In a Lull

As partially evidenced by the lack of posts, I would describe my current spiritual state as a lull. It is not a period of doubt or diminishing faith or a disappearance of love of spirit and the Church. I simply am lower on energy, focus, and activity. I am also not sad or depressed; it's not an emotional low but rather the inner equivalent of a physical tiredness.

I find myself more tired when it comes time to prayer near the end of day before falling asleep. I don't have the killer instinct and edge when it comes to really pushing myself to be fully diligent in prayer. I have been less active in reading off the back of my hand to myself and moving to stop-think-and-pray during the day.

But by no means is this disappointment. One of the things I know and believe strongly is that I (and we) am strongly limited in my abilities and reason; I am a very gifted child of God, but I am ultimately human. I will have weaknesses, valleys, and lulls.

Silent retreat taught me reinforced in me that God gives you what you need, even if that is something simple or seemingly frivolous, like a nap. After a few months of heightened spiritual activity and conscious action, the lull is no surprise-- it's both a result of that and could be kind of a reward for the effort. This is a period where the growth and development within me has to sustain me while I am low-energy and a bit spiritually tired.

I know I will bounce back up. For now, I'll lean back on my old favorite from Josh Ritter's song "Good Man":

We both have dry spells, hard times
in bad lands-- I'm a good man

A Silent Weakness Found in the SIlence

The processing continues in the aftermath of my silent directed retreat. There are many layers and levels to things I thought, felt, and experienced, but the major result of my experience is this: my relationship with God independent of my life and world (including my friends, their actions, my actions, other people, etc.) is pretty weak, and I struggle to find and feel God's love for me.

This sounds bleak, but it really isn't. My spirituality is dynamic and always growing, so it is good for me to find and embrace a weakness in it. In everyday life, I have grown greatly in placing God actively in myself, my actions, other people, their actions, and the world around me. So God is active in my life, and I feel and acknowledge Him. I also am close to God in prayer, especially as I continue to learn to listen in prayer rather than just talk/worry before God.

However, the shortcoming rests in not connecting to God on a straight, uninterrupted line. When it comes to solitary, silent prayer with God, I struggle to quiet my shortcomings, flaws, and weaknesses as well as the mind-centered parts of it like theological reflections and analysis of my life and relationships. Ultimately, I must be able to feel God's love for the inherent, fundamental being that I am. This is crucial because as I build my personal ministry and love in action on loving generously, instantaneously, and unconditionally, that all needs to be founded on the unconditional love of God, which is the perfect model and inspiration.

I tried accessing this through Scripture like Isaiah 43 (the words behind You Are Mine) and other Scriptural ideas like being made in God's image. The point where I came closest to God and His love was through Hosea 11: "I was like those who lift infants (or in my case, a grown person) to their cheeks; I bent down to them and fed them". That fit the image of God I felt in my heart of the Father as Consoler. I came closest to a genuine feeling in my heart of God's love, independent of my life and world, through this image and the inherent feeling of God comforting me as if by holding me in His arms (it wasn't like a levitation or vision but rather an inner realization and feeling).

Fast forward (that was Saturday night) to Monday night and daily mass. As I knelt before the Lord and the Liturgy of the Eucharist and moved through the mass, I was in this mindset of finding and feeling God's love. After mass and feeling my usual "I believe God is there and believe in the Body of Christ, especially as in the people since Christ has no body now but ours but did not feel it in my heart", I realized that this newly-recognized void within me was a key part of my struggle for intimacy with the Eucharist.

Now I have a better sense of what was missing and how I can grow in it so as to grow closer to the Eucharist and God's love. An increased faith in the Real Presence of the Eucharist and the way it nourishes, renews, and commissions me would be an excellent grounding to growing as a minister and man of Christ.

The Moon(!?)rise

I spent this weekend, Friday/8:15 PM-Sunday/Noon in a silent retreat, speaking only to discuss my silence with a spiritual director for three 20-minute periods and to say AMEN to the Body of Christ at Saturday mass. I won't get into a heavy discussion of all that a silent retreat brings out, challenges, enables, etc. until after I have given myself a few days for processing and reflection.

In the meantime, I wanted to share my journaling from Saturday morning when I woke up at 6:15 to watch the sun rise from the comfortable seat of a stump on the coast of St. Joe's lake. As much as I like some of what I wrote, these entries precedes the struggle intensifying in me, as directed by the retreat's goal, to move away from my brain--from doing and analyzing--to my heart to feel God ... this is stuff I will need to continue to process and grow with and will only begin to scratch the surface of here.

The retreat calls you to move away from problem-solving, worrying, and stressing to a completely removed contemplation in the heart between you and God and nothing or no one else-- a difficult experience for me being someone who places God's love and presence so strongly in others. I was struggling mightily to narrow my focus to just me and God, and the struggle showed an empty part of my spirituality: I do not have a relationship with God independent of my life and world, and I need to build that foundation to rest the balance of myself on top of...

NO. 3 / 11-14, 6:56 AM

I woke up at 6:15 this morning with the words to George Harrison stuck in my head: "What is life without your love? Who am I without you by my side?" I gathered myself and bundled up to come watch the sunrise. What I didn't expect to see was the preceding MOONrise. For the ashes of this week's new moon rose an ever-so-slight waxing crescent. As I watched the faint glimmer of light rise quickly through the sky, I was enthralled by God's imagery. From a completely dark and unseeable new moon, I come just in time to see the genesis of the moon's rebirth. It goes through phases of fullness/luminosity and darkness, but in the total invisibility is the NEW moon. Out of this new moon comes the beginning of fullness, and the waxing crescent's rise will bring its wake the absolute fullness of the sun. For out of darkness comes the greatest light; it's most dark before light. God has called us, claimed by Christ as God's own people-- holy nation, royal priesthood, soon to be as the sun rises, walking in God's wondrous light.

NO. 4 / 11-14, 7:49 AM

PRAYER PERIOD II
CANTICLE OF THE TURNING

My heart shall sing of the day you bring.
Let the fires of your justice burn.
Wipe away all tears for the dawn draws near,
and the world is about to turn!

I'm not crying, but the sun has not risen from behind the power plant as I look out over St. Joseph's Lake. But in fitting with the power that verse one has struck within me this morning, "my spirit sings of the wondrous things that you bring to the ones who wait." My spirit does not really sing that on its own like it should; rather, it is just taken by the power of the song and the strength of the hope in conviction the song entails, and it left the meaning until now.
The mini-discernments in minute-by-minute life have been teaching me, most recognizably over the last six months, that patience is such a virtue. I have learned to be more patient with the people and events of everyday life, and now the challenge is to stretch that out and relationships will be a great test and growing experience. As the sun finally starts to peek over the power plant, I find hope in the rewards of patience and hope reflection and quiet both now and in coming months can help me reground myself in moderate patience and allow me to mix patient waiting with active courses of doing-- patience must be underlying my heart and mind, but it cannot breed hopelessness, complacency, or worst of all, passivity. Especially as I continue to embrace the call to love generously and take risks in living that, patience cannot mean standing still. It does involve a deeper embrace of recognizing that difference between lack of response and rejection and holding fast to the principle that love never fails. It will also require and hopefully foster a deeper sense of trust in God-- I must grow towards the ideal of reaching out to God with my hands in such a trusting manner as a small child confidently takes its father's hand.

Could the world be about to turn? The world is about to turn. It IS turning.

Dan (8:02 AM THE SUN IS UP.)

Saying Good-bye

So this is kind of a dangling thought-without-a-conclusion post, but here goes...

I realized today in a more full way that I am really bad at saying good bye. I'm talking about any kind of good bye-- after eating a meal with someone, ending a conversation in passing or even on the phone, before a friend goes abroad, leaving friends at home for school or school for home, etc. I think the only one I have down is the one with my parents when going back to school.

I'm not sure what this really entails ore reveals, but it's a quirky fact that has its source in my weird affections. I am an obsessive hugger and usually want to begin or end anything with hugs, which I think typically people are not ready for, not expecting, or do not want. That's the best way I know to reencounter someone or see them off until the next time.

The best example of this is after long, deepish, genuine person-to-person conversations. You have to end them sometime, and when I do end them, I don't know how. My favorite simple solution to that is silence or simple approval. I hold close to my heart a pair of late nights at Catholics on Call in August, when to quote my conversation brother Jeremy, we were "transfigured" before each other because of the ways we opened ourselves to each other in sharing life and faith. When my friend Regina and I walked down the hall back to our rooms to finally go to bed at 4:something AM, we hugged each other and I remember so clearly her saying just, "Yeah. ... Yeah," in a simple, heartfelt approval and embracing of the love shared that night.

I Love School

Half dreading the often monotonous and overly detailed and lengthy assignments of my American Religious History class' (a class I really like) main textbook American Religions: A Documentary History, I pulled the book off my shelf and plopped it open to the right page, and my mood shifted dramatically-- Thomas Merton assigned for my history class? No questions asked, I dove right in and let's just say I've added New Seeds of Contemplation to my "books I should try to acquire and read" post-it note.

Here's the passage the grabbed me:

"Fickleness and indecision are signs of self-love. If you can never make up your mind what God wills for you... it may be an indication that you are trying to get around God's will and do your own with a quiet conscience."

He adds, "As soon as God gets you in one monastery you want to be in another" or "As soon as you taste one way of prayer, you want to try another". "You are always making resolutions and breaking them by counter-resolutions... Soon you will have no interior life at all".

Whoa. Wow.

Today at Adoration, my mind was running wild--notsomuch with the hecticness of a busy schedule or looming tests or projects but with emotions and anxiety. Leave it to Jesus to help me. I definitely did not come close to the silence I have often been able to find before the Lord, but Jesus helped me focus the traffic within me to reflect and think.

It's what I like to call "good noise". Sometimes in the quest for silence, the silence is seen as the end. Instead, I think the silence is a means to the end of what is found there. Beyond that even, I think the quest for silence can be a means to the end I call "good noise"--it is the "noise" in your head that comes as a result of that quest for silence. It can be new things that come with the diminishing activity inside you or the very things you are trying to quiet becoming more apparent to you.

Anyway, I had copied down the Merton text for my blog before Adoration and did not really consider it again until tonight when writing this. The only thing I wrote in my reflection journal today from Adoration was, "You're there. Just do it. TAKE THE LEAP." Talk about exhortation to love generously!

In this case, specific things in my life merited my taking more direct action and being more generous with my love; perhaps even adding a new aspect Vickey helped point out to me: loving instantaneously--moving to love before considering reasons not to love. But the overall message I drew from this clarity before the Lord was to move beyond deeper spiritual reflection of the call to love generously and to act on what I had found so far. I have to keep searching for the ways to love and what keeps me from doing so, but in the meantime, I have the leap headlong into love based on what I have found so far.

You're there. Just do it. TAKE THE LEAP.

The Overactive Mind

Time management is my thing--my forte, my strength, my strong suit; it's what I do. I am time managing all the time, and it is how I am able to do so much and become so much.

Obviously, as with any strength, it can be a weakness if not moderated. So, yes, from time to time, over compartmentalizing life and blocking things into time slots can pull the rug out from under meaningful things, so I try to temper that with the ideal of total and complete presence--present fully to what I am doing at the moment. That's how I can take my gift and grow as a person.

Well, I decided last week to take an active step in that direction. I was reading over my little notebook that I bring to Adoration for recording clarities that also lives by my pillow for late night thoughts. Here's a note I wrote to myself: "Take all you know about prayer and construct a personal, owned prayer identity."

Ok, me, let's do it. I was trying to decide what to do with myself and landed on the idea of a concrete reminder that would hit me throughout the day. I haven't used anything of that sort since I lost the third incarnation of my Kairos cross freshman year of college, seeing it as a sign from God that I need to step up and own my growth internally without the external reminder. I settled on writing a message to myself, on my hands: on my left hand, I wrote STOP; on my right, THINK pray.

It's been about a week, and besides having to move my message to the back of my hand since writing on my palms smeared on my face and clothes, it's been rewarding and effective. I have a blatant reminder in front of me that sticks with me throughout the day and slaps me in the face each time I judge, lose patience, or fall short. I STOP myself and review the judgment I just jumped to about something or someone; I THINK about why that was wrong and what I can do better in the situation next time; I PRAY for the person and my shortcoming and improvement.

It's hard to come up with a good singular example, but it has just made me perceive things differently and better. I am more aware of the reality that people carry with them. I may only encounter them as an annoying conversation that I don't want to have, but they bring with them a day or week or month's worth of stress or worry or concern that I don't know and will never know unless I listen.

Simultaneously, I need to be more aware of the times I am indifferent (and not just focus on the times I am negative or bad) as well as become more aware of the things people do to me or for me. At least five people in the last day-and-a-half have asked how the Folk Choir concert went on Saturday, and I did not stop-think-pray until now about the love and care that showed.

STOP. THINK. PRAY.
(Dear Blogger: I hate that you refuse to upload my image the way I flipped it)

Reflection on 11/15 Readings

Here is the reflection I did on the readings for next Sunday as part of the Catholics on Call program. A bunch of CoC program alums write periodically for the website, and this is my contribution. (I'll probably have an original post in the next couple of days, too.)

Readings for November 15, 2009

Daniel 12:1-3
Psalm 16
Hebrews 10:11-14, 18
Mark 13:24-32

“No one knows the day or the hour, neither the angels in heaven nor the Son, but only the Father.” The readings for this Sunday all invoke the mystery of the glorious return of Christ. Beginning with the prophecy of Daniel, we get a glimpse of the coming judgment and salvation and are called to grow in trust in God.

Daniel, in the midst of a divine address from God, looks forward to a future time when the dead shall rise, the wise will shine brightly, and some will come to live forever. However, it also is a time “unsurpassed in distress” when some will fall to “everlasting horror and disgrace”. The eternal question we face living on earth without omnipotent knowledge is, “How do we avoid falling into deep separation from God--hell--and instead reach the fullness and intimacy of heaven?” Daniel promises a positive fate for “those who lead the many to justice”—to me, this is a prophetic forecast of the Church and its role as shepherd. Christ died for the atonement of our sins, rose from the dead, and then ascended into heaven. To continue his ministry, He left us the Apostles and His vicar, Peter, on which to build His Church. Since His Ascension, Christ has no body but ours, so through the Holy Spirit, the Church is the way Christ leads us to justice and righteousness. For our faith in God and seeking to live the Christian ideal, Daniel says we “shall be like the stars forever”.

In the passage from the Letter to the Hebrews, Christ is compared to priests. The priests administer the sacraments and serve in daily ministry, but their work, though important, does not equal the work of the great priest, Jesus Christ. Christ’s ministry involved the ultimate sacrifice, his death on the cross. The death of Jesus was an incredible example for us: the demonstration of perfect freedom. Because Jesus was the Word Incarnate—that is the divine Logos incarnate in man—He was God, and Jesus the Son’s will was one with God the Father’s will. Jesus was a human and had the gift of free will, but within that, He freely chose to undertake the Passion in accordance with His Father’s will and die for our sins. Jesus perfectly models complete trust in God for us to the point of death, and in His obedience, He saved us and took His seat at God’s right hand in eternal glory. As a result of our ministry as Christians, we can realize salvation in Jesus, who “by one offering has made perfect forever those who are being consecrated”.

In Mark, Jesus teaches us He, the Son of Man, will come again in a time of turbulence, like Daniel predicts, to save His elect. We read the promise of glory in Daniel and find hope for salvation in Hebrews, but in Mark, Jesus warns that no one knows the time of this final glory and salvation except God the Father. Whoa. So, we can act and live righteously, fight for justice, be saved by Jesus’ redemptive death, but we don’t get to know when that’s going to happen!? Well, no, we don’t—the Gospel reading ends right there. And if you check your Bible, the next verses only give you more metaphors that encourage you to be on your guard. So what do we do? Dig around for clues in the Bible? Wait for a crazy apocalyptic person to predict the end time? No. We trust in God, according to the model of perfect freedom that Jesus gives us. We seek to live righteously as Daniel encourages and to emulate the example of Christ so that we may realize the salvation made possible for us in Jesus’ death. Jesus will endure as an example until the end of time for us to follow until we meet God in our eternal rest: “The heavens and earth will pass away, but my words will never pass away.”

So, I leave you with the words of hope, joy, and celebration of a hymn that calls us to embrace the mystery and place our trust in God:

Sign me up
For the Christian jubilee
Write my name on the roll
For I’ve been changed since the Lord has lifted me
I wanna be ready when Jesus comes

You know not the day nor the hour he shall appear
But we know in our hearts He’s coming back again
My heart is fixed and my mind’s made up
I wanna be ready when Jesus comes

In Our Human Frailty

In reading Book I of Augustine's City of God, I was struck by a passage amid Augustine's explanation of how good and bad people often are equally afflicted or blessed. Here is the excerpt that struck me as it was written, so you can absorb it before I tell you how I felt:

"Although the good dislike the way of the life of the wicked, and therefore do not fall into the condemnation which is in store for the wicked after this life, nevertheless, because they are tender towards damnable sins of the wicked, and thus fall into sin through fear of such people (pardonable and comparatively trivial though those sins may be), they are justly chastised with afflictions in this world, although they are spared eternal punishment; and they rightly feel this life to be bitter when they are associated with the wicked in the afflictions sent by God. But it was through love of this world's sweetness that they refused to be bitter to those sinners." (Book I, Chapter 9)

Wow. What consolation I somehow found here. Let me preface that my interpretation of this passage and how it hit me is based on the fact that I think I am a virtuous, good person--something that Augustine likes to challenge his readers to (re)examine in themselves.

I do dislike the way of evil, and my disdain for the evil I see and encounter keeps me from experiencing the profound detachment from God that is hell. However, my human condition--my weaknesses, my frailty, my original sin, my use of free will to choose evil at times--leaves me vulnerable to evil and sin.

I think the most accurate word for this reality is one Pascal uses to describe our condition--wretchedness; or as I sometimes call it, frailty. And a somewhat unusual or unnatural way to view this is as a gift (thanks, Bro. John). It is hard to embrace one's weaknesses but that can create strength. I have come to view my weaknesses as gifts that are kind of a slap in the face to help me realize things. Among other things, my often-excessive ego and arrogance helps me realize that my intentions are not always as pure and righteous as they could and should be. My inconsistent confidence and cyclical outgoing-ness are weaknesses that deter me from being myself fully and at all times; they prevent me from giving my gifts/strengths completely to others when my outreach could be a consolation to people who need it and keep me from realizing my full potential.

Augustine tells us that because of our vulnerability and the way we turn to sin--even if only momentary or rarely--make the afflictions we face just. However, the beauty is that though the presence of affliction is just, God does not make these hardships endure; they are fleeting problems. Even if they are lifelong, the glory and peace of eternal life with God tears away temporal evil and affliction. We are justly afflicted with hardship for the sins we commit, but we are spared from eternal affliction if we embrace God again. God remains there, in constant love for us, through all the affliction. Sin is the active choice to reject love, and God is always available to us, waiting to (re)receive us. He created incredible special access for us through the Incarnation, both to His person as the Word became Incarnate and to penance, grace, and absolution through the expiation of sin in Jesus' death on the Cross and the sacrament of Reconciliation instituted in Christ's Church. We can return to God through His Son and the absolution offered in Jesus' redemptive death through our sacrament.

"It was through love of this world's sweetness that they refused to be bitter to those sinners" -- what is this world's sweetness for you? What keeps you from becoming embittered to sinners? Sinners are full people, too, and they must be shown the light and love of God and His forgiving graces. For, ultimately, we at one time or another, or frequently, are part of that "them" that is "sinners". So we must forgive others' trespasses as they forgive us since our frailty moves us to rejoin the sinners time and time again.

Through God's abundant love, we can always return to Him and (re)reject sin if we genuinely and honestly admit our fault and seek the forgiving grace of the Father. This diligent spirituality and striving to be and do good leads us to the eternal reward that Christ has opened for us with Him: we are justly chastised with afflictions in this world, but we are spared eternal punishment.