Exhaling

2007-03-26T20:05:00.000-04:00

Ok. Everything isn't moved yet, but the new blog is set up and ready to roll.
Find me here:
http://kathryntherese.stblogs.com/

2007-03-26T16:28:00.000-04:00

I'm moving too...

It seems to be the universal reaction of anyone with conscience to the realization of what Blogger allows on its site. I'll post a link to the new blog as soon as it's ready...

2007-03-13T10:53:00.000-04:00

Some Thoughts for Lent
from Benedict XVI

Sacramentum Caritatis!

The Church's "thoughts" are the Spirit's "thoughts," so these are the best meditations of all:

http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/benedict_xvi/apost_exhortations/documents/hf_ben-xvi_exh_20070222_sacramentum-caritatis_en.html

2007-03-07T07:40:00.000-05:00

Some thoughts for Lent
from Sr. Miriam of the Holy Ghost (Jessica Powers)

Nor do you know your dwelling
for dark is your retreat,
and who would guess that darkness
could hold the Paraclete?

…
Measure your love by stillness.
He waits; do you as well
give to His infinite patience
your finite parallel.

…
When quiet has possessed you,
and dark has fled with dim,
you on a mount of morning
will be aware of Him.

(from “O Spirita Sancta”)

To live with the Spirit of God is to be a listener.
It is to keep the vigil of mystery,
earthless and still.
One leans to catch the stirring of the Spirit,
strange as the wind’s will.

The soul is all activity, all silence;
and though it surges Godward to its goal,
it holds, as moving earth holds sleeping noonday,
the peace that is the listening of the soul.

(from “To Live With the Spirit”)

2007-02-22T14:09:00.000-05:00

This blog's word-cloud. I love it.

From snapshirts.com

2007-02-20T15:49:00.000-05:00

Another Lent looms before us. Some people I know dread these six weeks of intensified prayer, giving, and fasting, but I always see them as an opportunity to take a step toward Freedom. The Church gives us this time to clean out our minds, our souls, our bodies, and our closets - and by the end, if we have made good use of the time, we are lighter (physically and spiritually) and able to soar closer to Truth.

I was talking with someone recently and suggested that we jettison all our props and embrace our poverty so that we can be blessed; the Kingdom of Heaven can be ours. God continuously forgives our crutches, our anchors, our safety valves; the Divine pity dismisses all we think we need to prop ourselves up or hold ourselves together in one piece, even as we are invited to surrender it all and be free. We must let go of one thing so that our hands are free to accept something better.

That something is the Truth, which sets us free. But first we must let go of our litle falsehoods, because wherever the lie remains, the Truth is not welcomed into that space. We open ourselves to the Truth to the extent that we rid ourselves of the lie; God is only able to fill the space that we open to Him by doing so. Every personal expedient, every prop for our self-love, every shred of self-sufficiency, every thought of our own ability to progress by our own efforts, every memory we hold on to in order to define ourselves according to our own desires, every habit of thought and action that does not allow for the action of grace - all these are false, and where we cling to them for fear of facing our utter powerlessness and emptiness, we are not free for the Truth to animate us. Christ fills what He is allowed to fill, but our willfulness prevents Him from filling us wholly. Truth and untruth cannot peacefully co-exist.

They are at war. But the beautiful thing about Truth is that it is not a thing, but a Person. And that Person is the King of Peace. Not only does this King maintain a profound peace wherever He is allowed to reign (Reign in us!), but Truth alone is able to peacefully conquer - as Christ is allowed to fill us, He subdues or exiles every falsehood with such gentleness and brings such joy that we hardly know that there has been a fight to the death. We only know that fear has succumbed to the force of Love, and Truth has triumphed in us - we recognize His victory by the peace and strength and certitude it brings.

He wants to give Himself wholly to us. He wants us to dwell wholly in Him. When we are surrendered totally to Him, every boundary within us is obliterated and we are free to embrace every good thing. No longer are we moved by our needs or wants or brokenness or bitterness; at last we are free to be moved by His Spirit dwelling within us, and we cannot seem to give enough until we have given all.

So this Lent, let's take up arms against every falsehood within us until we have cleared the way for the King of Endless Joy and Peace to reign fully in us. When Truth triumphs, we are free.

2007-02-11T16:58:00.000-05:00

We interrupt our regularly scheduled discussion for this brief FYI

Jean Heimann (freelance writer, retired psychologist, poet and Oblate with the Community of St. John) posts her review of the Suffering book today at CatholicFire (another great Catholic blog that is absolutely faithful; if you hear it here, it's so). If you are interested, read it here:

http://catholicfire.blogspot.com/2007/02/must-read-for-lent-his-suffering-and.html

And now back to our profound ponderings....

2007-02-06T16:55:00.000-05:00

Eucharist and the Mystical Body

Back to the Source and Summit.

We were discussing suffering and the Eucharist, and this lead us to examine anew the Mystical Body of Christ and our participation in It. This is the crux of everything, the point that makes sense of everything else – that we are IN Christ, and Christ is IN us.

“…that they all may be one as You, Father, in Me, and I in You; that they also may be one in Us… And the glory which You have given to Me, I have given to them; that they may be one, as We also are one: I in them, and You in Me, that they may be made perfect in one…that the love wherewith You have loved Me may be in them, and I in them…” (John 17)

My head spins with these words, because there is a lifetime of meditation here, and if we can get our minds around the truth of it, it transforms everything we do.

These were Christ’s words before He gave us His very Body and Blood to sustain us after His sacrificial death. He explained the mystery of the Mystical Body, described our oneness in Love, His identification with us and our incorporation in Him (we are “sons in the Son”). And then He fed us with Himself – became one with us physically, as a bridegroom becomes one with his bride. He gives Himself to us fully in love, invites us to open ourselves fully to Him, and we become one Body – one with Him, one with each other (we all partake of the “one loaf,” as St Paul puts it), one with the Father and the Holy Spirit, as we participate in the intimate life of the Trinity.

We are tabernacles of the Trinity.

We are in God, God is in us. Allow me to condense the whole of theology in one dense paragraph:
In every moment, God is acting, His plan is being fulfilled, His work is being done. His action is always love (we see this as mercy and forgiveness on earth) and His work is to draw all things to Himself in love. The Son became man, the Second Adam, to re-do what had been un-done, to restore man to his intended dignity, and to identify Himself with our weakness so that Christ may be all in all. Christ is all, we can do nothing without Him, we must put on Christ and submit our wills to His so that He can continue to act in the world, and so that we may become UNUM QUID – one entity, the Mystical Body of Christ come to full stature. And as we are all one in the Body, what we do to the least of these, and to the greatest, we do to Christ.

It is all Christ.

We are oned with God; we are alive by the breath of God. If God stopped “breathing” us, we would cease to be. Everything we do is participation in the life of God, who is intimately connected with our life. What we do, we do IN GOD.

Our understanding of this should change our understanding of our deliberate choices - sin becomes not just a "rejection of the rules" or "something I do by myself for myself" but a real interruption in the unity of the Mystical Body of Christ. Every selfish choice prevents Christ from participating in that action, and effectively prevents Him from acting in the world in that moment. Our pride and sin can disrupt the process of God’s action and prevent His will from being done fully in us and through us at that particular intersection of time and space. Every act contrary to the will of God cannot be shared by Christ, is not part of the life of His Body, and therefore has no real value.

And yet (one of those paradoxical mysteries of God that are hidden from our understanding in this life), Christ Himself has redeemed the whole world, and has somehow "made good" every wrong. Somehow, even our sins can be made to bring glory to Him, or He would not have allowed sin to be. And of course, He loves us and died for us "while we were yet sinning," so our sin does not diminish His absolute and unwavering - unwavering! - love for us.

So in an ultimate and real sense, our sins do not disrupt His Plan, because He has allowed for our sin too, which is the mind-boggling part of this meditation. EVEN THOUGH we sin and disrupt His plan, His plan is not disrupted; He's already allowed for our sinfulness and selfishness and woundedness. He's already become the Second Adam, undoing the worst thing that was ever done, redeeming all of creation, so that whatever is done now easily finds its remedy in His death and resurrection.

Yet Christ taught us to pray "Thy will be done," so that we would learn to conform our wills to the Father's, as He did. If there were no possibility that God's will could be disrupted, we would not have to pray that His will would be done. Our will CAN be (and often is) opposed to God's, in which case we are not allowing God to act fully. Christ "came to do the will of the Father," which implies that He had a will of His own, which He actively conformed to the Father's - "not my will, but Yours be done." This is our prayer as well, and insofar as we are able to let Christ reign in us and submit our wills to His, He will be free to act in us and through us in the world.

So in one of those ineffable awe-some paradoxes of God, we might say that even though our sins evade God or oppose Him or disrupt the unity of His Body or offend Him or prevent Him from acting fully through us, His will is always done. He's already allowed for our brokenness and weakness, He already knows what will happen, and so His Plan continues to unfold and His will is done.

Yet in the practical milieu of everyday choices, it is helpful for me to consider that my choices are not about the best thing FOR God, but the best thing IN God.

If I had more time to think and pray and write, I might make these reflections more organized and maybe even clearer. But you are forgiving, and the discussions here often clarify (when I don’t scramble everything), so I’m posting this and relying on the Holy Spirit, as usual ;-)

2007-02-06T08:34:00.000-05:00

Don't let this distract you from the combox below, and there will soon be more on the Eucharist above, but I wanted to share the view from my space on the planet.

Two feet of snow and a bona fide blizzard.

Glad we have food on hand.

2007-01-30T09:46:00.000-05:00

A while back, we were discussing the trinitarian nature of the human person, and I recently came across this excerpt which pertained to that idea and got me thinking again. Thought I'd share:

"Trinity is simple unity; it is not merged together - it is three in one...
Just in the same way, man has mind, word, and spirit; and the mind cannot be without word, nor the word without the spirit, but the three are always in one another, yet exist in themselves. The mind speaks by means of words, and the
word is manifested through the spirit.
This example shows that man bears in himself a feeble image of the ineffable prototype, the Trinity, thus demonstrating that he has been made in God's image.
Mind is the Father, word is the Son, spirit is the Holy Spirit, as the divine fathers teach in this example, expounding the dogmatic teaching of the consubstantial and pre-existing Trinity, of one God in three Persons, thus transmitting to us the true faith as an anchor of hope. "
(St. Gregory of Sinai in Writings from the Philokalia)

2007-01-23T14:55:00.000-05:00

Eucharist and Suffering

“...Burnt offering from me you would refuse, my sacrifice, a contrite spirit, a humbled, contrite heart you will not spurn. .” Psalm 51

I'll open with a few words from the combox (but too good to be kept there):
from Gabrielle:
Just as God is hidden from us, the way in which we "take the Eucharist to the streets" can be hidden; just as Christ makes His ceaseless sacrifice, there are those who also make a ceaseless sacrifice in unity with Him, but it is not "out there" for all the world to see. Even their exterior works, done with compassion and with the desire to live the gospel, are performed quietly, and often anonymously.

from Carol:
…yes, some live as Eucharist in a very different way. To me, those feed the best. Those who are eucharistic via imbibing and consuming Him, first.

We might even argue that the “hidden holocausts” are the cleanest, as they are untainted – the agonies we hold in our hearts are known only to Him, offered for love of Him alone, as we gain nothing from others by them.

I have been thinking about suffering a lot lately, and keep coming up against this inescapable conclusion:

to live and to love in this life is to suffer.

I could go on and on (as you all well know) and discuss the whats and whys of suffering (maybe we’ll do that later) but I want to jump ahead to make the connection between suffering and the Eucharist.

On one level, this connection is obvious: if the Eucharist is the “clean oblation” of the Cross, then the suffering dimension is clear. But how do our very personal sufferings fit in?

In order to grasp this fully (we all “get it” on a basic level, but in order to “live the Eucharist” we need to understand it experientially) we need to contemplate our own capacity for “redemptive suffering” and the invitation extended by Christ to each of us to participate in His Sacrifice.

Suffering helps the sufferer, suffering opens up avenues of grace and allows God to reach in and work miracles, and our own suffering can also help others. They may be inspired by our faith, fortitude, perseverance; they are given an opportunity to give of themselves for our sake, like Simon and the Good Samaritan; and, at the highest level, we can participate in the very Redemption itself by immolating ourselves for others.

There is the penance aspect of this, yes – we “make reparation” for our sins and the sins of others by "making sacrifices" – but if we don’t move beyond that to LOVE, we’ve missed the point and fallen into a morose rigidity that falls short of the Spirit of Christ. One who is stoically “offering it up” and seeing this as a kind of business transaction (an exchange of suffering for punishment of sins) can hardly join with St. Paul in exclaiming, “Now I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake…” (Colossians)

This joy, John Paul II tells us, “comes from the discovery of the meaning of suffering.” (Salvifici Doloris) This meaning is manifold, and we could compose volumes discussing it. But at the core is the truth that “We are always carrying in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be manifested in our bodies.” (II Cor)

We have the almost unbelievable privilege of participating in the Redemption itself, of joining ourselves to the One Sacrifice of Christ, because He lives in us and we in Him. When nailed to the Cross, Christ offered Himself to the Eternal Father as Head of the whole human race, of the Mystical Body; in the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, He offers to the Father not only Himself as Head of the Church, but all His members also, since we are united with Him and He holds each of us in His Heart. We are all included in that offering, and it is at Mass, in union with the Mass, that we offer all that we have to offer. We actually insert our sufferings into His, to “complete what is lacking in the sufferings of Christ,” not because the Redemption is incomplete, but because the Redemption remains open always to all love expressed in human suffering.
“In this dimension – the dimension of love – the Redemption which has already been completely accomplished is, in a certain sense, constantly being accomplished….Yes, it seems to be part of the very essence of Christ’s redemptive suffering that this suffering requires to be unceasingly completed.” (Salvifici Doloris)

It is “unceasingly completed” by those willing to love to the point of suffering, who are willing to suffer and become “hidden holocausts” of love.

And everything is offered to the Father only through Christ: “through Him, with Him, in Him, in the unity of the Holy Spirit.” There is no other way to the Father but through Him. There is only One Sacrifice, in which we may participate, and through which we make our own offering.

If we "present our bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is our spiritual worship," (Romans) then we are presenting our bodies to be gradually crucified, in union with Christ. And it is through this death to self that we live in Christ and Christ in us: "I have been crucified with Christ, it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me." (Galatians) We are united to Christ through the Cross which we embrace with love.

That little drop of water that the priest pours into the chalice of wine is like our little ordinary offerings, which are completely absorbed into the Blood of Christ and transformed. Just as at Cana Christ took something very ordinary (water) and transformed it into something beyond our capacity (the "best wine") because it was brought in simplicity and His word was obeyed, so our own very ordinary offerings are transformed within the Chalice of His Heart by His immense Love and become something worthy of the Father.

2007-01-17T15:49:00.000-05:00

Eucharist = holocaust

It's no doubt "bad form" to criticize my own poem before you even read it, but I have to confess that this is not my favorite in poetic terms. Imagine reading it out loud in front of our new bishop; it does not have a good rhythm for oral interpretation.

But the thoughts were still worth expressing so I published it anyway...

The New and Everlasting Covenant

You are always coming, veiling Yourself for us
In elements unworthy of the Godhead,
that we might look on You and live.
Remaining in Your changeless heaven has never been enough
For a King whose very essence is to give.

You once clothed Your glory in earth’s clay,
Hid infinite riches in abject poverty
and Your subjection of all things in meek submission;
Under cold cover of night brought forth the glorious break of day,
In brutal death brought Eden’s Promise to fruition.

But we were looking elsewhere, wanting more,
Even the friends You chose did not see clear;
believing they saw the gardener or a ghost,
Or a fisherman preparing breakfast on a familiar shore;
And we neglect to see You in the host.

Here, the unblemished Lamb, only light of Paradise,
Thrice-holy God, Victim King,
by every saint and angel now adored,
The gentle Way, inescapable Truth, the Wisdom of the wise,
Hidden in a form so easily ignored.

Untiring surge of Love, Lord of our sinful hearts,
The Shekinah, source of every grace,
here with us with compassionate restraint.
Not a relic, nor mere bread, but Your entire living Self to us impart,
And in silent ceaseless prayer You wait.

How can we then receive in Heaven
More than You offer us here on earth?
You give the whole of You without reserve;
As freely offered bond of love, You give new life to leaven
Without considering what we truly deserve.

Here You are closer to us than heat to fire
All the boundless God miraculously ours –
Your self-donation and Your mercy, Your holy Heart of peace,
Your longing to give Yourself exceeding our desire,
Perfect sacrifice offered without cease.

The burden of Your prayer in every place
The same as it has always been:
that all be one in You to the glory of the Father;
You draw us near to contemplate Your Eucharistic Face
And thus unite us, with You and with each other.

Will we wholly embrace the spirit of this Feast?
Allow the vibration of faith to move the will
to freely choose the utter fullness we profess?
Will we welcome the unwelcome and embrace the weak, the least,
Offer them their portion of this Bread we break and bless?

Can we drink from your cup, offer self as holocaust,
Freely pour our very lives out for each other,
making room within us for new wine?
Will we join our impoverished suffering to Your victorious cross,
And assent to be transformed in the Body we enshrine?

Fro here within us is the Kingdome of Your reign;
A reflection of Your life of Trinity
in which we now mutually abide
If we keep vigil, with lanterns we attentively sustain,
For the Bridegroom ever coming to His bride.

Rising Sun, Risen One, create all mankind anew,
In Your true Body build up the new City of God
and grant every soul rebirth,
Removing all that divides heart from heart and hearts from you,
Granting a foretaste of the New Heaven and New Earth.

“Behold, I am with you always.”

2007-01-17T10:41:00.000-05:00

Welcome, CatholicConnect friends!

I am glad to see some of you have dropped in for a look. Don't hesitate to add your brilliant .02 here. We'd love to hear it, and occasionally, the conversation really gets rolling...

When we're not all too busy with other things anyway.

For the rest of you, I visited with a very exuberant group of young people at CatholicConnect to talk about a very sober topic: suffering. Something they all know something about. Perhaps some of them will join in the discussion here as well, as we are continuing that very subject. Perhaps I will summarize what I covered at the meeting.

Also, I should apologize for the delay in posting. I've received a few emails to make sure all is well here, and it is. Just crazy busy. But I am working (in my head) on a post that I hope to share soon.

Meanwhile, we pray for one another always.

2007-01-10T14:03:00.000-05:00

Eucharist = Thanksgiving

As H’s words are no longer spouting at her blog (at least for now), I’ll share her profoundly practical thoughts with the world here in the form of combox words, to springboard us to the next level:

I've never thought of myself as living the analogy of bread being broken and fed to others, the horizontal aspect of His sacrifice that we share in; I suppose many do, but anyway, it put me in mind of an old lady the other night who tho' a Methodist, has pretty much become eucharist in her love. She conquers her wanting to take, by giving. We have to do everything but breathe in and out for some, and she's approaching that point, and is terribly disappointed, but she gifts from it when possible.

Yes, we are to become gift. That’s what the whole suffering book is really about, isn’t it, Honora? Being gift, so that others will know their own giftedness and goodness, so they can in turn become gift to others, for Him. And as I said somewhere already, our “givingness” comes from heartfelt gratitude for all we have been given. This is what it means to live a eucharistic life. Now let’s unpack this, and translate it into life.

This is a mystery, and one that we can only approach in small chunks. As a wordsmith and logophile, I like to begin with the word (well, everything begins with the Word, doesn’t it?):

eucharist
εuχαριστία
eucharistia
thanksgiving

Christ “gave thanks” before blessing the bread and wine and declaring it to be His Body and Blood. The early Church fathers (including Ignatius of Antioch and Justin Martyr) used the term “eucharist” to describe both the prayers of the liturgy and the consecrated bread and wine. Hence, “eucharist” has come to refer to the sacrament of Christ’s Body and Blood.

This is fitting, as the whole life of Christ was an act of oblation and thanksgiving, leading up to the institution of the Eucharist as a perpetuation of the complete immolation He was about to offer on Calvary.

But first, He lived a life of generosity and self-sacrifice, of humble self-gift and serving the needs of others (to the point that his friends and relatives thought He had lost a few marbles and felt they had to rescue Him from the crowds!). He came to demonstrate how God loves; He sets aside his glory, bends low as a servant to wash the feet of his disciples (even the one he knew would soon betray him) and then he gets up and says, “Love looks like this. This is how you love and serve one another.” And then He is able to say, “Love one another as I have loved you.”

“Looking up to heaven,” He gives thanks. Then, He blesses and breaks the bread and gives it to all, hiding His glory still more mysteriously than in the Incarnation itself. He lowers Himself and conceals His glory to become man, and then He lowers Himself still lower and conceals His glory still further to become Bread. Bread. Take and eat and have life in you...

He invites us to move beyond ourselves and live for love, loving both God and neighbor with all we’ve got, because this is the way of truth, the way of joy, the way of life in abundance.

I think I may post the poem I was asked to write for the 10th anniversary of our Perpetual Adoration Chapel here, which is very much focused on living the eucharist.

2007-01-09T12:22:00.000-05:00

Vigates!

Based on the visitors to this site in the last 30 days, I should be greeting you all variously, so:

Good day, eh?
Dé la bienvenida a todos!
Welkommen!
G’day!
Accolga favorevolmente tutti (fmn will correct me here)
begrüßen Sie alle

In a moment, I will attempt to address Gabrielle's suggestion that we focus on living a truly eucharistic life... Praying first, then talking...

2007-01-05T19:04:00.000-05:00

Praying

through the

Dark

When prayer is labor
and prayer-bones ache
and physical and spiritual muscles
begin to shake;
when we stop seeking You
in the lightning
and in the earthquake,
and only want to give ourselves,
forgetting we’d wanted to take,
the toil and fatigue of duty
become a safe and welcome ark,
the glimpse of our own
nothingness a good and holy spark,
the desire for Your will alone
becomes our distinctive mark,
and at last we know that
Your radiance
is best seen
in the

dark.

2007-01-02T17:24:00.000-05:00

Optional Memorial of the Holy Name of Jesus

I've said this before, but it bears repeating:

In the Litany of the Holy Name of Jesus, we refer to "Jesus, splendor of the Father...brightness of eternal light... eternal wisdom... infinite goodness...."

Trinitarian love is not a self-contained end in itself - it is always opening up something fresh within Itself to pour out on us, to give existence to what did not exist, to communicate something new yet eternal, to give life where death had been tightening its grip.

This Child named Jesus reminds us that the ever-new beginning, the infinite "givingness" of God, is tangible - salvation is ours because Love has been made flesh, Beauty made flesh, Life made flesh, Truth made flesh, Wisdom, Goodness, Justice made flesh and is among us, with us, for us.

This Child elevates and illumines the new beginning that is every new life, every absolved penitent whose childlikeness has been restored, every dawn, every heartbeat. Behold, He makes all things new.

We love You, Jesus. We praise You, Jesus. We thank You, Jesus.

*I found this graphic for a "Yeshua" t-shirt at christianshirts.net

2006-12-30T13:25:00.000-05:00

I refrain from political commentary on this blog.
But I cannot see how this makes the world a better place...

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,240117,00.html

+
"Eternal Father, we offer You the Body and Blood, Soul and Divinity of Your dearly beloved Son, Our Lord Jesus Christ, in atonement for our sins and those of the whole world.
For the sake of His sorrowful Passion, have mercy on us and on the whole world."

Mother Mary, you make a way where there is no way -
make a way to peace.

Here is the only public voice of reason today:

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,240158,00.html

2006-12-28T13:12:00.000-05:00

Feast

of the

Holy Innocents

Rachel still weeps

Holy Innocents, Innocentes pro Christo.
Primitiae Deo, et Agno,
not fruits of the harvest, but
fruits of the season’s hope and promise -
First fruits sacrificed on the altars of
the grief-hot hearts of new motherhood, abrupted.
The raging madness of the selfward
still rages on, sees a threat that is no threat,
still sees others as obstacles or objects only,
still spawns erratic fear and blinding obsession,
still boils in the veins, blinding to truth,
still sacrifices the pure, the innocent,
in the self-turned hearts of new motherhood, aborted.

2006-12-26T14:47:00.000-05:00

Feast of St. Stephen

"Salvator noster natus est in mundo"
...bringing fire and sword,
to purify and pierce us through...

Stephen, protomartyr
Stephen knows the universe was free –
it cost God nothing. Effortless creative joy.
But each soul was bought at a great price
(which fact God knew from eternity,
but He created us anyway),
and Stephen understands and is
wholly dedicated to Love –
to knowing Love, serving Love,
bringing Love to all.
One of the first seven,
speaking a word worthy of the Word,
an irresistible word of Love.
Stephen, full of grace and power -
a Power that makes him strong,
a Love that has cast out all fear -
stands on the Rock, with the face of an angel,
enraging the powers that stand on sand,
grinding their teeth, hands twitching
to impose silence. Fervid destructive selfwardness.
Outside the Gate,
bracing himself for blows,
he is himself embraced
by the Love that gave him power,
and immolates himself wholly under a cold rain
of stony hate.
Like the pure Heart of his Love,
Stephen’s heart is capable of
transforming darkness to light,
and hate into the profoundest love,
arms outstretched,
forgiving all,
praying for Saul.
This blood mingling with His Blood
as precious seed for a universal Harvest.
Look deeply, you will see
the outrageous price of me.

And if you'd like to take a little contemplative trip back to the fields on the outskirts of Bethlehem on that holy night, click here:
http://wordincarnate.blogspot.com/2006/12/christ-is-born-glorify-him.html

2006-12-23T10:44:00.000-05:00

Wishing you a blessed Christmas!

Well, the whirlwind weekend of joyous activity has begun. I leave you with prayers and wishes for a grace-filled Christmas and a peaceful New Year. And this little poem:

Bethlehem is the “House of Bread”

My King was born in a stable,
And that is outrageous enough;
But then He was placed in a manger –
An animals’ feeding trough.

The beasts don’t seem to have minded
That He rested atop their feed;
Nor could they have known
that He’d later announce:
“My Flesh is Food indeed!”

2006-12-18T19:37:00.000-05:00

How is it that this child King positions Himself in such a place that I must crouch down to enter its darkness and look down on Him snuggled amidst the winding cloths in the animals' feed?

You are always hidden in the most ordinary ordinariness, among the lowest and the least, reaching through accidents we would deem unworthy. But You elevate every low thing and humble the self-elevated. You share the cave's air with simple beasts, and the shepherds and kings (truly wise men to see beyond appearances!) are not loathe to enter and praise You in the dim light. Their eyes must adjust to the darkness to see the Light of the world...

"For unto us a child is born. Unto us a son is given."
A baby. No one fears a baby, except the madmen.
A baby, unseen, unknown; hidden. Love incarnate is here so helpless and unthreatening.

Come. Let us adore Him.

2006-12-14T09:54:00.000-05:00

San Juan de la Cruz

St. John of the Cross,
be our guide on our ascent of Mount Carmel.
Teach us the Via Negativa,
in which we desire nothing for ourselves
because we are so in love with Love
that nothing else will satisfy
and we will allow nothing else to distract.
Because we know that all is Love's.
And Love, at its summit,
mysteriously crucifies,
is crucified,
embraces crucifixion.
Help us climb to the height
at which we see at last
that beyond the dark, beyond the pain,
there is only Love.

2006-12-07T22:31:00.000-05:00

I will be out of town for the weekend visiting family. But I did not want to leave without a reminder to beg Mary our Mother for peace, on her beautiful feast day.

Shadowless
“Ne timeas Maria invenisti enim gratiam apud Deum.” Luke 1:30

The utter Utterance of Adonai
from all eternity
Desired to utter His Word to earth
in profound obscurity.
Down through long ages of prophet and king,
He tended vine and shoot,
In the fullness of time preparing a womb
to bear such glorious fruit.

Her soul like sun-splashed crystal
in the shadowless noon of day,
Her eyes ever on her Master’s hand,
her feet ever in His way.
Her docile heart and God’s own love
beat always as if one;
Such a living flame alone
could bear the heartbeat of the Son.

The Most High sent His messenger
to this humble Nazarene;
All of Heaven held its breath,
looking down upon the scene:
From the house and line of David,
a maiden of unprecedented grace
By her resolute, valiant, radical “yes”
gave to her God a face.

2006-11-29T14:17:00.000-05:00

* edited 11/30!

Well, my time is not my own, as I often say; life is in perpetual motion around me and the exigencies of each moment are keeping me from the keyboard… Plus, my ISP is quite uncooperative lately.
If you are not a regular, I invite you to explore the comboxes of recent posts for some profound insights contributed by others. I hope to continue the discussion we’ve been enjoying for the last several weeks. And the profiteroles as well ;-)
Meanwhile, a little sharing from a recent burst of rhyme:

Every prayer I cannot pray,
Every thing I cannot say,
Every word I cannot write,
Every secret locked up tight,
Every wound and doubt and fear,
Every silent thing, You hear.

2006-11-16T16:40:00.000-05:00

Well, St. Paul started me on this whole thing, so I can't think of a better place to pick up the thread of this thought than the Holy Father's recent comments on Paul's words about the Holy Spirit. We have been discussing this idea that we are created body, created soul, and something else - something Uncreated - and I think we have drawn ourselves to the truth that this Other is the Holy Spirit dwelling within us. And just as we were coming to this, Pope Benedict's Wednesday audience concurred, confirmed, explained in ways for which we were groping. It is worth reading in its entirety, but I will quote it at length:

"[I]n his letters St. Paul ... does not limit himself to illustrate only the dynamic and operative dimension of the Third Person of the Most Holy Trinity, but also analyzes his presence in the life of the Christian, whose identity is marked by him. That is, Paul reflects on the Spirit showing his influence not only on the Christian's action but over his very being. In fact, he says that the Spirit of God dwells in us (cf. Rom 8:9; 2 Cor 3:16) and that "God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts" (Gal 4:6). For Paul, therefore, the Spirit penetrates our most intimate personal depths...

Paul also teaches us another important thing. He says that there can be no authentic prayer without the presence of the Spirit in us...

It is as if saying that the Holy Spirit, namely, the Spirit of the Father and of the Son, becomes the soul of our soul, the most secret part of our being, from which rises incessantly to God a movement of prayer, of which we cannot even specify the terms. The Spirit, in fact, ever awake in us, makes up for our deficiencies and offers the Father our adoration, along with our most profound aspirations. Obviously this calls for a level of great vital communion with the Spirit. It is an invitation to be ever more sensitive, more attentive to this presence of the Spirit in us, to transform it into prayer, to experience this presence and to learn in this way to pray, to speak with the Father as children in the Holy Spirit. ...

The Spirit places us in the very rhythm of divine life, which is a life of love, making us participate personally in the relations that exist between the Father and the Son. ...

Thus let us learn from Paul that the action of the Spirit orients our life toward the great values of love, joy, communion and hope. It is for us to experience this every day, seconding the interior suggestions of the Spirit, helped in discernment by the illuminating guidance of the Apostle."

This is a long way from, and high above, vivisecting spirit and soul!

I am struck (in light of our conversation) by these words:
"God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts" (Galatians 4:6). For Paul, therefore, the Spirit penetrates our most intimate personal depths.

This identifies the "heart," which we considered a possibility for the third element of a trichotomy, as "our most intimate personal depths." As indeed it is.

2006-11-09T12:24:00.000-05:00

I don't think Gabrielle will mind if I use her last question to start a new discussion here. It's worth a whole new post -

kt, a couple of things I'd like to ask you. I was wondering if you could explain a little bit about the spirit being vivisected from the soul, and also, is it possible to share with us a little more about the imagery and implications of the word "revenants" in your poem?

Let me start with "revenants," as that is the easier of the two ;-)

The lines preceding are so dense, and they really need to be understood before we get to that particular word.

By cerement the conflagration’s fueled,
what light exposes, heat will cauterize.
Then healed, branded, by the King bejeweled,
freed, enslaved, like revenants we rise.

This fire through which we must pass is a kind of death, a death to self, and it is fueled by all the wrappings and trappings of the "old man" which we are shedding. The light of this Fire reveals to us our weakness, woundedness, sinfulness, and at the same time this woundedness is being healed. It is painful, but there is no other way. This, of course, is a reference to the dark night.

Once we have passed through this Flame, we are "healed" (of our woundedness and sin), "branded" (as belonging to Christ in an unmistakable and indelible way), "bejeweled" (as Christ adorns His spouse with every virtue and grace), "freed" (of our sin and woundedness), "enslaved" (to Love, as our wills are no longer our own and we belong wholly to Him), and we return to life wholly transformed, wholly spiritual.

We have gone through this total self-emptying, this kenosis, this death, and we rise from the ashes (like the Phoenix), aflame and renewed.

As for vivisecting...
On one level, we can say that this little death feels as if the soul is being wrenched from the spirit, or as if there is a "disconnect" between the mind and the soul. The dark night is a painful separating of self from self, of the selfward self from the true self.

But there is a d & m in this topic, and I would like to explore this idea with you - that the human person is a trichotomy of body - soul - spirit, much like the universe is space - matter - time. I would reference St. Paul and Edith Stein here (and perhaps I will add some links when I have a longer minute), but I'm hoping someone more astute than I (Father? Deacon? We need some help here.) can give a better theological explanation. I've said too much already.

2006-11-02T17:26:00.000-05:00

Gabrielle's comments on the seventh sonnet summarized so succinctly (I can't resist an alliteration), that I'm using them as a springboard for something else I've been thinking about lately. She said (in case you haven't explored the combox):

H, I looked it up too, and it was what I thought (a censor, for holding the blessed incense), but I read also that it is from the Greek "thyos", meaning burnt sacrifice. The "thyos" sometimes needs a "thurible"; the burnt offering sometimes needs a vessel. To be a "living thurible" - hasn't kt captured the essence of our whole spiritual journey, our "sojourn" on earth, with two words? We can be not only the living containers of the holy incense whose perfume rises to the Lord, but the actual burnt offering itself; living holocausts, living sacrifices.
St. Faustina often called herself a holocaust to the Lord, and she also said, "The bride must resemble the Bridegroom", who was the holy and perfect Sacrifice. Living thuribles. What else could one become, if one follows "the blood-paved path He trod"?

This reminded me (in an indirect way) of a verse in Mark 9:
"For everyone shall be salted with fire, and every victim shall be salted...Have salt in yourselves."

Yes, we are the burnt offering, the holocaust; fill this victim, this sacrifice, with fire.
Salt is purifying and preserving, signifying permanence and cleansing. We are salt - the salt of the earth - purifying and preserving. Salt is good, but if it loses its savor there is nothing that can take its place...
And we shall be "salted" (purified, preserved) with fire - the fire of the Spirit, the fire that consumes and transforms us, that makes our sacrifices pure and worthy offerings.
In the Spirit, we become an unbloody sacrifice, hidden in Him.

This "salting with fire" seems to lead to another implication - that we ourselves are "seasoned" and made clean by this action of the Spirit.

Ok, another poem is pertinent here -

Silversmith
“Cloud and darkness are His raiment…A fire prepares His path.”
Psalm 97

In the turbid dark where unseen sinnings steep
we seek the keys that make us free and whole,
but find a searing sword that pierces deep,
to vivisect the spirit from the soul.
The love He brings to free us must first burn;
to offer holocaust there must be fire.
He is puring flame and we in turn
must immolate our selves upon the pyre.
By cerement the conflagration’s fueled,
what light exposes, heat will cauterize.
Then healed, branded, by the King bejeweled,
freed, enslaved, like revenants we rise.

For He sits as a silversmith, refining,
vigilant till expurgation’s done;
burning off the dross till unalloyed souls, shining,
reflect the perfect image of His Son.

2006-10-31T07:58:00.000-05:00

Well, I know I've just posted sonnet six, but my Internet is working supremely well this morning, so it seems wise for me to upload the final sonnet while I can. We can still comment on either one, but I'd like to get this out before my Internet refuses to cooperate. I've posted pix to some of the earlier sonnets as well, which was my intention from the beginning, but it just wouldn't GO. We need sky pictures to keep us alive here.

Anyway, here is the final "installment" from the Seven Sonnets Through the Dark. I'm almost sad to see this end....

Diliculum
(daybreak)

“In the morning let me know your love for I put my trust in you.” Psalm 143
“For it was you who created my being…
I thank you for the wonder of my being, for the wonders of all your creation…
Lead me in the pat of life eternal.” Psalm 139

At dawn the world is gilded by starfire,
Our Stonehenge just a monumental tomb;
In the dark He has clothed us in festal attire
To await the near arrival of the Groom.
We are creatures of an uncreated God,
Created to reflect the Absolute;
By following the blood-paved path He trod
We allow Him to bring forth in us His fruit.
Living thuribles before Love’s Altar,
Sanctuary lamps before Light’s Throne,
Our love and work an endless radiant psalter;
We carry living Flame in flesh and bone.
We come from Goodness, Mercy our sojourn;
Rescued by Wisdom, to the Father’s Heart we return.

2006-10-29T12:07:00.000-05:00

We’ve made Honora tired talking about life moving at the speed of light (or almost – as fast as fiber optic cable can carry information anyway) and she wants to nap now. But before she nods off, a new sonnet. We’re nearing the end of these Seven Sonnets Through the Dark – this is number six:

Ante lucem
(before daybreak)
“Open to me the gates of holiness: I will enter and give thanks…
I will thank you for you have answered and you are my savior.” - Psalm 118

The first rays of the dawn are stone cold gray
And they still allow the depths and heights to hide,
But they portend a warm renewal and the day –
The Bridegroom ever coming to His Bride.
Something’s on the point of breaking forth:
Cold embers can be coaxed into a flame,
The thread of my remembering and support
Woven to altar cloth to offer my shame.
The wilderness has ravaged all I held,
Darkness whispered I was far astray,
Poverty persuaded me I cannot save myself;
Yet I trust the love I knew will not betray.
This barest light disperses every fear;
His Heart is the door burst open by the spear.

2006-10-17T15:03:00.000-04:00

As much as I'd like to dig deeper into Mary and myrrh, we've got three more sonnets to go to finish up these "Seven Sonnets Through the Dark." So, here's a new one to ponder:

In nocte consilium
(the night brings counsel)
“I rise before the dawn and cry for help, I hope in your word.
My eyes watch through the night to ponder your promise.” Psalm 119

On this craggy precipice, hope-bare heart in hand,
Gazing east through arid pathlessness,
I brace my battered faith in Promised Land
With touchstones of Your love and changelessness.
We must be freely emptied to be filled,
And a ruptured heart’s capacity’s increased;
Our hearts furrowed for mercy by acceptance of our guilt,
As darkness defines light and fasting feast.
I peer beyond familiar stone into the endless space
That is Your love, and all that’s good and just,
And I know the proving desert is sheer grace –
From the cliff I freefall empty-handed, and I trust.
When our orientation to earth we release,
we are oriented to Heaven, and we find peace.

2006-10-10T09:05:00.000-04:00

Buon giorno, amici.
I think it's time for a new sonnet. One of my favorites, actually. Number four of the "Seven Sonnets Through the Dark:"

Nox luna inlustris
(a moonlit night)
“…to you I stretch out my hands. Like a parched land my soul thirsts for you.” Psalm 143

Left alone to contemplate the absence of my love,
Lie apostles on Ascension Friday morn;
Confusion skulking vaguely in the blood,
A longlost fear and brackish grief reborn.
With eyes new-bright to the meaning of this cross,
I see the blood He gave first came from her;
Mother-love is balm for souls deep rent by loss –
Like the eleven I draw near for her myrrh.
She proves that to ascend, we must bow down,
The way to rush toward Him is to be still;
She tills spirit for the Spirit, suffusing sterile ground
With fountains from two hearts pierced on a hill.
Anointed by this gentle light I rise,
Lead by a mother who renews and fructifies.

2006-10-04T16:13:00.000-04:00

With no introduction necessary, I think, here is the third sonnet from “Seven Sonnets Through the Dark” –

In tenebris
(in darkness)
“Cloud and darkness are His raiment…A fire prepares His path.” Psalm 97

Bereft of light and rock I yet hold fast
To the finest outstrung thread of what defined me.
I know this turbid umbra cannot last
And espy the burning tears and sand behind me.
I long to have the grace of ever-yes,
But it takes heroic effort just to hold,
Encinctured with the sins I’ve oft confessed
And all the doubt and shadow yet untold.
Yet deep within the blaze of secret fire
Which guides His sheep beyond this self bedim,
The flame He set on earth still burns, inspires
Those He’s called to come and follow Him.
All that once was gain I count as loss;
The only way through darkness is the cross.

2006-09-28T13:34:00.000-04:00

I am enjoying the conversation immensely, friends.
Here is sonnet #2 from Seven Sonnets through the Dark:

Nocte intempesta
(at dead of night)
“…therefore my spirit fails; my heart is numb within me…” Psalm 143

Had I never known You, this would be despair;
This blinded discalced march a beat apart
Through hollow ashen wind and foreign air,
Bleaching bones, dry-curing brain and heart.
Over fields of shattered glass I tread, I bleed,
Balancing burdens full with shallow breath;
Sorting shards to the small dry cellar of my need
Where I bear the silent shrouding of this death.
But in the hope that I once knew, I persevere
Through dark obliterating all sense of place,
Though barren roots of dread, distrust inhere
Because I can no longer see Your Face.
I trace my map in sand falteringly,
Gathering courage to walk out on the sea.

2006-09-21T16:51:00.001-04:00

I am looking forward to this discussion, co-conspirators.
(Sigmund Freud said that anyone who believes that there will be a reward in the afterlife for things done or endured in this life is psychotic. So I want to address you all as "my dear fellow psychotics." But that might confuse newcomers, don't you think?)

With that introduction, which might have something to do with this and might not (!), here is the first of the "Seven Sonnets through the Dark" -

De nocte
(of night)
“…he has made me dwell in darkness like the dead, long forgotten…”
Psalm 143

There’s a dark that illumines the darkness we are
In the subterranean chambers beyond sin,
Where subtler poisons deface, disbar,
And unravel every hard-won discipline.
Below repentance’s smoothly finished frame
Lurk nature’s will and inward contradictions
Though we’ve immolated sense in puring flame
And submitted to our cleansing benedictions.
More contrariety with God have we
Than sin which once we chose but now reject;
He is more than sinlessness and we
Cannot sublimate through force or intellect.
We must let go of us, arms cruciform,
To expose our hearts to Fire that transforms.

2006-09-19T20:05:00.000-04:00

I am feeling that fullness I often experience before I begin to write, and I am writing a great deal with paper and pen, but nothing ready for this forum yet. I am eager for your conversation again, and am checking in with Gabrielle, who is doing a wonderful synopsis of the Teresian Mansions. Tempted here to share my Seven Sonnets through the Dark, as she is discussing the Dark Night over there. For now, I ask your prayers as I finish some projects and complete my Ignatian Spiritual Exercises. Meanwhile, this:

The test of fidelity
(every love affair has them, of course)
is not in the fire,
nor in the peace;
not in the most visible things,
nor the most obvious.
The test of fidelity
(and faithfulness is the first principle, of course)
is in the tilt of the heart’s valves,
the delicate pathways of the brain,
what glances eyes are allowed to steal,
the secret strengths and hidden weakness.
The test of fidelity
(without questions, we fail before we begin, of course)
is in what we do in secret,
what we keep from human eyes.
Yes, this is where the Beloved’s light penetrates –
this is where we must be free.
The test is in the darkness –
it is temptation overcome
that betrothes us at last.

2006-09-13T21:47:00.000-04:00

Thou
and I
and all else falls away.
The sun
a spark
and the darkness, brightest day.

2006-09-05T22:34:00.000-04:00

I just love this picture of my twins with their cousin in the middle of the sandwich.

Every time I look at it, I think that this is what Heaven is like - so much happiness we're bursting with it.

At last we will know the freedom of heart, the freedom of soul, that will allow us to run lightly as true children, unencumbered by fear or paralyzing questions or hyper-analysis.

Just joy.

2006-08-30T16:02:00.000-04:00

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.

2006-08-24T08:20:00.000-04:00

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!

2006-08-22T09:15:00.000-04:00

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:

2006-08-21T19:53:00.000-04:00

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.

2006-08-15T17:21:00.000-04:00

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

2006-08-14T18:07:00.000-04:00

+
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.

2006-08-10T08:37:00.000-04:00

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.

2006-08-06T16:09:00.000-04:00

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.

2006-08-02T16:21:00.000-04:00

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

2006-07-25T23:16:00.000-04:00

On helping one another (from His Suffering and Ours )

It’s almost universally true that the eye we turn toward ourselves is blind or obscured in some way, or the information we allow to reach it is filtered through our needs, our fears, our misconceptions. We cannot see the forest for the trees, must be reminded to remove the beam from our own eye before removing the speck in our neighbor’s, have adaged the imperative, “Know thyself.” Because we don’t.

If this is characteristic of our nature, it must be part of Your plan – even if it is only part of our fallen nature, as our fallenness is part of Your plan too! We do not really know ourselves wholly. Beyond that, we cannot judge ourselves (“neither do I judge my own self…but I am not thereby justified…” 1 Cor 4:3-4), and we cannot trust our own counsel (“…lean not on your own prudence… Be not wise in your own conceit” Prov 3:5). Why?

Because it is not Your will that we are completely self-sufficient. We are here for each other – to give to one another and to receive from one another. This is Your way in this world: to use us as instruments of Your love and truth. You reach through us to others, and through others to us; what we don’t always realize is that when we reach toward others, it is You we are seeking, and others are seeking You when they reach toward us. We are Your heart and Your hands in the world.

Of course, the clearer our connection with You is, the better conduits we are – we are channels of grace in proportion to how well we are in touch with the Source. But You use every good heart, even those with weak connections, because You are “ingenious to save.” You can use everything, everyone.

We are born needy and remain needy in many ways. We are physically born into a family of others, reborn into Your family (the Church) at Baptism, and destined for eternal communion. We are never solitary – even if we choose physical solitude, we remain part of a community of interdependence. There is no time or place at any point of our existence that we are ever really alone, and those who try to reject all communio are the most miserable souls alive. We are social beings, on every level.

We need each other physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually. We cannot live, learn, laugh or love (those being the four corresponding actions to those four needs) if we are alone. We cannot fulfill our “eschatological vocation” on our own. We cannot be whole without other people. Still, why? Why are we always in need of guidance and support from outside of ourselves? Because mutual self-donation and mutual receptivity are the highest expression of our ontology. It IS what we ARE.

We are made to become gift. And this gift of self must be personal, even intimate. At a distance, we can rouse people, we can even impress them, but we cannot really impact them. We are changed by love, but we cannot love a crowd. Love is individual, personally affirming; it implies trust and vulnerability. We do not trust a crowd. A “group hug” is less effective than a handshake.

It’s a one-to-one interaction, a mutual trust, a generosity and selflessness, a willingness to reach out to a single soul, to put ourselves at risk or sacrifice our own wants for another that characterizes the communio personarum for which we’re made. And each interaction is unique and personal and (because it is touched by grace) sublime. We need each other to become our true selves.

Our difficulty with knowing ourselves (I say even our difficulty with becoming ourselves) and our inability to solve all our own problems insures that we keep reaching out to one another, inviting others to step beyond themselves for our sakes. You could have made us wiser, more self-sufficient, less interdependent. But our need for others maintains the law of mutual self-giving in spite of ourselves. We might otherwise convince ourselves that we are gods, that we need no one; worse, we might believe that no one needs us. But they do. We must take care of one another.

Our responsibility to one another in this aspect is great, so great that “he who loves his neighbor has fulfilled the law” (Rom 13:8)! How many times are we instructed to “love one another”?! It is our distinguishing characteristic – Your love in us and through us. Your insistence on this is so unwavering that we cannot live fully, cannot be whole, cannot know that we have such sublime potential unless we are loved. Unless our own goodness is revealed to us by another’s unconditional love, we cannot know ourselves at all.

There must be a relationship of trust (with even just one other person) in which we learn that we are lovable. We have to see it in their eyes, know that it is personal, know that it is a response to what we ARE, not what we do or provide, to learn that we are significant and good.

Then we are free to love in return. Then we are free to give ourselves fully for Your sake. You accept less than all of us, if it is all we are capable of giving, but a true civilization of love would free every soul to give itself utterly to another and to You because each person would know fully what they were giving! I can spend myself for others because I should, but I do so in a half-hearted way because I do not know myself, do not really know what I am capable of giving, and am not filled with love to give away because I am only half-capable of receiving love. But when I am loved by another, I learn Your love, learn how to be fully receptive to Your love, and am better equipped to give love in the form of self-donation.

Whole, we can give ourselves wholly.

So, others’ issues often seem clearer to us than our own, and we are perennially looking to others for support and affirmation. We are not self-sufficient because You want us to lean on one another, to learn Your own love for us. It is the way You have chosen to teach us that we are loved by Absolute Meaning, and that we possess intrinsic value as unique persons given the power to choose love of others over self.

Give us the grace to love as we should, to put others first and be freed to be loved in return.

“Since you have purified yourselves by obedience to the truth for sincere mutual love, love one another intensely from a pure heart.” -1 Peter

2006-07-25T09:45:00.000-04:00

Lest we lose perspective in this Cospirazione, and forget what we are and why we're here, I found this again and thought I'd share. Maybe you've seen it before:

The Whole World As 100 People

If we could shrink the earth's population to a village of precisely 100 people, with all the existing human ratios remaning the same, it would look like this:
There world be:
57 Asians
21 Europeans
14 from the Western Hemisphere (north and south)
8 Africans

52 would be female
48 would be male

70 would be non-white
30 white
70 would be non-Christian
30 would be Christian
89 would be heterosexual
11 homosexual

59% of the entire world's wealth would be in the hands of only 6 people
and all 6 would be citizens of the United States
80 would live in substandard housing
70 would be unable to read
50 would suffer from malnutrition
1 would be near death,
1 would be near birth
Only one would have a college education
1 would own a computer

When one considers our world from such a compressed perspective,
the need for both acceptance and understanding becomes glaringly apparent.

2006-07-21T15:54:00.000-04:00

In case you missed it (as I almost did), tess said:

I do wish this were a forum where we could see instantly new posts rather than look through the comments in case we miss things, but that's just a wish.
A Marist priest, Fr. Dubay, clothed you! Fascinating.
I'm writing because you mentioned the brush with death. Now that's interesting since this has happened to me as well. Might I ask what happened to you?

I wish I could keep up with the comments more closely as well. But I’m not ready to move to anything more involved than this just yet. I am a bit techno-challenged.

Meanwhile, to your comments, Tess. Yes, Fr. Dubay happened to be giving a week-long retreat at the Carmelite Monastery that is home to our Secular Order chapter, and he was the priest who presided over our meeting and gave me my scapular. That was a wonderful surprise.

To answer your question, as is true of every "near-death" experience, the whole story is long and punctuated with beautiful moments of grace - from the doctor in charge to the emergency staff called in to help and everyone in between. It is a story I would like to tell in detail some day. For now, I will let the poem speak for itself, except to let you know that what happened was not uncommon: after the delivery of my last child, I hemmorhaged and needed emergency surgery, and that this was actually the second time I had almost died.

To Sing You Must Exhale
Cantus planus, bis

Life drains ferociously –
a cyclonic crimson torrent
and a rolling thunderhead of daguerreotype
I trace through the ceiling tiles.
I’ve seen this on sepia film –
a woman, damp with the fatigue of birthing,
every fiber relieved of a robust newling,
fading adagio in an oversized bed.
But here, the wan smile unacknowledged
as sterile strangers swarm
this well-worn instrument,
puncture what is left of a fading shell,
assure loudly in the direction of these
cooling wax pools
and then in
silent prejudicial prognoses
deliver the death sentence in glances and nods.
I know what I do not know,
refulgent galaxies churning to life in my skull,
I count my breaths and
mark the measure.
Danse macabre –
my steady, sturdy heart,
so recently quickening another waxing soul,
has lost its step and,
gulping for oxygen like a frantic trapped fish
deranged by the sunlight, it wildly clamors
to be free of this cage.
Erratic pirouette of ambivalence
to the deep whisper of luminous music
rising within me –
a music like the brilliant evaporation of dust
burning from
a falling
star.
I focus on the rhythm but
cannot will my hummingbird heart to
register a metered throb.
I waver – the dilettante’s toddle on that
high and
narrow beam
between
fervidly grasping
gristle and gravel,
currency and crumbs,
stone and the syllables I know, or
surrendering outrageously,
scandalously,
to the ineluctable promise of what
ear has not heard,
never before having been given the choice.
An impossibly delicate web holds me here
but I do not trust its strength
or theirs
or yours…
still, trust is all I am now –
trust and a lightning rod.
I breath in - Oh Jesus
I exhale – I am Yours.

Silence.

I awake, bewildered, to a new cadence,
my heart’s rhythm found,
all of me an unbearable weight,
plastic propping my jugular, portal for
a stranger’s life-gift,
a hasty row of threads holding me together
where my children once ripened,
your familiar hand,
warm with the mundane flush of
uninterrupted pulse,
draws me from where I dreamed I’d be.
Medical miracle of the month.
I ache to reassure you,
but how can I make you understand
peace at the brink?
I cannot make you know
the awkward unripe rhythm of our song or
the subtle oppressions of gravity
until you’ve felt eternity begin to fill
the lungs of your soul
and glimpsed the source of quarks and nervus rerum
which frees us of sinews and air and
transforms us
into ceaseless and ever-changing harmonies of
effulgence.
I know what I do not know and
I’ve leaned face-first into
the most fragile membrane and
balanced, breathless, on that stropped razor edge
which separates us from all we are meant to be.
And still my nostrils recall that new bright air
and still this heart of clay dances to an
unperceived chord, the whole
redeemable burden of me
longing to pierce infinity at last.

All the things we’re doing and
running from and cataloging and
all we hold in our fists
the equivalent of
dominoes in the dark or
a symphony without strings
once you confess that your
neat rows
cast no shadows.
And you cannot read the score
and you cannot really sing
until finally you

exhale

and know the incomprehensible
freedom of Truth.

Cantare amantis est.
~St Augustine

This one is the title poem from the poetry book .

2006-07-21T15:07:00.000-04:00

I'll be posting comments on the previous post soon, but please, let's not miss this opportunity (all emphasis is mine):

DAY OF PRAYER AND PENANCE FOR PEACE IN MIDDLE EAST

VATICAN CITY, JUL 20, 2006 (VIS) - Faced with worsening situation in the Middle East, the Holy See Press Office has been directed to communicate the following:

"The Holy Father is following with great concern the destinies of all the peoples involved and has proclaimed this Sunday, July 23, as a special day of prayer and penance, inviting the pastors and faithful of all the particular Churches, and all believers of the world, to implore from God the precious gift of peace.

"In particular, the Supreme Pontiff hopes that prayers will be raised to the Lord for an immediate cease-fire between the sides, for humanitarian corridors to be opened in order to bring help to the suffering peoples, and for reasonable and responsible negotiations to begin to put an end to objective situations of injustice that exist in that region; as already indicated by Pope Benedict XVI at the Angelus last Sunday, July 16.

"In reality, the Lebanese have the right to see the integrity and sovereignty of their country respected, the Israelis the right to live in peace in their State, and the Palestinians have the right to have their own free and sovereign homeland.

"At this sorrowful moment, His Holiness also makes an appeal to charitable organizations to help all the people struck by this pitiless conflict."

2006-07-18T17:01:00.000-04:00

Gabrielle is doing a wonderful job of presenting St. Teresa's "mansions" in overview. If you are interested, visit her blog .

Meanwhile, for contrast, I thought I'd post my first poem about St. Thomas. This one is in the book .

Didymus
vide et crede

I've regretted it ever since.
I asked and received
and Have regretted it ever since.
A hair's breadth from obduracy,
suffering an intellignece that refused to step aside,
demanding evidence.
Within me a heart not yet warmed,
beating only because it is its nature to beat.
A realist, relying on reason,
refusing to believe;
blaming this on their grief,
their fear.
So much tension makes men sna;.
Freely chosen enclosure in which I vaingloried.

He returned to save me.
He called me, struggling to believe,
and gently demanded I prove myself wrong.
"Let me have your finger. See. Believe."
Hand of clay I know so well
reached deeply into glorified flesh.
I was overcome.
And I surrendered.
"My Lord and my God."
But he did not call me blessed.
No.
"Blessed are they who have not seen."
Trusting souls who see with the heart.
Childlike souls
who know truth with no hands.
Blessed are they.

Be careful what you ask for.

I'm not sure I agree with myself now. As time passes, I think I was too hard on Thomas, and I see him differently, as evidenced by the poem I posted yesterday. He DID demand evidence. He DID protest. But I don't think it was vainglory...

2006-07-17T22:14:00.000-04:00

I'm back from camp, and I've been thinking....

Didymus reaches obediently,
though it is not necessary to his belief any longer –
still, he reluctantly raises his fingers of dusty clay
toward that definitive puncture between the ribs
and releases a glint of light –
not of hidden, smoldering flame,
but the radiance of a summer sky.

2006-07-13T19:11:00.000-04:00

La familia.

2006-07-13T09:51:00.000-04:00

Why a “conspiracy”?

Because we need a revolution, and revolutions must be planned quietly.

Because we must throw truth in the eye of the lie, but first we must be sure we know what we are throwing, and we know that best when we say these things out loud to one another and share our thoughts and experience (“Where two or three are gathered in My Name…,” even electronically). So we “breathe together” in order to learn, to clarify, to inspire.

(I am a real logophile, and all kinds of poetic thoughts start churning as I consider the etymologies of words, and all their derivations. Right now, I am weaving inspire, aspire, expire, conspire, transpire... perspire?!)

Because “exhaling” connotes “letting go” and surrendering, and we must surrender our own ideas in order to be filled with the Holy Spirit – we must be willing to surrender our entire selves in order to be used by Him. The name of this blog comes partly from the title poem from one of my books. In the poem, I describe my “brush with death,” in which I experienced my own surrender to God’s will in my exhaling – my “letting go” – and found profound peace.

In every moment, the culture is screaming, "TAKE MORE!" and outshouting the silence we need to remember what we are and why we are here. These are the questions that I often pose to people who are seeking something more - What are we? Why are we here? How can we best BE what we ARE?
And if we are only here and now, what is the point? We are only burdensome and loathesome to ourselves. Of course, we are made for more than this, but if we consider our nothingness without Him, all our frantic search for meaning and worth or for an escape for our meaninglessness is seen in stark contrast with our true dignity as creatures loved by Absolute Meaning. But how many know that they are loved? Loved in truth, BY Truth, with the only Love that matters...

This is what I mean by plotting against the nihilism of the day. We will have to chip away at this a little at a time, as we have real lives that take up our time (alas, my time is not my own). But this is a bare beginning.

I am off on a weekend trip as of tomorrow morning, and won't be back until Tuesday :-(
But I am confident that you all will keep the conversation going and the conspiracy alive!
I may have a minute tonight to check back, God willing. Meanwhile, ti amo!

2006-07-11T16:58:00.001-04:00

Gabrielle has me laughing out loud here .

Yes, we are full of cheesecake and antics at the moment. But still. We're just establishing a baseline of goodwill. We're not running away from Fr. Dubay (who, by the way, clothed me in my Carmelite scapular) and we will definitely ask St. John of the Cross to be our guide up Mount Carmel, even as we ask St. Teresa to lead us through the mansions of prayer.

More soon. But this is more fun than I usually allow myself.

2006-07-10T16:56:00.001-04:00

Prayer for the "Cospirazione delle Contemplative" (why DOES everything sound better in Italian?):

Father,
creator and ruler of heaven and earth,
you made man in your likeness
to subdue the earth and master it,
and to recognize the work of your hands
in created beauty.
Grant that your children,
thus surrounded on all sides by signs of your presence,
may live continually in Christ,
praising you through him and with him.
Amen.

~ from Christian Prayer, Sunday, Week II, Evening Prayer

For me, this sums up what we are about: acknowledging God as Father and Creator; acknowledging the beauty in which we are immersed, as a gift of His love; living a life of thanksgiving and offering this eucharistic attitude through and with Christ, as a continual praise of His glory.

More "unpacking" of this when I have more time.

2006-07-10T10:45:00.000-04:00

http://www.stl-ocds.org/

I love my iPod - it's my favorite way to multi-task - and Gabrielle posted this link over at contemplativehaven .

Someone invite her over here; she would bring something soothing to this conspiracy ;-)

2006-07-08T16:51:00.001-04:00

Theme song for the
'Cospirazione delle Contemplative':

(we're still about good coffee here)

Inextricably Bound
panem et circenses

So many stanzas whisper like reticent prayers to ourselves;
only the existential lies penetrating our citadels,
the purest lines cloying from age and misuse.
The past is old wineskin and all verity a noose.

Evolution has matured us far beyond comply,
and we’ve subtly outgrown the daily cadence of the sky.
We ignore that we’re merely elements bound by Providence alone
and reduce the blaze of truth to thin blue light or a pile of stone.

We are offended by mercy and too wise to be inspired
by those who live fully immersed in unseen fire;
and if the veil that conceals us should be pierced by their word
we’ll certainly insist a thicker curtain is preferred.

For the mysterious brilliance that certain lives reflect
the murky entrails of our own construct may neatly vivisect.
Seeing what they are, we see what we should be;
slavery is more poignant juxtaposed against the free.

Our match-lit labyrinths of self-indulgence and unreason
masquerade as righteousness both in and out of season.
Sacrifice rings hollow to hearts petrified and lame;
and we’ve been passed a cumbrous ancient torch without its flame.

We are aware that below us churn unstable molten seas
and know we cannot breathe but for the green breath of trees.
Not one of us can escape the gentle force of the full moon
or find shadows to hide us in the intensity of noon.

Still we try to bundle truth up in a grassroots opaque shroud
and then in the fervent madness of the single-minded crowd
shove it all diplomatically to the cliff beyond the privet,
mindless of what we’ll encounter as we freefall with it.

~ from "To Sing You Must Exhale," available through Lulu

2006-07-07T18:09:00.000-04:00

The conspiracy is here. It starts now.

I'm in.
honora is in, and bringing cheesecake. (No cheesecake, no in.)

We need someone to bring coffee, and I'm talking real coffee - no cafe americana. No bilge water. Black gold.

I have a few others to invite.
Do you?

It may be like the blind leading the blind, but the darkness in which we so often fumble is His. And His darkness is, of course, preferable to our own light.

2006-07-06T19:28:00.001-04:00

There is no such thing for us as a definitive “YES.”
We must decide again each moment to reach for best,
choosing who we are and what we will become
by remembering where we’re going, and from whence we come.
We must keep consciously choosing to be third,
neighbor being second, and always first, the Word.

2006-07-01T10:50:00.000-04:00

From the soul’s darkest deep,
essential Fire begins to creep,
rising with bright Wing, bright Breath –
white heat of necessary death –
till finally there is no dark,
if only we attend the spark.

2006-06-28T13:01:00.000-04:00

Yes, another poem. It's what I DO, and sometimes it comes in waves:

Do not wonder that now I weep
and then am filled with song –
Grace’s reach is sharp and deep
and clay vessels are not strong.
And so we sometimes reel,
stuporous and giddy,
As we are prepared to share a meal
with the inhabitants of God’s city.
We must be in proper attire
and embrace a kind of death
To hold the holy Fire
of God’s own sacred Breath.

2006-06-27T23:04:00.000-04:00

You said we must take up our cross,
if we would follow You,
and it’s true that we are burdened
and there is much to do;
but in the exigencies of the day
as mother, friend, and wife,
I see a seamless garment,
warm with Your life.

2006-06-19T10:24:00.000-04:00

Lots of Internet problems lately, so I haven't been able to log on consistently.
Mea culpa.
Here's something short, assuming it will actually upload (fiat voluntas tua).

She said You carved
a 10-faceted slavery into desert stone,
but I know this can’t be right –
from Your absolutely free and merciful Throne
can only come
codices of LIGHT.

2006-06-02T17:28:00.000-04:00

In what wild wilderness will You
leave me to weep, waiting for some sign
that what I seek
is already mine, unseen?

I have given all to You to take, use,
keep safe, bring brightly home, and every
burn and ache I vowed
to bear for You alone, for Love's sake.

But all appears empty now, and gray,
and my greatest fear here is at the end
of the day I am only
me alone and exerting nothing.

The delight of desire dampened
to vague trust, the former fire
dulled to ash and every breath
that once was prayer is now
just dust, lifeless air.

Is this the lowliness of love, the way
that is no way at all, the weird
half-dark before loneliness is at last
pure enough to be lit with
the deep lightnings of God?

When will fire again flash in this
vast uninteresting landscape in me
where You promised to
pitch Your tent,
to delight in dwelling?

Or at least, when will you again at last
let my shoulder feel
the weight of the cross, my arms measure
the circumference of rough wood, my hands know
the consolation of its splinters,
my heart
the rending of pure love?

2006-06-01T09:01:00.000-04:00

+
In our FIAT, there is always a "letting go."

We must, at every stage, be letting go of our own desires, our natural reactions, our preconceptions and expectations. You are always surprising us, if we are open to be awed; You are ever calling us to something new, something we cannot know, if we are willing to let go of what is familiar and secure; You are longing to lift us beyond ourselves, if only we will open our arms to You.

Why is it so difficult for us to step out into the sun? You invite us to be free, unlock the cage we are in, even prop the door open, but we often refuse to leave what is familiar - even if it is dark and uncomfortable. We must be opened up to the Light. Something must break through to us, to convince us to allow ourselves to be freed of all that prevents Your love from touching us, transforming us, re-creating us from the inside out.

We must go through progressive "openings." Steve Hand calls them "shatterings," and it's a good word. We must go through progressive "shatterings" of our own facades, our illusions, our securities, our erroneous ideas, before we are free enough to turn fully to You.

Sometimes we are shattered by being knocked off our horse and blinded (like Paul); sometimes by the shock of love and mercy reaching to us gently and unexpectedly (like the woman caught in adultery); sometimes by our own recognition that we have denied You and are weaker than we wanted to believe (like Peter); sometimes by Your very Presence manifest in a surprising way.

As we turn to You, reach to You, we hear You say, "Take up your cross and follow Me." We must walk the purifying path to Calvary, by which we are stripped of every unnecessary thing, often including even our own self-confidence and success, supported only by grace, dark faith, and pure hope. We must walk the essential path in which we are reduced to suffering love.

Yes, we are shattered down to love.

~ from His Suffering and Ours, available through http://www.lulu.com/kathryntherese

2006-05-25T10:21:00.000-04:00

We are each the Father's YES - YES to His very idea of us, YES to His love for us, YES to our existence here and now - and His gift to the Son.
And the Crucifixion is Christ's YES to the Father's will, which made us each His gift back to the Father. Bought at a great price, we are not our own.
Alive in the Holy Spirit (this living love between the Father and the Son), we are a new creation, awakened to the fuller reality vibrating just beyond sense - we hear the Voice of the Shepherd, see the Way that seemed hopelessly hidden, feel this new Life pulsing within us.

And if God said YES to us, how can we ever say NO?

2006-05-15T11:06:00.000-04:00

It is all too human to expect things to go as we want them to go, and whine or outburst when they do not. Experiencing the cross always seems like some kind of aberration, not the natural way of things. We so easily forget that Christ told us to pick up our cross each day and follow Him. We forget that unless the grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies it cannot bear fruit.

Sometimes, this tomb of earth is a welcome idea - a dark, quiet place of waiting - and seems preferable to whatever we are going through at the moment.
Certainly, it seems preferable to being crushed by God's millstone and ground down to something unrecognizable. It often seems that things get "piled on" and negative things keep happening at every turn - we are ground and then ground finer and finer. We want to say it is enough, but the finest flour makes the finest bread.

It is when we are ground down and re-formed that we become new matter over which He can truly say, "THIS IS MY BODY."

When we are cruciform, we most closely resemble Christ.

2006-05-05T10:54:00.000-04:00

"Do we experience belonging as a threat to our freedom, or as a fulfillment of our identity?
Is to be human to live for a reality greater than we, or is it to live for ourselves?"
~Lorenzo Albacete

2006-04-27T17:16:00.000-04:00

We are to "be perfect."
We are to be holy.
What is holiness?

To be holy is to be filled with His Love.

Now, we must free ourselves so that we can be filled.
That's what all the books and devotions are about.

2006-04-24T17:19:00.000-04:00

It is our sin that makes mercy necessary; mercy being love in the face of need.
And it is our sin - not the sin of our past, but the sin of our NOW - that makes God's mercy and love so incredible, incomprehensible. These things that we see in ourselves that make us unlovable and unworthy are the very things that allow God to show His mercy and love as our only hope, far beyond our capacity to grasp.

He always looks on us with mercy. His glance tears down the wall that keeps us apart from our selves and from Him, and leaves us open and vulnerable to change. His hands reach in through the cleft of our being and straighten the convolutions of our minds, calms our hearts, strengthens every fiber within. And His Word is always action and peace, coming from the mouth of Love and penetrating to the center of what we are, renewing us. His creative power is perpetually making all things new. Truth is dynamic and embraces every age and each person’s situation – He is alive and breathing through His Church and through each soul, revealing Himself ever anew.

Love is always new, love always finds new ways to give itself, to prove itself, to express itself. There is nothing sclerotic about Truth, because God is Truth, and He is “ever ancient, ever new.”

This giving that began before time and reached its summit when the King of kings was crowned with thorns and raised on the throne of the cross continues to give at every moment, to give through our hands and words. Every moment is an intersection of time with the eternal, in which the Incarnation and Passion of Christ are being made present in every life and circumstance. The Kingdom of God is within us, with its power to save each of us.

We are saved by His love and mercy.

~from His Suffering and Ours, available from http://www.lulu.com/kathryntherese

2006-04-24T12:50:00.001-04:00

"We've got to make room for everything and everybody - goats included. Whether it be a goat or a lambkin, the Master expects each beast to be returned in healthy condition. Don't go trying to stop a goat stinking like a goat - a waste of time and a source of despair, I can tell you...

A Christian people doesn't mean a lot of little goody-goodies. The Church has plenty of stamina, and isn't afraid of sin. On the contrary, she can look it in the face calmly and even take it upon herself, assume it at times, as Our Lord did."

~the Cure de Torcy in "The Diary of a Country Priest" by Georges Bernanos
(a masterpiece of storytelling)

2006-04-20T21:58:00.000-04:00

Life is good.
Life is very, very good.

Even if everyone's smile isn't perfect.

I have much for which to be grateful this Easter.

2006-04-13T09:25:00.000-04:00

I will post more after Easter. Meanwhile, let us all pray for one another during these holy days.

2006-04-07T08:22:00.000-04:00

+
You set aside Your glorious garments to bend low in order to serve us, to wash our feet to prepare us for a meal. A banquet of love which will make us new and for which nothing but the action of God can prepare us.

But we must not resist, must not protest out of a shallow humility that forgets that Your way is perfect, even if it makes us uncomfortable, even if we recognize our unworthiness, like Peter. Unless we are washed by You, we can have no part in You. "Master, then not only my feet, but my hands and head as well." (Jn 13:9)

We can only be prepared for the Banquet by allowing You to wash us, by yielding to Your loving condescension. It is by our willingness to surrender to Your love that we are made worthy of it.

Give us the grace of yielding to Your love, Lord, so that we may be readied and taken up by You into the fullness of life with You that You long to share with us. May we allow You to "chastise us with glory" (St. Teresa of Avila) and cleanse us with tenderness, accepting all as gift of Your merciful kindness.

Give us the humility to allow ourselves to be fully loved by You.

2006-03-29T20:20:00.001-05:00

I once (so long ago it seems like now)
poised my sealed, stone-filled heart on the
inky brink of hopelessness (no one put it there but I)
and still a gray midmorning brings back the
small precipice to stab at my eyes -
the damp of a slogging, sullen autumn stinging every sense
and deepening the reach of its unyielding decay,
every fetid mass of summer past filling my
constricted heart with
droning pity for my soul
and every fuscous plot of soggy earth
seemed fit to swallow me in
neverending death.

Miserere mei Deus -
all I see is stone and lowering cloud.
I did not yet learn that it is only in the deepest night
that we see the farthest things
or that it is only when winter fully comes
that we know what is evergreen.

What opened my eyes, lifted my head,
I cannot yet say -
gradually there seeped in (as grace always does,
creeping in gently from the bottom, rising light)
a possibility of more
the possibility of something possible
and opportunity to act.

There is a goodness in the world
(and still I weep when my own attempts at goodness
are acknowledged with even a nod);
there is a Truth so much larger than we are,
and which yet fits
precisely within us, as we fit into it.

Gradually, I opened my fists,
lifted my hands to receive,
and then, recognizing that
all is grace,
all is the gift of love,
I began to rise up.

Rise up, and give it all away.

2006-03-23T10:44:00.000-05:00

In conversation with someone recently, it hit me with more clarity than ever before that we cannot be assured of our grasp of the truth by grasping harder to what we think is true - this only makes us stubborn and narrow. Our certainty comes from letting go entirely of everything but Christ. Our grasp is never strong enough or pure enough to keep us from error unless we are holding on to NOTHING but Him.

We must freely choose to let go of the ideas and understandings to which we cling for security and become like little children - not in the sense of becoming childish and oblivious, but rather childlike and trusting in the face of our realities because we know we are loved. Perfect love casts out fear; perfect love implies perfect trust. But God will not demand our trust or force us to let go. And if we will not let go, we continue to be weighed down and enslaved by all to which we cling.
It is a false security, because our real security is Him. It is trust in His promise of salvation, relying on grace, not on the things we have learned, the consolations we have received, the feats we have accomplished (even if these are of the supernatural variety).

"My grace is sufficient for you, for power is made perfect in weakness."
2 Cor: 12
"For we also are weak in him: but we shall live with him by the power of God towards you. "
2 Cor:13

2006-03-13T20:37:00.000-05:00

Good News is always good.

The Way of the Cross for Children seems to be selling well. Lulu just informed me that it ranked in the Top 100 in sales for the past 30 days. I think we are always looking for something new (and trustworthy) for our children.

A lot of people are choosing the download version, which is less than $2.00 and is a fine option for those who don't mind it being unbound. Thanks to all your positive feedback. And yes, I am working on a similar book for teens, which I plan to have available for the John Bosco Youth Day at Holy Hill in Wisconsin, which is in September. Prayers appreciated.

As for the current book, we are at number 37 as of this evening:
http://www.lulu.com/browse/top100.php?fResolution=month

2006-03-13T20:14:00.000-05:00

A new podcast is available, for those who are into such stuff (as I am) - it is the audio from a local cable television show called "The Catholic Forum." I was recently interviewed for the show in reference to my book, "His Suffering and Ours," although we didn't talk much about the book itself; the discussion revolved around our understanding of redemptive suffering.

For the eager or the curious, you can find it here: http://www.catholicforum.libsyn.com/

2006-03-06T20:36:00.000-05:00

I have been overwhelmed by an utterly stupefying truth - that we poor, weak, sin-darkened creatures can bring God JOY. We ARE His joy.

God, who created all things by His Word, whose eternal thought included this vast magnificence of space and time, who lived a glorious life of perfect love and communion in which nothing was lacking and in which all was always present to Him and all things possible, this God (uncreated, without beginning or end, independent of any cause or power, absolutely free, absolutely perfect, absolutely complete, and absolutely content within Himself) willed creation into existence, saw that it was good (and innocent and beautiful), and He was pleased.

Then He created man in His own image and likeness, formed him "from the earth," not by a word but by His own handiwork (not "let man be," but "let us make man"), and breathed into him "the breath of life." And He walked with man.

And then man turned from God; sin came and would have ruined everything, had it not been for the fact that God had already intended that the Creator should become part of creation, that the Son would assume a created nature (the Incarnation being one of His eternal ideas, so that He never existed without this idea of creating and being a part of His own creation, nor without the idea of each one of us!) - only now the Son would also be Savior (but God always knew that by making us free, sin would come; and yet it was somehow more glorious for Him that sin would come and mercy would be given). Knowing all this, God still created us, still fell in love with the idea of each one of us.

And still, He gives us life, allows us to offend Him and to fail, and still He continues to love us - His mercy is infinite and His love is unwearied. This is stupefying - that EVEN THOUGH we are selfish and sinful and stubborn, He loves us.

But after all, love is like that - love is patient and understanding and forgiving. Even a deep human love (which is only a reflection of Divine Love) can overlook a great deal, and forgive 70 x 7 times, so we can almost comprehend how God can love us in spite of us. At least, we can accept this probability by extrapolating from the little we know of love.

But we often fail to see beyond our pathetic capacity to love; we often think that God's love is little better than ours. But of course, it is INFINITELY better.

Yes, God's mercy allows for our weakness (though I confess that at times I mistake this for a kind of grudging tolerance) and He constantly forgives us. He never rejects us, He guards our every step, He continuously sheds His light for us and invites us to something better. Yes, He even desires to BE WITH US, to DWELL WITHIN US, to give us every good thing and make us happy.

But this is still too restricted.

God's love for us is so great that WE can really bring Him JOY. Of course. He loves us and love finds joy in its beloved. But this did not really penetrate, or I did not penetrate those words until now. We can bring God joy - His delight is to be with us. We try to be "pleasing in His sight," but do we realize that we can really bring God JOY?!

I have said many times that an amazing threshold is crossed when we see at last and acknowledge with some humility the utterly stupefying fact that we are loved by Absolute Meaning. When we apprehend that GOD LOVES US, we are changed.

But I have found an even more utterly stupefying fact, and another threshold has been crossed: I can bring God JOY. God allows us to be His JOY.

I have perhaps lost you during this rambling post, and I am finding it difficult to find words to express this thought well. But it seemed rich enough to share nonetheless. I leave it to grace to persuade you (in a far more eloquent way than here) that God's love is utterly stupefying, no matter what facet of it we are blessed to see....

2006-02-23T10:33:00.000-05:00

Childlikeness.
Love is given as a gift from on high, a gift descending with the gentleness of dew. But this gift must be accepted with the un-self-consciousness, unpretentiousness, unencumbered joy of children - without guile, without calculation or negotiation. With utter amazement and untarnished wonder.

We are born with this openness, this sense of wonder. But the enemy knows that sin (first others' sins, and then our own) dull our sensitivity to this gift, this light. We slowly turn away from our true selves, restrain our natural wonder and awe, learn to weigh our giving and receiving, build walls around our inmost selves. It isn't long before most of us refuse to dance, hesitate to sing, dislike surprises. Sometimes we are so wounded that we hardly recognize ourselves any longer.

So many of us are broken, wounded, needy, unable to enjoy the NOW until the past is somehow addressed. We hurt one another in ways that can be difficult to undo. Sin disrupts the normal development of the human being - physically, emotionally, mentally, spiritually. If this growth is arrested or distorted, we cannot fully integrate all the many dynamisms within us and we are not whole or free - we are dis-integrated. We may become stuck in unhealthy patterns of behavior, emotionally or spiritually immature on many levels, or grasping in all the wrong directions for something to fill a real need that was never met (often a need for unconditional love, security, affirmation). Our past keeps rising to the surface to remind us that something is missing, something has not been adequately addressed, something has wounded us and the wound is festering.

And we may get caught in an ever-increasing tangle of negative behaviors and attitudes, layering webs of guilt, shame, anger and resentment on top of the wounds and making the "original sin" which initiated our separation from ourselves even more difficult to find. For some, it takes years of professional help to determine the cause of the destructive (or simply limiting) behaviors and attitudes. We live in knots.

But Christ came to unravel all our knots, illumine our darkness, free us from our bondage to sin. He came (indeed, He is always coming) to restore our innocence, our status as sons and daughters.

In Him, we can be children again, enjoying a spiritual childhood in which we are not afraid to lift up our hands and receive a gift, in which we trust completely that the Father will provide every good thing, in which we know that we are loved and protected. A secure childhood that does not doubt unconditional love, does not doubt that a Father will keep His promises, does not fear. In Him, we are free to be what we are, confident that we are on a secure path.

To find ourselves, know ourselves, be ourselves in any situation - this kind of sincerity and transparency is rare, which is why it is so disarming and so attractive. How seldom we look into the face of an adult and are surprised to find the open and innocent eyes of a child! Yet in these eyes, we see God.

2006-02-14T13:24:00.000-05:00

We are made to be living temples, but God can only dwell within us if we have not closed the door in fear, if we have not enthroned idols (out of selfishness and pride) there, and if our foundations are firmly grounded in the humility of knowing our place in the universe. Because it is only pride that can make us, as it were, impervious to God's mercy and love - He can reach past anything but our own self-will, our self- assertion. Because we are free, and He will not trample our freedom.

So we can keep God out by closing ourselves off from Him. If we are eager for our own glory, we cannot glorify Him. If we are grasping for more for ourselves, we are not grateful for all He has given us. If we are determined to maintain control of our own destinies, we are not open to His will for us. If we are relying on our own resources, we are not surrendering to His action in our lives.

Sin (especially pride) closes us off from God, from love.
But sanctity is openness to Him, to others, to the suffering that requires, out of love.

We exist not for ourselves, but for Him; our desire should be to glorify Him by abandoning ourselves to His will (because He will glorify Himself through us, if we will allow Him to do so). And we willingly, eagerly, surrender to His will once we recognize our utter contingency, our nothingness without Him, and His great love for us in spite of us.

We have Mary as our model of surrender. Of course, she was able to do this because she was uniquely sensitive to the guidance and movement of the Holy Spirit, Who established within her clear soul a house of perfect prayer, where no obstacle could be found, no hesitation ever slowed the flow of grace or the increase in holiness, where every energy was stirred only for God's glory, backlit by the consciousness of her own nothingness and unworthiness. She never forgot her "creatureliness, " never asserted her rights or her perogative as Mother of the Son, never kept anything for herself.

She was always content with her poverty, always recognized her unworthiness, even as she praised God's favors to her (which are many, and great) and extolled His greatness alone. She never forgets that she is one of the redeemed, that the Redemption (in which she plays such an important role) is the price of these great favors. She lives and breathes gratitude and trust and love. Her whole life said, "I am the handmaid of the Lord. The Lord has done great things for me, and holy is HIS Name."

It is not God's great favors to her that makes her our perfect model - it is her constant fidelity to grace (which increased in her every virtue). Perfect cooperation with the action of the Holy Spirit within her, leading her to total self-extinction with her Son, completely immolated for our salvation.

2006-01-20T22:16:00.000-05:00

How can new life be breathed into what seems to so many to be boring or obsolete? How can we rekindle the sense of mystery and majesty, enthusiasm for the most essential things, a sense of awe and wonder?

Not by over-explanation or hyper-analysis, certainly. The only words that might spark a fire are those that capture and hold out the Light as it is. Poetry is all I know. But beyond words there are concrete signs which can shed light on the deepest meanings of the liturgy.

But what can draw the distracted attention of so many to these silent things? What can make this thanksgiving, consecration, memorial, and offering VITAL to people who seem interested only in themselves and their own image?

How, for example, can the altar itself arouse the wonder that it should? What will help us recognize and appreciate the altar as a sign of the sacrifice of the cross, the table of the Eucharistic meal, the symbol of the tomb left empty by the Risen One?

This seems to me to be an urgent need today - to somehow refocus attention toward Christ's Presence among us, toward contemplative adoration, to allow Him to reveal His Light and Presence in Word and Sacrament, to somehow encourage this dynamic of the people waiting on, expecting, encountering Him personally.

How can our gaze and our hearts be directed toward Him?
How can we be opened up to transcendence?

2006-01-09T21:44:00.000-05:00

For those who have emailed wondering why I don't post more often, I thought I'd show you a few of the very good reasons why my time is so limited. God keeps me too busy to get into much trouble, as you can see!

2006-01-03T14:36:00.000-05:00

On this "optional Memorial" of the Holy Name of Jesus, designated as such by Pope JPII in 2002 (he was really just reinstating an observance that had been set aside after Vatican II), we take note of the naming of this child born unto us, this son that is given for us. Joseph was told in his dream: "You shall call His name Jesus, for He shall save His people from their sins."

So when we say that name, we recall the greatest gift that has been given to us: salvation.

In the Litany of the Holy Name of Jesus, we refer to "Jesus, splendor of the Father...brightness of eternal light... eternal wisdom... infinite goodness...."

Trinitarian love is not a self-contained end in itself - it is always opening up something fresh within Itself to pour out on us, to give existence to what did not exist, to communicate something new yet eternal, to give life where death had been tightening its grip.

This Child named Jesus reminds us that the ever-new beginning, the infinite "givingness" of God, is tangible - salvation is ours because Love has been made flesh, Beauty made flesh, Life made flesh, Truth made flesh, Wisdom, Goodness, Justice made flesh and is among us, with us, for us.

This Child elevates and illumines the new beginning that is every new life, every absolved penitent whose childlikeness has been restored, every dawn, every heartbeat. Behold, He makes all things new.

We love You, Jesus. We praise You, Jesus. We thank You, Jesus.

2006-01-03T09:25:00.000-05:00

"Chesterton was right when he said that the world is full of Christian ideas gone mad. The Gospel and the Church are plundered like a fruit tree, but the fruits, once separated from the tree, go rotten and are no longer fruitful. The ‘ideas’ of Christ cannot be separated from Him, and so they are of no use to the world unless they are fought for by Christians who believe in Christ, or at least by men who are inwardly, though unconsciously, open to Him and governed by Him. Radiance is only possible when the radiant center is permanently active and alive. There can be no shining from stars long dead."
~Balthasar, Das Ganze im Fragment

I think this is also true of those who argue WITHIN the Church, or who set themselves above the Magisterium with their endless arguments over liturgical correctness or moral relativism or whatever. Even if they have not separated themselves from Christ, or formally broken from the Church - they have separated themselves from His Church and picked the glorious fruits of the Church and tried to use these singular specimens independent of the Tree. The part can only live and be healthy when it is part of the whole. When we accept that the Church - though it is filled with sinners - possesses the Truth and teaches with the authority of Christ, then we are freed from all that might enslave our reason and drag us away to something that seems righter than the Church. We cannot know everything, and the arguments of our own minds, the lies of the world and the devil, the arguments of the well-meaning can lead us down paths we need not waste time travelling.

2005-12-30T11:46:00.001-05:00

Shameless self-promotion:

2005-12-30T11:46:00.000-05:00

Infant King.

The mouth that breathed the stars into the night now mingles breath with cow and ass.

How is it that this Child King places Himself in such a position that I must crouch down to enter its darkness and look down at Him? Look down at this King, snuggled amidst the winding cloths in the animals' feed?

You are always hidden in the most ordinary ordinariness, among the lowest and the least, reaching through accidents unworthy of You - elevating every low thing and humbling the self-elevated. Unless we are willing to bow our heads to enter the low entryway, we will not find You. Unless we turn our prideful heads downward, we may miss You altogether. You share the cave's air with simple beasts, and the shepherds and kings (truly wise men, to see beyond appearances) are not loathe to enter and praise You in the dim light.

"For unto us a child is born. Unto us a son is given."

A baby. No one fears a baby, except the madmen.

A baby, unseen, unknown, hidden in a cave. Love Incarnate is helpless and unthreathening.

Come, let us adore Him.

2005-12-28T09:02:00.000-05:00

Holy Innocents.
Innocentes pro Christo
primitiae Deo, et Agno -
not fruits of the harvest, but
fruits of the season's hope and promise.
First fruits sacrificed on the altars of
the grief-hot hearts of new motherhood, abrupted.
The raging selfishness of the tyrant
still rages on, sees a threat that is no threat
still sees others as obstacles or objects only
still spawns erratic fear and blinding obsession
still boils in the veins
still sacrifices the simple, the innocent,
on the self-turned hearts of new motherhood, aborted.

2005-12-12T15:23:00.000-05:00

Father, Son, Spirit; Mercy, Gift, Love.
Always reaching down to us, always desiring to lift us up to free us.

Your mercy, grace and love are Your desire in action, Your will to save us, Your desire to draw us near You forever, Your movement toward us, which desires to make us whole and free.

You long to unite Yourself with us, to fill us with Your life and its peace, but the vehemence of this longing is balanced by its absolute purity, which cannot take more than we freely give, and which knows the precise limits we set even when we do not fully know them. Our freedom is ours, and if we subtly withold something for ourselves, You will not take it by force.

And yet, You magnanimously step into every crack we (sometimes hesitatingly) open to You - as You did with the woman at the well, You step boldly into every half-truth we admit and gently invite us to admit the whole truth. And You step in as deeply as we allow You.

Your Mercy never fails to accept what we offer, even if You know we will soon grab it back again. And Your love never ceases to find new ways to call to us, new ways to give Yourself to us, new ways to lift us beyond ourselves. Because we are so much more than we recognize, loved so deeply, given so much, called to such dignity! We are indeed breathed forth in love, called to love, and drawn by love at every moment. But this love calls to us from the cross, where love's burden is made clear. We are freed for love by suffering.

Mercy goes THROUGH sin, and not around it; Love does not COVER our sin, but USES it to reach us; You give Yourself WHILE WE ARE YET SINNING, rather than reject what is unworthy of You. You come to us and make us worthy; You come to us and sanctify us with Your Presence immediately and as fully as we allow, as soon as we acknowledge and confess our sinfulness. You do not want one soul to be lost and You never cease to find ways to reach in with Your love and mercy to free each one from its exile.

Mercy. You are Mercy. The enemy has done a thorough job of convincing the world that You are everything but a tender, merciful Father by distorting the meaning of every good thing. But Mercy has the final victory. Love still gives depite its being ignored, misunderstood, maligned, even persecuted. Grace is ever being given, in ways we often fail to recognize and sometimes reject. Still, we are deeply impelled to love.

And in the end, we are judged by Love.

2005-12-06T11:10:00.000-05:00

In what wild wilderness will You
leave me to weep, waiting
for some sign that what I seek is
already mine, unseen?

I have given all to You to take, use,
keep safe, bring brightly home, and
every burn and ache I vowed to bear
for You alone, for Love's sake.

But all appears empty now and gray,
and my greatest fear here is that at the end
of the day I am only me alone and
exerting
nothing.

The delight of desire dampened
to vague trust, the former fire dulled to
ash and every breath that once was prayer
is now just dust, lifeless air.

Is this the lowliness of love, the way
that is no way at all, the weird half-dark
before lonelines is at last pure enough to be
lit with the deep lightnings of God?

When will fire again flash in this vast
uninteresting landscape in me where You
promised to pitch Your tent, to
delight in dwelling?

Or at least when will You again at last let my
shoulder feel the weight of the cross, my
arms measure the circumference of rough wood, my
hands know the consolation of its splinters, my
heart the rending of
pure
love?

2005-12-02T19:04:00.000-05:00

We talk about “abandonment to God” as if we were giving up something that belongs to us, something we have earned – and our fallen nature does perceive some loss. We cling so vehemently to these shreds we consider so valuable, these handfuls of gravel that appear to our unseeing eyes as precious stone to be retained at any cost.What then, when our blindness is cured?

Then we grin at the self that once clung to handfuls of rock in the same way we grin at the memory of our childhood arguments over toys. We wonder what all that intensity was about. A yo-yo?

We see at last that we are not abandoning ourselves when we give ourselves to You – we are only abandoning our fistfuls of worthless stone and FINDING ourselves under the rubble. Our abandonment loses its negative dimension altogether; we no longer see this as what we “give up” or “forego” for You, but rather what we EMBRACE for love of You. Self-denial becomes gift-of-self, and the focus is no longer on saying “no” to ourselves, but on saying “yes” to You. And our "letting go" becomes our receiving, our giving comes back to us, as it always does.

But how many of us are capable of a “yes” that is strong enough to embrace all You want for us, a “yes” that will not hesitate at each decision, a “yes” that isn’t tempted to be withdrawn with each pain, a “yes” that isn’t forgotten in the thousand interactions of the day, a “yes” that doesn’t waver when fatigue clouds the mind and drains the body – a FIAT like Mary’s that can save the whole world?

Give us the grace of ever-YES!

But this takes perfect love. It’s all about love, all about You. Your love WITH us, FOR us, IN us, THROUGH us, reaching toward others through our “yes.” If we could keep present in our minds the truth that we come FROM Your love are SAVED BY Your love, are made FOR Your love, to RECEIVE Your love, to GIVE Your love, to be FILLED with the UTTER FULLNESS of Your love, we would say “yes” to Your grace. And grace is Your love.

Our lives might be punctuated with ordinary and even extraordinary manifestations of Your grace, but all that matters is our “yes” to that grace. If we are not impelled toward greater love, then the experience is meaningless for us, for surely You invite us to greater generosity, a bigger “yes,” a more profound indwelling…

This is my only way to judge – am I more in love with Love?
Nothing else matters.

2005-12-01T22:37:00.000-05:00

Life is good.
And so is the view out my window.

2005-11-27T20:52:00.000-05:00

Letting ourselves be loved when we are most unworthy of love

It seems that Jesus did not always follow the rules.

Of course, He followed the unchanging law of God, but He did not always follow the rules made by man. He allowed His disciples to pick wheat to eat on a Sabbath. He also healed on the Sabbath. He ate with known sinners and allowed them to touch Him. He was not – IS not– limited by the rules set by human standards. No, Jesus always followed the need of people, not the rules set by them. He made His judgments not by outward appearances, but according to the sincerity of the heart.

We, of course, cannot see the heart as clearly, and we know our own hearts only imperfectly, and so we have a tendency to become “legalistic” in our following Christ. And this kind of legalism can lead to scrupulosity – because on our own, given our fallen nature, we can never do anything perfectly, and when we place too much emphasis on the external appearance or the mechanical adherence, we see only how we are acting, and how imperfectly we adhere! This vision of our unworthiness logically stirs up fear that we will never be good enough. But perfect love casts out fear.

Ah, there's the rub. We do not know love.

God is pure Love. Pure Love only wants what is best for others, and seeks ways to draw them to it. God is a good Father, a tender Father, a gentle Father. A Father who keeps His promises, and only wants us to return love for love. A Father who guards our every step, who forgets absolutely nothing but our sin - He forgets not one joy, not one pain, not one prayer, not one sigh. He is a Father who longs to hear us call Him by that familial word: "Father." This is not just pious rhetoric. This is very real; He longs to dwell with us, and not dwell on our sin. He provides every good thing for His children; He is constantly drawing His children to Himself (and we are all children when it comes to going home) in spite of our ingratitude and stubbornness. He is all mercy and compassion and love.

"Come to Me," He says to each of us.
Always, He says, “Come.”

If we could spend just five minutes every day simply "being" with God as His child, acknowledging Him as Father, not allowing our past sin to get in the way, we might make progress here.

Just be with your Father.
Know that He loves you.
HE loves you.
He LOVES you.
He loves YOU.

Of COURSE we're imperfect, of COURSE we're unworthy, of COURSE we have sinned today. And yesterday. And tomorrow. And probably until five minutes after we assume room temperature. Of course. That’s what the Sacrament of Reconciliation is for: reconciling. Perfection is God’s business; ours is just the trying.

We are fallen creatures. He loves us anyway. He wants to do the work for us, but He can't work if we're working too hard or making our own rules. Our work is in the surrendering, the admitting our imperfection and inability to perfect ourselves, our allowing Him to work in us.

We just have to say, "Yes."

We have to stop slipping into the kind of self-judgment that paralyzes us and keeps us from standing in His Presence. We have to stop ourselves in the tracks of perfectionist thoughts and say, "Jesus, I believe in Your love for me." We acknowledge our wrongs, our difficulties, our bad habits, and we know that our hope is in His unfailing mercy and love. We see what we are and we give it all to Him and allow Him to transform us.

This was the difference between Judas and Peter. They had both been chosen by Jesus, had traveled with Him, heard Him speak countless times. And they both betrayed Him. But Judas refused to accept the forgiveness he needed; letting oneself be loved when one is most unworthy of love takes great humility. Judas despaired because He did not trust in Christ’s forgiveness. Peter, on the other hand, wept bitterly and begged forgiveness; He trusted in the power of Christ’s love to overcome his own weakness. And he remained first among the Apostles.

We must have this same trust (it took Peter quite some time to learn it, so we must be patient with ourselves as well!). We have to be more certain of Christ’s love than we are of our own misery and sin. We must let Him judge.

Ask Him to make you what He wants you to be. Just keep trying to choose the best thing and leave the rest to Him. What's past is past. We only have right now to do what He wants, to love Him and love others. Imperfectly.

And that’s all He wants.

2005-11-18T15:25:00.000-05:00

There is in us love that we do not know exists until we are called beyond ourselves and asked to give. Simon of Cyrene did not know what he was capable of, nor to what he was called, when the soldiers forced him to help this Nazarene get His cross up the hill. He wanted to stay out of it; he did not want to expose himself to the suffering of this criminal. But Jesus, weak and on His way to death, welcomed him and was grateful for Simon’s help. What precisely this opened up within the Cyrenian we do not know. But we do know that he became a believer, and his sons as well.

We are all Simon. We are all called beyond ourselves to help one another, not hide from the suffering around us. When we respond to this call, we do not know what will be opened up within us, but no self-gift fails to enlarge us for greater things.

And the more we give, the more we will find that greater capacities for love are opened up within us. The more we conform ourselves to the self-giving of Christ, the more we become our true selves.

Because by His wounds of love, we are healed.
Healed of sin, we are freed to love fully.
And in sacrificing ourselves for love of others, infinite capacities for love are opened up within us.

It is this infinite capacity for love that is our eternal destiny.

~excerpted from: "His Suffering and Ours - words for pierced and wounded hearts,"
available now directly from the publisher at http://www.lulu.com/kathryntherese

2005-11-13T20:47:00.000-05:00

My parchment heart strains
toward Him who burns
with love for me, just beyond my reach -
one wavelength beyond my ear or eye.

My every sense empty, aching for You
alone, so that I refuse them
every other satisfaction.

My soul, expanded with Your love,
stands vacant, waiting
for Your return.

Empty, my burning hunger grows
and I wait for You at prayer.

Then I rise to seek Your Face,
Your will,
in every need and heart around me.

2005-11-08T20:40:00.000-05:00

2005-11-08T17:08:00.000-05:00

To Everyman, Abrupted

When will we reach for what is truest, what is at the
depths of what we are?
When will we stop running and listen to the
voice that is calling to us?
There is a Fatherhood that animates our being,
but you want to belong to yourself –
to hold on to yourself, you must
refuse every thing that needs a part of you;
you must cling tenaciously to you –
and how will you hold all of us,
with both hands
already full?
When will you let go and be free of loneliness?
We are earthen vessels, yes, but the elemental dust
from which we are made came from brilliant stars,
and still holds the capacity for fire.
When will you let yourself be warmed by this
flame within you?
It is in your bones, a breath from burning.

Will you surrender yourself to this birth into fatherhood’s fullness?
You must open both eyes to that radiance that is
father-child-love, and accept that you are both
father and child.
So why choose to remain alone?
When will you allow my love to open up in you
that place where you can embrace the fatherhood you cannot see?

When will you descend to that place from which
you can be lifted?
You must acknowledge the chasm between
what you think you will make of yourself and
what you are made to be.
When will the Father’s light -
creeping in gently from the bottom,
never denying our freedom, but always holding hope –
When will this deep light overcome your resistance to the
truth of what we are?
Admit that you will die and then you can begin to live!
Admit that I will die and then you will permit me to live.
When will you cease this solitary struggle?
Will you reach into me and breathe this light that
is not mine? Or will you only touch
the surface and
remain in darkness?
This light is bursting out toward you,
but you must open your hands to receive it.
You must let go and breathe it in deeply.

When will we speak of what is at the depths of you and me?
It waits to be wrapped in our words and discovered,
to be fanned out between us and
surround us with its
light until we
stand silent,
facing the truths too true
to be spoken or signed.

I am here, aching for you to know all of me and to still
accept me as yours –
to give me the gift of being known and yet loved! –
but you content yourself with shells and shibboleths.
I am here, aching to know all of you
and to prove to you that I will still accept you as gift –
but you cannot tell me what you do not know.
I am still here. Is our love to be measured in tears?
I am still here, offering. Is fatigue the measure of our love then?
When will you concede that you are the expression of the
Father,
that you do not express yourself only?

In us, the truth is embedded.
We must desire to know it,
work to free it so it can free us,
and then we must
ACT.

-from "His Suffering and Ours - words of hope for pierced and wounded hearts,"
now available at http://www.lulu.com/kathryntherese

2005-09-02T17:57:00.000-04:00

God's foot in our door

God begins with our feeble assent to faith - that first step of dark faith that does not yet fully know or understand it believes. Our openness to love what we do not yet know, our obedience to the word which we do not yet understand, is God's foot in our door. Now faith can take root and begin to grow, fed by grace and our experiences, which, penetrated by the light of faith, teach us about the content of that faith.

It is all just words until it is put into action.

It is in applying what we believe to our real living - in living and loving the truth - that we come to the necessary experiential knowledge of what we believe: "If you abide in my word...you shall know the truth." (Jn 8)

And in this knowing, what we once accepted in faith and seemed to belong only to the realm of thought or will becomes for us a living reality, even a joyous possession. This is not to say that we can know and possess God - faith is still faith and not knowledge, for God is always the impenetrable One, holy, infinite, inscrutable Mystery. We cannot have immediate knowledge of Him no matter how profoundly He allows us to penetrate His truth in this life. We only receive this truth (always through Christ), accept humbly, listen obediently.

It is always pure gift; a gift that grows.

The essence of our being is changed by our believing, or we do not really believe at all. Our faith cannot remain at the periphery of our lives - we must be open to the "divine invasion" of His love, allow ourselves to be transformed by grace, let the light of our faith penetrate every practical aspect of our living. It will not do to go through the motions, to mechanically perform the rituals "imposed upon us" from outside of ourselves (though this is a start). We must be fully present, participating in our own lives and in the sacramental life of the Church with the fullness of our personhood, offering ourselves in thanksgiving.

Then we learn at last who and what we are - in giving ourselves we discover ourselves. In assenting to truth in dark faith, we are penetrated by its light. In letting go of our own ideas, we freed to be filled with His.

And His are so much better than ours.