How Does Your (Spiritual) Garden Grow?

Too Close

It seems that in much of life, it doesn’t pay to be too close. We don’t like a close call; when we narrowly escape disaster we call it “too close for comfort”; when we get too close to a situation and lose perspective we say we can’t see the forest for the trees. This whole line of thinking was set in motion the other day when I was working on a big project restoring a stairway in my house. The stairway is wood, with lovely wide steps and good moldings at the top of each riser. I removed the old carpet and even older linoleum tile, then dissolved and scraped and sanded to get rid of old glue. I washed and then sanded some more, and installed lengths of shoe at the bottom of each riser where it meets the tread. Finally, I began to stain; and after two coats of stain I was ready for the clear-coat. Last but not least, I had to repaint the stringers and moldings on both sides as stawell as the handrail.

At a point in the process of applying the clear-coat, I became depressed about the project. There I was, nose to board with each step that I had carefully sanded and stained, and all I could see was imperfections! Flaws! Tiny mistakes!

And I realized that I could either let the realization of these flaws and imperfections ruin the project for me, or I could take a step back and enjoy the beauty of the big picture. If I looked at it as a whole, I had created something very beautiful — dark walnut stain gleaming under a carefully applied triple coat of satin-finish clear-coat, ascending (or descending, depending on your viewpoint) majestically and beautifully in the middle of my home. For the rest of my days, God willing, I’m going to be walking up and down those lovely steps — not kneeling on each one peering at it to find flaws.

The feeling of relief and release that came over me was a lot like the feeling I get after the Sacrament of Reconciliation — a kind of intense lightening of the spirit that opens me to joy.

I thought, then, about my recent blog post pondering what God thinks of me. The thought of God peering closely at me with an intent of finding every last single flaw and imperfection in me was a little daunting. But it needn’t be. He comes close to us, especially in the human nature of Jesus, not to inspect and judge but to enjoy the fruit of His creation. He sees us as the whole of His work, I think, and rejoices within His Trinity in the beauty of it.

And for myself, for my spiritual life, I think that it is important to get some distance from myself, instead of getting so close to my “work.” Of course it is important to remain aware of my sinfulness and to know my faults and imperfections; but I don’t think God wants me to dwell on that. Rather, He wants me to bring those to Him, along with my whole self, and then to step back from myself and focus my energy on using myself to serve and help His people, the people He puts in my path. He calls me not to be so self-centered that all I can see are my flaws; He calls me to be so centered in Him that all I can see is His love.

What Does God Think of Me?

That question — “What does God think of me?” — crossed my mind as my watch chimed the 10:00 a.m. prayer reminder this morning. To your Father, you are worth many sparrows. Cf. Luke 12:7. Yes, Father, I know…I am worth more than many sparrows, but what do You think of me?

The thing is, just lately I have found myself in a place where I’m more or less constantly wallowing in regret for my old sins. I’ve been quite open, here in my “spiritual garden,” about the fact that for a significant number of years I did not live a good Christian life — in fact, got about as far from it as I could, given who I am.

Life is good these days. I have what I need to care for myself physically, and I have the love and support of family and friends and church to sustain me. My needs are simple, and I feel that I am where God wants me to be, doing what He wants me to do. These days, I live a spiritual life that I never would have thought possibly even a few years back.

And yet I will find myself looking back on the “bad years” with a sense of shame and regret. How dare I walk around pretending to be this good and spiritual person when I have these awful sins in my past? In the worst and darkest moments of this funk, the question even becomes “How dare I put myself in front of God in prayer when I am obviously so unworthy?”

It does not take a spiritual rocket scientist to figure out where such thoughts come from. I know where they come from, I know who authors them and hangs them out there to tempt me, and because I know that, I reject them….only to see them reformulate themselves into doubts and questions about the nature of God’s mercy and forgiveness and love. And so another round of rejecting such thoughts and turning myself once more to God….

That’s why the question that came to me when that prayer reminder chimed is so huge and so important. The answer to that question is central to my ability to overcome such ugly temptations to doubt and despair.

What does God think of me? 

For starters, He created me because He loves me. He created humans in His own image and likeness (Gen. 1:26-27). After he created humans and finished all the work of creation, He “saw that it was very good” (Gen. 1:31). And when his first human creations, exercising the free will He had given them, separated themselves from Him by sin, there began His great quest for a means of redeeming His sinful creatures.

The entire Old Testament tells the story of a God Who, having created us in His own image and likeness, thus thought so highly of us that He searched constantly to bring us back to His heart. Time after time, He draws His people into a covenant relationship with Him; time after time, His people break the covenant; and God yet again reaches out to His people again.

What does God think of me? God loved His people so much, and so greatly desired them to return to Him and love Him back, that He became one of us in order to finally create a new covenant that would be unbreakable. His love is so great that it could only be fully expressed in His birth, His miracles, His teaching, His passion and death, His resurrection, and His return to heaven to make a place for us.

Those doubts, those fears, those temptations to turn away — all of those are nothing in the face of such love. All of those are merely another reminder to turn to my Father constantly, again and again and again, throughout each day; all of them are powerless in the path of the love He has for me and the love He calls forth from me.

What does God think of me? He kept loving me even when I sinned my biggest sins; He kept waiting for me to return to Him; He rejoiced when I finally started listening for His voice again, and He leans down to care for me ever so tenderly while I make my way through this world. He thinks so highly of me that He sends His angels to watch over me. He has already forgiven those long-ago sins, and He wants me to remember the forgiveness and mercy more than He wants my regret and guilt and shame.

We have that love around us and in us every hour and minute of every day. All He asks is that we open ourselves to receive it and listen for His voice.

What does God think of me?  Suddenly I realize — He loves me even more than I can love myself. He’s not going to stop loving me. And with that kind of love, I can overcome all.

Hiding From God

The Old Testament readings this 5th week in Ordinary Time are drawn from Genesis. I’m reminded of what a very short journey it was for Adam and Eve from the pure joy of being God’s beloved creation to the confusion and darkness wrought by the Evil One as he dangled the double temptations of personal power and equality with God before them — and they bit, if you’ll pardon a small pun.

The first response of the first man and woman, once they had separated themselves from God by disobeying His will, was the realization of their sin, reflected in the understanding that they were naked and in their attempt to cover their nakedness. And their second response was to try to hide from God. Knowing that their sin had separated them from Him, they tried to go even further away from Him. Because there had never before been sin, Adam and Eve did not yet know about God’s justice, mercy, compassion, and forgiveness. They knew, thanks to Satan’s work, only to fear God’s punishment. And so they hid.

The writer(s) of Genesis do not tell us how Satan reacted to this byplay; we can only imagine it. The homily I heard this morning sheds some light on it, though. Father G. was talking about St. Teresa of Avila’s vision of Hell, with the place that Satan had reserved for her, and these words jumped out at me: “Satan does not like you.” The Devil does not want us in a state of sin because he likes us and wants us to be with him; he wants us that way as a way of separating us from God, not because he likes us but because he hates God.

God, on the other hand, the all-powerful Creator of all things — including us, and including the fallen angels — God is full of love for us and constantly wants good for us. He also has a place reserved for us in Heaven, and it is a very different place from the little pit full of slime and vermin and slithery things that St. Teresa of Avila was shown. Rather than eternal confinement in a small space of ugliness and darkness and filth, God has for us a place of eternal freedom, light, joy, and bliss in His presence. And fortunately for us, He wants us to enjoy that place far more than the Devil wants us in his own horrid place.

And yet we humans, still possessed of our sinful natures, we still sin, and when we find ourselves standing thus separated from God, we seek to hide from Him. We hide in shame; we hide in defiance; we hide in our failure to understand that He is not only ready to forgive us, He wants to forgive us and to bring us back into His presence.

What if I could live a life so grounded in faith that if — when — I sin, I am instantly aware of my Father’s desire to forgive me so that instead of hiding from Him in darkness, I turn toward His Light? What if my days, right down to the hours and minutes of them, were so filled with His grace that even as my foot slips, I know I can reach for His hand and return to the safety of His love?

Sin is the disease of our souls from which we all desire healing. We can’t heal ourselves, and we can’t avail ourselves of the healing that comes from our Lord if we are hiding from Him. I am thinking, at this moment, of those stories in the Gospels where those in need of healing sought to touch just the hem of His garment or the tassels of His cloak — and in doing so, they were healed!

Father God, let me not hide from You in my sin. Rather let me instantly see my sin in Your light, and grant me grace to seek Jesus and through Him forgiveness. Let me reach for the hem of His garment, the tassel of His cloak — let me, in grace, always be reaching for Him and never hiding from Him. Please, Father, keep me always mindful of Your everlasting love, the love that seeks and desires to forgive me and keep me close to You even in my worst moments. And through the intercession of our Blessed Mother, please keep my heart and soul on the path You have laid out for me to lead me to the place You have reserved for me in Heaven. In Jesus’ name I ask these things of my loving Father. Amen.

No Escape

The Gospel reading for this Tuesday of the 4th week in ordinary time (Mark 5:21-43) presents us with an unmistakable and inescapable message from Jesus: Have faith. Really. It’s all about faith.

As Mark tells the story of Jairus, the synagogue official whose daughter is ill and dying, wrapped around the story of a widow whose hemorrhages have resisted all attempts at treatment for 12 years, we hear Jesus say it twice: First, he tells the widow, “Daughter, your faith has saved you….” and then, he tells Jairus, upon hearing that Jairus’ daughter has died, “Do not be afraid; just have faith.” St. Paul, in the first reading for the day (Heb 12:1-4), reminds us likewise to keep the faith, “running the race that lies before us while keeping our eyes fixed on Jesus, the leader and perfecter of faith.”

That seems simple enough. Just have faith.

Well, all of these things are simple when we are sitting quietly, reading the Scriptures and reflecting and praying on them. When it comes to dealing with real life, our human nature with all its distractions and worries and plans and expectations has a tendency to get in the way of the simplicity. And not the least of the issues our human nature creates is this tendency to think that the more complex a thing is, the more worthy it is of our attention and focus and energy to figure it out and understand it. By extension, the simpler something is, the less it engages us and requires our focus and energy. We just don’t regard “simple” things as being all that worthy of our time and attention.

I’ve said it before, though: Life in this world is complex and complicated. Faith, on the other hand, is very, very simple. Apply a very simple thing to solve a very complex and complicated problem? Now there’s a novel concept….

….And it’s the only concept that really works.

Let me reflect a bit deeper on Jesus’ invitation to us to “just have faith” and on His promise to the widow that “your faith has saved you.”

What is faith, anyway? Dictionary definitions range from general references to “complete trust or confidence in something” to a more specific “strong belief in God or the doctrines of a religion” (https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/faith). Scriptural references are summarized by St. Paul in Heb. 11:1: Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. And it is in this definition from St. Paul that we start to see how faith intersects and interacts with the way we experience the world and the way we experience God.

We’re trapped here, you see — the only place we have to live in is the world. It’s a tough place, because its inhabitants, like all of us, are sinful beings, many of whom seem to be singularly uninterested in letting God into their lives, much less walking the path that Jesus laid out for us. If all there was for us to know was that the world is inhabited by sinful people who do evil, rotten things, we really could have no hope for anything good in the present, much less the future. And without that hope, there’s really no way to go on, is there?

That’s where faith comes in. And when I write about faith, I recognize fully that theological experts with minds much greater than mine have done so, and that atheists and others with equally great minds on the other side have refuted these notions in their way. I’m writing about faith merely from my own small human experience of it. And here’s what I think:

First, it’s a gift. I received it in baptism, and it was later confirmed in me through the other Sacraments. I did nothing to deserve this gift; I could not earn it, but it was freely bestowed by God Who created me out of His great love for me. That’s personal.

Sometimes this gift is given later in life; people come to recognize both something missing in their lives and something like a seed planted that waits to grow, and that’s the seed of faith, and they come looking for baptism and the other sacraments so that the seed can grow.

Second, faith is both a need and a choice — and not necessarily in that order. It’s part of the human condition that we have a need to believe in something (Someone) greater and stronger than ourselves. The choice comes in when we realize that the need is for Someone, and we choose to adopt and exercise the gift that He first gave us. The choice is necessary for two reasons, I think: first, He never forces His gifts on us, but simply offers them; and second, if we do not choose to live in faith, then by default we are choosing to reject that gift.

Third, faith is a living, growing thing. Given that God plants the seed, given that we have a deep need for it and given that we (hopefully) choose to live in faith, we are called and compelled to nurture it and give it room to grow. We are called and compelled to express it, and we are called and compelled to share it.

The fourth and most wonderful thing about faith, I think, is how the Holy Spirit works in us. The Holy Spirit rejoices along with the Father and the Son at each step of our journey in faith: When the seed is planted in us, when we acknowledge our need (which truly never goes away!), when we choose to welcome this gift, and when we seek and nurture its life and growth in us — all along the way, the Holy Spirit rejoices. As with the gift of faith in the first place, He never forces Himself into our lives — but, oh, how good He is at whispers and nudges and suggestions! The more aware we become of how our faith impacts our daily lives, the more He whispers and nudges and suggests.

And that brings me to the active part of faith: Faith is an active listener. When we are listening for those whispers and nudges and suggestions, when we become aware of them and respond to them, then our lives become faith in action.

Faith is the foundation of our spiritual and prayer lives. It is “the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen” — the absolute confidence that the same God Who promised us His love and care and salvation is the God Who will keep that promise.

I absolutely cannot explain faith from the perspective of a life lived only in this world. I need one foot firmly planted in the next world for faith to make any sense at all. And when I have myself so situated that I live fully the life God has given me in this world, while recognizing that my real home is in the next, with Him — then I’ve given the gift and the seed of faith a place to fully live and grow.

Finally, seeing faith as complete trust and confidence in God leads me to the best place I can be in this life He has given me. When I pray about faith, I pray to always have the grace to meet each obstacle, each difficulty, each unexpected or painful experience, each joy, each gift, each moment of wonder that life brings me, with the strong confidence that God is with me in it — with me in all His creative, redemptive, and sanctifying power; with me to show me His presence in the people He calls me to serve; with me to keep my faith alive and growing, with its roots both here where I live now, and in heaven where I will one day see Him for eternity.

When I look back over what I have just written, I feel like I’ve poured out my heart, and yet that my words are woefully inadequate to express the deep joy and abiding peace that come with the knowledge and certainty of my faith. I think I need to conclude in this way: Just take a few seconds, if you will, to recognize God’s gift of faith in your own life; tell Him you are grateful for it, and ask Him to grow it in you.

I have complete faith that He will. You see, there is no escape. God’s love is everywhere, and it is expressed most wonderfully in the gift of faith.

The Chase

Several times over the past week, both in readings and in homilies at Mass, the beautiful and mystifying truth has presented itself that God loves us, each individually and personally, in the most passionate way, that He longs for us to turn to Him, and that He pursues us avidly in His desire for us.

When something comes at me that way, especially in the realm of my spiritual life, it’s a pretty definite signal that it’s something I should be thinking about. It becomes one of those things that my mind turns over and over, even when I’m not actively thinking about it. It becomes one of those things that has me, finally, asking God what it is I’m supposed to learn from or do with this “spiritual earworm.”

And then, if I’m listening, the response comes.

This morning, at Mass, I was thinking first about how grateful I was to be there — my attendance at daily Mass was interrupted last week because I was virus-y and again for a couple of days this week because of extremely cold and windy weather. As I began my prayer in preparation for Holy Communion, I thought about how circular this experience is: Jesus wants to come to us, and in our preparation we invite Him. He’ll never force His way in, but His grace is still compelling if we are open to it. He is the only one who can come to us in this way, and He so wants to be with us, but only at our invitation — and yet He is exactly what we need and all that we need.

And an old, somewhat whimsical phrase  popped into my head. “I only chased him until he caught me.” I found myself smiling as I moved forward to receive Jesus in the Eucharist. I need to pursue Him until He catches me. That little twist of thought is both humorous and very profoundly true. He will not force me to be His own — but He so wants to catch me, if only I will pursue Him.

Simple.

Psalm 116 presented me the other day with these beautiful words:

The LORD protects the simple; I was helpless, but he saved me.
Return, my soul, to your rest; the LORD has been very good to you. (Ps. 116, 6-7)

And a little farther on, just in case we are missing the point:

I kept faith, even when I said, “I am greatly afflicted!”
I said in my alarm, “All men are liars!” (Ps. 116, 10-11)

Praying with the Psalms can be a wonderful exercise in the kind of humility that comes from knowing Who God is and who we are. This kind of humility is grounded in the very wonderful simplicity of faith — faith gifted to us by the Holy Spirit in baptism and fed throughout our lives by Word and Sacrament.

But life, you say, is complicated! There is so much to think about. There are so many questions, questions without easy answers that require complex analysis. There are decisions to make all the time — big decisions with big consequences for my life. If I’m not careful, you say, I’ll get it wrong and the dominoes will start to fall.

And you know what? You’re absolutely right. Life is complicated, and so are the questions and issues we face every day.

The great blessing is that the period at the end of that sentence is not the end of it. The great blessing is that while life is complicated and filled with complex questions and issues and big decisions, faith is simple.

And faith is just what we need to deal with all those complexities and complications.

If we approach life as the psalmist describes in Ps. 116:10-11, we find ourselves in a constant state of something close to panic. We are “greatly afflicted!” and tormented by the deeds and misdeeds of all the “liars” around us, and the more we realize that we are pretty much powerless to fix all that, the worse it gets and the more frantic our thoughts become. We fall into the trap of thinking that if we don’t worry properly or sufficiently, we will never survive this train wreck we call life.

Let’s go back to verse 6: The Lord protects the simple. I was helpless, but he saved me. 

There. Take a deep breath.

How do we get to be “simple”? The answer is, I think, pretty simple in itself. Once upon a lifetime ago when I was coaching people in how to manage change in their lives, I taught the benefits of figuring out what we have control over and focusing our energy there. It seemed to me then, and it still does, that this is a fairly simple process — but it does require us to be honest with ourselves in a way that isn’t always easy.

We have no control over the chaos that the world puts before us every day. Zero. Zilch. Zip. Politics? World events? Corruption? Nope, no control. The boss at work? Fellow employees? Customers? Nope, their actions are outside our scope of control. Financial markets? Interest rates? Stock prices? Nope, way outside our wheelhouse.

God’s grace? His mercy? His love? I’m going to tell you right now, these too are outside our control. And for that we should be thankful.

Because here is where it gets very, very simple. The one and only thing we have control over in our lives is our own response to all of it. And if we can focus ourselves on one single, simple response, we find ourselves in a place best described by Ps. 116:7: Return, my soul, to your rest; the LORD has been very good to you. 

That response is faith — the faith that we were given in Baptism, the faith that the Holy Spirit works constantly to perfect in us, the faith that lets us take on any of the complexities and poly-gosh-awfuls the world has to offer, look them straight in the face and say to our Father, “I trust in You and in Your grace, mercy, and love.” And then living like you mean it.

When the world and its liars fill us with alarm, we have a place to turn. We are not stuck in a place where our only source of safety and peace is what the world out there offers — which isn’t much, by the way. When the world and its liars fill us with alarm, we go to our simple response — faith! — and we find that the Lord, Who is contant in His love and care, is very good to us.

I Can Live With That (2)

A few things on my mind this Tuesday morning, not the least of which is that I haven’t been here writing for about a week, and I’ve realized that that hurts.

It hurts because writing is, for me, a necessary step in my spiritual life. It is something I know I am called to do — to write about my faith experience and spiritual (hopefully!) growth — and it feels like a necessary step in my personal lectio divina process: After I read, reflect, listen, and respond, I have a specific need to write so that I capture what I just experienced.

Over the past week or so, I’ve dealt with some nasty virus issues and just haven’t felt all that well physically. And sometimes, instead of rising above that to choose how I’m going to deal with it, I give in to just a touch of self-pity and allow myself to sit around in the midst of a bunch of nothingness.  And that space, I have discovered, is a space where not much growth or good happens. And I didn’t write. I thought about it a couple of times, but I didn’t ever just sit down and ask the Holy Spirit to set me to the work.

So not writing, I have discovered, has a reverse ripple effect. When I skip this step in my day, it isn’t long before I find I’m shortening my prayer time; the time I spend in prayer begins to feel dry and rote, and there is less and less joy in it. Bottom line: when I’m not answering my call to write (and thus share!) about my faith journey, things start to become all about me again, and that is just never going to be something that ends well.

I find myself thankful, this morning, to have received the grace to pray deeply and honestly for a renewal of spirit.

The path to this grace was kind of interesting. This past Sunday, I was invited to attend a prayer meeting at a local charismatic ecumenical community. I went with family, and we joined friends who belong to this community.

We were just a little late — not an unusual thing when one of your number is a little one who needs her naps! And as we opened the door to enter the space, we instantly felt the enormous energy in the room. There were close to 200 people, all singing and clearly very deeply engaged in this experience. I’m not fond of being in the midst of large groups of people, but this crowd had such a positive vibe going! I joined in the singing, found it to be a very emotional experience, and listened carefully to the message. All around me I heard the murmurs as people prayed aloud between the worship songs.

Now, I’ve never been very outwardly expressive in my participation in music and prayer and worship. Raising my hands during the Lord’s Prayer at Mass is about as far as that goes for me; I’m just not very demonstrative. And usually when I find myself in a situation like the one Sunday night, I feel just a bit pressured about participating, and I also feel very uncomfortable because it feels unnatural, and then I feel embarrassed because I’m not joining in the outward expression of my worship (but not as embarrassed as I feel when I try to join in clapping or other rhythmic activities and find myself completely out of sync with everyone else — no sense of rhythm here).

That wasn’t the case on this Sunday evening. What I felt was that I was surrounded by a sense of peace and love and that it didn’t matter how or whether I expressed my participation in it. It wasn’t about me, it was about God — Father, Son, and Holy Spirit — present in this gathering and working in each of us very individually. The response that engenders in me is stillness and listening, and sometimes deep emotion. And I felt perfectly at peace with my own responses. What made me so positive that God was at work here, and not just the personalities and expectations of people around me, was the deepening sense of peace that I experienced.

The young man who spoke at this meeting talked about “the baptism of the Holy Spirit,” and this is where I began to have some questions — questions I’ve been turning over in my head ever since. What I gleaned from his message is that in addition to our baptism with water (the baptism which makes us members of the Body of Christ), there is yet an additional experience, i.e., the baptism of the Holy Spirit, that we should both seek and expect.

My belief about baptism has always had its foundation in the words of John the Baptist in his encounter with Jesus at the Jordan River: “I am baptizing you with water, but one mightier than I is coming….He will baptize you with the holy Spirit and fire.” (Luke 3:16) When we profess and proclaim our faith in the words of the Nicene Creed, we state our belief in “one baptism,” and the sacrament of Baptism is a baptism of water as well as invocation of the Holy Spirit.

So when I think deeper into this message about “the baptism of the Holy Spirit,” I become cautious. What it comes down to is that I don’t like calling it a “baptism.” And I don’t think it is a matter of semantics; if I believe in “one baptism,” as the Creed expresses, then I do not and should not spend my time casting about for another baptism.

Once I get past that boulder in the path, I love to think about inviting the Holy Spirit — as the expression of the love between the Father and the Son, and therefore the Triune God — to fill me. This is a way to a deeper experience of my personal relationship with God. This is a path to turning my life over to God more and more with each day I live it. This is a moment, a moment that offers itself constantly fresh, to forget about what people call it and just let it fill me.

Remember, I came to this prayer meeting at the end of a week of increasingly negative feelings and spiritual dearthand dryness. I went into it (before we opened that door and walked into the wonderful energy there) with a sort of jaded “Wonder what this is gonna look like? Will people think I’m weird if I don’t act charismatic?” attitude. The music and singing took me out of myself and my growing spiritual ennui, and the Holy Spirit used the deep emotions the music and singing evoked as a way into my heart…a heart that was in some danger of hardening itself, I think.

Thus it was, at the end of the young man’s earnest message, when he invited us to pray for the Holy Spirit to come and fill us so that we might experience this baptism, I closed my own eyes and prayed simply for the Holy Spirit to come and own me, to come and renew my spirit. I remembered the words of St. Thomas Aquinas, when Jesus said that Thomas had spoke well of him and offered Thomas whatever he might ask for, and Thomas, with simple eloquence, responded that Jesus was all he needed. And in my deepest heart, I expressed my own need for Him. I offered my complete trust in Him, without reservation, knowing that He walks with me through whatever this world might throw at me. I asked simply, and yet again, for the grace to hear Him when He calls — and for the grace to have ears that listen for Him.

I don’t know if I’ll ever experience what charismatics call “baptism of the Spirit,” or the gifts that they describe — healing, speaking in tongues, and the like — but of this one thing I am absolutely certain: The Holy Spirit is with me daily, active in my life, and willing to drive my intentions and my actions and my words as long as I am open to Him and trusting in Him.

I can live with that.

Be the Tree

No, this isn’t going to be a 1980s transcendental meditation piece or some flavor-of-the-month motivational bit. Hang in there with me, and you’ll see.

The morning prayer for today in Magnificat presented me with these words from Psalm 52:

I am like a growing olive tree in the house of God.
I trust in the goodness of God for ever and ever.
I will thank you for evermore, for this is your doing.
I will proclaim that your name is good, in the presence of your friends. 

 Word by word, my prayer time took me deep. Here I am, in God’s house. I’m planted here like a growing olive tree! That is, I’ve taken root. Here I have all the nourishment — light, water, food, knowledge — that I need for growth. Here I am constantly tended and cared for, cherished, my best features enhanced in all ways. Here I trust fully that all of these things will always be present for me — not just present, but abundant. There is no need for me to look for a good place to establish myself, because everything is here.

I am like a growing olive tree in the house of God. Content to stay here where my nourishment is constant, I grow and grow. And where does that take me? Think of what the olive tree was to the Jewish people: in its fruit they found food; in its oil they found a source of light, of heat, and of healing; once it had passed its useful life as a source of fruit and oil, they found its wood a source of items both useful and decorative for their homes and their daily lives.

It seems to me that if I am content to be like an olive tree growing in the house of God, and trust that I will have everything I need to grow into my best self, then I can be a source of good things to the world around me. I am, in God’s Spirit, a way for others to find nourishment, light, warmth, healing, and perhaps even things both useful and decorative in their lives.

By letting myself be and become who and what God not only made me to be but intends me to be — by trusting Him fully with that process and making myself completely available to Him — I find a wonderful vulnerability to God’s presence and His working in my life. It’s a wonderful vulnerability, because it requires me to give up my hold on all those things that I thought afforded me safety and security in this world and place my trust entirely on Someone I can’t see or touch, Whose Presence is yet no less real because I find it solely in faith.

A tree — especially an olive tree, left to its own devices, will grow quite haphazardly. A limb shoots off this way or that; another branch finds its growth impeded and thus withers, yet continues to take nourishment that other branches need for their own growth. Left alone, the tree grows without purpose and without care as to the best way to perform its function. The withered branch, taking nourishment, nevertheless produces nothing; the errant branch produces fruit that may fall into other hands or fall uselessly to the ground; some of the branches produce too many leaves and not enough fruit, depending on how these branches have used the available nourishment. Every now and then, some of the branches produce wonderful fruit.

But in the hands of the best gardener, each olive tree gets pruned and shaped to make the very best use of available nourishment, light, and water so as to produce consistent fruit; every branch has the right balance of foliage and fruit production; when a branch is no longer producing, it is pruned and what’s left finds its best use.

I think it’s that way with us. When we rely on ourselves and seek our own desires, we’re likely to grow in unreliable ways, and we won’t produce our best spiritual fruit. Oh, but when we allow ourselves to be the olive tree — to live in that wonderful vulnerability, trusting God to bring us into our best selves, allowing ourselves to depend wholly on Him for everything we need to grow and thrive; when we have our roots solidly in God’s house, we are free to let His care guide our growth. And when we exercise that freedom, oh, when we let Him have His way, then we become fruit and light and heat and decoration to everyone around us. And if that is not a reason to sing His praises, to thank Him always, and to proclaim the goodness of His name, then I don’t know what would be.

Abba, Father, let me be like that olive tree, rooted firmly in Your house and looking only to You for my care and tending and all that I need. Let me be like that olive tree, producing the fruit and oil with which I can serve You in all the ways You direct me. Let me be like that olive tree, Father, providing for all who come near it a source of good and a way to come closer to You. I trust in You, my Father — to You, I entrust my roots, my branches, my very self, in the faith and certainty that You not only know what to do with me but will, most lovingly and mercifully, lead me according to Your will. I ask this one small thing, Lord — I ask the grace to see and recognize Your will as it is done in my life. Amen.

That’s Not How Any of This Works

This morning’s early Mass drew me into such a beautiful state of reflection, peace, and closeness to Jesus — definitely what a spiritual director would term a “consolation.” It began with the penitential rite at the beginning of the Mass. When I bowed my head and closed my eyes and thought about how sin separates me from Jesus, I prayed for mercy and forgiveness, and I thought about how hard it can be to avoid sin; and then I remembered to listen.

And when I listened, there He was. I felt that what He wanted me to know this morning is that He will always be right beside me, ready to help me if I will just turn to him. And for the rest of the Mass and through Holy Communion and all the way home, I carried the warmth and feeling of His closeness. As I prepared breakfast, I thought probably writing today’s blog post would be a breeze, because my heart was so full.

So why is it that when it came time to pour that last cup of coffee and sit down to write, I felt nothing? The place my words usually come from was dry as dust, and the lovely wonderful feelings I had enjoyed during Mass seemed about as far from me as they could possibly be and still be remembered.

When I sat down at the laptop and put my fingers over the keyboard, I felt a bit like the youthful pianist who, having memorized her piece for the recital, sits down to play for the audience and finds she has forgotten every note, even the beginning note; there is nothing to play. The channel from my mind to my fingers seemed to be closed. There was no feeling, there were no magical words, there was nothing with which to begin.

Although patience is not my strong suit, I sat patiently for a few moments and tried to let myself be open to the Holy Spirit. Quiet. Listening.

The title to this post is what came to my mind.

That’s Not How Any of This Works.

This spiritual life does not form and work at my command, and it most certainly does not have its foundation in my own will or in my feelings about what I am doing or experiencing.

I realized that once again, I had allowed myself to be drawn into the idea that this was about me. And if it’s about me, then it needs to be loaded up with feelings and a sense of satisfaction that I am doing these things. If it’s about me, it needs to come with rewards and needs to have all the bells and whistles.

And it’s not about me. It doesn’t originate with me. I don’t create this spiritual life, and I don’t make it go. It doesn’t run on feelings, whether those feelings take the form of consolations or the dryness of dust.

As a frail, weak, sinful human creature, I really want things to be about me. I would really love to let myself be addicted to the lovely feelings so that even the act of craving those feelings would make me feel like I am getting somewhere.

This spiritual life doesn’t originate with me, though.  That’s not how any of this works. The spiritual life originates with God; it’s entirely about Him and grows from His Word and develops by the urgings and whispers of the Holy Spirit. What a skimpy and unreliable life it would be if it came only from my limited and weak capacity and relied only on my ability to feel something. If I were to rely solely upon my own capacities to live this spiritual life, it would dry up and blow away like the dust.

This spiritual life isn’t about me or my abilities or my feelings. It is about God loving me and pursuing me and wanting me to be His child. It doesn’t arise from me, and yet it is intensely personal — because it is very definitely me whom God pursues and calls and loves by name. It requires of me only the willingness to be open to Him — to invite, to listen, to welcome; that much, and I cannot help but do what He asks.

Oh, my Father, thank You for leading me here. I desperately need Your grace to keep me listening and to keep my heart open to the promptings of Your Spirit. Please lead me so that I always turn to You when I am tempted, so that I am always open to Your pursuit of my soul and to Your love and care for me. Then, dearest Father, then use me in whatever way You want to use me for Your honor and glory. 

Psalm Reflections: Ps 143

A few posts back, I talked about some writing I had done back when I was with the Sisters of Christian Charity as a student and a fledgling religious. This writing came from reflecting on some Gospel stories as well as on the Psalms, and then writing about my reflections by restating, for lack of a better word, what I had read. I knew that a certain amount of imagination was involved in these restatements, and it was very important to me that I remain true to the core of the scriptural passages. Rather than becoming flights of fancy, these written reflections seem now to be very similar to the Ignatian manner of meditative prayer in which one imagines oneself in the moment that is captured by the passage, with a touch of Lectio Divina thrown in.

I recall being a little afraid of showing these writings to my directress; since our rules placed her in a position of pretty much total authority over her young charges, show them to her I must.

To my great surprise, the work I had done received praise and even was selected for some of our mealtime spiritual reading (one of our group always read aloud from some spiritual work for the first half of our mealtimes); not only that, I was encouraged to continue with this work.

When I left the convent, I left this small body of work behind, and I really don’t mind that. I’ve never felt very proprietary about my writing; what’s important to me is that I use the act of writing to share whatever thoughts and ideas might be helpful or useful to others.

Now, 50+ years after leaving, I find myself drawn to continue that work. So going forward, some days you will find a “scriptural reflection” here; other days, you might find a post about something triggered by other readings, a homily, or one of those nudges the Holy Spirit provides every now and then.

Today, my morning prayers led me to Psalm 143, one of the penitential psalms.

In my heart, I know that God is faithful and just and righteous. And so He deals with me in my many sins and faults and imperfections; He calls me to be like Him, He calls me out when I fail, and He forgives me when I have fallen. Why, then, do I still sin? 

With David, I realize that I am surrounded by the enemy, and the enemy does not love me. The enemy is immersed in self-love and does not desire my good. The enemy draws me away from what I know is good and tempts me with all kinds of things. The enemy promises light but delivers darkness, and by myself I am helpless. 

But here is what my God tells me: He is faithful, and I am not alone against the enemy. He is faithful, and He hears me when I ask for help. I know this, because He has answered me whenever I called to Him. Why, then, do I fail to call on Him in all circumstances? Why do I miss the opportunity to bring everything to Him? When I remember His goodness and how He has always saved me in the past, when I recall the way He has faithfully drawn me back to His own side out of the deepest pits I had fallen into, when I think of how He has always fogiven me out of His love and mercy — then I remember to trust Him, and I ask for grace to trust Him completely. 

The Spirit He sends to guide me is kind and gentle, not rough and demanding and loud like the enemy is. Let me be still in my mind and calm in my heart, so that I can hear His voice and feel His promptings. Let me reach for Him and live in the certainty that He loves me and will show me the path He wants me to walk. 

In His very faithfulness, He came to earth Himself in human form so that I, in my weakness, would have a clear model for my life. He loves me, He leads the way, and He showers me with the grace to follow. 

It’s all there. I need only reach out to Him and earnestly desire to grasp it. When I think of how He loves me, my one desire is to follow Him and serve Him. The enemy is subject to Him. When my trust is fully in the Lord, the enemy has no power over me. No matter what happens, I can turn to God, and in Him is all the strength I need. He gives me life — only He, and no other. 

Psalm 143:

A psalm of David.

LORD, hear my prayer; in your faithfulness listen to my pleading; answer me in your righteousness.

Do not enter into judgment with your servant; before you no one can be just.

The enemy has pursued my soul; he has crushed my life to the ground. He has made me dwell in darkness like those long dead.

My spirit is faint within me; my heart despairs.

I remember the days of old; I ponder all your deeds; the works of your hands I recall.

I stretch out my hands toward you, my soul to you like a parched land.

Hasten to answer me, LORD; for my spirit fails me. Do not hide your face from me, 
lest I become like those descending to the pit.

In the morning let me hear of your mercy, for in you I trust. Show me the path I should walk, for I entrust my life to you.

Rescue me, LORD, from my foes, for I seek refuge in you.

Teach me to do your will, for you are my God. May your kind spirit guide me 
on ground that is level.

For your name’s sake, LORD, give me life; in your righteousness lead my soul out of distress.

In your mercy put an end to my foes; all those who are oppressing my soul, 
for I am your servant.