The Transfiguration

This is not a new thought but rather one that finds new realized meaning each time it comes back into play, which thank God is so frequent in my blessed life full of beautiful friends. Per usual, I gotta admit unoriginality and give props to my friend Jeremy who first introduced this thought to me back on Catholics on Call last August.

On Wednesday night of our week-long conference of Catholic awesomeness, we took a delightful little boat cruise out on Lake Michigan, eating some food, chatting on the decks, and hanging out at the tables. I had realized profoundly pretty early on that everyone there was similar on the basic level of feeling a genuine pull toward the Church and having a willingness to talk about it. I had uncharacteristically engaged a few great people and been rewarded with lush, fulfilling, beautiful conversations. So that night, the theme continued. As the cruise ended and we piled back into the cars to go back to CTU, we had a social time downstairs, but my buds Jeremy and Regina and I went and found a lounge and proceeded to just talk everything deep into the night.

The outline of what we covered is amazing, but the what is less important than the how. Building on that community that CoC enabled, there was a definite assent to vulnerability that happened tacitly. Without ice-breakers or assurances of confidentiality, we launched into sharing openly and comfortably. There wasn't fear beyond that which is natural and dismissed as petty; there wasn't concern over oversharing or undersharing but instead just free sharing.

The power of vulnerability to settle the heart, enable love to flow freely, and to build real relationship was so evident in the grace that night. This conversation in all its various beauty was the seminal part of a wonderful week that was legitimately a paradigm shift in my life and faith journey. I had been becoming more introspective and reflective and was seeking out these kind of conversations more, but not with the frequency or intensity that I do now and ever since then. It has become an internalized part of my spirituality and social life, that occasionally I push for too heavily but always find to be there just as I need it.

Jeremy put the best words to it at one point in the middle of it all. Describing in better words than I can recollect, Jeremy said that listening to us talk and hearing the kinds of stories of personal things we've shared, that we were transfigured before his eyes.

Honest, open, genuine sharing doesn't peel back the exterior of someone but informs others of the fuller person dwelling within. Knowing someone's stories, feelings, thought processes, spirituality, etc. causes you give them a fuller look when you see them--fuller than just moving past first-impression type reactions, fuller than judging their looks, fuller than remembering a time or two you had a fun time out with them, fuller than remembering a story they told you, fuller than having a nice chat over lunch.

Vulnerability is a gift we can give ourselves and others that transfigures the relationship--once you make yourself vulnerable to someone, you can never look at them the exact same, with your eyes or the eyes of your soul. There is a deeper appreciation that comes with the sight of someone after you have shared this kind of time or conversation with them.

Often when I make eye contact with a friend who I love dearly, I can only help but smile and laugh. Most friends will nervously ask, "What!?" [Many have learned to simply shake of my goofy love--right K-Jo?] And my only reply is nothing, because how do you describe the depth of the appreciation you can feel for someone with whom you've shared that vulnerability with?

It's a feeling that includes happiness but exceeds it to the depths of joy, which is the kind of deeper-set emotion that God calls us to, the type of feeling that indicates the profound goodness of what caused it. Joy denotes that what inspired it is good and right and probably linked to one's vocation. One of my favorite songs just came on iTunes (Only Living Boy in New York, Simon & Garfunkel, from Garden State) that sums up my goony habit: "I got nothing to do today but smile."

The Seldom Interrupted Peace

I have been reflecting on the idea of peace a lot the last few months. To work backwards from the more abstract version of what I've come to, it boils down to the central truth that "God's will is our peace" (pretty good huh? it's not my original. got it from Fr. Dunne class).

Along with that, at the heart of my faith, I have embraced the ideal of perfect freedom, an ideal that Christ embodied for us. Since Christ's will was exactly aligned with the Father's will, he maintained his freedom and perfected it in freely willing actions that were God's will. Now the thing about ideals is that we are not perfect and cannot really achieve perfection. However, we are called as Christians to emulate Jesus as best we can.

As with the relation between little discernments and big-picture discernment, the journey to peace--longer periods of sustained peace and feelings of more profound peace--involves the sum of smaller things as well. I would suggest three areas were the pieces of the peace puzzle can come into focus.

On the simplest level, some times in life are teeming with blessings whereas others seem comparatively sparse. First off, the key is that life is never without grace or blessings, but as humans, we fall into the trap of seeking to quantify these kinds of things.

One of my rules of thumb in reflection and introspection is to allow my honest feelings to surface and address them rather than deny my instinct entirely. So I allow myself to have this very human feeling but try to minimize the time that I dwell on the perceived dearth. I usually am not in this kind of valley--either my life is satisfactorily full of blessings or my disposition is such that I am usually contented with the blessings in my life. Perhaps these things are one in the same.

Regardless, the embrace of the already-present blessings and of a disposition to find at least contentment--hopefully happiness or joy--helps to build the peace. The second piece here is a comfortable disposition to appreciate and give thanks for the blessings God has already given.

The way that I have settled into that is with a special capstone to all my personal prayers. Regardless of the time of day or what I'm praying over, anytime I spend a significant amount of time in prayer, I conclude with my phrase, "Thank you for all that You've given me and all You will give me."

This Sunday's gospel on the rich man and Lazarus teaches us that we should not demand of God specific inspirations or proofs, especially when we are so unappreciative of the revelation and truth already given us. I don't have the quick fix way to transform one's outlook, but I found that making this sentiment integral to my prayer to be a big help.

The third thing is the hardest: having an eye to grace. I learned powerfully back in April the ways that we can fail to see the grace that is so active in daily life. The charism of stop-think-pray helps to slow life down a bit, but succeeding in having those moments is tough. This is another ideal where the hoped-for perfection is noticing every grace as it happens.

The realistic starting point is cultivating an awareness that identifies grace soon after its impact, hopefully beginning with nightly reflections back upon the day's blessings. Even if we cannot identify every grace and cannot find it until well after its help has come, we can let our prayer and reflection unpack the profundity of the grace in life. Rather than seeking systematic, timely awareness, we can simply hope to be formed strongly by the grace we do realize and give God thanks.

Going to mass, having quiet prayer, Adoring the Eucharist, enjoying the love of community, and talking with close friends are some of the ways that I maintain my outlook and experience blessings and grace. None of these things--and few things in my life--exclude God; at the very least, each thing allows the opportunity for God to impact it.

Peace is content and humble harmony between one's view of love at a certain moment and the truth that God is Love. Giving thanks for my blessings, maintaining a positive outlook, and keeping an eye to God's grace are parts of my life--things that flow naturally, not constructs that I've imposed on life--that make up my seldomly interrupted peace.

The Grace of not Knowing

I think I've covered this in some shape or form through the blogs, but here is a newly recapitulation of one my central reflective discernment things...

Discernment is a lengthy process, lifelong perhaps--if not for a specific vocation, for the way to live out vocation daily. In a society and culture that craves definition, description, and exactitude (that's a real word!?), the process of discovering one's gifts and determining how those gifts can serve God's world, its people, and its needs can be bungled.

A desire for the finite answer can make one rush into taking action that is based on incomplete reflection; that's not to say that you should only act when 100% sure, but sometimes the pressure is too hard to hone in on a lifepath without sufficient opportunity for reflection on where the junction is between one's gifts and the needs of the world.

Sometimes the quest for certainty can lead one to reduce the equation of reflection, conversation, prayer, etc. that allows for a holistic discernment. The reduction might produce a quicker answer, but will it be a better one?

My big question is why is there a pressure to know? Why do we push so hard to get that "answer"? Every bit counts toward the bigger discernment picture. Though I won't say "everything happens for a reason" (right, J-Po?), I will say that God's omnipotence has ordained a grace-filled existence for us based on His benevolent love for us in our journey through living our life in freedom.

Each step on the journey is revelatory if we let it be. I find a peace in my open-endedness. Part of that comes from having assembled a puzzle of options to leap into for the time after my looming graduation and knowing that there are plenty of seas left to be explored as I finish college and consider the prospects of graduate schools beyond Notre Dame (though I'd love to M-A here), service programs beyond Teach Bhride (which I'd love to serve), and hybrid programs beyond ECHO (which I think would fit me well).

However, the greatest part of the peace that keeps me grounded even when I start to go a bit "runaway" is the reality that my vocation right now is to have an open-ended vocation--not knowing my vocation is integral to my formation and discernment. There is a significance to my not having a strong certainty in what phase of life I'll ultimately end up in or exactly what job I can get and work in. There's a significance to not having an exact idea of where I'll be this summer or next year or beyond.

I can continue experiencing the graces of my life through the lens of this open-endedness in a way that forms me crucially for whatever phase of life or vocation I discover. The experience of life as I live it is different in this state, and it is truly a blessing. The reality that I lack a definite answer is not an anxiety-causing, stress-inducing, negative pressure; rather, it is a grace.

The Inner Becomes the Eternal

In class a few weeks ago, Father Dunne made the bold assertion that the inner life--the life of the spirit, the life of knowing and loving--is a life that can and does live on through death. He suggested to us that the inner life becomes the afterlife. Take a second and wrap your head around that one.

My gut reaction was one of awe but also one of skeptical doubt. I had always mostly viewed heaven or eternal life and something separate from this world, connected to my current life really only by the soul that animates my being, the soul that God created to be eternal. Now there are "heavenly" things about this life, but I mostly considered those things to be analogs to what will be part of the eternal heaven. Moments of strong love or peace are just snapshot moments of the eternal love and peace that exist in eternal life, perfect union with God.

I also seemed to think that this was kind of a spiritual extrapolation and that there wasn't much grounding for it in Christian spirituality or thought that I knew. I was willing to give some benefit of the doubt because upon further reflection, I really liked the idea that an intentional inner life can continue on into heaven.

In the beautiful synergy that is a Notre Dame liberal arts education/formation centered on theology, I had one of many annual instances of overlap between my courses. In my Theology of Benedict XVI class, we read an excerpt of Truth and Tolerance that included this quote that leaped off the page, "Heaven begins on earth. Salvation in the world to come presumes a righteous life in this world... We have to ask what heaven is and how it comes upon earth." (205)

Turns out my perception of limited heaven on earth was kind of right but far too narrow. Benedict XVI (then Cardinal Ratzinger) exhorts us to be aware of the heaven that is on earth. Creation started as a perfect result of God's hand, but humanity brought sin into the world; The Fall dragged the world away from this. However, we can still find glimmers of the perfection of heaven in Creation. Pope Benedict encourages us to seek those righteous and truly heavenly elements of our lives and our world and cultivate them. Eternal life isn't found on earth, but it surely begins here.

The inner life is something that God's gift of free will upholds beautifully. We have the power of freedom to choose love. In this way, we can cultivate a profound interior sense of love that permeates daily life and transcends to heaven each day and hopefully to the end of earthly life. I know I have recently been tending to concentrate on the negatives and the voids, allowing potent moments of woe to interrupt the love-filled stream of my life. However, with the gift of grace, God has shown me the love already present--just in one day: in the camaraderie of tenors sharing nicknames, some bros watching football, dinner with a friend, and studying/not studying with some knuckleheads.

Happiness is a luminous emotion that enlivens the spirit and brings smiles to faces, but joy is something deeper and more profound. Feeling this joy is being in the presence, in the moment of the will or love of God; the experience of joy happens as a result of being intimately and genuinely in the context of love and vocation being lived out. My (our) call is to align my will with the will of God, just as Jesus did in His perfect freedom. In this way, we can find joy in this life that will continue on into the next, as the next.

Trust...

Trust cannot be treated in one blog post, but here's one wretched human's attempt to scratch the surface. Let's start with the irony of where I'm at.

In discerning the shorter-term future (short of the dream job of working as a campus minister in a Catholic high school), my heart is set on getting a Masters in Theology. I love studying theology, and I'm really attracted to the way an MA/MPS/M.Div can intimately include pastoral-ministerial applications in the formation (not just education). The coolest option for all that seemed to be adding the super-appealing element of post-grad service into it. ECHO combines all this to allow people to serve the Church, gain real experience, and get a Notre Dame MA-Theology formation. The dark-horse that snuck in and revised the straight path of all this was the House of Brigid. Once I had embraced the idea of post-grad service and once the program got up off the ground, Teach Bhride was in the picture. Having come to terms with the degree/extent of my gifts in music throughout college and witnessing the early evolution of the program's mission to encompass youth ministry, liturgical stuff, and catechesis alongside the music ministry affirmed that this would be a great opportunity to consider. Experiencing the home (home not house) that our first three volunteers cultivated affirmed to me that the difficulty of spending nine months abroad could be mitigated by the support of that community.

So in early 2011, I'll apply to and interview with ECHO and Teach Bhride and see what shakes out. The process of figuring that out lasted most visibly from early sophomore year through spring of this year and continues semi-latently always. The whole process involved a definite element of trust that grew, matured, and solidified along the way. Taking the step in my head and heart of trusting that the community could lead the way in upholding me in volunteering abroad was a huge step in actively trusting. I mean, none of this is a done deal beyond the simple reality that I will apply, but the discernment--the journey--is so revelatory and powerful.

Neither of these options are a slam dunk, but I trust that what each opportunity requires can be met by the combination of who I am (my gifts, etc.) and faith in God and His love around me in all forms. I need to continue to investigate other options and remain open, but the trust permeates the balance of what I need to consider as I move to the next step beyond college (perhaps a bit to blindly, but that will adjust).

The irony for me is that in the first weeks of senior year, I had been struggling mightily with trusting in the day-by-day. I love my major, my friends, my life, but I would let little things bug me more than usual. I wasn't sullen or depressed nor was I mad at anyone because I am blessed with a demeanor that doesn't ever really go down those roads. I would even have really good times, like at the first things for Folk Choir, seeing and hugging people, and catching up with beloved friends. However, the college-long weight of never finding any one go-to friend was hanging a bit heavier on me.

I was spoiled in London for four months with my buddy Dan, who was a wonderfully loyal travel companion and really stellar friend overall. Also, having my most important, meaningful relationship to date fall apart during summer was rough. Back on campus, where there are 8,000+ of us, it was back to a wash of good friends. In typical woe-is-me fashion, I would let focus shift back to the lack of a best-best friend on campus, belittling the preponderance of terrific people who are my friends or failing to lean on my lifelong best friend (Tim is 2,000+ miles away but we're still as close as ever). It was something that I didn't and don't want to run from; I don't want to tell myself that it's not a big deal because it is: I am wired to rely on a small group of close friends, and I lacked that biggest go-to guy/gal at the front of it.

Now, I am relaxing into a peace that goes back to a great piece of advice I got from my friend Lauren years ago after a flimsily justified break-up by a silly girlfriend: just go with the flow. Don't press too hard, but don't mope around hopelessly either. Or when it comes to the real tough case, my friend Michele simply advised, "Be the best you that you can be for her." Let go of rankings or classifications and all that. Let the disappoint exist but not in a dominating, disproportionate way.

Trust boils down to finding a happy middle between passive faith that "The Lord will provide" and overly autonomous notions that one can impose their will on life. Trust is residing in a consciously reached place that brings peace. It combines faith in God's loving hand with the reality that God gave us free will to decide things ourselves, and that our call is to bring our will into congruence with the will of God.

I have cozied myself into this place of trust. It is not a place of lazy indifference; it is not a place of super-assertive action. Instead, it is a moderated complacency to go with the flow. I need to reground this trust in diligent prayer to thank God for the grace to reach this place. Grace can be a catalyst for opening our eyes, and it is up to God to endow us with grace as He pleases. So let us not only pray that we may be graced but also trust that God will grace us in the best ways. For ultimately, His will is our peace.