Grace – Page 5 – Frassati Reflections

Would You?…Why?…For Whom?

“I want names,” he said. I remember his words. I remember his eyes, red and swollen. I remember his face, creased with grief and pain, there on the nightly news.

His young wife had been struck with malignant melanoma while carrying their unborn daughter. She was considered brain dead, but was kept on life support for three months in the hopes of the saving the baby. The baby was born and lived for a few weeks, bringing joy in the place of sorrow. But then the baby also died.

“They say God has a plan, that He can use our suffering for good. That it can help others. But I want a list of names. I want details. I want to know exactly what good will come from this…”

“I want names.“ Although it’s been many years, his words have come back to me recently. It is easy, when in the throes of suffering, to question, to wonder just how such pain can come from a loving God. Theology tells us that all things work for our good, but abstractions don’t comfort. We know to trust, to hope, but how does one exercise this, practically, in the midst of darkness?

There is a game the kids play called, “Would you rather…?” It is a conversation game, in which questions are posed: Would you rather be able to fly, or be able to change shape? Would you rather be an elephant or a lion? Would you rather have a pool full of chocolate pudding, or a pool full of skittles?

The questions suggested are silly and innocuous, but in my experience, they usually turn a bit darker (or maybe I know morbid kids). Would you rather be buried alive, or burnt at the stake? Would you rather go blind, or go deaf? Would you rather be eaten by a lion, or by sharks? But I have found that the real question is not “What you would suffer?” but “Why?” or, “For Whom?”

When my mother was first in the hospital in 2016, and I spent my days looking around for the adult in the room, for someone else to take over what I could not handle, it was my little orphan babies that gave me the strength. Certainly the prayers of the six that I held, all baptized, before they went to heaven. But it was the memory of little faces, little arms reaching up, little eyes questioning, seeking love, seeking to know they were not alone, not ultimately abandoned—these little ones carried me. “Would you suffer this, for them?” a voice inside would ask. “Yes!” was the only answer.

I had prayed to stay in China. I had asked to give my life to rescue more little ones like these, to be love for the abandoned. God said No. But in the mystery of suffering, the economy of grace, He answered my prayer to help them in a different way. To learn to intercede from afar.

More recently other suffering in the world, in the Church, has been splashed across headlines, across social media. “Lord, something has to be done. Help me be part of the solution.”

Would I suffer this (whatever I am going through)…to save a child from abuse? Would I…to ease the trauma of someone who left the church because of unspeakable crimes by her clergy? Would I…to stem the rising hate across the political spectrum? Would I…to heal my friend from her disease, to save him from cancer, to stop the one about to commit suicide?

“The interesting thing about the Scriptures,” said the priest in a recent homily, “Is that they don’t speak of suffering as something that comes down. They speak of it as something that is lifted UP, that is offered.”

The real offering of course, is Jesus on the Cross, Jesus lifted up for us. But we with our little mustard seeds of love, can offer our little crosses in union with His. And He can grow them, magnify them, until the smallest of seeds becomes the largest of shrubs, in which all the birds of the air come and find rest.

Mustard Seed

Image Credit:

Distant Shores Media/Sweet Publishing [CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)%5D, via Wikimedia Commons

Saints I Don’t Like

One evening in August I heard a piercing scream from the living room. I quickly ran to find my mother shrieking and pointing at a large black shadow that dove about the room at extreme velocity. “There’s a bat in here!”

I found myself paralyzed with fear. “God—you’ve got to help me!!!”

The bat continued to dive about. Later, after I had recounted this story to a friend, she sent this video [language warning] of a family who attempted to get rid of a bat in their dining room. In the video, the bat fluttered about creepily, but did not dive. Our bat, in contrast, behaved like a kamikaze. “That’s because it’s a young bat, not an old bat,” my mother explained. “It is stupid and scared…”

It was not as scared as I was though. When God did not answer my prayer, I brought in the big guns: “PADRE PIO YOU HAVE TO HELP ME! You have to get rid of this for me. I cannot kill it. I cannot. There has to be another way!”

The bat flew upstairs, and into the guest room, where I quickly slammed the door and continued to plead with Padre Pio.

Suddenly, I remembered that this was the one room in the house with a door to the outside. It is one that is never used, but which opens out to a little porch. I moved quickly over to the door and opened it, praying for the bat to fly out before others could fly in. Meanwhile my mother, who had followed me upstairs, shut the door leaving me trapped with the bat.

I endured an eternity of terror—at least five minute’s worth—while the bat dove at my head, then back up and around the room, then at my head again. I cringed in the corner until finally, it flew out into the night.

“Thank you Padre Pio!” I exclaimed, my relief mingled with surprise that in fact, he came through for me—again.

* * *

You would think, hearing this, that I must be a great fan of Padre Pio. I am not.

Padre Pio has worked many miracles for me, but I can’t bring myself to like him. I’ve wanted to like him—felt that I ought to—but I cannot. He seems too austere for my taste; too cranky; too intricately linked with suffering.

I know that had I met him in real life, I probably would have really liked him. We might even have become great friends. I know that someday, soon perhaps, we will in fact be great friends. I know this because it’s happened to me before.

People who’ve seen me wearing my St. Thérèse necklace will doubtless be surprised to hear that I used to dislike her too. The saint whom I now credit with my spirituality used to be one I avoided at all costs.

Lots of people love Thérèse. Scores of friends have asked for and received roses from her on a regular basis. I knew I ought to love her too, but when I first read her story, I wanted to punch her. (True story). She seemed way too saccharine, too spoiled (first by her family, then by God), and it was impossible to take her protestations of littleness seriously. Yet she claimed to be “little” and to be in need of Jesus’ carrying her to become a saint. Please.

I’ve written elsewhere and at length about learning to receive God’s love and depend on God’s mercy, a lesson that I’ve come to appreciate precisely from St. Thérèse.

* * *

Last Friday, I was reading a reflection from St. Isaac Jogues. I’ve never disliked Isaac—he was in fact rather useful in teaching fifth grade boys, who relished the graphic details of his torture and martyrdom. But personally I found him a bit too gory.

“It is only my cowardice and bodily weakness which form powerful obstacles to the designs God has for me and for this country” he began, and I immediately wanted to roll my eyes.

This was the guy Erin wrote about last week—the guy who had his fingers chewed off, among other tortures—but who then WENT BACK VOLUNTARILY to minister to those same people. That he should call himself a weak coward reeked of absurdity and untruth.

“But what if it’s true?” a voice spoke within me, seemingly out of nowhere. “What if he really was that weak? What if he really was a coward?”

As often happens when I hear this Voice, I was deeply challenged and more than a little afraid. What if…?

It is much safer, I realized, to believe that saints are super-human, to believe that they are made of different material than I.

But what if they’re not?

What if they are in fact, made of the same stuff I am? The same weakness. The same fears. The same sluggishness of heart.

But what if the mustard seed is allowed to grow, the leaven received in order to transform? What if God’s life really does have the power to change us? To make us into more than we might dream?

When I was a child, I loved the butterfly. I marveled that something as ugly and crawling as the caterpillar could become something so beautiful and free.

If the caterpillar were a thinking creature, would it know what lay in store? Would it hear whispers from the butterflies of what they used to be, of their former lowliness, and doubt? Could it even imagine, a creature of earth with so many legs that moved so slowly, could it even imagine what it would feel like to fly? When it was finally ensconced in its cocoon, did it feel as though it were buried, trapped, that things were finally over?

I don’t know if a caterpillar can imagine flying. But it will be transformed into something that can.

Of course, in humans this transformation is not inevitable, nor can it be achieved by effort alone. It requires cooperation with grace. We must allow God to plant and cultivate the mustard seed. We must allow Him to incorporate the leaven into our very being.

But what then, if His words are true?

Jesus’s first miracle was the transformation of water into wine; His last was the transformation of wine into His blood. But His most remarkable is the transformation of us into Himself.

Lord I believe; help my unbelief.

Quotes:

St. Isaac Jogues, just before he died:

“I do not fear death or torture. I do not know why you would kill me. I come here to confirm the peace and show you the way to heaven.”

C.S. Lewis in Mere Christianity:

“Christ says ‘Give Me all. I don’t want so much of your time and so much of your money and so much of your work. I want You… Hand over the whole natural self, all the desires you think innocent as well as the ones you think wicked—the whole outfit. I will give you a new self instead. In fact, I will give you Myself; my own will shall become yours’… The process will be long and in parts very painful, but that is what we are in for. Nothing less. He meant what He said.”

St. John Paul II:

“We are not the sum of our weaknesses and failures; we are the sum of the Father’s love for us and our real capacity to become the image of His Son.”

**Disclaimer: Alert readers will notice that I’ve actually posted about next week’s Gospel, not the one for today! A big mea culpa–I didn’t realize my mistake until too late!

Butterfly

Image from Wikimedia Commons

Are You For Real?

“Suffering is Jesus kissing you from the cross!” Mother Teresa is reported to have told a woman in great anguish. “Well then, tell Him to please stop!” the woman supposedly retorted.

Lately, I have been inclined to agree.

I wrote recently that it is when you hit rock bottom that you discover just Who that Rock really is. But I feel as though instead, I am lying splattered and splayed upon its hardness. Previous pious platitudes have not brought comfort.

“I can’t handle this, Lord. I have nothing left to give.” I was praying weeks ago in front of the Pieta, on Saturday afternoon of the Frassati retreat, begging for a reprieve from fatigue and stress. Neither the statue nor any other voice spoke into the silence, but I felt a pain like a cross beam spread across my shoulders, then slowly into my neck. That pain did not subside after my prayer was over. It only grew, and I blamed my relentless stress.

A few days later, I was not able to turn my head without a cocktail of ibuprofen and prescription drugs. The doctors took some bloodwork, which revealed elevated lymphocytes and some other anomalies, and I was diagnosed with Lyme disease.

“Are you for real?” I asked God. “Didn’t I ask for rest, for reprieve? Did you hear me correctly?” Silence. “All right, I will say Yes, if this is Your will for me…”

After ten days of doxycycline, the pain had only worsened, spreading from my elbows throughout my arms and legs. I was unable to lift even small items without intense pain, so I called my sister Teresa to help me take care of my mother, and my 88-year-old aunt who has also been staying with us.

On the way back from the train station, I was telling my sister about my symptoms when suddenly the pain increased exponentially. Simultaneously there was a terrific bang and lurching. I struggled to breathe as the now excruciating pain tore through my ribs and neck. It took a few seconds to figure out what was happening—an SUV had smashed into our car, which in turn propelled our small Honda into the SUV in front of us. I didn’t even get a look at the scene as the ambulance carried us away.

“Are you for real God? Surely this is not happening…” I was mostly laughing, as I later texted neck-brace selfies from the ER to friends and family, but maybe it was the morphine. I was admitted to the hospital, to ultimately be diagnosed with a fracture of my neck vertebrae. Teresa returned to the city with her own very painful injuries (diagnosis still in progress).

A few days later I was finally feeling strong enough to sit up at the table for dinner. But a bit later, my mother started complaining of abdominal pain. The complaints grew in urgency and volume, and I looked to see that she was as white as a sheet and sweating. A call to a nurse friend directed me to call 911, in case she was having a heart attack.

My few minutes of sitting up became seven hours in the ER, only to have Mom admitted, not for her heart but her pancreas. “Really, not again…” I sighed.

The next morning, before I call for a ride to the hospital, I stumble into the kitchen to make myself some coffee. Something doesn’t smell right. Maybe it’s because there’s been nobody to do the dishes, but there aren’t that many, and the smell is worse than that. I painstakingly bend down to peer into the corner, to discover that an unwanted gift from Saint Martin has been decomposing in the corner of the pantry.

This is the last straw. “I HATE ALL LIVING THINGS!” I scream into the Silence. But I hate even more things that used to be living. Surely this cannot be real. Surely there is someone else to deal with this. I have said many times that I don’t mind being single and without a husband, except perhaps on garbage night. I add this to the list. “This is not okay, God!!!”

Mom is released from the hospital two days later, and I think I can finally breathe. But then we get the news that the car is likely totaled, and I look at our finances, and feel my feet sinking into an ocean of panic. “I trusted you, God!” Without a job, our finances have been precarious for awhile, and this is one hit too many. What are we supposed to do now?

On Saturday evening I am nauseous from the stress, worry and pain. We go to Mass, at which the Gospel is the Rich Young Man, who leaves Jesus, sad because of his preference for possessions. I feel an odd sense of conviction, that despite technically living below the poverty line, I am no different from this rich man. That there is still more to surrender.

“ARE YOU FOR REAL?” I ask God incredulously. Surely He cannot want more of me…surely there is nothing left to give!

God is silent, but other voices start piping in.

“Are YOU for real, Grace?” asks the Girl I Ought to Be. “Where is your trust in God?” snaps her snarky sister. “You talk about it all the time, about faith on the tightrope, about thanking God in all things. Time to see what you’re made of!”

Real Me responds with words that could constitute material for Confession.

“What do you want from me God? I am trying to trust you. I am trying to say yes. I am even trying to thank you, but it seems like a joke. Are you even there? Are you, in fact, for real?”

Doubt comes around like a Dementor, threatening to consume me with its darkness and despair, so I quickly shut the door, in my will if not my emotions. “Jesus, I trust in you.” The words comfort me, even if only 1% of me can get on board at the moment.

On Sunday I sit down to pray. “Lord, I am trying to say thank you. Trying to say yes. Trying to trust. But that is above my paygrade right now. I need you to do all these things for me, in me. I don’t even know what that means. I even need you to give me faith to believe that you are real.”

And I remember suddenly, that it is the date of my baptism, that (quite a few decades ago) on this very day I was brought as an infant to a small church in Kentucky. Brought to be marked with the sign of the cross, to receive the gift of faith.

The Silence remains, but I find rising up within me the grace to look up and say “You.” To remember and know that my prayers are not being spoken to or received by an abstraction, but by a Person. By Someone who is loving me in this. That I am saying yes not to the cross itself but to the Person who asks me to carry it (or more accurately, carries me during it).

Today is the feast of St. Margaret Mary Alacoque, to whom God entrusted the vision and message of His Sacred Heart. A Heart that was incarnate that we might know God’s love is not an abstraction, but in fact deeply human. A Heart that was pierced and bled for our sins, yet still burns with a personal love for each one of us.

Invitation to Festivus

Job opened his mouth and cursed his day.
Job spoke out and said:
“Perish the day on which I was born,
the night when they said, ‘The child is a boy!’
Why did I not perish at birth,
come forth from the womb and expire?”—Job 3:1-3

* * *

One of the prime tactics of the Opposition Voice is what I call an “Invitation to Festivus.” Festivus was initially a holiday invented by a character on the comedy sitcom Seinfeld to celebrate the “airing of grievances.” The idea became so popular that it was taken on in real life and now has formal recognition and its own date, December 23^rd, where it is billed as an “anti-Christmas.” While it is celebrated for the most part as a joke, and to be enjoyed as such, actual Opposition Voice invitations are another matter. It is particularly fitting that these invitations be recognized as in opposition to the gifts and joy that Christ brings.

These invitations have a way of arriving when I am about to begin a worthwhile activity, or even more frequently, when I sit down to pray. As I try to quiet myself, provocations for anger rise to the surface. Wrongs in the world, wrongs in my life, people that have failed me or failed at what I think they should be. “Someone is wrong on the internet” and so my mind starts composing a long letter-to-the-editor rebuttal. “Someone did me wrong” and my mind conjures up vivid, detailed video footage of the event and every word that was said, or that should have been.

Recently it was a woman who rather outrageously and falsely accused me of doing something wrong. I was in this particular case quite innocent, and while the matter itself was paltry and insignificant, her words continued to smolder in my mind. I do not always receive just criticism with grace, but false accusations, even minor ones, invite my ego to a duel onto death. My face grows hot as the resentment burns to a dangerous level. Instead of defending myself at the time however, I simply said, rather too quietly “That’s not true” and we awkwardly ended the conversation.

But the furnace has been stoked and the fire continues to rage, as my mind thinks of all the things I could and should have said. Some eloquent if lengthy depositions in my defense; some could be summed up in four letters.

We’ve all been there. And that’s the problem—I was there—more than twenty-eight years ago. This is not a new or recent grievance; it is one conjured up from a stash of hoarded unpleasant memories that were never properly put in the trash.

The self-pity party, with help from my imagination, has been upgraded to a gala. And then a new guest of honor comes crashing in: Shame. What is wrong with you? Why are you so insecure that you are bothered by decades-old criticism? Why couldn’t you have spoken up for yourself—why are you always such a coward? Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

How to respond?

The first line of defense is to recognize that most of these invitations are junk mail and require no response at all. Simply tear them up and put them in the paper trash. Many of these grievances disappear as soon as they are acknowledged as temptations or distractions.

Second—if that doesn’t work, and it seems to come with a message that requires something more, speak God’s love into it. In the scenario above, this would take the form of forgiveness: forgiving the woman who judged me unfairly, and then forgiving myself for a) my weakness at the time and b) my weaknesses now, in the recalling. Maybe even going a step further and saying “I love you!” by name to BOTH parties. I realize this sounds remarkably cheesy, but the fact that in practice it is so difficult to do suggests it may be more helpful than we realize.

Third—sometimes God lets us know that this has come to signal something a little more serious, and we are invited to look at what the invitation is really about. Why does it bother me? Is there an underlying wound that God wants to heal?

If this wound is not apparent, we should not worry about digging it up. Sometimes, however, God is allowing it to rise to the surface because it is time to bring it to light and to heal it. If that is the case, let this be a subject for your prayer time!

It is never helpful to attend a party hosted by the Opposition. But God Himself loves to hear whatever is on our mind, and He is happy to let us air our grievances to Him in all of their rancor and bitterness. Let Him be the host. When He does, there is always a gift exchange, with God being the more generous giver!

When God Goes Missing

“Your mother and your brothers are standing outside
and they wish to see you.”
[Jesus] said to them in reply, “My mother and my brothers
are those who hear the word of God and act on it.”—Luke 8:20-21

* * *

“Cie-cie, Santa’s dead!” announced Little Nicholas solemnly. I raised an eyebrow toward his mother, my friend Heidi. “I was telling him about Saint Nicholas, and how he lived hundreds of years ago…” she explained with a sigh. “Santa’s dead…” repeated Little Nicholas with a sigh of his own.

But the next day we went to the mall to ride the escalators and lo and behold, there was Santa Claus sitting by the Christmas tree. “Look Mom!” Little Nicholas exclaimed with great glee and equal volume. “Santa is alive! He’s risen from the dead and born again!”

I admit to a certain smug satisfaction: I am firmly in the pro-Santa camp, having fond memories of him and most of the other so-called “Fairy Tale Figures” of childhood. I loved waking up on Christmas morning to find the surprises that Santa had left under the tree. I loved waking up and searching for the chocolate eggs and jelly beans that the Easter Bunny had hidden for us around the house. The Tooth Fairy was admittedly more forgetful and less reliable, but sooner or later I would awake with joy to find a quarter under the pillow—relative riches.

But there was one such figure from my childhood whose games of seek and find I did not enjoy: the Whisk-Away Where Witch. I did not learn until later in life that the Whisk-Away Where Witch was selective in whose houses she visited, that in fact, I’ve yet to meet anyone else who even knew of her existence. This did not stop her from having an active life here on Maple Avenue.

When something was left about (i.e. not “put away properly”) the witch would hide it. The more one whined “Where is it?” (unless one was simultaneously cleaning up other things) the further away she would hide it. Some things she would mysteriously return if and when a room was cleaned up. Some never came back. My china doll mysteriously showed up in my mother’s dresser years later…

I was grateful later in life to discover an ally in Saint Anthony. But sometime when he seems to be slacking and my seeking fruitless, I am tempted to revert and blame darker forces. But what of those times when it is God Himself who seems to go missing?

In today’s Gospel we see Mary and the brothers of Jesus are looking for Him, they want to speak with Him. Instead Jesus says to the crowd “My mother and my brothers are those who hear the word of the Lord and act on it.” We are quick as Catholics to rise to Mary’s defense against those who might suggest that Jesus was diminishing her—surely, nobody more perfectly heard and acted better than Mary, so we know that in fact He was not dissing her.

But we must not rush too quickly past the thoughts and feelings of Mary that day, as she stood on the outside, unable to see and speak with her son. What must this have been like for her? This was not the first time she was asked to give her assent to the will of God, nor was it the first time that she sought her son and could not reach Him.

Caryll Houselander writes of Mary’s experience of losing Christ in the Temple:

The striking thing about it is that it was not really a loss. Our Lady did not lose Christ; He deliberately went away…Nor was this an isolated incident. When she had found Him, after three days of utter bereavement. He returned with her to Nazareth; but after what must have seemed a very short time to her, He left her again, and from that time forward her life was a continued seeking for Him.

We hear of her standing outside the crowd during His public life; of her following Him to the Cross, where the very life she had been given to Him would be taken away from her. For a brief moment He was put in her arms again, and then taken up quickly (for there was urgency over the burial) and put into the tomb.

Why did Christ treat our Lady this way?…

…It was because Our Lady lived the life of all humanity. Concentrated into her tiny history is the life story of the whole human race, the whole relationship of the redeemed human race with God…Naturally, then, she experienced this loss of the Child because it is an experience which we all have to go through, that our love may be sifted and purified.¹

The thoughts of Our Lady are not recorded; we know only her assent. That she said Yes to all that was to be given to her, all that was asked of her. Her assent was without hesitation, without reserve. Just as Christ fully entered into the human experience, so too our Lady lives her perfect assent in solidarity with the human condition. And it is the human experience to feel the absence of God, to seek Him—in order to find Him.

When we think of Mary’s fiat and maternity we think of her holding Jesus—as a tiny baby in Bethlehem, and then perhaps in the Pieta moment under the cross, when she holds Him again, this time lifeless. We do not often picture her arms empty, reaching, on the outside of Christ’s life. But this too is a key point of her fiat, of her maternity not just of Christ, but of us.

There would have been no doubt of Our Lady’s knowing her son’s face; but often, in the dusk, she must have searched for it in the face of another boy, and the boy would have wondered who this woman was and why she leaned down and searched his face; he could not have guessed that the day would come when the Mother of God would really find her son in every boy and every boy would be able to give Christ back to her….

…Later on, she was again seeking for Christ, this time among the crowd that thronged round Him in His public life. She is among those who are trying to get close to Him; therefore, she is among the sick, the crippled, the blind, the poorest beggars—outcasts of every description. For such are the people who follow Christ in every age.²

If we can take comfort in Mary’s search for God, in feeling His absence, we can take it also in her faith, and in her finding.

Surely when on Holy Saturday He is again missing, her arms again empty, and she cannot find Him; surely in that missing and absence she recalls His words of long ago telling her that even then, He is about His Father’s business.

Notes:

¹ Houselander, Caryll. The Reed of God. (Notre Dame: Ave Maria Press, 2006), pp. 109-110.

²Ibid, p. 140

The Heart of an Only Son

Jesus journeyed to a city called Nain,
and his disciples and a large crowd accompanied him.
As he drew near to the gate of the city,
a man who had died was being carried out,
the only son of his mother, and she was a widow.
A large crowd from the city was with her.
When the Lord saw her,
he was moved with pity for her and said to her,
“Do not weep.”
He stepped forward and touched the coffin;
at this the bearers halted,
and he said, “Young man, I tell you, arise!”
The dead man sat up and began to speak,
and Jesus gave him to his mother. –Luke 7:11-15

* * *

At first she was just a little confused, having trouble remembering the passwords to her computer and her phone. She had lost some weight; she was very tired; she had a persistent cough that was strong enough to trigger the automatic water faucet a few yards away from her bed in the ER. But nobody seemed particularly concerned. “There are some anomalies in her blood work—we’d like to keep her overnight for observation—but don’t worry; she’s not being admitted. She’ll likely go home in the morning.”

My mother had walked into the ER, normally if somewhat reluctantly. But the next day she was stumbling a little, the bloodwork was still a little “off.” She was admitted. On day two she needed assistance walking, and by day three she was a little confused as to where she was. “How is Teresa going to get into the school if they lock it up at 3:00 p.m.?” she worried.

By the weekend she could not get out of bed unassisted. Each day brought dramatic decline, both physical and mental. “Do you know who is there?” the nurse asked my mother, pointing to where I stood by her bedside, as I had every day for a week. She looked up with benign bewilderment. “No,” she said, “I don’t know who that is…”

But she could figure out certain things. “If they ask you where you are, tell them you are at XYZ Hospital!” she would tell me and anyone who would listen. But then add with a devious grin, “even though we know it’s not true…”

An MRI revealed part of the cause: a shower of strokes over both hemispheres of her brain. “I’ve never seen anything like this!” reported the doctors with amazement. Her bloodwork continued to reveal more strangeness, markers that didn’t match, and the doctors began to look for a cause for this “mystery illness.”

A few weeks in, still confused, she began to complain of stomach pain. This was a new symptom. “It’s probably just constipation,” they said. “Or she’s just confused. Don’t worry.” This continued for three days, until a new blood draw revealed a drastic drop in her hemoglobin. By then she was crying, begging to be given something for the pain.

After looking at the CT-Scan, the doctors finally gave us permission to worry. She had an internal bleed the size of a watermelon, and was being rushed down to ICU. “I have to be honest—she may not make it through the night.”

* * *

In today’s Gospel, Jesus comes face-to-face with family grief. From within the crowd that accompanied Him—many no doubt begging Him for favors, answers, healings—He sees a coffin being carried. His heart is moved, not just by the young man’s loss of life, but by the grief of the widowed mother. Why does this touch him so much? What is it that so moves the heart of the Unmoved Mover?

Father Paul Scalia writes:

By His divine nature He performs the miracle. But He is moved to do so in His human nature. That He was moved with pity refers to His Sacred Heart and His capacity to be moved with human love. Saint Luke tells us that the deceased was “the only son of His mother, and she as a widow.” (Lk 7:12) This describes Our Lord Himself, and His mother. So it should not surprise us that He turns first to the widow, in whom He sees the anticipation of Mary’s sorrow. “Do not weep,” He tells her—as if to tell His own Mother. Yes—Our Lord is all-powerful. But in His sacred humanity He places Himself within our reach—so that our misery moves Him to act on our behalf.¹ (emphasis added)

Jesus touches the coffin, and the man is raised back to life. Saint Luke then uses an interesting expression, “Jesus gave him to his mother.” Father Scalia notes that Jesus does not “allow the miracle of raising a man from the dead to obscure the importance of the man’s human relationships.”

We know that God is love, but the words do not always reach us. Some time ago I watched a grim-faced woman on the subway who barked at high volume: “Jeee-zus loves you! Jeee-zus loves you!” I watched as people rolled or averted their eyes. Some squirmed; a man across from me seem apoplectic with agitation at her words. I, who claim to be willing to die to defend such a pronouncement, found myself cringing and sliding down in my seat.

Yet I’ve also seen those same words move men twice my size and strength, and reduce them to tears. “Jesus loves you!” When these words become real, when the hearer is convinced that God’s love is in fact profound and personal, something greater than resurrection happens in the human heart.

This weekend Father Columba spoke about the power of Words of Knowledge. God uses human instruments, to speak into human hearts, often by revealing small, intimate details that only a concerned Father would know to reveal. It is one thing to believe in a love that is generic and amorphous. It is something much more when we realize that His concern and care for us is concrete, specific and personal.

Like the widowed mother, Our Lady would also be given her Son, there under the cross. We see her suffering, that Michelangelo carved into the Pieta. She held in her arms the lifeless Body of one who died that we might know that personal love. But she received Him forever when He rose from the dead.

* * *

I was there in the ICU that night as my mother journeyed to the edge of death, but came back. I was there again at his bedside, several months later, when my father took that same journey, but he did not return.

There was much suffering that year; it would be months before my mother returned home, her illness still classified as a mystery. There were many days in which I thought that I could not endure more, that there was nothing left in me to die.

But one of the beautiful things about hitting rock bottom is that you discover just Who that Rock Is. We are never alone.

Notes:

¹Scalia, Rev. Paul. That Nothing May Be Lost. (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2017) p. 134

Appointment With God

Jesus departed to the mountain to pray,
and He spent the night in prayer to God.
–Luke 6:12

There is nobody on this planet that would accuse me of being a neat freak. And yet, when I sit down for prayer time, my desire for tidiness goes suddenly and inexplicably into overdrive.

I notice the picture that is hanging ever so slightly unevenly, begging to be straightened before I start. I notice the pile of papers on my desk, and have an immediate urge to address or file them. I see the basket of laundry and remember that I must apply stain remover to that one shirt, and if I don’t do it right now surely it will be ruined forever. The books on my shelf are crooked, acquiring dust, need to be read, need to be given away—that would be a good one for Susie—maybe before I begin to pray I should call her? Maybe I should make my bed. Maybe I should get in my bed, because did I really get enough sleep last night?

And when all else fails, as I begin to pray while looking out at the morning sky, I will see a small shadow moving across the window, as yet another stink bug compels extermination…

Anyone that has ever tried to put a toddler to bed will recognize these for what they are: diversion tactics. Whether natural or preternatural, resistance to these and any other delays is the first step to prayer.

The truth is, the Opposition will use any strategy that works to get us not to pray, or to delay prayer until a “later” that he knows may never come. It is imperative to resist these temptations, but to do so we must recognize them as such.

*You don’t have time to pray! You are too busy. It’s not like you’re a cloistered nun—you have a life. Don’t worry, God understands. Your work is your prayer…

*Daily prayer is not realistic. God asks too much of you. You ask too much of yourself…

*Yeah, you should pray of course, but better to get to Confession first. You’re not in a good place to meet God at the moment, are you?

*You aren’t very good at prayer. When’s the last time you heard God talking to you? You’re not like those other people who talk to God like they know Him or something…

*You don’t know how to pray. Why waste your time on something that you won’t get anything much out of?

*You can pray later, when you’re not so busy or distracted; when you don’t have so much on your plate…

*How do you know God is listening to you? Is He even there? If He is real, why doesn’t He do X? Why does He allow Y? How can you talk with somebody you don’t know for sure is even there?

In today’s Gospel Jesus calls the twelve apostles and heals the crowds, but only after spending the night in prayer. What did that night look like? How did the Son of God converse with the Father? We can only wonder—and marvel that such questions can even be asked of God made Man.

We only know that even Jesus needed prayer, that all of His actions flowed from this union with His Father lived out in prayer.

Reading this gospel, I was reminded of Father Michael Scanlan T.O.R., the former president of my alma mater. After his passing in January 2017, alumni were invited to offer tributes and share memories related to his legacy in their lives. At first I thought I had little to say. While I am no doubt indebted to him for my college experience which set a trajectory for my life, my personal encounters with him were few and not the sort that great stories are made of.

Yet much is made in Christian life of the notion of planting seeds—how often that is what we as educators are called to, even when we do not see for years any visible signs of growth or fruit. I think of myself often as a seed planter (at least on days when I am feeling optimistic) but I forget at times of how much I am the recipient of the seeds of other sowers. One such sower was Fr. Mike, and the particular seed was his book Appointment with God.

The funny thing is, I am not sure if I ever actually read the book. My memory is rather foggy on that point. But the idea of a daily appointment with God, a designated prayer time, was spoken of frequently at FUS and modeled for me by many of my fellow students. His idea was simple—a guarded time set aside each day, put onto the calendar and thereby not to be moved, to meet with God in conversation, ideally before the rest of the day and its concerns came rushing in to fill the time.

I loved the idea of it from the beginning. But faithful practice of it was decades away, as I made what I realize in retrospect were flimsy excuses.

Years later, as I started to become more faithful to times of prayer, I began to experience God’s love in new ways. Sometimes I had experiences of His presence during prayer; more often I began to recognize His presence outside of prayer. Flashes of understanding. Conversations that confirmed something I thought God was saying. Snatches of song in the grocery store with their secular lyrics—that were not only poignant echoes of God’s love, but even prophetic at times. The more I made time for God to speak to me during prayer, the more I heard His voice in unexpected places.

Demons Are Not Humble

I am not in general prey to superstition, with one glaring exception: the Litany of Humility. I learned to fear this prayer in college, when I first took it up as part of the popular piety of the time. I quickly found that my prayers were answered rapidly and concretely—I was offered occasions of humiliation, often public, with nearly every recitation. On one occasion, I was sitting with an upperclassman to whom I was rather attracted and wanted very much to impress. Somehow I managed to rock and tip my chair backwards, landing flat on my backside with my legs in the air like something out of a slapstick comedy. I joined the whole room in laughter, but then decided to table the prayers for humility indefinitely. Like St. Augustine, I hoped that someday God might grant me the grace. But I added a very firm “not yet.”

It was years later that I was telling some of these stories to a fellow teacher, joking that if students needed quick assurance that God is real and responds to prayer, the Litany of Humility was perhaps a quicker bet than the Skeptic’s Prayer. It was only a few hours later that I was pulled over and given my first (and only) speeding ticket. While I sat in the driver’s seat with the police lights flashing behind me, blushing down to my goody-two-shoes, another car pulled over to join us. It was my mother and with her all of my siblings. Anxious to find out what the matter was, she drew over to ask what I was doing there. I don’t remember which was more mortifying—to have my family witness the speeding ticket, or to have the cops see my mother coming over to help. I changed the “not yet” to “not ever” and stopped even joking about the Litany of Humility.

* * *

Demons are not humble. They brag. The demon in today’s Gospel recognizes Jesus and wants to show off his knowledge: “I know who you are—the Holy One of God!” he cries out in a loud voice before being cast out.

Saint Francis of Assisi uses the example of such demons to warn us: having knowledge and powers is not an occasion for glory. In Admonition #5, he offers a candid (to put it mildly) warning that should be daily reading for anyone in Church ministry:

Consider, O man, how great the excellence in which the Lord has placed you because He has created and formed you to the image of His beloved Son according to the body and to His own likeness according to the spirit. And all the creatures that are under heaven serve and know and obey their Creator in their own way better than you. And even the demons did not crucify Him, but you together with them crucified Him and still crucify Him by taking delight in vices and sins. Wherefore then can you glory? For if you were so clever and wise that you possessed all science, and if you knew how to interpret every form of language and to investigate heavenly things minutely, you could not glory in all this, because one demon has known more of heavenly things and still knows more of earthly things than all men, although there may be some man who has received from the Lord a special knowledge of sovereign wisdom. In like manner, if you were handsomer and richer than all others, and even if you could work wonders and put the demons to flight, all these things are hurtful to you and in nowise belong to you, and in them you cannot glory; that, however, in which we may glory is in our infirmities, and in bearing daily the holy cross of our Lord Jesus Christ. (Emphasis added).

Translation: even the demons know that Jesus is God. In fact, they know more than we do. So any knowledge, any teaching or other gifts from God, do not make us great and therefore should not be a source of pride. We can only glory in our weakness, and in bearing the Cross of Christ.

We easily recognize pride in its more “worldly” forms: when men and women seek glory in the accumulation of wealth or prestige or power. In the Church it takes more insidious forms. I wrote last week how morality can become an idol; so too can our good works, our mission, or things that we do ostensibly for God.

Our mission is a gift from God. It points to God, not to ourselves. Currently, we are watching with shock and horror the unmasking of those who have abandoned the mission to serve God—and those who have put their mission ahead of God and ahead of those they are called to love. Abominable things have been covered up to protect the image of the Body of the Christ, while underneath, Christ suffers over and over in the wounds of the victims.

It was not a coincidence that when Christ was crucified He was stripped of His garments. He who had no shame took ours upon Him, so that ours might be revealed and healed. We more than ever need humble leaders, who will follow Christ, unafraid to be shamed for the Gospel. We need those who are guilty to be honest about their sin, to accept having their crimes laid bare, to stop covering their shame but instead bring it forth to the only One who can heal. We need those who are innocent to be willing to suffer shame with the guilty, as Christ did—for the sake of sinner and victim alike. We need a Church that is not afraid of the truth, confident in the knowledge that the Truth will set us free.

We need a stripping away of false versions of holiness, the false versions of ourselves that we worship in God’s place. We need to tear away the coverings that allow evil to hide behind pious facades. And we need a repentance that is recognizes what sin is, but also knows that sin doesn’t get the last word. Today more than ever we need to recognize the truth about what we are and what we are not. We are not God.

When Goods Become Gods

Jesus said:
“Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, you hypocrites.
You pay tithes of mint and dill and cummin,
and have neglected the weightier things of the law:
judgment and mercy and fidelity.
But these you should have done, without neglecting the others.
Blind guides, who strain out the gnat and swallow the camel!

“Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, you hypocrites.
You cleanse the outside of cup and dish,
but inside they are full of plunder and self-indulgence.
Blind Pharisee, cleanse first the inside of the cup,
so that the outside also may be clean.”—Matt 23:23-26

I recently subscribed to Apple Music, which enables me to listen to pretty much any song for free. In a fit of nostalgia, I downloaded many of my high school favorites from the 80’s and early 90’s. Listening to them I am amazed and amused by two things: First, these songs are so riddled with longing and angst I am surprised I survived even an hour of adolescence without copious amounts of Prozac. Second, I really had no idea how very many metaphors there are for the should-be-marital-act that I was completely oblivious to in my youth.

Just like the lyrics of an old country song, I too was “looking for love in all the wrong places.” But this is not a story about sexual mistakes or what Fr. Isaac dubbed the “Las Vegas Sins.” Rather I tried very hard to be a “good girl” and knew that my desire for love was ultimately to be met in God. But I (unconsciously) believed that God’s love was something to be earned, fought for. I thought it was a matter of getting the rules right, of moral perfection, of mastering my will.

The Opposition Voice will take one of two tactics when it comes to morality. First, he may tempt us to ignore God’s law entirely, saying a particular sin is no big deal, won’t harm us, isn’t even really a sin. Or, he may take an opposite tact: he may encourage us to fixate on sin, fixate on what is right and wrong, the details of law—at the expense of our relationship with the Law Giver. This was the mistake of the Pharisees in today’s Gospel, and at times my own as well.

All of God’s laws are for our ultimate good and happiness, even those we find difficult and unpalatable. Moralism, however, takes those beautiful and good laws and makes an idol of them.

We need a sidewalk to proceed down a street safely, but we are not meant to live our life looking only at the concrete. A map may provide helpful directions to keep us from getting lost, but life is not meant to be an endless squabble over the map.

A few years ago, some Frassati friends and I visited Yellowstone Park. There are hundreds of acres of land that are completely free and open to exploration. There are some areas with recommended paths that are helpful but not required. And there are some areas, generally surrounding hot springs or canyons, with paths and platforms that are absolutely essential for one’s safety—step off the path, and you could die.

The purpose of these latter paths is non-negotiable—we disregard them to our peril. But we do not come to Yellowstone to gaze at and photograph the path, but to enable us to enjoy all of the beauty that surrounds it.

Similarly, the moral law is not at end in itself, but God’s plan to help us live life to the full. A good marriage is not the absence of adultery or murder or skillful negotiations about who does the dishes and takes out the garbage. Certainly, those things are necessary if not deal-breakers, but they are not enough. What makes marriage meaningful is the love lived between spouses, the gift of self that grows into new little gift-givers.

The Opposition Voice will sometimes encourage perfectionism and moralism, not because he values morality, but because he knows we will ultimately fail. He will encourage us to jump as high as we can, in order to try to reach God on our own, knowing we will get tired and eventually give up.

After sin, he continues with the same varying tactics. To one he whispers, “Your sin is no big deal! No need to go to Confession. You didn’t kill anyone after all. Oh, well, maybe you did, but she deserved it, right?”

To the other: “What an abominable sin you committed! God could never forgive that. You are not worthy of the pure love of God. You shouldn’t even think about approaching Him in prayer!”

Always his goal is to block relationship, block reconciliation between creature and Creator.

When I taught children about Confession I would hold up a clear glass of water, telling them that it represented their souls at baptism, clean of original sin and filled with sanctifying grace. Then we would add drops of food coloring, representing various sins committed, until the water turned black.

“Does God love you when you look like this?” I would ask. There were always a few who guessed No.

“God never stops loving you—even when you look like this!” I would insist. “God loves you just the way you are—but too much to let you stay that way.” And then I would talk to them about the sacrament of Confession, how God’s love not only washes us but transforms us with His Grace and Mercy.

To further illustrate this, I would pour into the blackened water Absolution (represented by a bottle of Clorox), which changed suddenly the contents of the glass. I had been told that this would make the water clear again, but in fact, it turned it a deep golden color. At first I was dismayed that it “didn’t work properly,” but then I realized that this was in fact a more appropriate image for Confession.

Scripture tells us that “where sin abounds, grace abounds more.” God takes the evil we offer and transforms it to an even greater good than existed previously. The Prodigal Son upon His return finds not the life of servitude he expects, but a great welcome, the father running out to meet him, a party thrown in His honor

May we seek to follow Christ, who is the Way, the Truth and Life, and never let any sin be an obstacle to His love for us.

The Give-Away Pile

Then Peter said to him in reply,
“We have given up everything and followed you.
What will there be for us?”—Matt 19:27

“It’s funny how quickly life changes from, ‘Sure God—I’ll give you anything you want!’ to ‘Well, not that. Or that. Or that. Can I perhaps interest you in something from this small give-away pile—you know, the things I no longer actually want or need?’ 😊

This was my Facebook status on April 15^th of 2016. Two years later I am hazy as to what sort of sacrifices inspired this particular post, but hindsight highlights what I could not then begin to imagine.

Things were crazy, as I recall, and among other things there was a problem with my apartment, which could have precipitated a drastic and immediate move. I spent the day cleaning out my closet in preparation, only in the eleventh hour to have things work out enabling me to stay, to my great relief.

Yet for some reason I felt something deep within me stir and suggest that I should plan to put everything in storage and be prepared to walk away from my life.

This sounds rather outlandish, but I was preparing to go to China to volunteer for the summer, and the idea of staying longer greatly attracted me. In fact, I had been feeling for some time an interior nudge, to say Yes to something that God was calling me to, something I could not yet see or understand. I imagined a call to stay in China, or somewhere more exotic perhaps, to be a missionary, to follow some new and exciting adventure planned by God. “I will go anywhere you want!” I told Him with enthusiasm.

It was just after this thought came to me—of putting all my stuff in storage and preparing to move—that I went down to get the mail. On top was a flyer from Lowes, which said in bold letters “You’re moving!” (over an advertisement for supplies of course). I was both startled and amused by what seemed a concrete confirmation of this interior sense. I saved the flier (I still have it today) and told all my friends about this strange sense of calling—and I am so grateful I did, because nobody would have believed me given what followed.

I went to China and fell in love. Half of my heart still sleeps on a bamboo matt under mosquito netting in an obscure orphanage in the suburbs of Beijing. I would have given anything to stay and continue to work among the abandoned little ones. But contrary to my wishes and my expectations, God did not ask me to stay.

Instead, I flew home to New York depressed and bored by the life that awaited my return. I resented my naiveite in believing that interior call was from God, particularly as it became clear that all of the boxes that I had carefully packed and brought painstakingly down six flights of stairs now had to be brought up, unpacked, put back. We brought up a few at a time, and they sat in my living room, unpacked for days, while I glared at them bitterly.

Then one day, just a few weeks after my return from China, I got a phone call that changed everything. “Something is not right with your mother…” I left work that day to make the drive upstate, unaware that I would not be returning.

I did, in fact, walk away from my life—from my job, my apartment, my social life and community, to move back to my childhood home. It was not the exotic foreign destination I had imagined. More than once, I questioned God, doubted that His plan could possibly be right.

But no matter how much is in our give-away pile (or how reluctantly we add to it) God’s is always greater. He is never outdone in generosity. I have learned this too.

In the Atrium we taught the little ones about the Mystery of Life and Death—how the grain of wheat must die in order to give life. We planted wheat seeds, then took them out at various stages to examine them. A few days in, if we dig up the seed it looks much the same. A few weeks in, green shoots have pushed through the dirt, and roots have begun to grow—the grain they have come from is changed; it looks more like a shell now. At four weeks, the original grain is a fraction of its original size and has almost disappeared, but the plant and roots are bigger still. And then, later still, when it is harvest time, we find the seed has vanished entirely, but on the stalk are a hundred new seeds in its place. From death comes more life.

I have had many experiences of God’s generosity in my new life. I am grateful for the deepening of relationships, to give just two examples. I was able to spend a few months living with my father, unaware that those would be his last months on earth. Had things stayed as they were, I would have seen him only for a few days perhaps at Christmas. I have also now been able to spend time with my best friend from childhood. She has for more than a year now been suffering from debilitating Lyme disease and its various coinfections. I am able to cook weekly for her family of eight children, and we accompany each other in this strange season of our lives. I am grateful for many other blessings that God has given me during this time.

Let us pray for the grace to give to God all that He may ask of us—and to better receive all that He wants to give us.