contemplative life

The contemplative life has always been a topic that intrigues me. It is sort of a "buzz word" that I hear, and it instantly lifts my spirit up to the zephyrs of joy. We all have those words that do that. In truth, my prayer life has felt like a big, immobile rock that I cannot move forward in the last year. I have tried to read many books on prayer in the last year--"The Way of a Pilgrim", "Strannik" "Molchanie" "Philokalia" ...ya know, the classics. #sarcasm Okay, most of you have probably never heard of those titles, because the books I have been reading are actually rooted in Greek and Russian Orthodox spirituality. I have been really moved by the Orthodox faith, but that m'dears is a whole other blog post! The point is, I am stuck in my spiritual life, and have been hungering to move forward. If i ever feel myself get spiritually blocked, I diagnose myself with the "Carmelite Doctors"--that's right, Dr. Teresa d'Avila and Dr. John d' la Cruz. But so often, like any remedy, we forget about it and go looking in the wrong places, when all along we had the knowledge we were seeking. Does that ever happen to you? You restlessly search for an answer, and then some wonderful soul comes along and re-reminds you of what you already know? It is a moment of recognition and familiarity, like finding a lost piece of a puzzle that you once possessed. This is what happened to me this weekend.

I went to Canada on a "Notre Dame de Vie" (French: Our Lady of Life) retreat in the backwoods of Quebec. I initially did not want to go--I knew it was going to be a series of talks and TBH, as a missionary who is constantly doing Church-related activities and travelling, I just wanted to veg out and make soup or something on my first free weekend in many moons. But God woke me up at 6:30am on a Saturday wide awake and full of energy (if you know me, you can acknowledge this is a miracle!) and so I took it as a kick in the butt from the Holy Spirit that I was meant to attend this retreat. When I arrived at the retreat I noticed it was full of kind, elderly souls who also were in need of spiritual renewal, and to my delight everything was in French, which made me realize how much I love being outside of America. Monsignor Lavalley, a theatrical wise-as-all-get out priest was our retreat director, and as soon as his James Earl Jones-esque, commanding voice started to speak, I was buckled up and riveted to my seat.

Here are some of my notes from the retreat to chew on:

Contemplative prayer...only a child can do it.


"Unless you convert and become like little children,"

 Jesus says, "you cannot enter the kingdom of 

heaven." 

I repeat: only a CHILD can do it. What does that mean? A child is full of trust, looking to their mother and father to help guide them. Children are humble, little creatures. They don't lead themselves--they need someone to carry them along. Children also need and demand attention. Imagine a child who never asked for intention! You can't--because it doesn't exist. Children crave and NEED attention. And, the funny thing is, in the spiritual life, we, the self-sufficient American adults we are, need attention too. We need the Father. We need to rest in His big arms and nestle there. Yes, nestle there! We need to know we are loved and appreciated. But not only appreciated, for appreciated is one of those blah-words you use when you want something deeper, no we hunger for the attention of the Father. We want to know we are delighted in. Yes, God the Father, who created you and me, created us exactly as we are and loves us exactly as we are. With all our warts and wrinkles and drama and messiness--He loves us. And as the children that we are, we must delight in knowing that our Father in Heaven is always our #1 fan. How hard to understand...we are so sinful and selfish...but yet He gazes. An audience of 1 (but the 1 is 3, glory be to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit) is constantly watching His creature, full of joy no doubt, if we are living in His grace, and waiting in expectation for the moment we gaze back. This my friends, is what we call communion, and it what we are created for. And this union is only intensified when we receive the Lord in the Holy Eucharist--for there is the total consummation of the flesh, reminding us of the marital embrace, the two becoming one.


Second, mind blower: Discover the God who lives within you. (Divine Indwelling)

One word tells us everything we need to know about contemplative prayer, and it was uttered by a poor, illiterate 15 year old girl over 2,000 years ago: Yes. 

Fiat!

Yes, this little girl was our Lady, the most holy Mother of God. She teaches us contemplation, because God came down from the Heavens, to dwell within her. The Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us. God is living within us too--and like our Lady, when we say YES to God, Jesus happens.

Theotokos--she whom the Trinity indwells in

Divine Indwelling. Do you believe God dwells in you? This is a total game-changer. God is not "out-there" or distant, but He is actually inside of you. Through Baptism, we share in the very life of God dwelling in us. He is there! Do we acknowledge Him?--not nearly enough as our ancestors did I assure you. Our world is too fast, too diverting, too I-phoney. Why talk to God when I can check my FB or listen to Spotify? Wait, we are made for relationship. Relationships require communication (communio) and if I am not talking to God or listening, then there really isn't a whole lot of communion happening.  "But I have people--I mean, I get God through people. That's how we communicate. I don't really hear him..." Ah. But here is where we have to be creative--when the relationship gets gray or we run out of things to say or do, we need to get creative. We are made in the image and likeness of THE Creator, right? Lets be creative. I cannot tell you what you need to do--I am still finding ways myself, but I can tell you that in any relationship we have to spice it up once in awhile, or its gonna get as boring as flossing your teeth. Try switch up your "floss flavor,"--you been using "plain, waxed"? I say go for "Cinnamon Tingle" next time, or "Sassy Spearmint"--you get my drift? Do something that will spice up your relationship with God! Visit a monastery. Buy a book that is utterly fascinating. (Amazon, yo) Or rise early to chant the Morning office while listening to Byzantine chants. (That's on my list) Walk in the forest with your journal and bible. Join a bible study or get involved with a prayer group or volunteer group. Teach someone to pray the rosary--if you don't know how, go to www.comepraytherosary.org. Go grab coffee with a priest or sister--ask them their vocation story. Watch "Padre Pio: Miracle Man." Buy an African drum and ask for the gift of praying in tongues and go to town! Praise the Lord! Remember life with God is above all things: an adventure.

Just do something. He sees the effort. He knows your trying. 

"If the soul seeks God, her God seeks the soul with even more love, infinitely more love."
-St John of the Cross


We need to be creative in showing our love in all our relationships--why not with God?

One other thought: to enter into contemplative prayer, which is in Monsignor's words "resting in the arms of the Father," we need to expect something: emptying of self. 

Prayer is a pilgrimage into the heart of God. It is to empty one's self for the sake of souls--its truly a missionary journey. The more we enter into God, the more He enters into us (infusion) but God does not start to resemble us...no we who are nothing fade into HE who is all ALL. The more we become like Christ, the more Christ is crucified IN US. "Now, this is hard... I don't want to be crucified. Why would anyone want that?" Let me repeat,  to enter into contemplative prayer we have to TRUST the cross of Christ within us.

Behold! Behold! The Wood of The Cross...on which has hung our salvation...oh, come let us adore!

Christ is in you  and He is in me. Oh yes, He is Risen and glorious, but He also bears the marks of His glory--the five wounds in His hands and feet, in you and in me. The more we become like Christ, the more we will resemble the Bridegroom. (The Bride must resemble the Bridegroom--Jesus to St. Faustina)  Souls are costly. We cost Him everything--all the blood and water flowed out of Him to the last drop. Through this cross in us, which we must TRUST because it comes from Jesus, we will lose our lives to save them. A saint once said, the cross is the only ladder to Heaven. Jesus saved us by the cross--so too, we will be saved by the cross.

2 Corinthians 4: 8-12
We are hard pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed.  We always carry around in our body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be revealed in our body. 

I Peter 2:22 
 For unto this are you called: because Christ also suffered for us, leaving you an example that you should follow his steps.

Luke 14: 27 
And whosoever doth not carry his cross and come after me cannot be my disciple. 


Galatians 6: 14 
May I never boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, through which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world.

Saints show us how to suffer like a boss.
St. Maximilian Kolbe, martyr at Auschwitz.

In short, we can save souls with Christ inside of us , by offering up our small and great sufferings to God--which we call "redemptive suffering. Suffering is the only road we have to trod to save souls. Period. Look at Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane the night before the cruelest death in human history, "Father, let this cup pass from me, but let not my will be done, but thy will be done. " 

No I am not saying Christ's own suffering wasn't sufficient or that His death wasn't enough the first time to save our souls. I am sayin', ....just sayin' that in God's great plan of redemption he wanted us, the Body of Christ, to participate and co-cooperate.

I Corinthians 12:26 
And if one member suffer any thing, all the members suffer with it: or if one member glory, all the members rejoice with it. 

Colossians 1:23-24 Now I rejoice in what I am suffering for you, and I fill up in my flesh what is still lacking in regard to Christ’s afflictions, for the sake of his body, which is the church


So. I did not even mean to write all that! But guess, somebody out there needed to hear about redemptive suffering (aka myself). Often when i write it helps me understand something deeper. 

One last thing about prayer. With contemplative prayer, expect it to be a road of emptying. You are emptying yourself, so you can enter into God. Expect darkness, dryness, loneliness, and feelings of abandonment. John of the Cross calls this the "dark night of the soul," or at least the beginning stages of it. But offer it up for souls--God uses it all for the good of the world. 

As Fr Marie-Eugene, founder of the Notre Dame de Vie Institute, says to remember about suffering:

Dawn does not come until the night is over.

We do not climb Calvary as heroes, like champions who have won the race. A saint is not a hero: he is someone filled with God and with God's strength.

And when faced with the Cross, we are all weak. Weak, little children. (praise God for crosses!)

Yes in order to enter into contemplative prayer, and ultimately in order to grow closer to God, we need to become like little children. Little, weak, and totally dependent. He is watching and He is within us. 

Fr Marie-Eugene

"Silent prayer is the somehow the sun and the center of all the day's activities. Each night one has the impression that this is virtually the only important thing we have done." 

We are all trees...

I am feeling really inspired right now and have a great need to write what the Lord has put on my heart.

So, first off, I write this for the glory and praise of God--and am not proficient in this topic, but really feel the only way to pin a tail on the donkey is to hammer it in a bit. So here we go. On New Years Eve, the missionaries and I threw a party for our students attending the SEEK National Conference. I remembered the year before I had gone to a party where we drew names out of a hat to find out who our "saint companion of the year" was. Mine this last year (2012) was St. Martha...I am ashamed to admit that I was not exactly psyched about this saint matching. I have never related to St. Martha--I was always a Mary--and was unabashedly proud of it. I always saw Martha as the one who wears herself out--who doesn't choose the better part and hang out with her Savior. But, in my ignorance, I failed to see that Martha is as essential as Mary, although gazing upon the face of the Lord is always the Church's more elevated state of life. We as a Church have both the contemplative life and the active apostolate--and we need them both for the Church to survive, as they are both parts of one body. However, the contemplative is the heart pulsing in the body, while the active life is the necessary hands, arms, and feet. The Lord was smart to give me St. Martha as an intercessor, because as a FOCUS missionary I have truly learned the beauty of service and how it is necessary for my salvation to pour myself out like her. Sure, I yearn for solitude and intimacy alone with Jesus (Mary-style) but I believe the Lord had given me many "Mary-years" before I joined FOCUS, as my previous spiritual life was much more solitary. It's time I get up off my butt and share Jesus with others, I need to move aside from the "best spot" -- and let them sit at His feet for awhile so they can fall in love too.
So, thank you St. Martha for teaching this reluctant Mary to help out in the kitchen.

So, on to the idea of companion saints...this year I got St. Catherine of Siena. Again, wasn't so excited--was actually jealous of Sarah White, my teammate for getting St. Margaret Mary Alacoque ("I wanted her!") But, turns out I did not comprehend with my peanut sized intellect how abundantly mind-blowing is St. Catherine of Siena--who is known for mystical espousal and "death". Oh, and she's one of 4 women saints who are Doctors of Holy Church. Which means her intellect is bigger than a peanut. So, she picked me--or so the tradition of saint companions go. In case you didn't know, your saint companion follows you through out your year and promises the following: intercession, protection, and a share in their charism. Say char-rizza-what? Yes, whatever supernatural gift or virtue or mission the Lord endowed them with on this Earth for charity's sake is given to us. What was Catherine of Siena known for? A LOT. (I won the spiritual lottery!) She had the charism of boldness and fearless courage-- at 28 years old she preached in the streets of Italy prophesying the Church's need for reform. She personally talked sense into Pope Urban VI (it was the Great Schism--*shivers*) to leave Avignon and return to Rome, the true home of the Papacy, and re-claim his vicar's chair from another man claiming to be Pope. I'm 25, and I cannot imagine telling a priest what to do, let alone the pope--so this courage inspired by love and obedience to God is incredibly inspiring.


I really could use that kind of courage this year--as a FOCUS missionary, and as a Catholic living in the US in this present age. I am living under the most pro-choice President in US history, who is eradicating all justice in our country--allowing preborns to be killed without civil rights in mass numbers, and squashing the Church's autonomy on issues of faith and morals. We have no voice--just like the preborns in the womb, and we are in solidarity with them who are being silenced by evil. So, there is a lot to pray for and work against--and the Lord needs our hands, arms, and feet more than ever. He needs our voice too--not only to praise Him because we were created to do so, but also to proclaim Truth in a world that disclaims Truth exists. Here is my voice: we need to go back to our roots. I say this a lot, but now I mean this in the spiritual sense. We cannot fight this war with human weapons--intellect, materials, physical strength--but rather we need to retreat first, to the cell within our soul, where the Lord Himself dwells in each person.

St. Catherine wrote about the following in her "Dialogue", but I am gonna recycle it and put my own understanding to it. Our Eternal Father showed her that each soul is a tree, and each soul must be rooted in HUMILITY. Our roots can either drink of humility, or drink of pride. There is a circumference around each tree--and this circumference is called "self-knowledge." In Delphi, there is a saying written on a stone tablet-- "KNOW THYSELF." All the saints proclaimed this simple truth: love of God starts with knowledge of self. We must know who we are NOT before God WHO IS. The more we contain ourselves in the room of self-knowledge, the more we gain the favor and delight and friendship of Almighty God. Why is this? It seems a bit neurotic or self-centered in the act, how does a person know who they are truly? We all have biases, right? So in order to see ourselves clearly--we need the Light of God. We need access to another room--"the cell of our souls"--which is where the Father of Lights dwells. He will show you yourself--but it must begin with the desire to see yourself as God sees you. This must be an act of love, because the cause will bring  the effect of an increase in love of God.

You see, how can we love God if we don't understand who we are in relation to Him? If we don't understand that everything He gives us is free without charge and is entirely unwarranted, how can we ever be sincerely grateful for His death on the cross? How can we want to return His love for love, if we don't understand the great mercy within His love? What does this mean, simply put, you ask? It means...He doesn't owe us anything--we're in debt. But He paid it--because He is MERCY--mercy is simply paying a debt which you are not indebted to pay. Mercy is Love Personified. So, in His Mercy He gives us ALL (rewards in the after-life, graces at every moment, infinite love) through the precious blood of His Son which opens the door to all these luxuries. Every day that I do not thank the Lord for His precious blood poured out for me drop by drop, I am offending the Father. (And Jesus even gave us the best hour of the day to thank you--3pm--the hour he died on the cross, called "The Divine Mercy Hour."  http://thedivinemercy.org/message/devotions/hour.php) Some of us do not say thank you out of forgetfulness or perhaps because we've never thought about it before, but I think that is the problem: we forget who we are before God. We are nothing and we owe Him everything. He supplies every little need we have for no reason but LOVE. It's madness. And as I write it, I still don't comprehend the immensity of the gift of mercy. When Jesus appeared to St. Faustina, He said, "LET IT BE PROCLAIMED TO MEN THAT MY GREATEST ATTRIBUTE IS MERCY." Do you know for how many years I've grappled with what Jesus meant by this? I don't really appreciate this term --"mercy"--it seems like an abstract holy word that encompasses a really broad thing--like "redemption." We hear it, but we don't take too much time to ponder the meaning. But to understand mercy and the immensity and madness of the gift, we have to understand humility. A proud person doesn't appreciate mercy--because they've never been to the bottom of the pit or waded in the dregs of misery. A miserable creature--a person bent low--understands mercy. They swim in the oceans of mercy--they see that they are misery without God, and thus they depend on God for every little thing. Jesus calls these special people "His little ones." The little ones understand they deserve nothing before God. They see clearly and know that their sinful nature (we all got one!) demands justice, not mercy-- but mercy awaits them with open arms--arms nailed to the wood. The floodgates of mercy were opened with the open arms extended nail to nail on the cross. "I saw Jesus nailed to the cross in such a way that when God wanted to look at the earth, He had to look through the wounds of Jesus. And I understood that it was for the sake of Jesus that God blesses the Earth." And here is the humbling truth: only through the wounds of Jesus does the Father call me daughter. Through his merits, not my own, I can call upon the Father for everything, and I should more. United to the wounds of Jesus, I can be refused nothing--as long as it is within God's good will.  This holy madness makes me grateful and even more humbled--even our existence is an act of mercy.


So back to the tree analogy (see blog post title)--our tree's roots must soak up humility, which is located in the earth of self-knowledge. The earth is dry...and each vice has to be rooted out in order to gain the living water--the knowledge of God. St Catherine writes about two types of knowledge--and we need them both--knowledge of self and knowledge of God. We need knowledge of self so we can spot and uproot our sins so we can live more intimately united to the Divine Spouse of our Soul. After we remain in this room of self knowledge, we need to into the "cell of our souls" while keeping one foot in the room of self-knowledge. In the inner cell of our souls, we grow in the knowledge of God who dwells there. In this inner room, we will begin to BURN with the love of Divine Charity. In a sense, if we are like trees, our wood needs to get dried out--through purification in prayer and spiritual dryness--so we can blaze in the Divine Furnace. This process is written about the best by St. John of the Cross and St. Teresa of Avila--some more Docs of the Church. But going back to my original statement of how we need to fight this war the spiritual weapons of self-knowledge and knowledge of God--we need to be enflamed ourselves if we can do any good work. We can only be a voice or extra arm...or drop kick in the body of Christ if we retreat first. We need a profound union with the Almighty before we can take down Goliath.

So New Years Resolution--instead of weight loss or knitting more quilts, maybe we should spend time asking for the grace of self-knowledge. It's a good shooting off point -- to "know thyself." Be honest with your weaknesses--embrace them united to the wounds of Christ. And as St. Paul says, this shall be our crown of glory in the life to come.

St. Catherine of Siena, you are so awesome. Keep blowing my mind.