I'm still here - just busier than ever.
But as long as Honora brought it up (see Comments in previous post), I'll post this:

Between Two Mountains
amor proximi

I sought His love in kneeling throngs of prayer
In liturgies sublime, incensed, communal,
Gathering for myself the perfumed air
And richly vested full confessed tribunal.
I listened for His voice in chant and hymn,
From page and word I strained to visualize;
In solitude and quiet rest pursued Him,
But caught my first true glimpse in Samaritan eyes.
So I sacrificed to serve Him in my neighbor –
Gave past my wants to lessen others’ needs.
I’d thought I would find God upon Mount Tabor,
But heart-proof of love is not what glows but bleeds.
The sanguinary road to Calvary we must trod
If we would listen to the heartbeat of God.

I couldn't resist this - my best photo from my trip to Roma.
I pray I will be able to take forget me not up on her offer to show me Italy, but it will be hard to top my last experience there!

She is Queen!


Someone snapped this shot of my seven children and I praying before the National Pilgrim Virgin statue when she visited our parish.
We were listening intently. And we're not the only ones who listen to her:

When we remain at the foot of the Cross, we are never alone. Always, Mary is there.
It's when we try to run from the Cross that we are alone.

Peace and blessings on the beautiful Solemnity of Our Mother!
Busy with family, but I'll share this:

Twice United

Annunciation
The unexpected light of Gabriel’s pure spirit
brightens the grace-lit eyes of one,
ardent and expectant,
who will bear the Light of the world,
who will conceive the inconceivable,
who will contain the boundless power of Adonai.
The purity of these virgin eyes
drives Gabriel himself,
pure Gabriel, messenger of the Most High,
to bow low before this hidden maiden,
as he solemnly entrusts to her
the unutterable gift of bringing forth in flesh
the Word she has ever embraced in spirit;
the Word that has ever born Its fullest fruit in this
vibrant, fertile, unencumbered soul,
now comes to fruition in this body
which He has prepared and protected.
This immaculate flame is found worthy
to feed the Fire of Love at her breast.
to nourish the very Bread of Life,
to cradle and sustain the beating Heart of God.
She alone can
introduce her Creator to the things He made,
teach Truth Himself to love the law He wrote,
prepare Israel’s Messiah to proclaim
the Kingdom long-promised and
instill into the world’s Redeemer
the radical self-sacrifice
that will ripen to the scandal of the cross.
She so loves the world
that she will give her only Son,
and the blood that saves the world first came
from her own heart.

Assumption
She assented to be separated from her Love for a time,
for love of her children,
until at last, her soul is loosened from its clay
by her conflagration of desire to be one with Him again.
Oh! That same burning love that once enfleshed the Word
now gracefully frees this fragrant flame from flesh.
She sleeps, is mourned
(pity John, now bereft of this rich inheritance!),
and interred for a time;
the body that provided the Blood that poured from God
and the Heart that animated Mercy
cannot be allowed to defervesce to its
numbered and unrecognizable elements.
Her body is then lifted by the very hand
of the God who formed it,
taken up to the Father,
ravished by the Spirit,
joined again with her Son!
Earth is impoverished
but Heaven enriched
as she is lifted high to her rightful place
and arrayed in gleaming billows of unspeakable light,
adorned with the very stars,
enthroned next to the Son she bore for us;
Heaven’s crown Jewel,
enrapturing the saints forever.
As every angel looks in awe
at God’s exquisite handiwork.
Gabriel himself,
pure Gabriel, messenger of the Most High,
bows low before his Queen.

~from To Sing You Must Exhale

+
Adam lived only after You breathed Your own life into him - from the first instant, man partakes of Your Divine Life. It is no merely natural life You gave us; we are something more than beasts.
Christ is first, and in anticipation of His assuming flesh and blood, we are, from the start, elevated above every other earthly creature.
And because of this dignity, because of this fact that we are made in Your image and made to share in Your Trinitarian life of Love, we must be made FREE. Because love is a free union, not a forced association or worse, a bondage.
You love us so much that You gave us the freedom to reject You.
You give Yourself to us (in the breath of life, the life of grace, the kiss of suffering) even as You give us the freedom to reject You.

Only Love could allow for that possibility.

Ok, I will. Here it is:

Tear Down that Wall

When is it that we learn to hide ourselves?
When is it that we take the first steps away from our essential selves, erect the first portion of the barricade around our hearts?
At what age do we begin to connect knowing with loving, begin to believe that we will not be loved if we are fully known?

It seems we are born expecting to be known and loved for what we are (and for God, knowing and loving are one essential act: He knows-loves us), but at some point we discover that human love is all too often conditional. At the point at which something makes us believe we are not lovable, we make work of suppressing those things that we believe MAKE us unlovable. In that moment, we begin to find ways to keep our true selves hidden, even from ourselves, because we are afraid that if we are known fully we will not be loved. We build barriers and try to hide those things behind the wall, and act other than we are. Then, like East Berliners, we learn to ignore the wall and go about our business as if it isn’t there. But it is always there, keeping good things out, holding bad things in, threatening to reveal the truth.

We erect walls and then at some point grace illuminates them and we begin to try to dismantle them. We reach toward Heaven, we desire God’s love, and He says, “I love you already, but you’ve got to get rid of that wall you’ve erected around your heart if you want Me to come in.” And gradually He teaches us that we can’t remove one stone without His help (even though we put them all in place on our own!). So He gives us the grace to remove the barrier that keeps His love out and our true self hidden. One by one, He helps us identify the obstructions, and one by one He helps us knock them down, and at each victory His light shines through more fully until at last our true self is revealed.

Now we should be free, but…
But it seems that wall has come to mark a false boundary, so that even though it is demolished by His grace in us, that interior space is avoided, our newly-emancipated true self is not entirely free. It has forgotten how to reach out, how to trust fully, how to be loved freely. And our thoughts, accustomed to going about their business ignoring the wall, still routinely avoid that core space. The essential self has been guarded for so long it no longer remembers how to reveal itself confidently, without expecting to be driven back behind the wall, or perhaps even wishing it were pushed back there. An ambivalent dance.

What’s the point here? Why does the subconscious, the level of “sub-experience,” insist on pushing toward the light of consciousness? As if it wanted to reveal its story, in some way to inform the conscious, rational part of the mind with what it knows. Is there buried treasure there, or only more stone to weigh us down? How much does our “internal history” need to be consciously experienced?

Inasmuch as the true self may be trapped underneath the rubble, perhaps the seeking has value. Beyond that, who knows? But there is one answer that is inescapable and that is always correct: Christ is the answer to the question posed by every human life – His love reveals the ontological worth of each person, penetrates each life, gives each one a dignity that precedes any conscious act.

In order to realize this innate dignity, we must go beyond ourselves, we must reach out to the things and souls around us, allow ourselves to be affected by them. But this is only part of (a condition of?) the fulfillment of our unique humanity. The key to fulfillment lies beyond us – it’s a vertical transcendence, not horizontal. We are called to surrender the self that we are so that we can become – by God’s love alone – the self that He created us to be. Genuine change takes place on the condition that we choose to open ourselves to His transforming power.

We choose, but not all at once, because we cannot see the choice to be made all at once. We determine our course by small daily decisions – it is our liberty to decide, our daily actions, our exercise of decision over daily options, our integration of all we are and know and have done before as well as our willingness to transcend ourselves incrementally that determines what we are as persons. We recognize, initiate, determine, act, and are thereby transformed…

We say “free will” as if our freedom lies in the will alone, and as if every decision were black and white. But the measure of freedom in the person is more complex – it is more like the degree to which the person has integrated the many complex facets of consciousness and the many “dynamisms” within. To the degree one is able to achieve such integration within his whole being, he has realized the inherent and unique potentiality of his personhood, and he is free. Liberty is not in what we know in the intellect or decide with the will, but in our active self-determination. Every action affects the whole person and changes us, for better or for worse.

Without God, we can do nothing but lose ourselves, dis-integrate. But if we allow His love to penetrate us, surrender what we are to His mercy, correspond with the grace He continuously sends, we begin to act as integrated persons, whole and free. With His Spirit informing each action, we learn to act like Him, and our will gradually conforms to His; as our will becomes more united with His, our actions and choices continue to transform us into the persons He created us to be.

Free to love fully.

I always come back to that. We are made to know and to be known. We are made to love and to be loved.

Made BY love, made TO love, made FOR love.

But we put so many things in the way - so many barriers to our knowing and loving. And yet, there are no barriers beyond which grace cannot reach. Christ penetrates every darkened heart and mind with His unwearied invitation to light and truth. From all eternity He pursues every person with His love.

Sometimes that pursuit involves helping us untangle what is knotted within the subconscious to free what is trapped inside.

You guys are making this too easy for me.
As Honora and forget-me-not and Gabrielle lead us right from surrender into the confessional, this idiot has only to post another excerpt from His Suffering and Ours to seem like I'm paying attention. Talk amongst yourselves ;-)

God’s judgment is always mercy;
on the Sacrament of Reconciliation

We are made for something more than we pretend to be. But deep down, we know. We can’t not know. There are moments when we see with stinging recognition the disparity between what we could be and what we ARE, and in these moments we know that this is an invitation to become what we are created to be. But we are so far from that goal. Now we have to choose which response we will make our own. We can waste our time agonizing over the life we have tried to live, filled with fear and confusion and resentment, but God has a better idea: Confession.

For some, who have really closed the door of their hearts to Him, this means reconciliation, others focus on the penance, but really, it is about our own confessio. It is about admitting our failings out loud so that we become serious about DOING something about them. It is about hearing our own failings from our own mouths, taking personal responsibility, learning from our mistakes, receiving the grace to become what we are created to be. But first, we must admit to ourselves what we are.

Self-knowledge is a necessary thing; knowing what we are and understanding our own character and what made us what we are, goes a long way toward cleaning our mirror to reflect Him. To know where we have gone wrong, we need to have a good picture of what we should be, so we need to examine ourselves. But here it gets tricky – if there’s one thing the devil knows, it’s our psychology (sometimes I think he was the original psychotic – the first creature to become totally detached from reality - but that’s another story) and he can turn this quest for self-knowledge around on itself, and the infinite hunger of the spirit can get mixed up with the unappeasable human need for understanding.

There is, on the one hand, a self-absorbed, endless cycle of questioning, carrying the past around like an albatross, running ourselves in circles trying to determine past motives, endless guilt over our culpability and the ramifications of our stupidity.

On the other hand, there is a real self-examination, in which we think about our lives in His light, see ourselves through His eyes, with the awareness that His love and mercy never fail. Never. This examination is really a kind of profound prayer that can tear away all the shadows and bring us to a new consciousness. It is a kind of “beknowing,” if we allow it to be; a knowing of our knowing (and unknowing), much like Mary’s own “pondering in the heart.” When we are awakened to this beknowing, we find our place in the universe and begin to view things from that place and everything looks a little different. Things are in proper perspective.

We begin to see that all creation gives God glory just by being, that all things praise Him in seed, in flower, and oftentimes in fruit. But in all of creation, we are the only creatures that can refuse our flowering. All things give Him glory simply by being what they are, without any choice in the timing or manner of their glorifying. They simply are.

But we, having the opportunity to love truly because we have the gift of free will, we think we can negotiate. We think we can know ourselves outside of God, become ourselves without His love, make our own way in the world. We think our destiny is self-made, that we can make ourselves happy. We ignore the fact that He is our only joy, that He loves us already. We make our own mess. Pelagius lives.

This leads to every variety of anxiety and regret and striving for all the wrong stuff. Yet the Church is there, consistently offering forgiveness (which we block by our refusal to admit our faults) and true self-knowledge (which we are too proud to accept) and real freedom – complete freedom from all the questions and doubts, freedom to leave the past to the past and continue toward Home, confident in God’s mercy and love.

It’s too easy. The hard work of reconciliation (and it was VERY hard work) has already been done. God is the “Father of mercies.” He sent His Son to reconcile the world to Himself, because we couldn’t do it. And now He sends the Holy Spirit among us for the forgiveness of sins.

We only need to accept that forgiveness and do our small part. He loves us first. He calls us first. He wants to make us deliriously happy. We only need to accept His offer and cooperate with the grace His love keeps pouring out on us.

We must speak the truth about ourselves to the priest, and the rest is up to God. He will change us. As one theologian said, Simon bar Jonah could have examined himself for the rest of his life, and never discovered Peter in there. It was Christ who revealed his true self to him, once he had admitted his own frailty, and openly called himself “a sinful man.”

He learned what we must all learn: that God is mercy, that His judgment, freely submitted to, is always mercy. That God makes all things new, reveals to us the truth about ourselves, and that it is always better than we think it is. But of course, we must turn to God – Peter was looking at Christ, reaching toward Him, not looking inside himself. And if we look to Christ, reach toward Him instead of looking inside ourselves to discover the truth, He will reveal our true selves to us as well. And we will probably be surprised to find that it is so much better than we think. He makes all things new. He transforms us.

It seems too easy. There must be more to it. But no.

We profess to believe in the forgiveness of sins, but accepting that forgiveness is not always easy.

In case there is any doubt (and until we truly know, experientially, that GOD IS LOVE, we may still doubt), the Church requires the priest to give us absolution in a kind of “solemn declaration” that is very clear:

“God, the Father of mercies,
through the death and the resurrection of his Son
has reconciled the world to himself
and sent the Holy Spirit among us for the forgiveness of sins;
through the ministry of the Church,
may God grant you pardon and peace.
I absolve you from your sins
in the name of the Father,
and of the Son,
and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.”

It is a moment of personal liberation – to sign ourselves with the means of our redemption, to receive through the priest the awesome gift of absolution and mercy, to feel free and grateful and strengthened, to discover anew that we are creatures born for radiance…

Our pristine state is to be light, free, ready for whatever God asks of us. Free enough, like Mary, to bear the words of an angel, free enough to say “fiat” to whatever he asks of us in God’s name. Free enough to see His will in every circumstance and embrace it fully for love of Him.

Yes, free to love fully.

It has been a long break - family has kept me busy.
But as we are talking about loving one another, in Him, for Him, I thought I would post another excerpt. That is cheating, I know, but you will at last be able to exhale, fmn and honora ;-)

Surrendering even our sins

In the past, there were parts of me that I tried to seal away from myself, only accepting half of what I am. Usually, it was the sinful, inadequate part I held on to; the part that made me feel too unworthy to be in God’s presence, the part that made me fear God’s justice.

Then one day, I was filled with the necessity of being thankful to God for every single moment of our lives. Every moment? Some moments don't seem like much for which to be grateful. I sat in front of the tabernacle trying to absorb this idea, asking for the grace to step beyond what I am and become what He wants me to be. And there it was, unavoidable: God loves us.

In order to be, we must know what we are.

But what we are is so stupefying that we need to be in a safe place to see it or we dare not look. We must know our place in the cosmos (which is infinitesimally small, a non-visible arrangement of photons in a universe of burning things) as well as our place in the Heart of God (which is disproportionately huge, given what we are in relation to the cosmos) before we can stand firmly, confidently, in that place and BE WHAT WE ARE.

God provides the safe place from which we can absorb this view and He assimilates there so many of the fragments we have gathered up to now, pulling in every stray thread like a master Weaver, creating a tapestry that we cannot envision. But we must trust that when He severs the last thread, His loom will have yielded precisely what He'd intended from the beginning, and all threads will be centered in Him...

We cannot give Him only what we think is good, or wait until we feel “ready” before giving ourselves to Him; that is holding back, refusing to fully acknowledge what is not good. We often wrestle our weakness and failures, trying to win the victory before fully surrendering ourselves to Him. But we cannot win until we stop wrestling.

We must each turn around and face head-on all that we’ve been trying to run away from, gather back into ourselves what we are working so hard to push away, and accept it all as what we ARE: the pain, the fear, the need, the sin and weakness; but also the grace, the gifts, the joy. All of it is the life we have lived, all lived under His gaze, all part of His plan, and He is waiting to accept our giving it all to Him. We must be wholly His, sins and all. And when we do this, we see that He has saved us already, saved us from ourselves, paid our debt, freed us to be more than we have up until now been able to see.

We are forgiven...
Once we accept this, wholly and humbly, we can see what we are, and glimpse what He is, and recognize our place in the moment. That is truth and that is humbling. Everything before this was blind groveling based on only half of the truth, which is acceptable to God, but less than He - in His incomprehensible love and mercy - desires for us.

And we find it difficult to accept what He desires for us. To know as we are known? To be called His friends? To be embraced and welcomed with robe and ring and feasting? To have a place prepared for us? All this is beyond our comprehension, because we so often make the mistake of thinking that His love is no better than ours.
But, of course, it is infinitely better.

The most awesome and radical threshold is crossed when we truly know and accept with humility the utterly stupefying truth that we are loved by Absolute Meaning.

He loves each of us with an unwearied and everlasting love.

He loves us.

And when we glimpse this truth, our eyes are opened at last to the reality that He has guided us through every moment of our lives, even through our mistakes and failures, and that they have all lead us to NOW, closer to Him.

This is what love does. Love draws us.

~ from His Suffering and Ours