How Does Your (Spiritual) Garden Grow?

Listening

At some point during my years in the convent, it occurred to me to capture the Psalms by writing what they meant to me. I suppose it was an early way of Lectio Divina prayer. Long before this beautiful way of praying with Scripture was crafted, I was reading these beautiful words of Scripture and writing out what they spoke in my own heart. At the time, my directress encouraged me to continue this work and even used some of my scribblings in the spiritual reading at mealtimes (we used to listen in silence to one of our group reading aloud from a selected work during the first half of our meals). At the time, I was hesitant — it seemed like I was sort of retranslating the Psalms, if you will, from English into more everyday language.

Now, I find myself newly intrigued with the idea. I’ve long since lost the work I did back then; I suppose I turned it in to Sr. Alvara or Sr. Judith as I did it, and it probably was not returned to me. Our preparations for vows of poverty and obedience involved ceding our claims to such things in favor of the interests of the community.

I first encountered the Lectio Divina approach to prayer about three years ago when a small faith-sharing group I was leading explored a series of presentations by Dr. Tim Gray on the topic. The words “Lectio Divina” suggest the approach within themselves; the literal translation, “divine reading,” leads us into the Scriptures, the Living Word of God. The steps, in most articles on the topic, are summarized as follows:

1. Read (slowly, prayerfully, mindfully — often reading the passage several times, sometimes reading out loud)
2. Reflect (what does the passage mean to you? what stands out? what seems to call for attention?)
3. Respond/Resolve (talk to God “as you would to a parent, sibling, or trusted friend”)
4. Rest (in silence, in God’s presence — and listen)

(https://www.evangelicalcatholic.org/lectio-divina/)

The final piece to this puzzle, for me, is that as a writer, I never quite feel that an experience — especially a spiritual experience — is complete until I’ve captured in in writing. This need is almost a compulsion for me. The Evangelical Catholic, in fact, recommends writing as part of step 3, when particular insights present themselves.

The beauty of Lectio Divina is in the way it leads one to listen for God’s promptings. This begins with the process of centering oneself on Scripture as the Living Word of God; by reading a selected passage slowly and reading it several times, we become open to it, and then in our time of reflection we can begin to hear what God wants us to learn.

What I find most fascinating and captivating is that third step — having a conversation with God. As someone who grew up on memorized prayers, I have always tended to absorb the formal “language of prayer” even in my “extemporaneous” prayers. I have been astounded by what has happened since I began to focus on having the kind of conversation with God that I would have with my brother. Once I wasn’t searching for the formal “language of prayer,” I became free to share everything with God. It wasn’t long before I found myself having this running conversation with my Father even outside the times of Lectio Divina prayer — just as I can sit with my brother over coffee and talk for hours, I find myself simply talking to God in my head about what’s going on in my day or about what I’m concerned about or thinking about.

The greatest beauty of Lectio Divina, for me, is the listening part, because God is always speaking to us through His Living Word. Jesus is present as the Word of God in this way. And He does indeed speak. Sometimes it’s the “still, small voice” that Elijah heard; and sometimes it feels like thunder (cf. Job 37:4-5). It can be quite startling to become aware of a thought, fully formed, presenting itself. There is no “voice” involved, at least not for me, but there might as well be — it is that evident that Someone is speaking to me.

Sometimes, His communication is much more subtle, as when a particular word or phrase in Scripture, prayer, other spiritual reading, or the Mass will suddenly stand out, and I find myself compelled to a listening sort of reflection. A simple truth: the grace to listen and hear and capture these moments is a life-changer. The more I listen, the more I hear — and the more I seek.

It is my hope and intention, in the coming days and weeks, to be able to share in this space what comes from some of those moments of reflection and listening.

Father, I need Your grace to keep me tuned in and listening so that I will always be ready to hear what You have to say to me. My days are busy and can be full of distractions. Please use them to get my attention so that I can “pray always.” 

A Prayer As I Age

In a few weeks, I will be blessed to reach the age of 6 — 6 dozen, that is. Seventy-two years since I first saw the light of day. Seventy-two years on a journey through a world that is at best a stopping place on our eternal journey, and at worst an enormous source of temptation to see this as being all there is, or at least all that is really important.

I’ve said before that the fear of death is rooted in our attachment to the things, events, and yes, even the people, that populate our lives. It’s part of our human nature to form those attachments — and they can help us be our best selves while we are here. But it’s also part of our human nature to let these attachments to what we can experience with our bodily senses, and our even deeper attachment to the feelings they evoke in us, become our primary goal and our main source of comfort. When that happens, we tend to cling to what we know, and that make us resistant to the changes that come with aging — and the ultimate change that comes with our transition to eternal life.

We all say, with a certain wisdom and dark humor, that aging is better than what’s in second place, and we even acknowledge that what’s in second place is inevitable. But how often do we think deeply enough about these changes to embrace them? And that’s really what we need to do, in order to free ourselves of the too-deep attachment to the temporary things of this world.

We are called, indeed, to live well during our time on earth — as disciples of Jesus, not as slaves to our youthfulness and our possessions and accomplishments — and we are called, finally, to praise Him forever in Heaven. This season of Advent is such a wonderful time for gentle reminders of where our true attachments lie.

And as I pondered these ideas one day, I found myself praying like this:

Lord God, You are to be praised as the loving Creator Who has given all living things their life, the time and span for which You hold in Your infinite wisdom. Please grant me grace to live out my life in full accord with Your will and in constant gratitude for the many rich blessings You constantly provide.

And another great gift I ask of You: please grant that I may age gracefully. By that I do not mean in physical appearance or beauty or even physical abilities. My plea, Father, is that I may have the grace as I age to continue in faith and to hear the voices of those who love me, so that I understand when they tell me that the time has come for me to stop driving or that I should no longer tackle stairs or other challenges, and so that I hear their concerns as coming from the heart. Let me hear and heed their advice and suggestions as offered in love with my best interests at heart. Lead me to the greatest independence I can enjoy, but save me from the need to cling stubbornly to my own ideas when they are no longer good for me.

I pray that you may surround me with people who love me and willingly help me and that as much as possible I may not be a burden to them. And Lord, please save me from becoming a disagreeable, cantankerous person whose moods and bad temper turn people away or cause hurt and sadness in them.

If it should be in Your plan and will for me that I suffer from mental or physical infirmities, or both, I beg of You the grace to suffer them with a gentleness of spirit that will draw my caregivers into the circle of Your love and join my sufferings with those of Your Son in His redemptive act. For my caregivers I ask the grace to see the value in their work and that they may receive Your richest grace and blessings as a reward for what they do. Let us all join our deeds with the redemptive sufferings of Jesus for the good of souls.

Father God, I fear the time when I may lose control of my bodily and mental abilities. Please grant me freedom from fear and let me trust in Your infinite goodness and mercy, so that I may always live in faith.

These things I ask in the name of Your Son, Jesus, Who told us that whatever we ask in His name will be granted. Amen.

Prayer for Times of Anxiety

Everyone experiences some form of anxiety. For some of us, it’s a fleeting sense of apprehension or dread that passes quickly; for others of us, it’s a pervasive and persistent thing that threatens to take over our emotions and our lives and that exhibits itself in myriad ways. There are probably as many treatment options in the world of medicine as there are forms that anxiety takes in our lives.

And as with all forms of medical treatment, they tend to work best when accompanied and supported by prayer. So for anyone suffering from any form of anxiety, whether fleeting and temporary or a painful part of daily existence, I offer this Prayer for Times of Anxiety. And with it, I offer my own prayer for those who suffer, that they may find relief.

Father God, You know me inside and out, top to bottom, soul deep.

Father, right now in this moment, anxiety threatens my peace of mind and puts in front of me every possible worry and fear – and even some that might be impossible, but still make me uneasy and fearful.

Your Son told us that You count the hairs on our heads, that not even a single sparrow falls but You know and care about it, and that we are worth many sparrows.   

I am the single sparrow, Father, and I am falling, and my human weakness makes me so very frightened.

Blessed are You, Father, for You raise me up on angels’ wings; You bear me on the breath of dawn; You make me shine like the sun, and You hold me in the palm of Your hand. Blessed are You, Father, for You remind me, with this time of fear and anxiety, that I am called to trust completely in You and that I can and must do so.

Here I am before You, and I beg You to send Your Spirit of peace into my heart and soul. I give You my anxiety and fear, and I trust You to fill the space that it leaves in me with love and peace. Please, Father, give me the grace to always remember to turn to You in prayer when this monster, anxiety, raises its ugly face on my life. Please give me grace to pray and trust. I ask this in the name of Your Son, Jesus, who told us that what we ask of You in His name, You will always give us.

Amen.

Right Here!

My two-year-old granddaughter, who can light up entire city blocks with her smiles, likes to emphasize the stories she tells with a couple of phrases. One is “all the time,” and the other is “right here!”. If she is feeling very strongly about what she’s telling me, it’s “all the time, right here!”.

Her fervent emphasis reminds me a little of Dr. Scott Hahn’s recounting, in the early pages of his wonderful book The Lamb’s Supper, of the first time he (then a Protestant minister) attended a Catholic Mass. He went there prepared to reject everything he saw and heard….until the Consecration. He writes that when he heard the words of Consecration, “I felt all my doubt drain away….I felt a prayer surge from my heart in a whisper: ‘My Lord and my God. That’s really you!'” 

My little granddaughter would add, “All the time! Right here!”

Each morning at Mass, in that chapel with the mosaic of the wedding feast at Cana, I find myself remembering Dr. Hahn’s words and the sense of wonder they impart every time I go back to them.

My Lord and my God. That’s really you!

All I can see is a white wafer of bread and a cup filled with wine; yet my heart is filled with wonder when I contemplate His very real Presence behind and in those forms.

When I receive Him in holy communion, all I feel and taste in my mouth are the texture and taste of that wafer of bread, that sip of wine. But my soul knows better.

My Lord and my God. That’s really you! All the time! Right here! 

My soul is captivated by the thought that while I can see and taste only bread and wine, the truth is that Jesus Himself is here. My soul can see and taste beyond these mere physical and earthly forms. My soul knows her Savior, her Bridegroom. My soul lives and thrives on the promise that one day, in God’s good time, she will not need to look beyond these physical and earthly forms and try to imagine herself in His Presence: She will see her Lord and King face to face.

The older I get, the more I tend to think about that ultimate transition to eternal life. I know full well that God has put me here in this world for a purpose and that He wants me to make good use of all the blessings and resources He has provided me here. But it is, by the very nature of the Universe God created, a temporary assignment, and a stop on the journey home. I’ve lost all fear of death as I have come closer and closer to a glimmer of understanding of what Heaven will be like. I really love my life, and I love and cherish all the people who fill it; and it is wonderful to know that there is more, much more, in the fullness of God’s time.

And that is where my mind goes to the grace of absolute trust in God. Our nature is to try to control things, to work toward the outcomes we want; God’s nature, on the other hand, is to provide for us the outcomes we need. When we’re busy trying to stay in control of the process, we make it difficult for ourselves to see that, and we get in the way of God’s work in us.

So I go back, once more, to my granddaughter’s enthusiastic emphasis, as I pray: Father God, instill in my heart and soul the wonder of Your will and the sense of complete trust that being where You want me is far better than being where I think I ought to be. Let me be always attuned to Your presence and Your will — All the time! Right here! Amen.

Water to Wine, and Pouring

The chapel at my local parish where weekday morning Mass is offered has a wonderful mosaic behind the altar. The mosaic depicts the wedding at Cana, with Mary on the left, Jesus on the right, and the bride and groom behind a table between them. In front of the table are several tall jugs, and a servant is pouring wine from one of them. Below the mosaic is the legend, “Do Whatever He Tells You.”

I often sit there before Mass and reflect on that mosaic. There is much symbolism in it, even in the three X-shaped fasteners on the draperies behind the wedding table, which often lead me into meditation on the mystery of the Holy Trinity — each is a complete X on its own, and the three X’s together are a single thing. And other mornings, the words below the mosaic help me get my mind and heart and soul into listening for the promptings of each Person of the Trinity to guide me through my day. I think of the Father leaning down to remind me that He made me out of love, and it’s that love that must go from me into the world; then I reflect on the Son’s call to follow Him; and I think finally of the many ways the Holy Spirit prompts me throughout the day.

Most days, I am led by those reflections right into the Mass, and my mind is thus awakened to the beauty of the prayers and gifts that follow.

Recently, though, with my mind so taken up with thoughts of how God calls me to change, my attention has been drawn to those tall jugs, and the servant pouring out the wine. Everyone remembers the story: The wedding feast is in full swing, and somehow the wine is running short. Jesus and His Mother are guests, and we see that Mary knows something about Jesus’ mission here, because she comes to tell Him about it. He responds rather offhandedly, but she knows, as only a mother can know, that the time has come, and she tells the servants to do whatever He instructs. Jesus confirms His Mother’s instinct by telling the servants to fill six large jugs with water and pour it out to serve the guests. They must have been skeptical, but they followed His instructions, and the wine that poured from the jugs prompted amazement among the guests — after all, what host keeps the best wine for later in the party when everyone has already indulged?

It’s Jesus’ first miracle, the first “big splash” of His public ministry, the first step, really, on the long road to that cross on the hill at Golgotha. The story is full of rich symbolism, and it has fueled many homilies and profound writings about marriage as well as about obeying God.

But for me, on this particular day, the image and words before resonated on a different note. I began to reflect, as I often do, putting myself into the picture and imagining the events as if I were there, thinking of myself in the role of a servant, a guest, even the host or the bride or the groom. And I realized that what I really wanted to be was the water in those talls jugs!

I wanted to be the water. I wanted to be the substance that Jesus changed, utterly and profoundly in its very nature, into what was needed at that very moment for the wedding party and their guests. I wanted to be the water that Jesus changed, and I wanted to be the wine that he created from that change, and like the wine, I wanted to be poured out. I thought about how pouring out the wine that Jesus made had created joy and relieved stress for the host of the wedding feast and had created happiness and joy for the guests; and it seemed to me that being like that water-into-wine was a marvelous way to carry God’s love into the world.

This desire has wound its way into my daily prayers and meditations. I feel myself awakening more and more to the ways in which God calls and prompts me to change — to make of myself a better servant of His will, to grow in this loving and very personal relationship He offers.

Make me like the water at Cana, Lord. Change me at the very heart of myself, and like the water-become-wine, pour me out in service to Your people. 

Faithful to Change

Recently, I wrote about my decision to leave the convent, and how I felt, at the time, that staying would be a kind of betrayal of what God had made me — that I would have to change, become a different sort of person, in order to live that life.

At the time, I thought — in all my 19-year-old wisdom — that we are called to be true to ourselves as God created us.

That kind of thinking requires that we define creation as a static situation. That kind of thinking denies the possibility — and the benefit — of change.

When I left the convent, I did not understand how necessary change is in our lives — how essential it is to growth. And when I left the convent, I had no understanding of the transformative nature of God’s love.

Early in my studies of change management in the business culture, I used the analogy of stagnant water to demonstrate how change is essential to beneficial growth. When water is stagnant, only one type of growth is possible, and it’s of a kind that chokes off life. When water is moving, it supports all kinds of growth — fish and plants in and under the water, and plants and animals on the ground that is nourished by the flowing water. All is light and reflection and motion and freshness; constant change supports constant growth.

I became enamored of change. I welcomed it, and sometimes I created it. People around me feared that I was a “change junkie,” that I went too far beyond managing change and lived in a space where change for the sake of change was the norm. Whether or not that was the case, I became adept at living with change. My ability to adjust quickly to change and to overcome natural resistance to it meant that I was generally happy and pretty unflappable.

As time went on and I began to grow in faith, I set aside my thoughts about change. Faith, I thought, was a wonderful constant in a shifting world. Living in faith, I knew what to expect and I would experience life without the turmoil of uncertainty and constantly shifting views. I saw faith as something that, ideally, was unshakeable — and, therefore, had nothing to do with change.

That actually worked, for awhile. And then I experienced a couple of major shifts in direction in my life that caused me to start wondering if my past study of change and the ideas I had developed might have some application in this new world of faith I was experiencing.

Certainly it was true that I was experiencing faith itself in an entirely different way from what I experienced as a very young woman. When I looked back at my time in the convent, I recognized that during those years, I saw faith as a set of practices and rituals — a response to rules and obligations, really. And that’s why I found myself on the outside of the main entrance to Maria Immaculata Convent, back in 1966. I wasn’t prepared to live in response to a set of rules and obligations.

Beginning with my return to the Catholic Church in 2012, my experience of faith took a very different form. With sudden and uncharacteristic insight, I realized that faith was a response to love, not to obligation. Faith was a living, growing, flowing thing that supported life and grew from love — and in a small explosion of enlightenment, I saw that faith was the ultimate definition of change!

This new understanding of faith as a culture of change began to flourish when I saw how Jesus, in His coming as the promised Messiah, turned everything the people of Israel had anticipated upside down. I think this is illustrated by three main truths:

• First, Jesus came as a humble workman from a poor family — far from the kingly warrior the Jewish people had come to expect as their Messiah, based on their interpretation of the promises delivered through the prophets. His mission was to save them from the oppression of sin, never mind the oppression of conquering nations.
• Second, this Jesus Who revealed Himself to them as the promised Messiah chose death by the most humiliating form of torture and execution possible in that time, as the means of redeeming His people from their sins.
• Third, as I learned from a recent homily, throughout his public ministry, Jesus repeatedly restored sight to people who had been born blind. This kind of healing had never occurred before. Old Testament prophets foretold this restoration of sight, but although some prophets had raised the dead, there is no record in the Old Testament of giving sight to a person born blind. This kind of healing — and what is healing, but a profound change? — is unique to Jesus.

In reflecting on these ideas, I begin to see Jesus as the ultimate bringer of change, and I begin to see faith not so much as a defense to the foibles of the world around me as a way of responding to the changes that God offers me as a means of staying alive and flourishing in my relationship with Him.

Now, when I look back at that turning point when I decided to leave the convent, I recognize that God was indeed calling me to change in profound ways. It has taken me many years and repeated promptings of His grace to recognize that and to see how He continually calls me in faith to respond to the change He desires to accomplish in me, perhaps through me in the world.

You see, something I lost sight of at some point is that my human nature is, left to its own devices, essentially sinful. Whatever we may believe about the story of original sin told in the book of Genesis — fact or allegory — the truth is that in a misguided exercise of free will, mankind separated itself from God and chose to sin. Jesus came to repair that separation, to heal that breach, and to teach us that living in the grace of His Spirit requires us to constantly seek to change in response to His call.

And so, my way of thinking about change has come, in its way, full circle. Change is essential for life to flourish — the spiritual life, in faith, as a response to God’s call. All is light and reflection and motion and freshness; constant change supports constant growth. God’s call is to transformative change — change that cuts to the very essence of our being. And that requires us to own this change and to focus our energy, the life force that we have through God’s grace, on the things we can do something about.

Change, Always Change

A dozen years before I retired, the company I worked for entered into a merger of what was, for us, of  unprecedented size and complexity. We brought four organizations together — organizations with identical charters and strongly similar, if not identical, missions and purposes; organizations with enormously different corporate cultures. As the pieces of this big merger puzzle began coming together, we recognized that a great deal of change was about to happen. At first we thought it was going to be pretty easy — after all, we weren’t going to change how people did their jobs from day to day. And we started down the road to completing the merger thinking that the biggest thing we needed to manage was keeping the change as transparent as possible to our customers.

It was the consultant we hired to help us manage the change with our customer base who clued us in to how much change our staff, all the way through the ranks to the top executives, would be experiencing as we brought these four very different cultures together. Once we realized the magnitude of the impact it would have, we expanded the consultant’s role to help us manage change with our employees.

Those plans were sidelined when, at the time of my retirement, my husband’s terminal illness required and merited my full attention. Over a period of weeks in early 2012, I transitioned from full-time middle management to full-time caregiver. I devoted myself wholeheartedly to my new role and even applied some of my own newly-developed principles of change management to the transition: owning the changes and focusing my energy on those areas where I had control, I felt that I was doing a pretty good job.

Even more important, during this time I also began to pray for God’s guidance and inspiration and leading. I came to understand the importance of being “in the moment,” in the very special construct of faith and complete trust in God. I began to see how quickly peace and comfort and joy — those wonderful consolations of the spirit — come into my life when I allow myself to be where God wants me to be, doing what He wants me to do. With that kind of peace and comfort and joy, pouring one’s whole self into that calling becomes much easier.

And just when I thought I had nailed it, everything changed.

Tom died on July 1, and it did not take me very long to realize that his death changed everything. Nothing in my life, in my world, was ever going to be the way it had been on June 30, or back on February 1 when I retired, or back in September when Tom and I together made the decision about my retirement. Nothing was ever going to be the same, and I thought, “That’s what I’ve got to live with.”

I thought if I could just adjust to that change — own it, focus my energy on things I could do something about — I’d have it made.

I was wrong.

I guess God is really the ultimate change-management expert, because He has really showed me some interesting paths over the past few years.

As my writing over the past several months has carried me into memories and reflections about how I got to this point in my life — nearly six dozen years, now — I kept returning to one significant moment, turning it over and over in my mind and trying to see what it was that kept bringing it back.

That moment was the moment when, as a young first-year novice, I heard my directress tell me that I needed to seriously question whether I belonged in the convent. In that moment, I made my decision to leave the convent because, as I put it that day, it seemed like staying there would require me to change everything about myself. I saw it as “thwarting” what God had made me, and as long as I saw it that way, there was no hope of my ever succeeding in the religious life.

It has taken all these years, and all this reflection, to see that indeed God was offering me the opportunity to change everything about myself. If I had been able, in that moment, to see it as an opportunity, I might have decided very differently. In fact, as I look back now, I probably did have a vocation, and I rejected it that day. I see two important facts as a result: First, that I might have avoided much of the sin and struggle that marked my early-to-mid-adulthood; second, that God has, as is His way, brought ever so much good out of the (probably) bad decision I made.

I think God calls us always to transformative change (and that isn’t a redundancy, by the way; “change” is just something being different, whereas “transformation” involves the very depths of being). I think God asks us every day to be open to change — the kind of change that He leads by filling us with His grace.

More, tomorrow, on what that kind of transformative change looks like. Meanwhile:

Father God, create a new heart in me — for a new heart is a changed heart. Let me be like those jugs of water at the wedding feast at Cana: changed in nature by the hand of Jesus, then poured out in the service of others, in whom I find You every day. Amen. 

Attachments, Advent Perspective

Oh, we are so very attached to this life and this world. And really, that’s not terrible. After all, God created this world, created us in it, and gave it to us to take care of and enjoy. (And the fact that we don’t take care of it as well as we ought would be fodder for a whole string of blog posts…worthwhile, but not today’s topic.)

No, it’s not terrible that we love our lives and the world we live them in. But the season of Advent, perhaps more than all others, asks us to take a look at the depth and strength of that attachment and compare it to our attachment to God and His Kingdom.

We can get so wrapped up in what we are doing here that we lose sight of the fact that this is just a temporary phase and that our true destination is eternal life in God’s heavenly kingdom.

That all seems abstract and ephemeral to us. I think this is so partly because it really is so different from our experience here, and partly because we don’t seem to have a very good frame of reference for that next phase — the one we call eternity.

But wait! We do have a frame of reference for it! In fact, we have wonderful and specific descriptions of it. Throughout the Gospels, Jesus frequently refers, in parables and directly, to what the kingdom of God is like. And the Book of Revelation is filled with descriptions of John’s visions of heaven. Scripture is one of God”s greatest gifts, and spending 10 or 15 minutes a day reading and pondering some portion of scripture is an incredibly rewarding way to begin to understand its richness. Make it a small portion — the Bible is not meant for speed-reading. Begin reading at some point — perhaps locate a favorite passage — and read until something jumps out and stops you. Then sit and re-read that one bit, and reflect on it, and ask your Father for understanding. Talk to Him about what the passage is saying to you and ask Him to guide you in exploring it. And then….just listen.

I promise that you will gain more from doing this than you can imagine — But I digress.

If this world and this life and the things they are made of are temporary, and our life with our Father God in heaven is eternal, it makes sense to view our attachment to this world and this life as a time of preparation for the next world, the next life. And when we do, it completely changes the nature of our attachment.

I had such a graphic and intense experience understood that there were no treatment options other than palliative/hospice care — that his life was, without question, going to end — there was a sense of being cast adrift on a very wide sea. Everything we’d held to be important up to that point was still there, still visible, still tangible — but somehow meaningless. Our very human tendency to still cling to those things — to live each day as we always had, to do the things we always did, to plan and dream as we’d always done — was drawing us into a spiral of frustration. It seemed like everything we did, every conversation, every plan, every action led us to the same conclusion: It isn’t going to matter. In 3 months or 6 months or 8 months, but in any event in less than a year, barring a miracle, he would be dead. Yes, that’s the word: dead. No euphemisms, no sugarcoating. His time in this world was going to end.

The only conversation we ever had about the next life, while he was still able to converse, went something like this:

Tom: Where do you think I’ll go?

Me: What do you mean?

Tom: Well, heaven or … you know …

Me: Oh, definitely heaven, maybe a stop in purgatory but you know, you’re one of the good guys. 

Tom: I wonder what purgatory is like.

That conversation got me thinking, and the thinking got me praying. I really wanted Tom to go to heaven, so I began simply asking God to take him there. In Tom’s last hours, I prayed out loud with him, commending his soul to God and asking the angels to carry him to heaven. I’ve written elsewhere about that experience. Today, I just want to dwell for a bit on what it taught me about attachment to life and things this side of heaven.

Because we’re human and thus imperfect and sinful, we tend to become all too invested in what our human nature is accustomed to. We cling to material possessions, we agonize over failed human relationships, we cling to the very time we are given in this world as though those things were all that had meaning.

Don’t get me wrong — they do have meaning. God made them to be meaningful so that we could make the best of our time before eternity. But because we are human, we are all too likely to magnify their importance to such a size that they can blot out what God really made us for.

When I think about eternity — about the life we were truly created for, the life that Jesus came to earth and died to save us for — as it is partially revealed for us by the Gospels and by the Book of Revelation, when I sit and try to visualize it and think about actually being there, fulfilling my ultimate purpose by constantly praising God with all the angels and saints, it creates an amazing sense of both anticipation and peace. The God who loved me into being wants me, after all, to spend eternity with Him. To the God who brought the entire universe into being with His Word, my individual soul is more important than all the vastness of the oceans and the mountains and the sky and the earth.

Believing that — and I can and do, because it is the very heart of the promises Jesus made while He was here teaching — changes everything for me. I can love this life and all the blessings in it, and I can live it to the fullest — because that is what God wants of me, provided it all happens in the context of His desire to have me with Him for eternity.

This is not pie-in-the-sky; this is not some abstract idea to be grasped only by the greatest of thinkers and philosophers.

This is personal. This is between God and me. This is about the promise my Father has made, through His Son, that He watches for the tiniest sparrow, lest it fall — and that I am worth more to Him than many sparrows. When I think of life in these terms, my heart is filled with anticipation. What I have here is wonderful! I’m meant to enjoy it. I’m meant to use it as God intended — a stepping stone to the fullness of life with Him. And I’m meant for something much more meaningful.

For most of my life, I feared death; it seemed terribly unfair that the one thing I dreaded most was also the one thing that I could not possibly avoid. To understand this focus on eternal life — the ability, so to speak, to look beyond the window rather than at it — both required and enabled me to release my fear of death.  The dread of death, mine or that of others, is tied to my attachment to this world. When I focus on the life that Jesus has promised, the dread disappears and is replaced by anticipation. It will come, when and as God wills. It will be the end of me as this world knows me, and it will be the beginning of me as the fulfillment of God’s will for me.

That’s what Advent is about: the anticipation of something, Someone, greater than we ever imagined, and yet coming in the form of a tiny child — embraceable and loveable, so small and so eternal.

Father, Creator and Lord of all I know to be real, teach me to see beyond the bonds and attachments of this life to the greater reality of Your kingdom. Teach me to trust in the redemptive act of Your Son, Jesus Christ, and the sanctifying power of Your Holy Spirit. Help me to grow in the knowledge that I have nothing to fear, that I can trust in Your grace and rely on your mercy and compassion to keep me focused not on the temporary things of this world but on the eternal glory that awaits. 

Promises, and Anticipation

In the Gospel reading for this third day of Advent, Jesus tells his disciples, “Blessed are the eyes that see what you see. For I say to you, many prophets and kings desired to see what you see, but did not see it, and to hear what you hear, but did not hear it.” As I reflected on these words early this morning, I thought about those prophets and kings and how their desires sprang from the promises God made over all the years beginning with His promises to Adam and Eve after their great sin.

The Old Testament is replete with these promises, and they follow a pattern. God creates and preserves His people; they sin against Him and turn away from Him; and God responds with covenant promises to bless, save, and redeem His people; they sin and turn away, and He responds again with a renewed sacred covenant.

Those prophets and kings of the Old Testament, those leaders and judges and rulers of the people of Israel, took God’s covenant promises seriously. They knew, in faith, that one day the promised Messiah would come, and with the light that the Holy Spirit put in their hearts they longed with all their being to see that day and to hear the words of that long-promised savior. One by one, they lived their lives in the hope of that fulfillment; one by one, they died without seeing and hearing that day and those words. And so it continued until that last prophet, John the Baptist, who was privileged to see and hear Jesus and to know Who He was.

In these words of Jesus, we learn how very privileged we are. As I follow the daily Scripture readings at Mass and the Psalms and brief Scripture readings of my daily morning and evening prayers, I am struck with a sense of wonder at the realization that people have been reading these same scriptures and praying these same Psalms, in one language or another, for thousands of years.

The same words I read this morning have been read by others every single day of the past thousands of years since they were first written under the Holy Spirit’s inspiration.

Each morning, my prayers take me to the Canticle of (Luke 1:68-79), which reminds me, “He promised to show mercy to our fathers and to remember his holy covenant.” And I consider two wondrous concepts: first, that these words have comforted the people of God for thousands of years, and second, that these words emphatically underscore the truth of God’s intentional salvation and redemption of His people.

We have, it occurs to me, the benefit of several thousand years of history – those thousands of years from creation to original sin, to God’s covenant with Abraham and His renewed covenants over the centuries, to the culmination of His plan in the life, death, and resurrection of His Son, to the more than two thousand years since Jesus walked among us as the Son of Man. We have the grace of knowing that God’s Word has stood firm throughout all this history; we have the grace of learning from others who have studied it and spread it and lived it, and from whom we can further learn it; and we have the grace of the Holy Spirit working directly in us to own it and live it.

We have, by God’s mercy, the grace to see and hear what those long-ago prophets and kings longed for: The truth of God’s Word.

For each of us, the question is whether we ignore it, take it for granted, or embrace it with all the gratitude it merits.

Against this backdrop of grace, my own sinfulness is both magnified and made insignificant: magnified, because I am reminded that in spite of all that history, despite the completeness of God’s Word and Covenant and redemption, I am so small and so imperfect that I turn my back on Him time and time again; made insignificant, because I am reminded, by these same daily readings and by prayer and by participation in the Eucharist that God’s forgiveness and mercy and compassion are complete and deep and abiding.

The story of God’s plan of salvation and redemption, laid out in these daily Scripture readings, allows me to understand that to Him, all of those years I spent (by my own sinful choice) outside the light of His grace are now as nothing in His sight. When He forgave me, through the words and actions of the priest who heard my first confession after my 45-year absence, He forgave me so completely that – as the priest told me that day – even the sins I didn’t remember having committed were wiped out.

Forty-five years became a drop in the bucket, but by the grace of God it also became a learning ground. From that experience, and through the great blessing of Reconciliation, I gained a depth of appreciation for God’s Word, for the redemptive act of His Son, and for the sanctification of His Holy Spirit, that far exceeds what I think I might have gained otherwise. I learned more about His grace by needing it so desperately than I might have learned otherwise. I feel a much stronger and deeper call to share His Word and His love in all the aspects and corners of my life than I might have felt if I had been content to stay put rather than take that first step away from Him when I was 20 years old.

I think that this is so; who knows, though, what I might have become had I not gone so far astray before my return? I can only believe that the story my life tells is one that affirms the depth and breadth and width and height of God’s love and mercy and that proves that He can, and will, and does, create good out of even the worst things we bring to Him.

Abba, Father, those long years I spent turned away from you are but a drop in the boundless bucket of Your grace, and I am filled with gratitude that with the benefit of Your timeless Word, with Your boundless mercy and forgiveness, and with the combined grace of all those millions of people over thousands of years hearing and reading and reflecting and sharing Your word in Scripture, I can live my life surrounded by Your love. You have brought good from my worst actions, Lord, and in the humble knowledge that by myself, I am capable of nothing, I ask to be filled with Your grace so that as one of those countless millions, I may reflect and share Your goodness and love with others.

A Father’s Love

When my mother was about 8 months into her pregnancy with me — just before Christmas, 1946 — my father took one of his infamous walks. “Going for cigarettes,” he’d say — and he might come back, or he might take off for several months or years. The youngest of my three older brothers told me that this particular departure happened a few days before Christmas. He remembers being secretly glad, because then the man — who was an alcholic — couldn’t ruin the family Christmas.

In all of the previous 15 years of their marriage, my mother had always taken my father back when he showed up again. This time, he came back on the very night I was born in January, 1947. He professed to be thrilled at the birth of a daughter after three sons, and I’m sure he made amazing promises — but perhaps not; perhaps he just relied on what my mother called his natural, and sinister, seductiveness.

In any event, she was done. She told him no, that it was over and she would not live with him again. His response took the form of threats — she shouldn’t try to get child support, because he would harm us all — and off he went. I learned, much later, that he got as far as Indiana, where records show he entered into a civil marriage less than 8 months after I was born, and without benefit of a divorce. Less than three years later, he abandoned his new wife and 2-year-old daughter on the side of the road and headed farther south, where he “married” again in New Orleans and fathered four more children that I know of (one of them with his wife’s niece). He never told his New Orleans wife about the four children in Michigan or the one in Indiana until, disabled by a stroke in 1963, he had to make disclosures to receive social security benefits. He lived another 17 years after that, but I never met him. My brother — the same one who was secretly glad the man had left — established contact in 1980 shortly before our father died. Our father wanted to be forgiven, and all of us extended our forgiveness. It cost us little to do so — all the pain was in the past.

There is much more to the story, some of it sordid, some of it poignant; the fact is, I grew up in a single-parent home and never knew my father at all. And for a very long time, that fact got all tangled up in my relationship with God. For much of my life, I felt and believed that my experience of God as my Father was limited and somehow unsatisfactory because I had no real idea, no first-hand experience, of how a father functioned in the family. Just as I always felt uneasy in the homes of my childhood friends when their fathers were around, I felt a little uneasy about God the Father. I didn’t know what to expect.

Over the years, I guess you would say I kept my distance. But God wasn’t keeping His distance, not at all. Tantalizing clues kept peering out from Bible studies and from the Liturgy of the Mass. Some kind of awakening began when one Bible study I attended posed a discussion question about how we address God, and I was intrigued by the image of Jesus referring to God as Father in the intimate manner of a family relationship: Abba — almost like “daddy.”

One appellation really drew me in — a deacon who taught one of the studies I attended used to start his prayers with “Father God….” and that seemed to speak in my heart. Over a period of a couple of years, I pondered this relationship, this sort of fuzzy distant feeling I had about God the Father as unapproachable and unknowable, and something began to change.

As I prayed to my “Father God,” He began to answer me, and this is what I learned: How very fortunate and blessed I am that my first real experience of a father is with the Father of all creation! I began to understand that He loved me into existence and that as the Creator of all the universe, he knows me personally and intimately and wants me to come to Him every day, every hour, every minute of my life. When I begin to pray, I seek to put myself in God’s presence, and the image that forms is of me sitting at the feet of the most fatherly person you could imagine, leaning on His knee and feeling utterly cherished.

In this imagery, little tags of Scripture take on a whole new meaning. “To your Father, you are worth many sparrows….” I’ve learned to take all kinds of things to my Father in the conversation of prayer. I don’t need the experience of an earthly father to form this relationship; rather, I understand that my Father God wants to reveal Himself to me in His own way, that He is waiting every day to show how much He loves me.

I find myself at a loss for words to describe what this new understanding of God as Father means to me. It’s nothing I’ve invented or conjured out of the experiences in my life or from my own lacks and wants. Instead, it is something that God Himself creates and renews constantly in my life, and my soul rests in His embrace as surely and as safely as any infant in a father’s arms.

And for this, I give thanks. I can’t waste time wishing I’d figured it out sooner — it’s enough just to live in gratitude for it.

~Sparky~