Our Only Comforter

As we honor today Our Lady, Mother of the Church, it seems fitting to speak of her Spouse, the Holy Spirit, in this afterglow of the great solemnity of Pentecost.  Specifically I would like to focus on one particular word describing Him.  While praying the novena leading up to Pentecost, one of His titles burst through the veil formed by the mundane repetition of having heard it said many times through my life:

Comforter.

I was listening to this Veni Sancte Spiritus when the word penetrated into the depths of my heart through the lyrics:

You are our only Comforter.

So many times we desire comfort to counter the trials and tribulations of our lives.  We look for the simple things—the reliable things—the coffee and cookies.

Of course we also look deeper.  We try to find happiness in fulfilling work, in relationships with those dear to us, in following our vocations, and so on.  Yet sooner or later all of these things fail to satisfy us.  The world will fail you left and right, as say the lyrics of the song "I'm Not Alone" from the singer Plumb.

Where do we look?

Everywhere except to the Holy Spirit.  After all, it's incredibly difficult to look at an invisible reality who happens to be the Third Person of the Blessed Trinity.  If you can find a way to look at Him, let me know.

I can't.  Although gazing at the beautiful alabaster image of the Holy Spirit symbolized by a dove in St. Peter's does help.

Looking to Him means opening ourselves to something beyond our control—it means letting go of control—abandoning our expectations.  We may find ourselves tossed on the seas of doubt and fear or joy and longing.  We may feel nothing.  Yet if we do dare to sink deep within ourselves, to stop looking outside, and to find Him within, we may just find that He gives the comfort that the world can never give.  For He gives the comfort of belonging, of being welcome, of being loved: the fulfillment of our hearts' deepest desires.  He gives the comfort of heaven—the comfort of our true home.

Of course He may not give it right away.  He likely won't give all the comfort we desire or at least not all the time.  Yet He can't give any comfort to hearts that are closed to Him.

If we will be patient and trust Him, we will experience comfort according to His promise.

It was the pouring out of the Holy Spirit that brought the Church to birth.  It is His pouring out of Himself on us today that brings us to birth as the Church—as the Mystical Body of Christ.  And it is Our Lady who is the Mother of Christ and therefore also the Mother of the Church.

Veni Sancte Spiritus! Veni per Mariam!

Faith is Easy When You Don't Need It

FAITH IS EASY WHEN YOU DON'T NEED IT

I passed this sign as I biked to Mass this morning.  It seemed particularly relevant in light of my recent experience.  Also its message is uncomfortably true.

When we see the winding paths of our lives wending into a straight course toward the heavens, we do not need faith, for we can see and recognize that God is at work.  We need faith in the darkness when we seem to have lost the path.

Yet sometimes in that darkness faith does not seem enough.  We can have faith certainly—indeed we must have faith—but we must also know how to act.

For example, I recently held auditions for a play to be performed in honor of the feastday of Saint Philomena.  I had been praying that Saint Philomena would bring the actors necessary and trusting that if she wanted it to happen she would indeed bring them.  So as I prepared to audition the fifteen or so people I needed along with my stage manager and designer there to support me, I found my expected cast reduced in the face of only one auditionee.

How would faith have me respond?  It seemed entirely unreasonable to have faith that the rest of the cast would miraculously appear.  Why would God make happen in extraordinary ways what He had chosen not to bring to fruition in the ordinary offered way?

Yet would faith have me turn back?  Certainly faith must be tested and tried and not give up when it meets the very first obstacle, no matter how great an obstacle it may seem.

Often through our lives we face this dilemma: faith gives no answer.  God's will seems muddied beneath our own efforts and desires.  We do not know whether to go on or to turn back.  Is it a roadblock that means we should take the detour or is it only a decoy put there by the enemy to make us lose hope?

So we stumble on in faith as best we can, step by step....

To Continue or Not to Continue, That is the Question

After spending Lent in various daily practices it seems strange to discontinue them, particularly the writing each day upon this blog.  As I ponder whether to continue, my inclination is to ask you, my readers, whether it is valuable for me to keep writing daily meditations to pass to you through the pixels of your screen.

Is it folly to thus ask for visible fruits?

We are called to give of ourselves, to give without counting the cost, to give without asking for any reward.  Surely then it ought to be unnecessary to consider whether my efforts draw you, dear seekers, any nearer to our Lord.  Yet I must needs dispense of the time given me wisely.

Discernment of this small piece of the time given me requires thought and prayer just as does every decision of our lives (although the quantity may vary substantially according to the weight of the outcome).  Sometimes we are given a clear answer in exterior circumstances or conviction that strikes our heart.  Sometimes, though, we have no illumination, but must choose to step forward in faith, hoping that in abandoning ourselves in the darkness we choose the right way, trusting that our Lord will guide our steps.

So I step on, pondering and seeking....

Our Hearts' Desire

How much do you desire God?

That was the question heading the most recent Restoration newspaper I read from Madonna House and it is a good question.  Ultimately it is the question that underlies all that we do throughout our lives, but particularly during Lent.

The whole purpose of Lent is to identify our desire for God.  We sacrifice goods in order to purify our desire within that we may recognize it as such.

Desire is like a flame; it starts small and it grows.

So Catherine Doherty wrote in the first article I read and I think the simile is so apt.  Desire truly is like a flame, which, as we feed it, grows and grows, while when we give it no fuel it dies away into embers, waiting perhaps for fresh kindling and a breath to bring it back to life.  The more we feed that desire the larger it grows until it becomes a bonfire and we are set on fire.  And then, as Saint Catherine of Siena said:

If you are who you should be, you will set the world on fire.

That conflagration may start from the smallest of flames.  It matters little whether you find in your heart only a coldness and emptiness or whether you feel that your desire for things of the world outweighs any desire for God.  If you feed the tiniest flicker with prayer and abandonment to God, you will become that burning light.

We exist to desire the Desired One: God.  As St. Augustine said, "Our hearts were made for Yourself, O Lord, and they are restless until they rest in You."

Catherine Doherty's words speak so powerfully to the reason for our existence.  One of the greatest struggles of our lives is to determine the answer to that question: why do we exist?  The Baltimore Catechism answers it simply: To love and serve God in this life and be happy with Him in the next.  In that simplicity there is great truth and it is our desire for God that prompts us to love and serve Him.

In order for that desire to grow, however, and in order for that flame to burn, there must be room for it.  As Catherine Doherty puts it:

His every act, His every word, must be enclosed in our desire, for if we are to fulfill our desire to see Him when the door of death opens (and even before, for the Kingdom of God begins now), we have to imitate Him whom we are going to look at.

This will require that we empty ourselves of many things, since the kind of fiery desire we have takes a lot of space.  It is not just a little kindling that we are going to ignite but huge dry wood.

We must desire to empty every corner of ourselves of everything but this person called Jesus Christ, God and man, who died and resurrected so that we might see the face of the Triune God....

All Glory, Laud, and Honor

This beautiful hymn expresses so wonderfully the glorious praise heaped upon Christ as He made His glorious entry into Jerusalem.  Imagine all the people gathering in the streets, laying out their cloaks and palm branches and shouting Hosanna to the Son of David! as He fulfilled the scriptures by riding in on a donkey.  This glorious event was a recognition of Christ as fulfillment of the prophecies and as the King, the Messiah.

What happened to change so quickly the people's hearts that they should go from praising and glorifying Him to calling for His death?  For it was only a short time later that they shouted instead: Crucify Him!  Crucify Him! 

Is it not the same thing that happens in our own hearts?  When all goes well and we see the brilliant path of God's plan, we praise and glorify Him, but as soon as we face trouble and discouragement or no longer feel a desire to serve Him we want nothing to do with Him.

Again and again we face this reality through our lives.  We are uplifted on the waves of joy and delight in His consolations and then crushed beneath the weight of desolation.

As we come to know this pattern more deeply and to understand His love more fully, perhaps we shall be able to abandon ourselves more perfectly in both joys and sorrows.  May He grant us that grace as we enter this Holy Week with Him!

Prayer and Hope

Since Nouwen's words on prayer are so powerful, and prayer is so important for our lives, I shall continue on with some further words of his:

To pray means to open your hands before God.  It means slowly relaxing the tension which squeezes your hands together and accepting your existence with an increasing readiness, not as a possession to defend, but as a gift to receive.  Above all, prayer is a way of life which allows you to find a stillness in the midst of the world where you open your hands to God's promises and find hope for yourself, your neighbor, and your world.  In prayer, you encounter God not only in the small voice and the soft breeze, but also in the midst of the turmoil of the world, in the distress and joy of your neighbor, and in the loneliness of your own heart.

-With Open Hands

There are so many powerful words there—so many powerful ideas.  If I were to summarize them in one word it would be this one: abandonment.

For the idea of abandonment is, to put it simply, to let go of yourself and your needs and wants in all situations in order to find God everywhere and to be open to receiving the gifts and graces He is pouring out upon you.  It is particularly true that we must find Him in the loneliness of our own hearts.  That is where it is most difficult to find Him sometimes.  We seek to fill that loneliness with everything except an openness to Him because it is painful to experience.

Yet in prayer we must accept that loneliness and embrace that pain if we want to truly begin to know this God so much greater than our minds can fathom.  For in that acceptance, that surrender, we begin a true communion of hearts—the true purpose of prayer—and we find a source for a burning hope.

On a Pilgrimage

Praying means, above all, to be accepting toward God who is always new, always different.  For God is a deeply moving God whose heart is greater than ours.  The open acceptance of prayer in the face of an ever-new God makes us free.  In prayer, we are constantly on the way, on a pilgrimage.  On our way, we meet more and more people who show us something about the God whom we seek.  We will never know for sure if we have reached God.  But we do know that God will always be new and that there is no reason to fear.

-With Open Hands

As I was struggling with prayer, trying to find time for it amidst the busyness of life on the road and demands upon my time and energies, I felt more and more that I did not even know what prayer was.  Then, like a light from the heavens, came a little book specifically on prayer.

The quotation above comes from that book, which was a gathering of various quotations from Henri Nouwen on prayer.  Always his words speak so deeply to my heart, reflecting the truth like a prism bending light into the depths of my being.  He is quickly becoming a steady spiritual guide for my earthly pilgrimage.

In that quotation, the words that strike my heart most deeply are these: We will never know for sure if we have reached God.  What a powerful and almost chilling statement.  Must we truly let go even of certain knowledge of reaching God?  Now that is abandonment indeed.

Yet that is often what troubles me: that I cannot know what is God and what myself, or what even may be the devil masquerading as an angel of light.  How can I go toward Someone when I do not even know I am headed in the right direction?  It feels too much like risking opening my heart to a stranger or merely to a phantasm of my own creation.  Either I must build up some comfortable idea of this God I worship or else find Him a perfect stranger, like Psyche who had never seen even the face of Cupid.

If we, like she, prompted by her sisters, try to see our Lord, to force Him to conform to our own will, perhaps we will find that He too vanishes in the darkness.  Perhaps instead we must remain in the darkness, with no candle, receiving His love and giving ourselves wholly even when He seems strange and unknowable.