Finding Silence

Right now is the perfect time for “pre-Lent” — a short period of time before Ash Wednesday when we have the opportunity to prepare our hearts and our environments for Lent. The time is now to prayerfully consider how God is calling you to renew your heart, transform your mind and reform your actions in order to rediscover (or truly discover for the first time) the mystery of our risen Lord.

In order to do this important work, find some silence. In that silence, determine how to create more silence. Lent should be quiet. In order to enter into the desert of Lent, we need both interior and exterior silence. Since we live in such a very noisy world, it’s going to take some time and effort to establish silence in our lives. We need to consider carefully how to distance ourselves from the distractions that fill life with so much noise that we can’t hear Our Lord and so much stuff that we can’t see him. Our world is not conducive to quiet recollection, so if we want to pursue it for Lent (and we do), we all need to be intentional.

Cardinal Robert Sarah’s powerful book, “The Power of Silence: Against the Dictatorship of Noise,” is a beautiful place to begin. Don’t wait until Lent; start reading now to craft a quiet, pondering place for yourself throughout the 40 desert days.

This quest for quiet is an urgent one if we are to notice and listen to God. Cardinal Sarah writes, “Without silence, God disappears in the noise. And this noise becomes all the more obsessive because God is absent. Unless the world rediscovers silence, it is lost. The earth then rushes into nothingness.” Noise begets more noise. God won’t compete with the noise. You won’t hear him over the din of daily life.

Consider all the ways you engage in noise. We live in a world of constant conversation. At the swipe of a finger, a myriad of voices comes alive in the palms of our hands. Looking for silence? Start there. Then, consider how our smartphone habits have created new circuits in our brains. We’ve trained ourselves to always be engaged in the noise of our world. Our brain is always busy. Cardinal Sarah poses an important question: “If our ‘interior cell phone’ is always busy because we are ‘having a conversation’ with other creatures, how can the Creator reach us, how can he ‘call us’?” For human beings accustomed to being perpetually available, it’s good to ponder if our souls are similarly accessible to God.

We need to wake up to the power of silence. Noise numbs us. More accurately, we numb ourselves with noise. We are constantly hearing something, but are we truly listening? Or are we barricading our souls with a wall of noise because we are uncomfortable in the quiet? Cardinal Sarah challenges us to think about the role incessant distractions play in our lives. “Noise is a deceptive, addictive and false tranquilizer. The tragedy of our world is never better summed up than in the fury of senseless noise that stubbornly hates silence. This age detests the things that silence brings us to: encounter, wonder and kneeling before God.”

What if this Lent is your time to encounter wonder? What if this is your season to kneel before God in silence and let him fill the void? What can you do right now to open yourself to that possibility?

Hope for what hurts

“Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.” Matthew 5:4

It took three decades of the same argument over and over again (with different details each time) before I recognized the pattern. I’m not proud of this slow understanding, but I am encouraged by an intimate knowledge gained over time. It was so easy for me to see my husband’s pattern when we argue, to think I knew what his goals were every time, but it took a very long time to recognize what I wanted every time. Why did I keep repeating the same pattern of argument and what did that pattern have to teach me about myself?

We’ve worked hard to know what we do now. Since I’ve long subscribed to the idea that wives would do well to sing their husbands’ praises publicly and keep the rest to private conversation, we won’t talk about his arguing style; we’ll focus on mine. I am almost always seeking reassurance. I want to know he is a safe person, ours is a solid relationship, and we are a couple that is healthy and whole. During an argument, I almost always want to be comforted.

For me, to be in conflict is to mourn. Peter Kreeft writes, “Mourning is the expression of inner discontent, of the gap between desire and satisfaction, that is, of suffering.” When I open the definition of mourning to this interpretation, and I consider my intense need for reassurance, I see what Christ intended when he promised that those who mourn will be comforted.

He promised reassurance. He is the reassurance. He is the deep certainty, the safest of safe people, the most solid of all relationships, the truest expression of wholeness. The Father sent his Son into our suffering — all of our suffering — in order to satisfy our deepest needs for intimacy, understanding and reassurance. He promised that our suffering has redemptive value.

Jesus is with us when we weep. He’s there when we mourn in the most conventional use of the word, but he’s also there in the many struggles of our everyday lives. Certainly, he is also there when it all becomes too much to bear and we despair. Jesus came to earth to sit with us as we open a bill for which there are no resources, as we answer a call that brings terrible news, as we lie seemingly alone on a medical gurney. God knows what it feels like to be rejected, to be betrayed. He knows the grief of broken relationships and prodigal children. Knowing all, he entered in. Every pain we suffer, he suffers too.

He was wounded when he walked the earth, and we wound him even now. But he doesn’t turn away. Though we cause him pain, he stays. He reassures. His presence comforts us in a way nothing or no one on earth can. Even more astounding, he endures our sins. He is steadfast when we are not. We turn away from him over and over again, with every sin, big and small, and he stays.

Emmanuel. God with us.

The redeemer of our suffering comforts us in the sorrow. When life is crushingly hard, it is the Jesus of the scourging who absorbs the blows for us. He pours himself into us and we are strengthened. With that strength born of suffering, we have strength to offer others. He is risen and we are his body here on earth, blessed and broken for others. So, we stay. We enter into the sorrow. We offer ourselves.

We reassure a hurting world that there is hope.

His name is Jesus.

When we reframe the stress response

The last few months have been objectively stressful. There were unexpected trips away from home to provide necessary care to grown children who were sick and needed someone “on the ground” with them — my husband and me together, and then tag-teaming it, trading off so that one of us was at home and one of us was away for more than a month.

To that, there are massive changes in his workplace, very public layoffs that are staged to happen in waves over the course of the spring. There is the bewilderment and the deep grief that comes from the loss of a corollary relationship that came with my dad’s death, and the sorrow that he still hasn’t been buried and there’s nothing I can do about it. And then there are the “things that used to be big things, but make us shrug and sigh and say ‘of course’ now”: The dryer is broken; there are conflicts on the calendar between events we need to attend in other states and events we need to attend at home; the car is making noises as I coax it along the 400-mile trip to Virginia again.

I am a certified health coach. I’m a Catholic mindset coach. I know stress when I see it, and I know the sage advice is that something has to change. Prolonged periods of intense stress are detrimental to one’s health. The familiar advice is that stress is bad and we need to stop being so stressed.

The reality is that stress is life. And the measure of stress in any one life at any one time is not entirely within our control. Ironically, to the stresses of each of our lives we add another stress: Studies show that stress takes years — even decades — off your life.

To some degree, I believe that. I have seen stress turn someone’s hair entirely gray in a matter of weeks. I’ve seen stress put 60 pounds on a person’s body almost overnight. I’ve witnessed what stress can do to blood sugar and blood pressure levels. We are wired to have physical responses to stress.

But what if stress isn’t the bug that causes a system malfunction, but a built-in feature that can be utilized to enhance performance and improve the way we live life? What we think about the stressor will determine how we feel about the stressor. How we feel about the stressor will determine what we do about the stressor, consciously and also — to some degree — unconsciously. When we feel our breath come heavier and our hearts beat faster in response to stressful stimuli, we can choose to react with more fear or we can recognize that our bodies are now providing more oxygen and more awareness. When we reframe the stress response and see it as a system feature that is helpful to enhance performance, we can be less anxious and more confident. Further, our bodies will respond the way our minds direct them to. When you think about stress differently, your body can read that stress response — butterflies in your stomach, increased heart rate, shaky breath — more like it does when you’re falling in love than it does when you’re falling apart.

We don’t need to eradicate stressors — which is good because life has a way of throwing them at us. We do need to learn to change the way we think about stressors and about our physiological response to stress.

What is necessary is simple: surrender. Recognize that undesirable events and emotions are part and parcel of life. Recognize that feeling this flood of “stress energy” in response to those events is part of being a human being. It’s normal and it’s how we were created to respond.

Ironically, research shows that people with more anxiety perform better than people with no anxiety. Anxiety is going to provide you with some energy to meet the challenge at hand. And that can drive you into a peak performance mode. Embrace it in the moment; see it as a gift hard-wired into your person by your Creator. When you see the physiological response that way, it helps you to also see the stressor differently.

God allows challenges in our lives. He allows hard things to happen. And what he desires from us relative to those hard things is also surrender. The reality is we have very little control over what happens in our personal lives or what is going on out there in the world. It’s the same powerlessness as we have over the surge of hormones when we are afraid. And we can invoke the same surrender response.

In that moment of overwhelming stress, we can recognize what is happening and recognize the power we do have and the power we don’t have. We can ask the Holy Spirit to help us to discern what matters most and to use the energy we feel to think the thoughts that drive the actions that are consistent with God’s will. Surrender means trusting God’s design, and then giving the full assent of our will to him so that he can work in us and through us to bring about his perfect plan. Fair warning here notes that his plan might look nothing like yours. And you have to be good with that.

The last three years have taught me that right on the heels of a basement flood that wipes out almost every family heirloom will come a totaled car and then there will be emergency eye surgery and then there will be a grief so deep and sorrowful it will never find its way onto these pages. Stress happens. I know that.

But when it’s urgent and incessant and unrelenting, what if I could see that God is calling me to himself urgently, incessantly, unrelentingly? That he is ready and willing to stand shoulder to shoulder with me, to show me how to harness the energy of my body’s response and to labor alongside me? And once we’ve navigated the hard things yet again, what if he is eager and willing and waiting to show me how sweet the moment of true rest is in his presence, knowing that he can and will work it all together for the good?

To: The Dear One on Your Way Home for a College Holiday

Re: Managing Expectations

I have been counting the days until you return. I’ve missed having you woven into the dailiness of life in our house. You’ve been so busy, especially these last few weeks. At the beginning of the semester, everything was new. You navigated new places to eat, and sleep, and study. You met hundreds of new people at a time. Living away from home, you learned so many things about life in the world; you’ve been fully responsible for your daily life. And of course, you learned a lot of things taught to you in lecture halls and between the pages of a book. You’re tired. I hereby promise that even though I want to talk with you and hear all about all the things (and solicit your help with kitchen duties and Christmas lights), I will bide my time and recognize that what you want most in the world at first is just to sleep — in your own bed or in the corner of  the couch you wore into the shape of you during high school. I’ll let you sleep. And then, let’s catch up.

Late nights studying, added stress, crowded planes and trains to get home; you may walk through the door feeling quite ill. I won’t be surprised. Though I surely hope you will stay well, if you are sick, we’ll adapt. You’ve been working hard (and probably playing hard, too), and it takes its toll. I’ll remember that and help you heal. I’ll feed you well, and offer you a break from institutional food that doesn’t quite nourish the same way homecooked meals do, no matter how good the meal plan.

I know that just as I’ve been counting the days until I see you, you have been counting the days until you can hang out with your high school friends. Let’s strike a balance, shall we? I won’t take it personally when you want the keys to the car almost as soon as you’ve arrived, if you will take a moment to sort your laundry before you go. And as we settle into the season, remember that I’ve missed your friends, too. Invite them to our house. I’d love to see them again.

While we’re talking about the car and going out, please remember that this is not a college campus. The people who live here get up in the morning to go to work, or they have work to do at home. They go to sleep at reasonable times and wake before the workday begins. We also eat in the kitchen, put the toilet seat down, put dirty clothes in the hamper and clean clothes in the closet. It might take us both more than a minute to get used to sharing space again. When (if) alcohol is served, it accompanies the rest of the evening’s food and entertainment. It isn’t the star of the show. I guess what I’m saying is that this is our home, and we function a bit differently here than from where you’ve come. Please bear that in mind as you re-enter our world and adjust as needed to being at home again. We can talk about old curfews and new considerations. There’s a way for us all to grow together, especially if you don’t assume that none of the old habits are necessary any longer. Some of those habits are just part of living together well. They’re here for the long haul.

This is not my first time to welcome someone home. I learn something new every time. One thing is certain: that college break goes by in a blink, and I’ll be sad when it’s time to hug you goodbye again. What I want you to know before it even begins is that sometimes I let my idealistic notions of the perfect holiday get between me and you. This time, my plan is to let experience temper my expectations, to let go of the ideal, and to cherish every moment of the real time I have with you.

I am so glad you’re coming home!

Love,

Mom

How Things Are Here

Mike and I went to a very early Mass last Sunday. We live in a diocese that observes the Ascension on Thursday, so our readings were for the seventh Sunday of Easter. As I listened to the readings, and then to an excellent homily, I could not shake the feeling that this week, in particular, they were spoken straight to me in preparation for what the week would hold. Our deacon zoomed in on the second reading. He said that sometimes our suffering is of our own making; we make poor choices and natural law means there will be sad consequences. But sometimes, we suffer through no “fault” of our own. Sometimes, we suffer because we believe in Christ and we believe that followers of Christ should both seek his will and behave as he would. I may ask the deacon for notes; it was just that good. It was also the preface to a week that proved to begin a new chapter in our lives. 

On Tuesday morning, about an hour after he left for work, Mike called to say he was on his way home. He said he’d been laid off and he was ten minutes away. He told me he wanted to give me a heads-up so that I could collect myself. Then he asked if I needed more time. Apparently, he really wanted to be sure I was collected when he got home.

I did not need more time. I had time enough to call one friend and ask for prayers that I would be calm and wise and wholly in God’s will. 

After decades of loyal service to his company, my husband was let go in a downsizing. I’m not terribly surprised. Nothing has surprised me lately, because everything has surprised me for three years. Almost three years to the day that we closed on our house in Connecticut, he was losing the job for which we moved. And in those three years, nearly every day, that job was a challenge to what he believed to be right and good and true. A company he once loved and for which he’d sacrificed so much was caught up in the current tidal wave of wokeism, and despite his best efforts, Mike could no longer hold back the surge. 

After he arrived, we sat in the garden and talked for a few minutes, then gathered the four children at home for a family meeting. He was a man who’d been liberated at last from a job that was slowly choking him. Despite all the uncertainty, there was a palpable sense of relief. Finally, he would be relieved of the daily pummeling that “the other cheek” has endured since we got here.

All is not sunshine and roses. We do love our life here. Our children are settled. We have community we cherish. And our son and his wife and their five children are woven into our daily lives. We want to stay. Maybe we can. Maybe we can’t. He spent the whole day on the phone yesterday, and the calls continue today. 

I keep returning to the spot pictured above, stopping to pray, “Just keep us on the narrow path, safe inside your holy will.” That is my only true want right now. It’s been three unspeakably difficult years. My eyes have been opened to the culture in ways I could never have imagined. But God has been so faithful. He’s carried us through some agonizing sufferings. He has shown us how necessary the grace of the sacrament of marriage is, and he has shown us that he is truly present in it. We are three. Every hard bump along the way, every exhausting, sleepless night in the last three years–he used them all to get us ready for today. 

I didn’t even need ten minutes:-). I just stood there on that brick walk, asked someone to cover me in prayer, and met Mike there, fully confident that whatever this new wrinkle brings, God’s grace is sufficient.

That said, I hate surprises. I love to know the plan. And I need order. So on Tuesday, after we talked to the kids at home, Nick made a tee time and took his dad golfing. I stayed home and cleaned things. We all have our ways of coping…

When my sister calmly suggested that maybe I could stop vacuuming, I turned to a project Micaela and I have been quietly working on for some time. There are plans to bring Take Up &  Read into the fullness of the vision we had for it from the beginning: a mentoring and coaching site that will serve Catholic women in a healthy and holistic way. Now that Mike is going to be around all day every day, maybe we can move that launch date up a little. 

I also checked in with Beautycounter to see if I could get a beat on what June will hold. Beautycounter has been a blessing in more ways than one these couple of years. It’s kept the lights on here on the ‘net and paid for educational opportunities for me and been such a push in the right direction at just the right moment. And in the face of some economic uncertainty, I wanted to see what this little business opportunity holds in the immediate future. There is that new lipstick, and a new product that promises to make us all look bright and beautiful by autumn. And–the thing I was most interested in having been so recently kicked in the teeth by the culture–there is very little reliable information on how and when and whether rainbows will be ominous beacons of things unintended by God next month. I have been sharing a product I love, believing in a company that promotes good health.

I am weary and watchful and so-not-woke. I’m praying that June is not political. But I don’t know. I truly don’t know. Perhaps, this too, will fall away, because the way of Christ is really very narrow, isn’t it?

For now, there’s a chance to try the new lipstick and snag a really great-smelling shower gel for dad (and for you too, because let’s be honest, it’s really nice when they smell good). There’s a gift with purchase offer to celebrate the holiday weekend. As always, but maybe a bit more poignantly today, your new lipstick blesses my family. 

Thanks for listening, for your prayers, and for your friendship.