiritual community. My heart is also deeply attuned to the need for on-going (or first time, for that matter) conversion to Christ in the heart of every person.

That’s where I am today. I think this morning's experience put me in touch with elements of my religious past that I can now see with much different eyes. I guess what really struck me today is the huge, gaping divide between religion and an encounter with the supernatural. I will say that we need both, but in very different ways. Religion, as I am using the term here, is a human, natural virtue. It is the natural virtue of being reverent, of knowing that there is a God and acknowledging His right over His creation and humanity. It is about a sort of natural justice and goodness. There are people, I know, who have no formal religious affiliation at all who excel at these virtues. There are probably lots of people in every church whose religious lives express these sentiments.

But it's not Christian.

I think there are other people who go through churches who aren’t strong in these natural virtues, and they look at the claims of organized religion and the actions of the people around them and they declare Christianity a bunch of worthless sentiment. They might believe there is a God, but find the practice of religion meaningless. And sometimes I think they might actually jettison religion as an exercise of virtue, because our somewhat crude culture emphasizes not so much to respect form but to seek what is real and what actually works.

Here’s the real kicker: The natural virtue of religion must have a supernatural encounter with the living God, or you can't call it Christianity. There is so much more than religious form, and you’d better believe it’s real and it works! Lived Christianity is supernatural. Jesus Christ, the Son of God, broke into our humanity in the womb of the Virgin Mary -- that is an absolutely reality-altering experience! God came to show us His face; this is what is above nature coming into what is our nature. As a result, He raised us up to be with Him. God makes us to "share in the divine nature" (2 Pet 1:4). The life we live is not one powered by warm fuzzies because of a great example of a good man, it is breath breathed into a corpse that resurrects! Christ did not come to make bad men good, but to make dead men live! This is that which is above nature blasting into life our fallen humanity. He raises us up, anoints us with His Spirit, and sends us out to participate in the same supernatural, miraculous ministry that He had.

That is Christian.

I have been in healing services and heard accounts of powerful healings. I have prayed over people to receive charismatic gifts. I have personally had various supernatural experiences happen to me in prayer services. And while fully acknowledging these, I will also say that the single greatest evidence of God's presence is love in the human heart. Love will do the humble thing; it will also care of the physical needs of anyone at hand, just as Jesus did. Is this not exactly evident in the fact of the Eucharist? There is no Eucharist without a miracle, without the supernatural breaking into our ordinariness. And then, Jesus gives Himself to each one, feeding us, loving us, and bidding us and enabling us to love one another. How absolutely perfect!

At times in my life, I have been toxically religious. By that I mean that I was deeply entrenched in a system of human efforts to reach God, but that I lost sight of the goal and became addicted to the system and the effort. And, I must stress, this toxicity is possible in any ecclesial community, for Catholics as easily as for Protestants. Today I am so thankful to God for exactly the path He has chosen for me. He never left me to drown but allowed me the grace to call out to Him for rescue. Thanks be to God for every painful step, for every bit of confusion, and most especially for the witnesses to the supernatural He has sent across my path to show me there was a way out being traveled by others.

Praised be Jesus Christ! Now and forever!!

Wordless Weekend: I Will

A little love song from the Beatles...

Writing Lessons

I'm more than halfway through this month of daily posting, and I'm noticing some valuable lessons. For one, I realize that sometimes I need to speak in order to be silent. Sometimes I simply cannot be at peace if I have something bubbling around in me and I don't say it, or write it. I have a tendency to struggle against my desire to speak until it does me violence. So, writing has a bit of a salvific edge to it for me. St. Vincent de Paul said that it is in silence that God communicates His graces to us. Expressing myself is vital to my ability to be silent and continue to receive God's grace. Trying to living without grace is like trying to live without breathing. But expressing myself, well at least, always feels like a death to me. It is perfectly fitting! To live the risen life, I must die with Christ.

So, I also realize that it is work to express my thoughts. I was really struck by something said at the Mass I attended last night, about this thing of God desiring us to be transparent vessels of His love to others. I think that one thing I have struggled with quite a bit all my life is this paradox that I am both very reserved and very open. I might not say anything to you, but if I will tell you anything, I'll tell you everything. This is a big struggle for me in many ways. But it gave me peace to consider last night that transparency is something that God wills. It is work, though, to choose words, to consider what should be said and left unsaid, and finally to simply open my heart and give and not worry about whether some will find me unpalatable or whether I may expose my own silliness, or my jugular, so to speak. They will, and I will, but if I speak because I can't figure out any other way to live my relationship with God, I trust He will take care of correcting and protecting me as needed.

The silence of Advent approaches. I hope this November writing exercise might push me beyond my sort of writing comfort zone into a place where I am really emptying myself, allowing new room for the silence of Mary and Joseph to fill me, and for the light of the glory of God to truly burst out again before my eyes.

Mass with the Charismatics

Tonight at my parish there was a "charismatic Mass." I use quotation marks to express the little bit of confusion that phrase always gives me. Yes, I know full well what is meant and commonly understood by it. And yet, the contrarian in me always wants to ask, what Mass isn't a charismatic Mass in a more technical understanding of the term.

I was there, and it was a happy thing. I wrote about an experience last March of another charismatic Mass which left me with different ponderings. As I re-read my thoughts about that Mass, I wondered how much my rather strong sense of anticipation then affected my experience. With today's Mass, I remembered it only last night as I checked the dutifully filled-in calendar. I looked forward to it as I look forward to going to any Mass every day, but with no particular heavy expectations of the community or the experience. I wasn't going to "get," I guess. I was going to give.

It always does interesting things inside my brain to mix together different facets of my history in unexpected ways. There I was, in my own parish church, which is filled with a wide assortment of very current memories, singing songs that I had learned and sung frequently some 25 years ago. Unlike the last Mass, I was able to enter in immediately into the praise and worship before the Mass began. I was struck with an urge to dance as I used to long ago and far away at my charismatic fellowship. I have never danced in a Catholic setting (my one experience as a liturgical dancer at a parish Mass on Pentecost excepted -- yes, really) and I wasn't entirely sure how it would culturally fly. Then I looked around the church and realized that the average age meant that the Holy Spirit would need to move people somewhat miraculously to get anyone to hop around! Pews and kneelers inhibited me more than the people around me, though, so all I could really do was shuffle.

I always wondered when I was in my early days of transitioning into being a Catholic if I was going to be missing out on really satisfying worship. To go from Pentecostal hootenanny to a staid or routine-like Mass was a seismic cultural shift. And while I can say that for someone like me to whom music is so central to my heart and therefore my worship that I can enjoy praising God with certain worship songs, clapping, hand raising and yes, dancing, there is absolutely nothing more satisfying than the Mass. It is what we are made for. Oh, we can't be too precise about rite because there are of course other valid rites than the Latin, but the experience of God coming to us in Word and Sacrament -- there is nothing else than can compare. Nothing.

God's call to us tonight was to allow the Holy Spirit to transform us, to make us transparent vessels of His love, so that this power of His love could spread to and through His children far and wide. To be joyful, to be peaceful, to be confident that we are loved amid the dire turmoil of life -- this is evidence of the supernatural at work. These are signs of hope to those who need to see. This is what Jesus desires for us to become.

And I say, Yes! and Amen.

Tired Ramblings about Marriage, Treasure and Risk

Tonight I am thinking about my dear husband, today's gospel, and treasures.

My husband and I have been married eleven years (11.5 come next Monday). Today's gospel was all about investing your talents. And treasures? I'm thinking in terms of the spiritual treasures that are available to us, in Scripture, in graces, in the Church, in the saints, in holy places -- the whole bit.

It is so easy, after time has passed and romance grinds into regular life, to lose any sense of pizzazz, of wonder, of the desire to stretch and grow and seek new territory. And I mean this with regards to marriage, to work or vocation, and to the spiritual life. It's so easy to settle into a rut, repeating familiar patterns, staying in a dull and unfulfilling safety zone.

What did the king in today's parable (Lk. 19:11-28) have to say to the one who decided to play it safe? He called him a wicked servant. There was potential for this servant to do something with the riches entrusted to him, but he, out of fear, let the potential slip away by doing nothing.

It can be so easy for the potential in a marriage to slip away by doing nothing with it. It's so easy to daydream about how wonderful it would be to have someone who would give us everything, do everything we want, be everything we want. But if marriage partners spend all their time dreaming, who is going to do the personal investment required to become that sort of person in the other's life?

My husband is truly a treasure. It can be tempting to want perfection in the other, but really what we need is just the right combination of struggles and flaws to complement our own struggles and flaws. God always seems to provide with abundance in this regard! Spouses need to be thankful for the ways our frailties and weaknesses are both challenged and supported as we stumble forward toward the one goal of our eternity.

So I mentioned those spiritual treasures of the Church, as well. (Forgive my sloppy writing, will you? This daily blogging late at night makes for some less polished and more stream-of-consciousness writing!) Treasures can be very nice to admire, but they really do make for a lot of work and care. My son and I are reading J. R. R. Tolkein's The Hobbit right now, and those dwarfs sure go through a lot of peril and effort to reclaim their treasure. So many Catholics, just like so many married couples, might think "oh yeah, we've got a lot of neat stuff here... somewhere," but in effect the treasure is never theirs if they don't do the work to own it. What good does it do that prayer can produce miracles if we never put in the effort to persevere in prayer? What good does it do if we know that Scripture can transform our minds if we don't put the effort into soaking in it? What good does it do to realize that all the saints and angels in heaven stand at the ready to intercede for us if we never employ their help? If we don't make the investment of our hearts, which is measured in our time, our labor, our resources given in firm, consistent pursuit of the good, pulling together like those pitiful, battling and murmuring dwarfs (and hobbit), then that treasure that exists objectively will never become our very own possession.

So, I'm challenged. Risk, invest, push forward with who God has made you. Everything changes when I remember that my husband is given to me to help me to do this. The fact of the matter is, I need the way my husband keeps me grounded. I need his reliability, his steadfastness, his loyalty which flow out from him in rich abundance. And, he needs me to keep jumping off of cliffs, testing how my wings work, gazing wild-eyed into heaven.

There is nothing like the gift of being embraced for exactly who one is. But there's also nothing like the work it takes to press forward to invest what we've been given.

Today's Thoughts on Communion and Liberation

This morning my prayer led me to contemplate the role, the meaning, the presence of Communion and Liberation in my life. There is a little bit of a sting in this for me, because how I relate to CL as a movement has changed rather significantly within the last year, and while its all good, good can also feel bewildering to me when it involves relationships with other people. In my mind I have often repeated the phrase I don't do people well, and while I believe this less as time goes on, I do sometimes wonder whether other people get as consternated as I over what is appropriate and inappropriate with regards to relating to other people.

Communion and Liberation is an ecclesial movement started in the 1950s in Italy by Fr. Luigi Giussani. It grew up with high school youth and then college students, and then blossomed over into a movement for adults, and it is all about living Christianity (Catholicism) not as an inherited cultural set of baggage but as a living encounter with Christ Who is present here and now. As my CL friends always liked to say, it is nothing other than basic Christianity re-proposed in modern times. But as with all movements there is a definite spirituality, a way of expressing these truths, of living them. When I was newly drawn to the Catholic Church it confused me just a bit that there were different spiritualities such as religious orders and movements. If it is a good thing to be a Franciscan, then why isn't everyone a Franciscan? I wondered. I suppose I could have just as easily asked If it really is good that I am me, then why isn't everyone me? which betrays the misbelief I had about myself, and my misunderstanding of God as the creator and lover of individuals.

About two years ago I proclaimed myself a devotee of CL to the extent that I joined the fraternity, which is simply an official way of saying one is following this way of life. This was a lover's leap, but it was an immature one. In hindsight, I can see that I was responding to a clear recognition that CL is centered on Christ. I suppose I still have a hermeneutic of suspicion when it comes to groups that are in some way ancillary to the Church. Ok, maybe they are legit on paper, but what's it like on the inside? I was so happy to find a true desire for Christ that I figured a desire for Christ was all it took to "be claimed by" a spirituality.

Let me just say plainly that in my personal judgment, not to mention that of the Church, there is absolutely nothing "wrong" with CL. I'm taken back again to this notion of religious orders. To a man called to be a Dominican, there is nothing "wrong" with a Jesuit or a Carmelite. But of course, the key is that we do not make our selves, we do not choose our way, really. We are chosen, called, embraced, and we respond. God is the orchestrator, and in the full but mysterious exercise of our freedom we become exactly the one He knew us to be all along. We are His.

So as I began to heed exactly what I was gleaning from CL, and following Christ as He presented Himself to me, I began to see that the way I adhered to CL itself was a problem! In many subtle ways, I found myself trying to follow something extrinsic to myself, as if I were eating a certain kind of food and insisting that it was delicious. At the same time, the Lord was calling to me strongly, wooing me with frightening intensity, in other directions. I started to feel as if I were being pulled in two.

After an intense struggle, in my mind I "let go" of CL. The collapse hurt, but at least I collapsed onto my Lord. It took time to incarnate this letting go and to have the strength to own it (because of the human affection involved with my CL friends, all fine people).

But this morning, to continue the story I nearly started, in prayer I was reading Scripture and was drawn to the Psalms, and I specifically thought to pick up Giussani's book on Psalms and read a few entries. This is a book I've had for a couple of years but had never read from at all. In the two entries I read, Giussani repeated familiar themes, of our need to see Christ with us, to be aware of Him. He asked repeatedly "where is this presence?" While the question itself is completely valid, I found my heart shouting out "Right here!! He's here!" Going to another random selection and finding the same question "where is this presence?" I suddenly started hearing it not as a provocation to delight, but as a nagging doubt. "Where is God? Is He really here? This is our sin, that we don't see Him. We need to see Him..." And my heart became sad.

I put down that book and searched out another that I read voraciously in the months after my "collapse" : Iain Matthew's The Impact of God: Soundings from St. John of the Cross. I opened it, again to a random chapter, and found my spiritual journey described, understood, and re-enkindled. In fact, St. John of course said the same thing: "Where have you hidden, beloved?" But somehow in this difference I caught the glimpse of the God who had called me, personally -- to me -- through and in my particular history and circumstances, and I could almost blush with the awareness of the intimacy of it. There is a world of difference between following truth because one acknowledges it is truth and submits obediently, and being gripped in a passionate love where life and death hangs in the balance of being with the Lover or not. Truth, acknowledgment and obedience are all involved, but passion .... ah, that's the ticket.

It is all about the Lover who calls. He is here! And I just want to be with Him and live as lovers live.

Thoughts Sparked by Fr. Larry Richards

Tonight I listened to the first half of Fr. Larry Richard's talk "The Mass Explained" from the Mary Foundation. Unfortunately I wasn't able to finished before my space and quiet for the task were entered in upon, but I need and want to go back and finish it very soon.

Here, in fact, is the first part of the talk from You Tube.



I was struck by how he speaks of the Mass as the single most intimate and important thing we can do with our lives. And I suddenly realize that I have always considered the interchangeability of those two words with each other and with the spiritual quest as the foundation of my life. It is so powerful when I hear someone else speaking my life back to me. It helps me understand again who I really am. And I think that is the essence of evangelizing: telling someone who they really are. This is love.

Fr. Larry spoke of how the Mass is not only the most important thing we can ever do, it also requires of us our very life. We go to Mass, he says, to learn how to die. Jesus died to give us His body and blood, this intimate communion, and we as well are called to die to give ourselves to Him in love to our brothers and sisters.

So, what is it again to evangelize? Ah yes, to tell someone who they really are. What is it to evangelize? To love. How do I love the people who are closest to me? Do I lecture them on how they need to lay down their lives for me? Gosh, sometimes I think so. But no, I love them. I tell them who they really are.

I feel like I've spent most of this afternoon locking horns with my son. Whenever I lock horns with my son it is because there is something the Lord needs for me to see. This much I have learned from experience. Sometimes I have this question in my heart: when does loving someone turn into letting them walk on me? When is speaking a hard truth love, and when is it my desire to lecture someone about their need to love in a way that serves me better? I don't have the answers for all that today. I just know that sometimes when I meet with a lack of faith or courage or love or industry, part of me wants to just push the subject in question face first into this good, for their own sake, ya know? But something tells me that love suffers and offers it as prayer, and waits.

This is pure rambling, you see, but it is a ramble my heart needs to do just now.

Do yourself a favor; listen to the whole talk, too (you'll need to go to YouTube and follow the talk segments). Feel free to share how it moves you, too.

Desire

Of late I have been wondering, in the substrata of my soul, about the purpose desire serves. Oh, I never think in neat words (hmmmm, I wonder what purpose desire serves....), but I guess what I mean to say is that my heart has been rumbling a lot lately, and this is the best way, in hindsight, that I can put that rumble into words.

Why, indeed, would a heart surrendered to God fittingly have seasons of longing, of finding no deep fulfillment, of wanting, of craving, of a nagging emptiness? Is not the One I adore enough to satisfy?

Well, yes, but there must be more than this... (as this song begins)




Our hearts intuit that we are made for the infinite. We intuit that there must be more, and so we are filled with longing.

I think longing becomes frightening and dangerous only when we have no faith, no hope. With faith and hope we know we are not only made for the infinite, but the Infinite reaches to us and draws us onward to Him, into His embrace. Even when we lose all sense of this truth, if we retain this truth with our minds, our memories, we can take another step forward and long in safety, because we know the cry of our hearts is not going to bounce out into an empty universe and merely echo back into our own ears and no other.

How do we long for something we already have? We can't.

Every desire is a desire for God. Not every desiring heart realizes it. God is always bigger than we are. That's sorta the definition of The Infinite. So those feelings of longing, of wanting, of craving, of dissatisfaction... what do we do with them? Let them drive us to what numbs us? Stuff them and try really hard to ignore them? Beat ourselves up over how surely holy people don't crave something else? Wallow around in some thing at hand that seems to come close to what we desire? Cry out with a passion we don't really understand?

Yes, that seems about it.

And today, I read this: "The entire life of a good Christian is in fact an exercise of holy desire. You do not yet see what you long for, but the very act of desiring prepares you, so that when he comes you may see and be utterly satisfied." St. Augustine.

Desire is fitting for this time in the liturgical year when we are heading toward Advent and desiring the Returning King. Desire now allows us to be fully satisfied when He who is our life appears to us. Both now, and in the final coming.

Desire is never something to be shut down, only brought into the light, purified, and intensified.

Changing Education Paradigms: Sir Ken Robinson

Church Door Phobia

So, here's an interesting blog post idea: strange phobias. I don't have many of them, really. I'm working through my issues with the telephone, at least in my head. But I did once have a sort of anxious catch in my heart about church doors. This goes back to the time of my conversion to Catholicism as well.

Some Catholic churches have so many doors, no doubt owing to the evolution of how people arrive at church. Doors off sidewalks accommodate walkers. Side doors accommodate parking lots and handicap accessibility. But sometimes there are just so dang many of them that it is hard to know which is the best door to use. Then there are the round churches. Who knows where those doors will lead! Back in my early days of trepidation my chief worry was that I would open a door that would lead me smack into the front of a church -- right on the altar how about -- when a Mass was going on. I could picture a crowd of 500 Catholics going pin-drop silent as the poor wayfaring stranger stepped in. Everyone would realize I was deeply clueless. (I was just a tad self-conscious.)

One of my favorite memories of God's care for me amidst my now seemingly silly insecurities involved church doors. The Lord had given me the instruction to "be going to Mass," which I knew meant daily Mass. I tried to obey. Since I had overheard a volunteer at work mention that she went to daily Mass in the morning, I figured I had to go in the morning as well. I had to be at work by 8:30, but I knew a nearby parish had a 7:00 morning Mass, so one morning I mustered myself up to go. As I walked, I fretted, because this was one of those big, old churches with six different banks of doors at three levels. I had never been in this church before, and I had no idea what I'd find once I walked in. So I prayed, begging the Lord to send someone ahead of me whom I could follow in. As I approached the church, sure enough, a man crossed the street and my path in front of me, and went in. The door he entered was two inches from closing when at a natural gait I approached it, took it in hand, and went in. I followed him down the steps, right into the rear of the lower church where people were gathered for Mass. What a relief that was!

Now, I had gotten used to services that were nearly three hours long, so when the entire Mass was finished in 20 minutes, I hardly knew what hit me. I had barely gotten comfortable in the pew, and it was all over! Bewildered, I never went back to that early morning Mass. In fact, it took me almost an entire year before I started daily Mass in earnest -- in the late afternoon after work!

How Making Phone Calls Changed my Life

Ok, when I started this blog-every-day-for-a-month challenge I stated that my theme was going to be "stories I never get tired of telling." I haven't really done that yet. But today I will pick one such story, brought to mind by my post yesterday.

And this story is all about a little work assignment I was given back when I worked at Wisconsin Right to Life. This was a very providential little task that had a pretty significant impact on me, and it shows how God has a very keen sense of humor.

This was "back in the day" when technology was not very developed. Internet and email were things barely heard of even by our computer guy, and all of the contacts we generated had to be done the old fashioned way. So we did a lot of networking with groups and churches.

In one particular networking blitz, all of the churches in the local area were broken down and a few of us were assigned to help get some information out to them. This is how I was assigned the task to call every Catholic parish in the Archdiocese of Milwaukee. I even asked "Couldn't I call the Protestant churches?" No, I was told, we need you to do the Catholic ones. Ugh.

I always loathed the jobs where I had to call hundreds of anybody, but I was especially fuming at this point over calling the Catholic churches, because I had just had three friends announce to me that they were becoming Catholics, and I was extremely upset about it. I really was not in the mood for having my face rubbed in it any further.

Called I did. Call after call after call. Sometimes I got a grumpy response, and I felt justified in disliking these odd people. I felt my know-it-all pride poked and prodded as I looked at parish name after parish name and realized I had no idea who most of these saints were. (There were parishes named after women, for heaven's sake. Wasn't that scandalous?) Oh, then there was the time I came across a parish named "Mary, Queen of the Universe." I had to get up and take a short walk after coming across that one. What kind of heathens name a church that?

But something happened as I talked with all these... people. I started to realize they were people! At one point I sheepishly asked a Catholic co-worker, "Do I call them Father John or Father Smith? What about Sister Mary or Sister Jones? What's a "Monseigneur"? I slowly felt the inconsistency bubble out of my heart: I was supposedly (in my mind) this loving, Spirit-filled super-Christian, but I was firmly entrenched behind a bigoted hatred for people simply based on their religious affiliation, and it was excruciatingly painful for me to acknowledge any good coming from them. Even though I had acquaintances and co-workers whom I knew to be Catholic, I'd never really spoken to any Catholics as such in my life, really acknowledging them as representatives of this group I disliked. Catholics as such in my mind were worthy of contempt, because they were so wrong about so much. They were essentially a theoretical group of people whom I hated, and now I was talking with them and discovering they were human beings.

It was in the course of the weeks that I made these hundreds of phone calls that I realized that one cannot hate a group, or an idea, without being unjust to individual human beings. The discord within my own heart made me realize that something was very wrong with how I was discerning truth.

Up until that time, my logic went "Catholics are idiots; it's reasonable for idiots to believe lies." When I came to grips with how blatantly disrespectful this was, I had to humble myself enough to change that. I realized that Catholics had a completely different paradigm than I did for discerning truth. My paradigm was "The Bible says this, the Holy Spirit says this." And, I knew that whatever the Catholic paradigm was, was wrong. But I had to admit I had no idea what the Catholic paradigm was. I had no idea what their starting point was that enabled them to end up with churches named "Mary, Queen of the Universe" or to believe in a Pope or sacraments and all the rest. I had no idea what the paradigm was because I had never learned anything about Catholicism except from a Lutheran (or other Protestant) perspective.

I realized that to understand why Catholics were so goofy, I'd have to read Catholic sources and authors.

So I did. And within a few short months, I was telling the Lord I would follow Him and become a Catholic.

The Lord Is My Shepherd, There is Nothing I Shall Want

Today at Mass the responsorial psalm was Psalm 23, probably the best-known Psalm in the world. It seems to me that it is easy for best-known Scriptures to lose their punch from familiarity, if this familiarity comes simply from rote memorization or the "oh yeah, I know this one" check-out procedure upon hearing it. But there's a different kind of familiarity, as of that between lovers. That is when words or images trigger memories of a path walked together, a path where pain and understanding, where anxiety and gentle reassurance have once met. Then, familiar words bring all these experiences that have shaped a relationship, a history, to life all over again.

That was what hit me when I heard those familiar words today: "The Lord is my Shepherd, there is nothing I shall want. He makes me lie down in green pastures... He leads me in paths of righteousness for His name's sake."

The memory triggered for me today was a spot where I sometimes spent my lunch breaks in Milwaukee. Just a few blocks from the office where I worked was the beginning of a city park, where a river was helped along towards Lake Michigan by a concrete embankment. There was a bridge where a road went overhead, and I often climbed down onto the concrete and sat under the bridge to ponder and get away from the noisy office phones I was responsible for answering.

As I look back now, it seems the whole point in my having the job I did at the time was that it gave me an excellent backdrop for my conversion to Catholicism. All the details about that belong to another post, I suppose, but my time there bookended my journey very nicely, predating its advent by several months and ending as I headed out to "missionary life" in Japan as not much more than a neophyte. But I digress.

It was somewhere in the middle of this time, when I was committed to becoming Catholic but still in the process, that I was sitting in my favorite park spot one day with a real worry in my heart. The process of conversion cost me a lot, internally. I was leaving everything I knew; I left a church fellowship where I felt secure for a faceless crowd of Catholics, among whom I had not a single spiritual friend. (Those who had been instrumental in my conversion lived an average of 1,355 miles away.)

The Lord took excellent care of me, though. The immediacy of His presence to me, the evidences He showed me of answered prayer and His special attentiveness to me, I now can see, were extremely abundant. It was one of these moments when I felt I was walking into a desert alone that He brought to my heart and my mind this psalm. Even though it felt ridiculously impossible and 180 degrees away from what I was then experiencing, the Lord gave me this image of walking with Him through deep, verdant, rich pasture, being richly fed with everything I could desire. He challenged me to trust Him.

In the time that has passed since then I've known His promise fulfilled. There have been so many times that I have knelt at Mass and my heart has felt like bursting with gratitude and fullness, not only because of the abundance He gives, but because it reminds me He promised, and He fulfilled.

So when I hear "The Lord is my Shepherd, there is nothing I shall want," I want to tell people "It's true! He is my Shepherd, He has led me, and even though it didn't always feel this way, I now know that He gives freely, richly, and He satisfies. It's true!"

In Right Relationship With Glory

Today at Mass, I was reminded of this quote from Pope John Paul II:

Man must reconcile himself to his natural greatness.... he must not forget that he is a person.

At one point in my life, this would have shocked me, scandalized me even, to a degree. "Natural greatness" just seemed too deep a contrast to my understanding of sin and its effect on the soul.

But today's homily, on the occasion of the feast of St. John Lateran, focused on the glory of God coming to rest on this earth (Ezekiel 47) and then, in particular, in the person of Jesus Christ in the miracle of the Incarnation. Fr. David spoke of a modern painting of Mary at the moment of the Incarnation, with her abdomen surrounded in an orb of light which she embraced, kneeling, awestruck and humble.

I was struck by this realization because everything about the Incarnation really stops me in my tracks and makes me catch my breath. The Incarnation has been the theme of my journey with the Lord for the last 19 years. It seems that I have come to be able to accept finding the glory of God revealed through another human person. But what struck me today is the awkwardness I have at accepting the glory of God revealed through myself to others. This, I believe, is the key to humility and the antidote to pride: to know that the source my good is the Lord, to really and truly acknowledge this, and then live in right relationship with this fact. To the extent that I mistake the glory of God for my own efforts, or vice versa, I am not in right relationship with this fact.

And this too is a work of God's grace. But Mary shows us the pattern for us: to look intently for and at the glory of God, to be lost in adoration, praise, and worship as we gaze deeply into the reality before us, including the work of grace within ourselves, as one aspect of God's vast design.