Don't Cry Out Loud

There are some people who seem to be able to share their deepest self with no particular effort. For them opening up is like simply showing someone the page of the book, and then, when it has been read, showing it to someone else and so on.

I think I've gotten more private as I've gotten older, perhaps because I've discovered that I don't seem to be able to simply "show" people pages. I feel much more like I rip them out and hand them over for good. A piece of myself goes with that person, and sometimes they don't realize it. Letting go of that person, or letting ties drop would be like letting go of myself.

I lose trust in a person when I feel they don't value what I've entrusted to them--why should I hand them out to someone if they aren't important to them? This has happened in many, small reparable ways with people who know me only a little, who only have perhaps a piece of a page. Once I lost trust in someone who had almost an entire chapter. Try as I might, I cannot force myself to trust that person again. I want to. But it's like force-feeding, against my will and my heart.

Only Say the Word, and I Shall Be Healed

All these devoted themselves with one accord to prayer, together with some women, and Mary the mother of Jesus, and his brothers.
Acts 1:14

So I was convinced when I started writing about prayer (and I've got two more posts on it coming, hopefully) that there was a disunity in the church catholic, and it bothered me. I spent a lot of time thinking about unity in prayer and the importance of it. I think it is very important that we don't make more of these differences in the outer forms of prayer than is absolutely necessary. It is not my design by any means to reform your prayer by what I have been writing, but only to share my prayer life with you in the hopes that we may reach a greater understanding, and perhaps, if the Spirit moves you, to show you what great richness He offers in the Church His holy bride.

Prayer is profoundly personal in that it reaches to the deepest parts of our being and draws them out. In prayer we turn ourselves inside out and offer up the torn, the dirty, the broken, the soul stirring feebly--the nothing that is everything that we have. But prayer is not just personal, but interpersonal, deeply communal. I think liturgical worship is particularly fitted to communal prayer. In such a setting each one of the faithful may offer up in total freedom and without fear or judgement the expression of faith that is the Church's over the ages.

If you and I greet the same Eternal God by the same Spirit-inspired cry, "Abba, Father!" then you are my brother, my sister, in all truth. Do not shut me out of your prayer, or draw distinctions between what I wish and what you wish, but come under the wings of Christ's holy church and learn how to pray.

yuck, nasty!

Originally the song of the week was going to be something else, but I've been working on my prayer post and listening to this song and over and over--so I'm taking it as an omen. The song of the week goes to Kate Nash, "Mouthwash." This is the sort of song that goes on my girly mix. In my itunes I have a "girl power" mix with songs like "Fighter" and "Miss Independent" and "Listen" and "Big Girls Don't Cry." You know, breakup kind of songs. And then I have a mix with songs like "Mouthwash" and I call it "Roadtrip" mix. This is the sort of song I like to listen in the car on a one-way trip to the end of the road. Youtube!

And website of the week is my homepage, Catholic Exchange, which I like because it has some of my favorite columnists, plus daily mass readings and Catholic news.

Eat all your carrots! Eat your spinach! Leave the green peppers, yuck, nasty!

What is Love?

Christians in general want to distance themselves as much as possible from the worldly view of love. It goes something like this: the ecstatic feeling termed "love" is to be treasured above all else, morals and whatnot, and that all fate will bend and buckle to achieve the celestial union with one's soul mate. Obviously flawed, right? And so we march out onto the battlefield of ideas will all banners blazing and the choir singing the refrain: LOVE IS NOT A FEELING!

Man is a mystery unto even himself and a curious hybrid. He is spiritual (rather like angels) and also physical (rather like rats). It is easy to ascribe everything to our physical bodies and nothing to our spirits, even those experiences, impulses, and desires which have their seat in the soul. So our first problem, I think, is this hazy term, "feeling," which drifts mistily between emotion and desire and perhaps a spiritual experience. If emotion is raw chemicals running through the bloodstream then it is not much good for anything. But what if it--The Feeling--is more than that? What if it's a Presence?

The single greatest commandment is to love--with all our mind and strength (will? Intellect?) but also with all our heart.

If you were thinking I had the answer, you were wrong. I only have the question.

Any or all of the above may be rank heresy and do not neccesarily reflect what I would call dogmas I ascribe to.

Go to the Ant, Thou Sluggard!

Learn his ways and be wise*... Have you ever wondered why ants bite us? I can understand why a clan of ants would attack a being maliciously stirring up their home and destroying its many passageways with a cruel and abhominable stick. But why, if I'm just sitting there, actively attacking nothing and no one and harming no fly nor beetle, would an ant decide to crawl into my pants and bite me on the derriere? What data is being sent into his instinct receptors that tells him to bite (I'm assuming such a small animal can have no brain to speak of)? Does he smell sweat and flesh and assume it is food?

Ants are idiots. Dead idiots.

* Proverbs 6:6

Lord, Teach Us to Pray

I wait for you, O Lord;
I lift up my soul to my God.
Psalm 25:1-2a

The Catechism of the Catholic Church is broken up into four very broad sections, one of which is entirely devoted to prayer. It begins with this question: What is prayer?

Years ago it would never have particularly occurred to me to ask what prayer was. That, I assumed, was a "duh," like asking what a pew or the Bible was--it was something everyone knew. As a teenager, "talking to God" was not something I particularly liked doing. I did not know how to present a clean heart, a prerequisite to prayer I knew was essential. Even the very purpose of prayer more or less always eluded me. I could tell God about my day, but He already knew my every thought. I could ask Him for things, but He already knew I needed them. This view of prayer is, of course, very narrow, very pinched, very immature. When I became Catholic this view was blasted open, blasted into world of prayer so large that even now I feel completely inadequate to write about it. I have but put my toes into the ocean that restlessly awaits.

The first real definition of prayer I ever read was penned by St. John Damascene. He wrote, "Prayer is the raising of one's mind and heart to God..." There was much food for thought here, and it the implications of this simple statement occupied my mind for days. The idea that prayer might be something more than talking somehow came as a great revelation. Gestures took on a whole new meaning. I was always taught that one bowed one's head and folded one's hands to show that nothing will distract one from prayer (it never worked for me--the greatest distractions were there, inside my head). I never thought that the actions of kneeling, genuflecting, and crossing oneself might be prayer, leave alone any action that lifted the mind and heart to God. The question "What is prayer?" also made me realize that I was right to acknowledge that I didn't know how to pray. That simplicity was actually the perfect seed, the place one really has to start. I learned to say with the disciples of Jesus, "Lord, teach us to pray..."

Humility is the beginning of prayer--not only humility in the knowledge that we do not know how to pray ("...for we do not know how to pray as we ought... Romans 8.26), but because of the distance between our sinfulness and God's holiness (Luke 18.9-14). Although we speak of "man search for God," it is really ever God's search for us. Man's love, man's thirst, man's desire for God all begins with God's desire, love, and thirst for us. Like the woman at the well we do not at first even know what it is we are being offered: "if you knew the gift of God!" We thirst for God because He first thirsted for us. (John 4; 1 John 4.19) The goal of prayer is the Beatific Vision, to begin here on earth to taste, to see, to understand, and to learn of the infinite eternal love of God. "Because of his transcendence, God cannot be seen as he is, unless he himself opens up his mystery to man's immediate contemplation and gives him the capacity for it. The Church calls this contemplation of God in his heavenly glory 'the beatific vision':" (CCC 1028) Every Christian, without exception, is called to the heights of holiness and prayer.

"How great will your glory and happiness be, to be allowed to see God, to be honored with sharing the joy of salvation and eternal light with Christ your Lord and God, . . . to delight in the joy of immortality in the Kingdom of heaven with the righteous and God's friends." --St. Cyprian