Conversations with God

An excerpt from my paper journal in which I usually converse with God.

What is my purpose Lord? What is your plan for me?  I feel like sometimes I do nothing.  I go along spending and making money and for what?  Money only lasts so long.  What shall you have me do?

I can be such a coward.  To live to die for something?  I am such a coward.  What do I do that makes any difference in this world?  I live my life just like everyone else.  So mundane and mediocre.  I pray that my fear to abandon will not steal my salvation. I fear absence from You, Lord.  And yet I fear to live recklessly for you!  And then there is the forgiveness.  If God, you our serious about forgiving our trespasses as we forgive others, I might be in a little bit of trouble.

God, how I want to let go.  No longer be angry.  To not let things jade and disappoint me.  Lord help me to find healing.

Misericordes oculos

Turn then, most Gracious Advocate, thine *eyes of mercy* toward us…

Eyes fascinate me.

They show so much about a person (i.e. “windows to the soul”).
They’re so important to our daily lives.
They’re one of the very first things I notice about the opposite sex
If something’s irritating them, we’re all but incapacitated (i.e. why pepper spray deters attackers, why getting something in your contact is one of the worst feelings ever).

Paintings depicting Jesus’ and Mary’s eyes are so compelling… But can you imagine what they would have looked like in real life?!

The first line I have here is from the prayer, Hail, Holy Queen. The Latin for “eyes of mercy” is “misericordes oculos”, and if you break the word down into its roots (okay, okay, I’m like the only one who’s going to do this, so I’ll share the insight, ha ha), the first part is pity or mercy, while the second part means heart.

So in Mary’s eyes, not only do we see regular old mercy, but we are shown the mercy of her heart… Her Immaculate Heart… the fount of her innermost truth and purity.

In our Merton discussion today, we talked about praying from the heart: the simplicity and depth of it, and what we really mean by “simple” prayer and even the concept of “the heart” beyond the actual organ.

The simplest of prayers that the Trappist monks and primitive pray-ers used was “Lord, the meditation of my heart is in Your sight.” In other words, “Lord, you know my heart,” a prayer I actually say quite often when I get to the point where all I feel like I’m doing is giving God lists and lists of intentions.

How tightly these two body parts are tied — eyes and heart — to our souls and our prayers.

Something to think about: How many other ways is your flesh made spritual? Many, if you think about it….

Deserted

[Sorry for the blackout there for a couple days: 24 hour silent retreat followed by a full weekend o' fun and religiosity.]

The retreat I went on was called Poustinia. It’s the Russian word for “desert”, and it originated in the Eastern Rite of Catholicism, but is now a more common practice across Catholic traditions.

Basically, you spend 24 hours in a “cell” with just you, a Bible, a journal and pen, a loaf of bread, and water.

That’s it.

And it was AWESOME.

We did it in the empty rooms at the seminary, so they were single rooms that were your decent, old, bare, dorm rooms with a bed, a sink, a desk, and a window.

Nothing crazy weird or anything happened, just lots of great insights and personal peace.

After the first hour or so of just concentrating on being open, I was thinking about my post earlier about “that generation” it occured to me that I’d heard that Moses was never allowed into the Promised Land, but I’d never actually heard what he did that was so terrible. So I followed a lot of cross-referencing (side note: If you’ve never done this, I HIGHLY recommend it: It’s an experience in and of itself to see how tied together the ENTIRE Bible is!) to find out. Basically, he gave up on God’s mercy for sinners. He got short — and sort of downright mean, the way I read it — with the complaining Israelites! They were complaining for the second time of not having water in the desert, and he’s like (paraphrasing, obviously), “You Rebels!” (And I wonder if that actually had a swear-word connotation back then, as though he was saying something equivalent of “You ************s!”… food for thought…) “We’re just gonna get water out of the rock here again for you, even though you don’t deserve it, you ingrates…” And he has to strike the rock a second time because the first time doesn’t work, whether Moses was lacking in faith, or his negativity got in the way, or whatever the reason for not being able to perform a miracle is.

So God comes in and tells him that he just blew his chance at getting to enjoy the Promised Land. Now, obviously, he made it to heaven, seeing as how he appears with Jesus and Elijah at the Transfiguration, but while on earth he only gets to see the Promised Land, he does not actually get to enter.

So lesson: DO NOT, whatever you do, DO NOT think that you are any better than the next sinner, because God’s Grace is going to have to get BOTH of you through the Pearly Gates. And your sin of pride and lack of faith in God’s mercy is going just going to cause you suffering.

I also felt like I didn’t know enough about the Prophet Elijah. He’s the spritual father of the Carmelites, and beyond knowing that he was a big-time OT prophet, I didn’t really know him.

I highly recommend 1st and 2nd Kings, if you’re interested in him and his successor, Elisha. Not only did it really open my eyes as to why they were so important, but it also gave me an idea of why Jewish people kept calling Jesus just a prophet even with all the signs he was performing. Because they did a lot of the same kind of miracles! Ordering fire and water around? Bringing people back to life? Elijah did it! Multiplication of loaves and fishes? Elisha did it! So if you just heard about Jesus and His works and didn’t actually hear any of his preaching, you’d probably come to the same conclusion!

Plus, I got to the real roots of Carmel: Mount Carmel was the original place where Elijah did his greatest feat: Proving that God was the only god, and slaying all the prophets of Baal. Totally didn’t know all that.

So there’s the tip of the iceberg of awesomeness that is the insight I gained.

In other words: go into the desert — it’s pretty sweet out there

Hey! Different is good!

Remember the long-running Arby’s slogan: “Hey! Different is good!”?

It was all about how Arby’s was better than Mc’y D’s and BK because they had totally different food and not just burgers.

But we fear change. We instinctively fear new things because there is a sense of the unknown.

The trick?

Thrive on it!

Instead of shrinking back into the shadows of uncertainty, feed upon that rush of having to figure things out, the feeling you get from exploring something and discovering new wonders.

So often we get stuck in these ruts and begin to feel depressed about our lives. But we are blind to the way to get out: CHANGE SOMETHING.

They say that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing time after time and expecting a different result, and yet… we just keep walking in our straight lines with our heads down.

And it’s especially easy to do in our prayer life! We memorize prayers, and we get into habits of saying them, and unless we progress past them and make prayer more than a rote set of words that we say, we just end up calling out from the ditch: “Helllllooooo?! My faith is stuck!”

So try something different!

Whether it be a Rosary, just hanging out and chatting with God, Adoration, meditation, contemplation, Ignatian spiritual exercises, Daily Mass, retreat… Just DO something that you don’t normally do.

Act now, and you’ll receive this lovely renewed devotion to God with every order!

Dying to Live

Tonight in YA Faith Formation, it floored me that no one in my group had ever heard of the concept that in order to rise with Christ, you must die with Christ. As in, they knew the “take up your cross” thing, but the mention of *death* was something totally new to them. Not only have I “gotten” that concept for quite a long time myself, but we also put on a retreat all about this concept of the Paschal Mystery last spring for the teens.

I guess sometimes I forget that even though something has been drilled into my brain by Life Teen, it doesn’t necessarily mean that the rest of the world has been exposed to it.

But Thomas Merton is a great intro to the idea of putting selfishness aside and figuratively dying to yourself and your own wants and desires for the betterment of others.

I love his image of it: that of progressively ridding yourself of layers of selfishness, like snakeskin, until all you have left is pure love.

 I feel like that sometimes: I feel like I get to a certain maturity level in my faith, then I need to shed my skin and enter a new phase, a new level, of spirituality.

This growing process also comes with a slight problem, which I encounter often: Once I become this new person with a new skin… It’s hard to remember what the old skin looked like, hard to remember what it felt like to live in it. Which wouldn’t be all that bad, except for the fact that in peer and youth ministry, relatability is one of the most important things. And yet, at the same time, I’m still learning to live in the new skin, so that’s a little awkward as well.

Lord, help me shed the old and grow into my new skin, and teach others how to join me in doing the same. Help me teach them how to die to themselves for the sake of others, and become better at modeling that behavior!