Enter into God's Rest

 "Let us listen to the voice of God; let us enter into His rest."

This is the way we begin the invitatory psalm on Saturday of weeks two and four of the Liturgy of the Hours. It evokes Psalm 95 (which typically is the psalm prayed at this point), where we exhort each other to "listen to the voice of the Lord, do not grow stubborn" [and not end up like the people to whom God said] "They shall not enter into my rest." Who were they? People whose hearts went astray, who challenged God and provoked God, regardless of seeing him in action, people who did not know his ways.

It also evokes Hebrews chapter 4 where we read that there remains a Sabbath rest for the people of God. Our Sabbath rest is our union with the Blessed Trinity, opened to us by Jesus and modeled for us by Jesus, to which we are drawn by the Holy Spirit to our identity as sons and daughters of the Father. 

I woke unusually early this morning and listened to a 50 minute teaching on YouTube which a Facebook friend of mine happend to post. What drew me was the title: Becoming a Non-Anxious Presence. The title comes from the work of an Internal Family Systems psychologist (something else I've been learning about within the last year), and in my mind it struck me as equivalent to someone who embodies hope. That's language that makes my spiritual antennae perk up. And while I've pulled a minor imitation of mi Madre Teresa of Avila in not going back to re-read my recent posts, I feel like I have been developing a life theme right now of letting go of anxiety in its various manifestations. 

So, yeah. This Vineyard minister, apparently right before shut downs affected public gatherings in the UK in 2020, is teaching here on the need for contemplative silence and prayer in leadership and life, to operate from a place of listening to the voice of God, not with a goal of fixing problems. 

Consider the witness of martyrs, like Ss. Perpetua and Felicity. The account of their martyrdom shows them basically in a state of ecstacy so profound that they do not feel physical pain. Now, I do not take that as a guarantee that martyrs do not feel fear or pain (the Carmelite martyrs of Compiègne certainly had to steel themselves to approach their deaths). But there is also the Scriptural account of Stephen, the first martyr, who saw heaven opened and Jesus standing there. This is an extreme example of entering God's rest in the midst of turmoil, and I believe it is an example left to us by God on purpose. It doesn't glorify death; it reminds us that we have nothing to fear. If death and hell have lost their sting, then there is nothing before which we ultimately must cower. 

What we must journey through is purification of our attachments, or as Comer puts it (referencing St. Ignatius Loyola), our journey to freedom. Purification frees us for union with God; purification frees us for service, for ministry, for life to flow through us. We cease being reactive, of being determined by problems, by fears, by other people's issues, by the rage machine. 

It was a good talk. Where does it leave me?

Human formation is really important. If we think that all we need is correct doctrine or right worship or receiving sacraments, or any of these other things that are all objective, we don't get the whole picture. For good life, we need good human formation, good ground in which the seed of truth is sown, grows, and bears fruit. 

I personally need to examine my drive to produce. I've been on overdrive. God is calling me to slow down and rest in Him. And to not make prayer "more work to do." I think there's a danger for Carmelites and for intercessors to make prayer always about "work." 

Fasting is, in part, about letting go and letting God. "Letting God" is such an ironic expression. But to take God seriously at the level of relationship, every day I need to realize, to touch, the reality of his presence with me, and to once again acknowledge that I am partnered to him, apprenticed to him, and that once I catch his eye on me (the gospel has eyes, as St. John of the Cross says) I am drawn once again into the drama that is my unfolding life in him. And sometimes I'm just tired and can't even focus my eyes. And still he is with me. 

I have also been reminded how anxious my thinking can be. I remember back in the 90s I tended to specialize, at work, in trying to mentally solve problems in other departments that weren't even my responsibility. Seeing big problems just laying out there, apparently unattended, is a huge anxiety trigger for me. It is part of how I try to calm myself through overwork. Insert rueful laugh. I am drawn back to the realization that I am not the Savior of the universe, I just belong to Him. He is the master orchestrator, and I am available to Him in whatever way our partnership asks of me. 

Lent isn't over; it's barely under way. So for now I guess this is enough...

Called On

There is a big danger in being a highly religious person. I mean, there's a big danger in being a person, period, but there's a special kind of deception that can trip up people who engage in religious disciplines, and it enters through self-referentialness. If we purport to serve the God of the universe, the Almighty, the All-Wise, then we are signing up for a life where we are not Masters. We are not The Teachers. We don't stand in self-made security; slick, triumphant, neatly-packaged ease, if there is any reality in it at all, is on the flip side of a broken, humble heart that is the first to acknowledge the good of "the other," the first to bow before mystery, the first to cry "help my unbelief," the first to know that to be held in love by the Almighty is our rightful place.

Human dignity upheld, regardless of whose it is. 

Certainty of divine revelation and security only in it.

Humility of heart and freedom to bend between heaven and earth. 

These are somehow the hallmarks that I saw among Catholics in my early days in the Church that struck me with their subtle witness to truth and reality. I used to believe that Catholics were the epitome of those "caught up in religion," that is, those who practiced meaningless ceremony and recited empty formulae and relied on their own righteousness to stand before God. I was taught to believe that this is the foundation of Catholicism. Rather, I think that this is the foundation of humanity and "natural religion." I think it is probably where we all start, because we have to start somewhere. In the Old Testament, God certainly instructed Israel in all sorts of sacrifice ceremonies, and I highly doubt that at the time they enjoyed the pinnicle of mystical involvment in their interior meaning. God was teaching them. And just as children can listen to a story at ages 3, 6, 9, 12 and 17 and exercise completely different abilities, so as time went on, what Israel experienced in these sacrificial commands was different, I suspect. 

But isn't this just the thing: We can get stuck with what we exercise at the six-year point, and not move on to what the 12-year point calls forth from us. We are ready to build our monuments to truth-mastery and settle into being Masters and Teachers, because we have this one really figured out. Or we can forget, and get reminded of six-year-point truth, and feel happy that we have found our true home again, and vow never to leave.

Somewhere along the line, Christians can fail to register that we are called to union with the God of the universe, the Almighty, the All-Wise. Rather than yearning with openness to the Infinite, we celebrate learning to stand on a small, finite plot of solid earth under our two feet, and call it a day. 

Standing on solid ground is good, but we are called to more. We are always called to more. God is Love; Love is infinite, He does not wish to stop until the flame of His heart enkindles the dried wood of our own hearts and we burn as one. We can't make that happen, but God can. This is the story of the interior mansions: God draws us where we cannot go. There is always somewhere to go. This is such a word of hope for me! There is always somewhere to go. At some stage, moving forward means allowing the breaking up what we have all figured out. It means holding our hearts upwards to the God we cannot see, cannot feel, and whose existence we perhaps question. 

If God is Love (and He is), then God is the one who is waiting to in-fill us. This is the witness of the Carmelite saints. This is our experience. When all is lost, God is, and He in-fills us, and we are brought beyond our sins, beyond our wounds, beyond our limitations, our efforts, our abilities. This is who God is. This is what God does. 

This is not the tame, manageable God that we so easily mistake for ourselves and then begin to inflict on others to bend them to us. This is Reality before whom every knee will bow. This is the God who heals and transforms by His presence, from the interior. 

When Evil Overwhelms

My heart is aching. My spirit is troubled, and my prayer is heavy. News of the war in Ukraine, Putin's relentless barrage that seems very unlikely to stop at the boarders of Ukraine draws my heart out in solidarity with especially with women and children fleeing, or staying. Even amidst so many accounts of beauty, of love, like so many Poles opening their homes and welcoming refugees, reports of divine interventions, and demonstrations of faithfulness of believers turning to God in earnest -- even amidst all these, there are the other stories, the other cries:war, hatred, lies, destruction, death, accusations, greed, arguments, blame, complaint, pride, fear, evil, disregard. 

And then locally there was another priest sentanced in a horrible case of sexual battery and spiritual abuse. It stikes close to home, because it is close to home, literally. This is a priest I was acquainted with and at one time thought well of. I read the victim's horrific statement. The psychological, physical, and sexual abuse was bad enough, but the abuse of spiritual authority was perhaps the most devastating. It left me gazing into my own abyss.

So it is from this place that I am trying to write and pray today, to find a coherent thread.

To be honest, when I read of the sentencing of that priest (five years' probation), I was left with a feeling of responsibility to fix this horror. There was such a failure of human formation, such a mistaking of what is human, what is spiritual. Such an ignorant and evil response to human brokenness. My husband had to remind me that brokenness is the human condition. And I recognized in myself the "trigger" if you will of seeing the failings of those I don't want to have failings, and scrambling -- for the sake of my own sanity -- to figure out how to fix their failings. It's "I need you to not have failings so that I can be at peace." And that simply can never be. It is a perverted longing for "holiness."

Jesus on the cross sure looked like a failure, a scandal. He sure as hell did not look like someone one desires union with. He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief. (Is. 53:3). We know that God is love. Love was despised. Love was rejected. Love was acquainted with grief. Why? Because of how deeply those whom He had created turned away from what they were made for. "Yet it was our pain He bore, our sufferings He endured. He was pierced for our sins, crushed for our iniquity. He bore the punishment that made us whole, by his wounds we were healed."

Where is God in all of the suffering? Somehow, He is the one who is suffering; that's how close. 

We have a grave responsibility to the vulnerable. Because the pain in this world is so exhausting, and we humans are so limited, this must include in a primary way our own vulnerable hearts and souls. We must not forge new armor of hard hearts; we must turn these hearts to the Lord in His own agony. Look closely and weep with Him, and He with us. Then our first duty is to weep with those other people who weep, stepping into the Lord's own love and strength and not hesitating to hear and listen, and feel, all the while handing it all back to the Lord. 

At the end of the day, being the Lord's good servant means that He is in charge. It is a relief not to be God. To make our home in God means that we have an eternal refuge, a place of rest to which all are invited. We become the message: there is a place of rest and healing for you. Do not grow deaf to your own heart, and do not fear, but turn with trust to Love. 

What Does God Want?

Historically for me Lent always carried this specter of some need to reach a misery quota so that God would be happy with me, or so that I could grow, or so that somehow good things could come of it. Or, I figured God wants prayer, fasting, and almsgiving, so I'll do those things, not really grasping any interior depth to them, but I'll do them because that's what God wants. 

This year, the Lord is helping me to glimpse some interior depth on the "why" question involved here -- always my favorite one to ask. 

At the core, God wants us to embrace and live in our own human dignity. It is His creation. Our difficulty is that so much clutters us, so many layers accrue over our souls, and we get satisfied with much less, with the things we create for ourselves and call our worth. And when and if we do touch the raw parts of our hearts, where our dignity resides, we often respond negatively: kicking, beating, shutting out, starving off, or otherwise incapacitating and silencing.

So we can spend Lent either rearranging our false worth, or doing a bunch of self-harm. Yikes. What person in their right mind wouldn't give up on that?

But what God wants us for us to know ourselves the way He knows us. To pray effectively, we have to go to silence, open that dark heart, and allow the light of the Word of God to shine into us. To know God and to know ourselves, we must stand before the Word, Jesus. We must soak in the light and power of the Holy Spirit coming to us in Scripture.

Fasting has always been hardest for me to seperate from self-harm for obvious reasons. For some reason it has been hard for me to grasp that fasting entails a choice: deciding to eat or not eat in a certain way. I set aside something of mine for another person, either by giving away the food, the money, or the time that would have been entailed in my eating. In my state of hunger, I offer my emptiness to the Lord to fill. I turn my desire for food into a desire for justice. This makes me actually feel the dignity of the person next to me, and in the light of that, my own dignity as well. My dignity is not to be found in how productive I can be, how sleek and strong, but in my existence itself.

Almsgiving, living in a wasteful, affluent society, can't just be about throwing a few bucks at a cause. Almsgiving is the ability for one heart to hear the cry of another, and to answer it at one's own personal cost. I feel like our notion of job and employment have cut off many from what it means to serve others with what we have. Maybe we are given people to help, 9-5, but then the rest of our lives are for us. We have our protocols and parameters of what we do for others, and stepping out of these is unprofessional. Public and private life have firm boundaries, and those in need of help need to find the professional agency or program set up to help them, the proper way. People, in this system, lose the dignity of acting freely, of learning how to organize themselves together, to truly pool their human strengths for the common good of all. We lose our dignity when we don't know how to give to one another freely. I think of those in Poland who have opened their homes to 1-2 million Ukranian refugees. From what I saw of Poland in the month I was there, this isn't because the average Pole lives in an expansive house with luxury out the wazoo. 

Pursuing these facets of Lent personally and corporately is transformational. God wants us to be transformed in Him, because He wants to heal our interior pain and our exterior need, and to make us whole.

Achy Bodies, Moving Parts

 

Fr. Iain, the Carmelite who teaches me so much, says that St. John of the Cross teaches us that the point witin us to delve in to prayer (presuming we already have the prayer relationship open and active) should be our point of felt need. Something like that.

Today what I feel is my aching body. I'm only 54 years old, and even as I type that I can hardly believe it. I feel like when I turn 55 this year, there's just no turning back! I feel young on the inside and still very connected to my early adulthood, at least in the good ways. But, the reality is, I'm getting old, just like my Mom did, just like my grandma did, and just like my ancestors before her who died before I was born. This way I too shall go.

Aging is teaching me something about cooperation, though. I mean in the sense of St. Paul's analogy of the Church being the Body of Christ. And this does actually fit in to my own Lenten meditation I have going. 

Lately I've been doing physical therapy, and while I'll spare you all the gory details, this process has taught me the price of one part of the body chronically doing the work of another part, or shielding parts from fully doing what they are meant to do. It has been fascinating to me to experience that as I stretch some bits, use other bits more reliably, protect the right bits and work the other right bits -- that all of this is also freeing emotionally and mentally, not just physically. 

Yesterday I was hinting around at how I love to do hard work for the sake of hard work, and I can feel good about my capacity to work (even if it is intellectual, or what have you). Here's a think I've learned: I have believed that exercise is good if it is hard, and that is not always true, because you can sweat and strain with bad form, and really do your body some injury. Effort is not queen. Effort must be united with good form, and good form is actually more important than hard effort.

I'm not entirely sure that in normal parish life we have either good form or hard effort. I rather fear that we have a lot of couch potatoes who feel a strain to do normal daily things that should flow from us much more freely. There's a mountain that could be said there, but that's not really my point.

In me, I have been catching myself acting with a kind of habitual anxiety that has been a culprit in my spiritual life and definitely the main culprit with my physical difficulties. One of the demonic refrains in my life since childhood has been that the best thing I could do for the sake of humanity is to shut up and go away. Now, I've wrestled down the large boulders of that lie, but vestiges, echos, of this lie still attack as temptation. It can show up in my love of efficiency: move along, get out of the way, think fast, no stalling, chop chop. This can meld into acting like there is no love for me, no one will be patient, no one will embrace me just for being me. And it leads me to interior anxiety if I have a misstep or waste ten seconds. 

If I am in touch with the presence of God and am held in his patience with me, and am responding to his eyes on me, then I will be less likely to crush myself with this kind of interior anxiety. And the more I let it go, the more peace will become habitual. But I have to become aware when these pains spark up, and respond to them differently. 

So, another shift here. What strikes me is how important it is, not just within my own body to let go of anxiety and replace it with peace and to function in that, but how important it is for every member of the Body of Christ to peacefully be their part. When one part of the body is at peace and freedom, it will release others. Still others will hurt and crab more. But no one should embrace lies in order to silence the hurt and crab of another. The one with the hurt and crab has to respond to the Lord, too. I can't do anything to make another person change, but I do believe I can do something to make people want to change. And most of the time it does not happen because I lecture someone, but because someone observes something in me while I'm not even aware of it. I did my first week of prescribed leg exercises, and then ohhhh I wanted to sit with criss-cross legs and it felt soooo good. 

Christians are called to be people of continual conversion, who live daily in the presence of God, who bear witness to Him with us by the faith, hope, and charity we exercise in our interactions. There is movement, dynamism, inherent in this life. Something is always new, always moving. 

Your Father Knows What You Need

The Word of God is alive. One of the things this involves is that "now" words can spring forth from it, mixing with my heart in a variety of ways. I'd say it is something like different chemical reactions, if only I knew something more about chemistry. But it sounds reasonable.

Maybe it is more like an adaptogen. The Word comes to meet my now need. Ok, enough of analogies.

What I heard in today's gospel struck me in a new way, even though I've heard it hundreds of times before. "Your Father knows what you need before you ask him." The context there is not to rely on the number of words you can produce in prayer, or (ahem) feeling like you can find just the right word to express what you want to say to God. (Caught out -- yes I love precise words and find it pretty important to do the work to reveal my interior thoughts in all their magnificent brilliance...) Yeah, ok. Jesus says our Father knows what we need before you ask him. A couple things stood out there with immediate clarity.

First, God does actually know what I need and want better than I do. That is not the same thing as saying that God denigrates what I feel I need because He is smarter and knows better and I'm stupid. He is smarter, and I am stupid, but he doesn't treat me that way. He is a father, a teacher, and as Fr. Iain Matthew OCD says, he loves us from the standpoint of what we will be in eternity: whole, complete. God loves us into that; that's kind of the process that life in Christ on earth is all about. 

There have been plenty of times when I've come to the Lord with desires and realized his communication that he has a complete grasp on what my desire entails, while I have a partial grasp. At first, this was a bit offensive to me, because I did feel like he was rejecting something deeply important to me. Anything that gives a mental image of God as a mean oger is a lie and feeds spiritual warfare and human pride. My thought was something like, "Well, why would you care about knowing about my desires if you just want to tell me that they are aiming way too low?" It really revealed to me something about myself -- that I expected to be thought little of, not called on to fuller potential. This put me on the defensive and fed my distrust in God and my belief that I had to somehow pull myself up by my spiritual bootstraps, and THEN find favor with God. Wrong, wrong, wrong.

One time I specifically prayed about something, knowing completely full well that I was taking the posture of a toddler asking a parent for delightful goodies. There's something big in that. Theresianly big. In the first place, I approached God as a Father that I trusted in, and delighted in at least as much as the goodies I was asking for. I kind of knew my priority was not the goodie, but my posture of asking, because it was a trustful act of opening my real desire to God. It was on a Divine Mercy Sunday. It is not super often that the Lord will answer me in clearly discernable words, but this was one of them. His response was, "What you really want is kept in heaven for you with more certainty than if you had [this thing you are asking for all scheduled and prepared for today]." For years and years, that phrase echoed in my mind: "What you really want." For the first time I realized there was more in my desire than met my eye. God's desire was in it... but I didn't know Him -- or myself -- well enough to grasp the actual potential it was pointing to. Once I trusted God, he was ready to answer my prayer by this kind of confounding revelation.

Which leads me to the second point that became clear today. If my Father knows what I need before I ask him, a worthy chunk of my prayer is profitably spent on burrowing my heart into the infinite heart of Almighty God, who has all wisdom, all understanding, along with all provision for things temporal and eternal for me, and for all of creation. That, I suppose, could define contemplative prayer. 

I have a very strong need to understand things. If I am facing a crisis, whether that be health, relational, practical, spiritual, or any combination of these, my first natural response is to investigate every avenue to understand it. It gives me a sense of control of chaos, of peace and order. But I've definitely learned that this has limits. Sometimes some things really are out of my control. I can't understand problems away, or fix them by knowing about them. 

My Father knows what I need. Maybe lately I have felt like I have things pretty well in hand. As if "I and my Father are one." But this is also pride, and pride is danger. Humility is the true foundation of all prayer. What I am hearing today is the call to come to God, needing to be shown who I am. Not, obviously, fearing condemnation. But also not settling in to a comfort and control of my own making, that already has everything in hand.

Work, Overwork, and Listening

 So if I live in this awesome reality of partnership with God, as I see it I have two primary responses to that. First, I should respond to the needs that are obvious: doing my daily duty (oy vey -- try being a seer of endless potential and ridiculously high ambition, and then figure out what I "should be doing" every day!), the things asked of me by the commitments I have undertaken, and second, I should listen for the directives of the Holy Spirit. 

I guess I could group that as another task I should do, but it seems a different kind of thing, so I'm trying to distinguish in order to unite.

St. John of the Cross says somewhere or another that we shouldn't wait to feel inspired to do what we know is right to do, because sometimes we are only given the knowledge of what we should do, and not any accompanying feeling. I know that I have had the tendancy to check in with my feelings in a rather primary place when "discerning" what to do. I would try to figure out if God wanted me to do something by considering how much I wanted to do it. As if God motivates solely through making us want to do things. Sure, "for it is God who works in you both to will and to do in order to fulfill his purpose" (Phil. 2:13). But that willing part is about choice, not necessarily about feeling like it. I can feel like all sorts of things. Sometimes I know that my duty entails faithfulness to a task. That needs to be able to movitate me right there.

If you are like me, you have a issue with being right. Doing right. Pridefully hating to be wrong or to miss something that will make me look like I'm not all together, in command of myself and everything. It's kind of an anxiety; something in me can't settle unless I feel like I know what to do. And I have looked for that in myself. I think that's why I would scour every little feeling that would go flitting through my interior radar, because I thought perhaps God would be sending me a message, and I would miss it, and screw up. But if as partner with the Holy Spirit I can reliably know that I don't have to feel anything to know I need to be faithful to my obvious duty entailed in my commitments, well then, that helps. All of that interior scouring of my feelings leads to being very complicated. Faithfulness to duty frees me for simplicity.

Listening to the directives of the Holy Spirit. I think of the song by John Michael Talbot called We Are the Exiles. The chorus says this:

We are the exiles in the far end of solitude

We are the exiles living as the listeners

With hearts attending to the skies, we cannot comprehend

Yet waiting for the first far drums of Christ the coming King

Planted like sentinels, upon the earth's frontier in exile we sing.

It's a song about cloistered contemplatives, and while I'm definitively not cloistered, I am called to contemplative life as a Secular Carmelite. 

And you know what, I really love to just be busy. I'm thinking maybe I like it just a bit too much. Or perhaps it is that I can take care of the work that is on my plate with a deeper element of contemplation. And maybe that's what is really, really vital to living in partnership with the Holy Spirit, this think of actually not ignoring my partner, but checking in deeply, expectantly. People have been telling me for at least ten years that I am a natural-born leader, something I never saw in myself earlier. More and more in exercising that I have found freedom and growth, but it also plays into a life-long fear that the people around me are not going to step up and take their own responsibility, and that I will end up with it.

Work, yes. Not as a slave, but as a creator, because only Love creates. 

I think maybe I need to get myself registered for that JMT retreat over Pentecost!

Partners

We are therefore Christ's embassadors, as though God were making His appeal through us: Be reconciled to God. -- 2 Corinthians 5:20

I feel like I just heard this reading today at the funeral I attended. If I didn't, it has been resonating of its own accord. But I'm fairly certain that was the context. 

It sums up well the lightbulb that went off when last I wrote. Well, that's misleading, because it wasn't so much an idea that I had as a "light shining in a dark place" as 2 Peter 1:19 would have it -- the dark place being my own grasp of my life. ("We have the prophetic message as something altogether reliable, and you will do well to pay attention to it, as to a light shining in a dark place, until the day dawns and the morning star rises in your hearts.")

God calls me into a partnership with Him. He calls me into union with Him, as a bride with the Bridegroom. My sense of that parallel is a bit fraught with stuff, not unlike I wrote last time about my concepts of penance and Lent in general. So much fraughtedness in my history. But a partnership... My sense of this is He calls me to share His life, His work, His heart. To learn from Him not only to imitate, but to actually receive His own presence, His own power.

When a woman gives birth, while her body is fully engaged (or is, ideally), so is the body of the child. The child actually sends out the hormones that trigger the beginning of labor, or so I'm told. If the Holy Spirit is the life within us which we do not create but we receive and are given, so the Spirit initiates things within us, which then engage us fully (ideally). This partnership is mysterious. 

I remember vividly seeing my daughter's face for the first time as my midwife handed her up to me. Her eyes were already searching for me and seeking that first contact. It was almost like she was welcoming me into motherhood as much as I was welcoming her into life. Maybe I expected a more passive glancing partner. She was 100% intent on connecting with me. There had been this whole hidden exchange whereby she took in everything I did, everything I heard, everything I ate, everything I felt. 

The Holy Spirit knows me on a completely different level, being God. But I am like the clueless mother who is surprised to find this life inside. When my daughter was born I had struggled with infertility for five years, and in some ways, it took me right up to birth and even after to realize that I carried an actual human baby inside me. I was in awe even days later that it was a baby that came out of me. I remember a few days before she was born, my breasts were producing colostrum already, and the thought escaped my mouth with a gasp: "I'm pregnant!" (At the time I was like nine months and 10 days pregnant, but it was still a shock.)

So, yeah. What is striking me is the awesome reality that the Holy Spirit actually lives within me and speaks, acts, moves, calls, shapes my life. That I can act in partnership with God. In fact, this reality is essential to my design as a human being. 

God makes his appeal through me. That is freaking awesome. 

Checking In

There's nothing more deceptive, I think, than the feeling you get on the day after Ash Wednesday. Like almost every year, I was up very early to eat breakfast. I went to bed early Wednesday night because when fasting is new to me again I suddenly get tired very quickly. So, being the Latin rite Catholic that I am, I was making my eggs with ham and enjoying breakfast by 6am. One day of fasting, especially when you aren't doing it any more, doesn't seem so bad. 

Then Friday comes and I realize Easter isn't until half way through next month.

So I have to ask myself: how accustomed am I, really, to running on my own steam? 

Frankly, Lent brings up specters of thorny questions for me. Once I got to a certain place in my spiritual life, say, in my early 20s or so, I acted like I believed God was happy if I was miserable. Or that he liked to see me kick my humanity in the shins, and laugh when said humanity started to cry. I did see this kind of behavior modeled for me by a former pastor I had (in my non-denom days) who very intentionally changed the verse of Scripture to "If my people who are called by my name will humble themselves and pray, and turn from their pleasurable ways (not wicked ways, you see), then I will hear from heaven, and forgive their sin and heal their land." It was interesting, because basically what he said in doing that stated a) I don't have any wickedness to turn from, but also b) pleasure is wicked, and displeasing to God, so really I am wicked.

There is a lot in religion, faith, Christians -- whatever term you want to use that means "us, not them," that perpetuates garbagy thinking, brokenness. I don't blame it on a religious system, except where sound theology is just lacking. I blame it on the fact that we spout us when we should be speaking the Word. Probably more on that thought in days to come.

So, specters. If I run on my own steam, I'm likely to start tripping over them.

My task here is to stand under the word "Be holy, for I, the Lord, am holy." And the extremely vital thing in that equation is self-knowledge. I'm hearing this statement addressed to me, and I am a particular person, not generic humanity. I have a history, I have a soul of a certain shape, a body of a certain age, a color, an interiority, a mission, a call all my own. 

Also when I was in my 20s, I was very aware of this fact, that I wrote into a song: "I cannot find the way for me by looking at anyone but Jesus. That feels so out of sync with the way of the world." I am not very conscious anymore of feeling like a red marble in a sea of yellow marbles. I've come long distances in accepting myself and soaking in the respect of my daily companions, especially in my church circle. That is all very much at peace. I don't get as emotionally stung, in a positive way, when I am acknowledged for who I am, and I think it pleases God that this is normal, at least within that social context. 

I do yearn, though, I do ache. I do long for more. When I hear "be holy," it's like I feel my spirit stretching forward, wishing it could go further, really with groans that words can't express -- not even to myself. What I think of is all the birthing scenes I've been watching on Call the Midwife lately. It isn't a mental process. I can't sit down an figure it out, or make a plan to carry it out as work. It's actually helpful to realize that, as thinking and working are two of the most natural reflexes to me. It's a tad scary to feel without these "helps." In fact, it's hard to even get quiet enough to allow myself to feel the ache. That's a little surprising to me, because I also like silence. But interior and exterior silence are not the same thing, for certain. 

So my check in conclusion is, when I feel a yearning for more, for a fruit-bearing closeness, for traffic across the bridge that is my life between the divine and the human, there is a dynamism at work that is bigger than just me. Cooperating with the life Jesus brings forth is a work to enter into.  

Be Holy

Yesterday's Mass reading from 1 Peter concluded with the line: "Be holy, for I (God) am holy."

What I heard in that is not an invitation to fruitless and impossible striving after perfection issued by a God who isn't satisfied with us and wants us to do better. Or the echoing of an arrogant mind that makes projects of self-improvement, calling it "pursuit of holiness." Or some confused and shame-infused realization that I should be better, and I'll have to try, now that it's Lent.

What I heard is God at creation. He has an intent in His heart, and he makes it reality by speaking it forth: Let there be light, and there was light.

What I heard is Jesus with the leper who has approached Him in faith: I do will it; be made clean. 

What I heard is Ananias, sent on a mission of healing to Saul who is in the midst of the conversion of his life: Brother Saul, receive your sight.

Faith, hope, charity. Hmm, do they fit? Creation itself receives its substance from God. The leper cupped his heart upward to Jesus to receive from Him, requesting with hope of receiving. Ananias went to Saul animated not by his own understanding, feeling, motivation or decision, but by the word and call that Ananias was able to receive because he was in a communion of love with God. That love brought Saul healing.

There's definitely human agency involved with the command of God Peter records, but it isn't a case where God makes his expectation known and the human then consults his merely human efforts and fulfills God's demand. Rather, this command of God calls forth what it commands. As St. Teresa of Jesus explains (in Chapter 25 of her Life, as well as other places), "When the Lord speaks, the words are accompanied by effects," and "he appears to wish (the soul) to realize His power and the efficacy of his words."

So hearing this Scripture proclaimed, "Be holy, for I am holy," I hear it as a command to receive from God. Receive this grace, be open to what He is doing, allow it free course, and cooperate with what it is pursuing within me. Wisdom! Be attentive! God is inviting you to an encounter with Him. 

To Teresa, prayer is an intimate sharing between friends. "It means taking time frequently to be alone with the One whom we know loves us." So the command to be holy is one to be received in this context of being wholly, intimately, and personally loved. It is a willingness to have called forth from us that which makes greater potential for this way of love. To be holy, we have to go to what is intimate to us interiorly, what makes for our integration, what involves our whole person. 

For me, writing is an integrating, personal, and intimate experience. So I shall write this Lent, to stand under this word: Be holy. There's usually some poking at fears, pain, shame, etc involved with receiving grace and allowing it free course, not to mention human stupidity and whatnot. That's all fine. I'm not going to try to produce but to respond. So, here we go.

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.