All About Him

Recently, I shared some thoughts about listening in a column. Ann has asked for thoughts on listening in prayer this week. So, I share them here, with the hope that they may bless.

It’s summertime and the living is easy — at least that’s the theory.Schedules are more relaxed; there is more time for leisure; our calendars aren’t crammed to overflowing. There are spaces, pockets, places of unstructured time. Perfect. May I make a suggestion? Let this be the summer of prayer. Take the gift of those pockets of time and do something genuine with them. Learn to pray on your summer vacation.

So often, our prayer looks like it did when we were 9 years old. Dear God, here I am. I really want a new bike. Please make my grandma feel better. I’m sorry I picked on my little sister. It’s all about me. Me. Me. What if instead this were the summer we made it all about Jesus?

In his letter to the Galatians, St. Paul writes, “It is no longer I that lives, but Christ who lives in me.” Can you imagine emptying yourself of you completely and then being still long enough to fill yourself with Jesus? Can you imagine becoming a completely new creation inside your old body? So often in popular treatises on prayer we are asked to imagine ourselves walking alongside Jesus, to use our imaginations to place ourselves next to Him. What if, instead, we abandoned ourselves entirely and let Jesus Himself fill our very beings?

We need to learn to make prayer about Him and not about us. We need to lose our lives in order to find life in Him. In her excellent book, Come Meet Jesus, Amy Welborn poses this pivotal question: “If I seek to meet Jesus in my prayer, is he at the center of my prayer, or am I? Am I really ready to listen? How open am I?”

The most beneficial prayer of all is probably not the prayer where we pepper God with all our thoughts. The most beneficial prayer might be the quietest, the prayer where we throw open the doors of our souls and invite God to come in and make a home in our very being. Prayer is about emptying and opening.

Pope Benedict invites us to open ourselves to Christ in prayer in just this way. He writes:

“It seems to me that this gesture of openness is also the first gesture of prayer: being open to the Lord’s presence and to his gift. This is also the first step in receiving something that we do not have, that we cannot have with the intention of acquiring it all on our own.

“We must make this gesture of openness, of prayer — give me faith, Lord! — with our whole being. We must enter into this willingness to accept the gift and let ourselves, our thoughts, our affections, and our will be completely immersed in this gift.”

We don’t know how to pray. We seek God constantly, because we were created to seek Him. And the very restlessness of seeking is a prayer, but we tend to flit from thought to thought and rarely to find the union we seek. Prayer is the intentional act of uniting ourselves with God in order to know His will for us and to know the grace and strength He will give to live in that will. But God knew we’d struggle with this. He knew that we would not know how to move from the weakness of restless, seeking prayer to a settled, constant prayer of unity. St. Paul told the Romans, “The Spirit helps us in our weakness, for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with sighs too deep for words. And he who searches the hearts of men knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God.” When prayer is difficult, the Spirit takes our very expression of that difficulty — sighs too deep for words — and makes it a prayer to the Father for us. The Son and the Spirit request from the Father what we need, not what we want. What we need is always, always to be filled with Christ Himself.

Knowing about God is not the same as knowing God. He doesn’t ask us to know about Him; He exhorts us to be still and know Him. So seize a quiet summer pocket of time. Empty your busy brain of all fancies of your imagination. Throw open the doors of your soul to the warm breeze that is the Holy Spirit. Sit with your Bible open (Psalms perhaps?) and let God pour His mercy like oil over your very being.

Velveteen Me--New Beginning

...once you are Real, you can't become unreal again. It lasts for always. ~The Velveteen Rabbit

Fifth in a series.

All of the other posts in this series were written a couple of weeks ago and queued up at Typepad, ready to go. This one is mostly being written in real time. That's because I have used this last week, the ninth week, to come to an understanding of the eight previous weeks. I thought I had it figured out, but God had other plans.

On Monday of this week, my first real day back online and the day I planned to integrate all my new habits into my real life, I woke up sick. Sick enough that I didn't exercise. And I didn't pray the Hours. I didn't get dressed. I dragged myself through the day, feeling sicker and sicker as time went on. I did manage to get drawn into an internet dialogue. Spent more time hunched over the computer than I had in the last eight weeks. And then I spent too much time on the phone. At the end of it, nothing good was accomplished and I had a headache and an overwhelming urge to go to confession.

The day ended with me curled up in a ball in excruciating pain from my waist to the top of my head. My entire left side burned. It was the kind of pain that when they say, "On a scale of one to ten, with ten being the worst pain you've ever felt..." I briefly remembered the time they forgot the meds right after my c-section and said "Nine, but almost ten." All night long, I kept considering how very wrong the day had gone. Did I mention that I also ate leftover brownies from the weekend party? Yep. Blew that whole thing, too. It was as if, in one day, I had the opportunity to see how critical every component was.

Tuesday, I went to the doctor. People who know me know that I never go to the doctor. The last time I had a sick visit to the doctor, I had taken a child to the pediatrician and he made me stay until he managed to diagnose pneumonia--in me. It had never occurred to me that I needed a doctor that day. I have just a wee bit of post-traumatic stress where doctors are concerned. This was not improved by my last [life-threatening] delivery. But I went to the doctor because I was that sick and that desperate. Turns out I've been nurturing a staph infection for sometime now. That might go a long way to explain the recurrent mastitis and the fatigue. I left the doctor, filled the prescription and went home.

Wednesday, I read Amy Welborn. Have I ever mentioned how much I love Amy Welborn?  She articulates the good and the true and the beautiful so very well. I read all of Come Meet Jesus on Wednesday. And then I began to read it again on Thursday. It's my new gift book of choice. I think everyone should have a copy and I mean to put one in as many hands as I can.

Wednesday definitely found me trying to make sense of it all, trying to hear what He was saying clearly. Turns out this wasn't an eight week experiment. It was the unveiling to me of a rule of life.

I need to start the day with prayer. Lots of it. And I need to pray it in the rhythm of the real Church, not the Church that other people represent to me.

I need to exercise every single day. (No, I don't mean when I'm sick, but I could really tell how the lack of routine could upset the apple cart even if I felt fine.)

I need to start the day (after the prayer and exercise start) with a shower, clothing and lipgloss, and then some quiet time with the Bible. I want my children to find me in that room, with a candle lit and the Bible on my lap when they first wake up. I don't want them to find me staring into my laptop.

I need to refrain from internet drama, even a little bit.

I need to limit the phone to times when my children and husband aren't present, so that I can be fully present in my home. And oh boy, I need to be fully present. To them.

I can't eat sugar or flour--not even a taste.

On Thursday, I packed up the children and went to visit my father and his wife in Charlottesville. Because even after all these years, Charlottesville still calls my name. I am the child of a naval officer and my parents divorced in my late teens. Those two things make it very hard to know where to go when every bone in your body wants to go "home" to someplace where someone will take care of you for a day or two. 

My father and stepmother live in Charlottesville--the only town I've ever chosen for myself. It was my town before it was their town. I went to school there and around every corner are little pieces of me and of people I love.Those are my trees, my mountains; the air smells like home to me. It's a good place to be. Sometimes, when we're very tired, a change is as good as a rest. And if that change takes you "home," all the better.

So, surrounded by people I love, in a place I cherish, it's been easy to reflect on the past nine weeks and know what I need to do every single day to live the seamless life I so long to live, to walk in the peace of Christ. Over the past couple of days, I've had heart to heart, face to face talks with people I trust. I bought new lipgloss and a new candle.  I met a friend for lunch and kind conversation and then put two tiny girls in the van and drove around while they napped. I drove past the places where I was educated. I drove past the places where I taught--and where I fell in love with teaching. I thought about how dear it all is--the things I've done, the places I've been, the people I've loved.

And I thought about how dear the time to come is. I want it to be everything God intends for it to be.

The last big question remaining for me has been whether to continue to blog or not.

One of the things I did when I decided to take a month-long blogging break was to sift through lots of old columns and give them to my children as copywork to keyboard. In such a way, I preprogrammed posts and continued to blog, using writing that was sometimes 15 years old. The process of choosing those pieces was lovely, indeed. I spent several hours reading my own writing and remembering things I know I thought I'd never forget.

But I had forgotten.

And it was a joy and a consolation to read them again. I read about our happy times, my moody times, the struggling times. As soon as my eyes met the word on the page, I instantly remembered every column in great detail. I even remembered where I was when I first composed them in my head. My children enjoyed reading them and I think they were touched more than once to see in black and white how very much they are loved. Those columns have value. And it's a very personal value.

The blog is even better. This place has always been the place on the web where I am at home; I am myself. I am real.  There is more writing and many, many photographs. It's a family treasury and my immediate family has never been anything but extremely supportive of my blogging. I know that every post is a deposit in a treasury of family memories. Some of those memories are family anecdotes and others are the personal musings of a mother's heart. I think, when I sift through them fifteen or thirty years hence, both will be of worth.

More than my memories though, I want these posts for my children, particularly my daughters and daughters-in-law. I want to connect with the young mothers they probably will be. I want to empathize and to encourage and to support. I want to be for them the hand up, the strong shoulder, the warm hug I have wanted so many times on this journey. I think these posts might help us both. I want to remember the struggle of these years. I want to remember how hard I tried, how much I pondered, how deeply I loved. I want to remember because I want to be able to empathize. Going forward, it is my intent to write with those young ladies of the not too distant future as my audience.

So, why publish?

Because of you. Because despite the nasty notes and ugly threads and hurtful comments hurled through cyberspace, mostly the people who read this blog are very good people. And you wrote to me. You told me how and why this blog mattered to you. You told me your stories and you touched my heart again and again. You sent me birth announcements.

We are given gifts. We all have our talents to bury or to squander or to invest. All my life, God has given me words. When I have been lonely, afraid, without comfort or attachment, He gave me words. I write to make sense of the world around me and I always have, for as long as I can remember. Actually, He gave me the Word and He gave me words. Late at night, huddled under the covers with a flashlight and the Children's Living Bible, I had a very strong sense of understanding that to know this--really know--the God of these words was the only way I could stay sane.And then I scribbled notes in the dark, reams and reams of notes.  I write because it's my gift--the lifeline God has thrown me, for me. But, He showed me that when I have the courage to share those words, they can bless someone else. I can give them as a gift. I can articulate something that she is thinking and so help bear the burden of the thought.

As I recently told a friend, if you have a beautiful voice, and you sing the Hours faithfully at home in total privacy, that is certainly a beautiful thing. You are giving God a beautiful gift and you are allowing yourself to be open to His transcendence. But I would be ever so grateful if you would consider recording your voice. When I lay down to nurse my baby to sleep and start to sing to her, she ceases nursing, holds up her hand and says, "Stop." I cannot sing. Your song would be a gift to me.

I want my words to be a gift.

I worry, though. When I first started blogging, one thing several friends who are writers agreed upon was that this is a great medium for people who think in narrative. At last we had some place to actually put all those thoughts. The last few days have me wondering. Are we supposed to think in narrative? I don't think so. I think we're supposed to think--or not think-- in prayer. Thinking in narrative focuses our minds and our hearts on ourselves. Living a one-piece life of genuine prayer focuses both heart and mind on God.

To know Christ is a gift, a gift I am tempted to shelter and carefully protect, lest it slip away somehow. A gift I can scarcely believe is mine. A gift that seems so precious that my first instinct is to protect it deep within my soul.

I think I'm making this all too complicated. Maybe it's really much simpler. Live the life of prayer--make it genuine and true and real. And if the Lord gives me the words and the time, share abundantly.

I know that I cannot control how I am received. I cannot control what people will write and say and do. I cannot begin to take into account every possible situation. I can just remember how much I wish someone would sing the Hours for me in clear voice and how I might somehow bless someone likewise with clear prose. I can share a life of prayer--just as long as sharing it does not cause it to cease being  a life of prayer.

I could sit for hours and try to do a cost-profit analysis on pushing the "post" button. And I have. In the end, it doesn't matter if blogging has caused more pain or more happiness in my life. In the end, what matters is whether I have the words and whether I have the means to share them. These words are God's gift to me. I cannot, in good conscience, smother a gift so dear. Instead, I give thanks for this new media. I give thanks for the opportunity to see words come to life on a MacBook in the small spaces of my day when my children leave me in the quiet with my thoughts. I fully understand that those times may be scarce and I promise not to squander them wandering mindlessly online. I give thanks that I can and will tell my children and anyone else within earshot that there is joy.

The whole series:

Velveteen Me

Velveteen Me~To Desire Him More

Velveteen Me~My Heart in My Home

Velveteen Me~The Years the Locusts Ate

Velveteen Me~New Beginning

Velveteen Me--To Desire Him More

Does it happen all at once, like being wound up," he asked, "or bit by bit?" "It doesn't happen all at once," said the Skin Horse. "You become. It takes a long time. That's why it doesn't often happen to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or have to be carefully kept. --The Velveteen Rabbit

The second in a series

After the first three weeks of exercise and prayer, I recognized that more habit-changing had to happen. I was no where close to the peaceful healing I so wanted and my family needed. I decided to stop blogging for the month of June. More about that in the next post.

In addition to the blogging break, I undertook the Saint Diet. I knew I wanted to fast--I wanted my body and my soul to be oriented towards dependence upon God. I considered other fasts, but this fast made the most sense to me. I wanted to overcome my tendency towards gluttony and to be reliant upon the tangible help of the Spirit to do it, but I wanted to work with my body chemistry, not against it. My body reacts very badly to sugar and to wheat. A fast that eliminates other foods, but allows wheat and sugar would have conspired to make overcoming my gluttony more difficult and it would have been detrimental to my physical well-being. Furthermore, I have learned that essential fatty acids are, well, essential, for me, particularly when battling depression. I paid careful attention to increasing fatty fish, beneficial oils, and EFA supplementation. The Saint Diet offers ample opportunity to whisper imploringly to the Spirit, "Please God, help me to desire you more than I desire this food." Jen does such a good job connecting the physical and spiritual dimensions in her posts, that little more needs to be said here.

After the first week or so of the "s" focus, I read this piece. And that finally resonated in a way no other look at fasting --and everyday eating--ever had. Again, I had to tweak a bit to reflect a healthy diet for me. But I have pretty much adopted this monkish meal plan.

My family does not eat this way. One of the other things I did during my detox time was to make well-considered meal plans and detailed grocery lists. I've always done this, but this time I did it with a distinct sense of detachment. I still believe in the beautiful expression of love and community that comes around the dining room table. And I still believe in healthy, well-prepared food. My personal perspective has changed a bit though, in a way I can't articulate very well.

This was about the time I added an intentional reduction in telephone use. I have long had a tradition of little or no telephone use when my husband is home. In searching my heart to see how things had gotten so out of control, I could see that my telephone and computer use had gone up exponentially when he stopped working from home and took a job downtown, right around the time Karoline was born. So, in order to train myself to be sensitive to computer and telephone use once again, I endeavored to refrain from both when my children were present and awake. It's crazy how much peace that practice brings! Truth be told, I have never been idle while on the phone. I use a headset and fold laundry, clean the kitchen, cook meals, but there's always a bit of chaos around me as I do.

And then there is another thing: my children are older now. Adult conversations don't sail over their heads. They hear them. They understand them as well as one can understand when he only hears one side. They shouldn't. It's not their world. Nor should I carry on a conversation with someone else while they are in the room. It's just rude. There are rare exceptions, of course. But they are exceptions. It's amazing how much this has affected the quality of the conversations I do have. When I wait until I can fully focus on talking instead of being distracted and interrupted by my children and couching my speech so as to protect them and the listener, I have better conversations. I can share more deeply. I can reach my "real." What's more important is that I can reach the "real" of the person to whom I am talking.

So, the second three weeks was more of the same exercise and prayer, with the addition of sharply curtailed internet use, very little telephone, and the Saint Diet. About a week into this phase, it was Memorial Day weekend. Three soccer tournaments, three different towns, all far away. I drove and drove and drove. I schlepped my poor baby around in 90 degree heat and DC humidity. I got to know every corner of rural Maryland.I didn't even think about the computer or the phone. When I got home at night, the only things I read were soccer-related emails. And I felt utterly detached from the bloggy world. That was the good part.

The bad part was that I was so unbelievably, incredibly, overwhelmingly tired that I seriously wondered when I would fall over. Around Thursday of the week following Memorial Day, I crashed again. And I despaired. All this work! All these habits! Hours and hours of prayer. And all that driving time? I had spent that listening to spiritually uplifting and challenging podcasts. Still, here I was a sobbing, exhausted heap.

What in the world was the problem with my program?

The whole series:

Velveteen Me

Velveteen Me~To Desire Him More

Velveteen Me~My Heart in My Home

Velveteen Me~The Years the Locusts Ate

Velveteen Me~New Beginning

More on Monks & Liturgy

First, an amazing tip kindly passed on by Amy. You can hear the Liturgy of the Hours and pray along with human voices here. My kitchen will never be the same.

And this is Sarah Anne's current favorite video. I think there must be something at the very core of our being that is drawn to prayer sung this way. Hat tip to the Anchoress.

Man of God

Dear Patrick,

Did you know that you just kept singing all day, the day you were confirmed? We all know that you are not the most gifted singer, but sing you did. All day long, sheer joy bubbled up from you. Joy. You have found joy in Our Lord.

Two years ago, you told us that you could not honestly profess our faith. You had too many doubts, too many unanswered questions. You had learned too young that the Church is made of imperfect people. Alongside your seeds of faith, seeds of doubt had been sown. We appreciated the courage and honesty you showed in that moment. And we began a long, hard journey with you to find Christ.

There were nights I trembled with fear as I watched the storms rage within you. I prayed. Oh, how I prayed! There was a grain of faith there, I knew. A mustard seed, if you will. You tried to crush it.

We read great books. You talked to brilliant apologists. You remained unconvinced. You faltered. And you fell.  You learned that living in a family of faith means that someone will pick you up and carry you as far as you need, for as long as you need. You saw in your father the face of forgiveness and the example of sacrifice for someone else's sins. You softened and opened yourself just a little bit to the grace of the Lord. You heard the voice of Jesus in the confessional. I will forever be grateful to that good and holy priest. You returned to the Eucharist, tentatively at first.

There were so many, many people praying for you. Among them was a band of brothers in Louisiana and their sweet, faithful Mama. You knew they could be counted on to drop everything and pray through overtime of the State Cup finals. We could almost hear them cheering from so far away when you scored the winning goal. But you also knew that a faithful woman in the deep South joined her prayers with mine and your godmother's and the prayers of so many people who love you for a much, much bigger triumph.

On a warm, late summer afternoon, just as you were beginning to embrace Our Lord, your world was rocked. The baby boy newly born to the merry band of brothers died in his sleep. And that afternoon, as we sat at an outdoor cafe on the way to soccer practice and I tried to make some phone calls, you cradled your baby sister very close and I noticed you were trembling.

We all held our breath. How would tragedy test your faith? How would you reconcile the pain you were witnessing to the gospel?

You, you saw a new saint and claimed him for your own. He is your constant companion. Some of the first prayers Mrs. Mitchell whispered heavenward to her dear little one were prayers for you. We begged his intercession even as we mourned the loss of him.  September 1, 2009 was the day Patrick Foss began to step heavenward with a firm assurance that still astounds everyone around you. 

You began to prepare in earnest for your Confirmation, eager to complete the healing begun in baptism.

You chose Coach Harkes for your sponsor. He is the perfect choice for you. He understands you. He understands your intensity about all things. He understands the formidable challenges that come with your remarkable gifts. And he is a man of God.  He'll be there for you, wherever "there" is. 

Finally, it is so fitting that in the same place where seeds of doubt were scattered years ago, a new priest celebrated Mass. You were humbled by his profound witness of faith. You were inspired by his obvious love for the Eucharist. And, you were renewed in hope and faith in your Church. You left that makeshift altar in a school gym and walked home with the confidence of a man who was very sure of his God. In the Year for Priests, we are so grateful for the holy example of an extraordinary man of God.

Did I cry on the evening when you were confirmed? Oh, yes, dear boy. I definitely did. And no tears ever tasted so sweet.

God bless you, Patrick Gabriel Bryce.