Surrendering to Perfect Our Love

The most important thing I have read in the past two or so years is this: “For until we love God perfectly, His world is full of contradiction. The things He has created attract us to him and yet keep us away from Him. They draw us on and they stop us dead. We find Him in them to some extent and then we don’t find him in them at all…. In stead of worshiping God through His creation, we are always trying to worship ourselves by means of creatures. But to worship our false selves is to worship nothing. And the worship of nothing is hell,” (Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation).

There are so many things in which I have desired know Him, so many places I have looked for Him. All those things are gone, lost to me, and the places, too, are vanished from my sight. And for so long to lose so much seemed assurance of such forsakenness that I could not comprehend. “Why have You forsaken me?” in every place I have gone looking for You.

But it is I who has forsaken Him. Isn’t that the promise of the Cross and its victory over death and sorrow, suffering and pain. It is I who am only now finding the courage to trust what is offered. It is precisely in forsakenness that I will find Him. Such is the depth of His compassion, to choose freely to meet us at the point of our deepest need for Him. All we need to do is to ask His grace to choose freely to forsake our desperate searching and yearning for all that is lost and to draw closer in surrender to our perfect love for Him. Amen.

Humble Beauty

The Climbing Path L’Hemitage, Pontoise, 1875.

“Blessed are they who see beautiful things in humble places where other people see nothing.”
Camille Pissarro, July 10, 1830 – Autumn 1903.

May our hearts of prayer come this week seeking beauty in the most humble places finding there the beauty of humility. Amen.

A Gift Named Wanda

"Old Woman Sitting," Rembrant

Thirty-six Roman Catholic patients received communion from Wanda whose tortoise skin hangs lose over a right mandible clearly misshapen. Cancer of the tongue spread to the jaw. Saving her life meant disfiguring her appearance and her speech. It has taken me years to train myself to understand her; even now, I smile and nod, not infrequently, through my miscomprehension. She keeps Jesus in her pocket (in a pyxis, of course), that smells faintly like mothballs and is light coated with cat hair. Wanda brings me cat toys for my cat and homemade pie and rabbit cakes at Easter, religious costume jewelry from old, dead nuns and worn prayer cards to dead saints I have never heard of. Wanda tells how she does not believe in gossiping and then proceeds to for far too long. And she tells me about what a bad patient her husband Joe is since his stroke; she herself has been a patient through enough surgery and chemo and radiation and rehabilitation to know a good patient when she sees one. Joe is not. But he is a man she says, he cannot help it. She loves him as he is. She loves me.

I try to make a point of sitting in the office when she volunteers to bring Roman Catholic communion the first three Fridays of every month so that I can listen as she talks to me. She seems to need someone to listen. On the forth, she drives to her childhood home parish, St. Boleslaw’s, or the like, bringing Jesus to the elderly homebound there who speak only Polish. I wonder if their ears, perhaps a bit more muted, but certainly more patient then mine can understand her better in her parent’s tongue. I imagine they do not care so much. They are grateful for her companionship, for the familiar guttural cadences of their youth, for presence, for the Jesus that she brings.

Lately, it seems as though Wanda’s walk is becoming misshapen too. Her gait lists to and fro; every step a seeming victory over pain. After serving thirty-six patients she seems exhausted. I invite her to sit in the other office chair used by my colleague for our talk. Always, the talk. There is her neighbor who she dose not care for but wants to help but who will not let her help… Joe has been particularly difficult not following doctor’s orders. We drift, for the first time, into stories of the other young men who wanted to marry her before she met Joe. There were two of them during World War II. One turned out to have a drinking problem and a violent streak. She left him at the first hint of danger. The other, even his mother thought would turn out to be no good. She told Wanda so and begged her not waste her life on him. She was smart, she did not. Then she met Joe. He was a keeper. “But,” she continued, “it turned out I couldn’t have any children, the fibroids,” whispering and pointing to locus of her shame.

Wanda really never wanted to get married, she confides. She was smart in school and wanted to be a doctor to heal people. She thought her mother secretly encouraged her. Her father, though, would hear nothing of it. To have a good life in this good new country of theirs his daughter needed a husband. “But I’m smart,” she told me, “I would have been a good doctor. I care about people. ”

My colleague has been waiting impatiently for his chair to do his charting. I want to listen further to her stories. She is growing older and frailer and more misshapen by the day. She knows what is coming. She is hard to understand. People have a hard time listening. She is smart. She has no children’s children to leave her stories with. I am honored. She loves me. Jesus is not in her pocket.

The Ah-h-h-h! of Prayer

joy
“Everybody prays whether [you think] of it as praying or not. The odd silence you fall into when something very beautiful is happening or something very good or very bad. The ah-h-h-h! that sometimes floats up out of you as out of a Fourth of July crowd when the sky-rocket bursts over the water. The stammer of pain at somebody else's pain. The stammer of joy at somebody else's joy. Whatever words or sounds you use for sighing with over your own life. These are all prayers in their way. These are all spoken not just to yourself but to something even more familiar than yourself and even stranger than the world.” The Rev. Frederick Buechner.

May we come this week seeking that which is more familiar than ourselves and more strange than the world. May we come in sighs too deep for words and with hearts filled with joy and pain for the hearts which are held by our own. May we be filled with ah-h-h! and lose our selves in the odd silence. May we pray the daily-ness of our living and the living of the lives we love. Amen.

Thy Will Be Done...

The Kingdom of God is “the presence of God in all things and the presence of all things in God. In the Kingdom of God everything tastes divine and smells divine because the divine and the human, the heavenly and the earthly, are intertwined and interpenetrating. This is a great vision of the prophets of Israel and of the apostles.

“I think this is necessary because then no part of life is separated from God. If you speak only about the salvation of the soul, then you neglect social salvation and the salvation of the earth. We have a lot of one-sided theology, and we need this holistic understanding of the Kingdom of God which is present everywhere.”

Dr. Jürgen Moltmann is Emeritus Professor of Systematic Theology, University of Tubingen, Germany. Widely considered one of the most important theologians of the last fifty years, his landmark book Theology of Hope (1964) has been translated into many languages. His other books include The Crucified God (1972), God in Creation (1985), and The Coming of God (1995).

May we pray this week, “Thy kingdom come.” And may we bring there our frail human hearts and all we can see and taste and smell of our earthy-human living, for there is no part of us or our living which is separate from God. May we pray, “Thy kingdom come.” And may we seek to find God everywhere present: may we seek to find God in the lives of the sick and the poor who come to us here seeking our care and in the lives of all those in the community which we are called to serve, and may we seek to find God everywhere in this good earth entrusted to our care. May all that we do this week be prayer. “Thy kingdom come.” Amen.

Happy Father's Day, Dad

My Dad died while I was at college. A long time ago. I’ve lived well over twice as many years without him as I had with him in my daily life. I was so young for most of our time together. Memory dims. Yet, if I dwell in the memory for a while, I can still recall, with vivid detail, what it felt like when I was a little girl, in petty coats and Mary Janes, to see him come through the door at the end of a work day. I can feel the excitement and bursting love upon seeing him again, feel the anticipation of arms out stretched to receive in warm embrace. My heart recalls its fondest hope. Happy Father’s Day.

The Truth is... Elvis Speaks the Truth

Awhile back I had a really good day in a Chemical Dependency group I lead. In attendance were several young second-generation gangbangers recently shed of their orange wardrobes (been released from jail). They all had been in our program for a couple of weeks and gamely tolerated their once weekly cruel and unusual punishment of mandatory participation in the Chaplin’s Spirituality Group fairly well up until this point; mostly trying, quite successfully, to keep a low profile by not making eye contact with the enemy (me) and volunteering only minimal information when asked; survival skills honed, and which no doubt served them well, in both their gang and prison lives.

My first hint of trouble came in the introduction and goal setting portion of the group (right off the bat). A really, really, big young guy dressed all in black and sporting a complex collection of ink and piercings introduced himself by shifting in his chair, slumping to an almost prone position, opening his legs wide toward me, while simultaneously crossing his arms against his chest, and stating that his goal was “to be more open.” Translation: “F’off lady!” In the monkey-see-monkey-do spirit that can saturate a group dynamic in less time than it took for the first monkey-to-do, the three other young men in the group with gang affiliations and prison time in their backgrounds soon followed suit.

Of the ten other patients in the room, after a quick mental survey, I recon about four of them of similar mindset, just not strong enough to launch an initial sortie but quite willing and happy to lend ground support, and the rest sufficiently intimidated to keep to themselves.

It’s working. Therapy is working and in those initial moments I am both terrified and grateful. Terrified, because I have no real idea of what to say and how to make the next fifty minutes of any real value to these patients who deserve my best efforts to help them come to a deeper understanding that it is only a power greater then themselves that can lead them to sanity amid the insanity of their addiction. Grateful, because something in the room has been getting to these four over the past few weeks and its making them uncomfortable enough to act it out it the group. If they do not bring their pain into the group there is no meaningful way to point them toward the Power that is more powerful than it, or themselves or their gangs or their drugs, or sex or money or power or anything else in which they put their faith.

The opening salvo is predictable; I am accused of forcing Jesus down their throats. This is a familiar and always amusing criticism, intended to put me on the defensive turning attention way from the accuser. It is amusing because I never mention Jesus, of my own accord in group and only in response to a particular patient’s stated Christian belief or in a litany of examples of a teaching which exists in all the major faith traditions. With a bit of therapeutic conversation I refocus the conversation where it belongs and start probing for what they have really brought to the group: Lives which have known mostly pain and suffering, abandonment, death, loss, abuse and victimization, guilt and shame, loneliness, grief, fear and trembling.

“What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth, have you come to destroy us?” (Mark 1: 24), is ringing in my head, and all the while I am praying because I have no idea what Jesus has to do with any of this in their lives as they have lived them in a world light years away from mine; it begins to seem the height of hubris for me to be standing there trying to speak for Jesus to all of that… Then Elvis speaks. Yes, Elvis. There is an Elvis impersonator in the group and he loves the King enough to look quite a bit like him, even in his off time. “I guess what were trying to say is, ‘Where is my God?’”

Suddenly, Ivan Karamazov, after watching wealthy land owner set his hounds upon a boy ripping him to death before his mother’s eyes, is speaking with him: “It isn’t that I refuse to acknowledge God, but I am respectfully giving him back my ticket to a world like this. Understand me, I accept God, but I don’t accept the world God has made. I cannot resolve to accept it.” These young ex-con-addict-gangbangers have not rejected God but are rebelling against the unexpiated suffering (borrowing from Moltmann) of their lives. They are challenging not Jesus of Nazareth but a cultural Christianity that holds up on Sunday mornings with folks who would never be like them—never enter their world of seemingly endless hopelessness and pain—preaching a mind numbing gospel of repentance and goodness and blessed success, illumining their lives as worthlessness and wanting, relegating to the shadows Christ’s radical transforming message of acceptance and love.

If I would speak to them for Jesus, and that is what I’m called (and paid) to do, I had best take seriously the message of Jesus. The Kingdom of God comes closest to the suffering of the poor, to the sufferers who society rejects and judges most wanting. Jesus of Nazareth offers to them acceptance and a radical love of healing and peace and hope, not in some distant time come but here and now. For today and tomorrow and the days after that. Jesus of Nazareth expiates their suffering, but not by asking them to deny it but by joining them there and traveling with them along their way (Luke 24).

So I travel, as best I can with them, acknowledge their experience of betrayal by the Faith and speak with them, as they are able to hear, of how they might find healing for their suffering souls. It is enough that on this short journey, they might however briefly recognize Him. This is what Jesus of Nazareth has to do with them and with us all.

If I would dare to speak for Jesus to them or to any, I had best take seriously as well the suffering journey of my own life. Stand squarely in the face of it. I had best, come like Job, festering, sitting on the midden of that which is my own and pray aloud its truth in sorrow and loss, and sufferings and pains. In praying there recently in this space, I was more fortunate then Job. The blundering Eliphaz, Bildad, Zophar, Elihu and the ungrateful and phenomenally unsupportive Mrs. Job did not appear, thank God for that, but the blessed voices of the two in whom I recognize God’s presence; a willingness to reach out into a world which may not be their own, but which they nonetheless entered with compassion and concern.

If Elvis were to ask me now, I would answer, “There, there is my God.” I am so blessed. Amen.