Tag: prayer

glances

Since I last wrote, one daughter received her first Holy Communion, three children received the Sacrament of Confirmation, I started post-trauma therapy, sold and packed a house, caravanned 2600 miles with a truck of stuff and van of people, and a dear friend passed away. Since school started, half of us have been sick with something, including the toddler (=no sleep for my husband and I). We’ve also been delightfully busy with fun and wonderful things to do: a musical, a Shakespeare play, Trail Life, swing dancing, school dances, homework, parties. Between festivities and illness and grief and trauma work and budding new relationships and new EVERYTHING… I’m tired y’all.

There’s good weariness, like after a satisfying workout or Christmas shopping. And this is for sure a good weariness. This big move (which I will talk about more later) has been fruitful. It’s just a lot. I feel like we built a new house very quickly and now the foundation has to settle.

Through therapy and by necessity through the fast-forward events of this past year, I’m trying to chill spiritually. Not laziness, but less anxiety. The first day of this year, I had a three-hour Confession-session, one of the juicy fruits of which was realizing how much I have felt I needed to EARN love. (thud) I needed to relax and enter into God’s unsolicited love for me. And this year has offered ample time to do so. All I do is pray on the run. St. Thérèse called it “ejaculatory prayer” which, while jarring to our modern ear, is a mother’s arsenal. And if prayer is– also St. Thérèse– a “glance toward Heaven”, then (sigh) that’s all I got right now.

I know it’s not a form of life-sustaining prayer. The relationship has to be there, has to strengthen and grow through the sacraments, contemplative prayer, adoration, Scripture, etc. And I’m looking forward to entering into another period like that. But right now, God is balancing me on this highwire. There’s a lot less of me, and a whole lotta Him. And honestly, it’s nice to know that when I let go, He will catch and carry me.

About five years into motherhood, I discovered the Benedictine motto “ora et labora”– pray and work– and it’s been my lifeline ever since. I’ve always had the phrase near at hand to remind me of how to anchor my vocation. I just painted it on the hood over the stove in our new house. It feels a little more like home now. And it’s a reminder that praying in weariness, little glances towards Heaven, is about resting in God’s unsolicited love, offering the little I have, receiving a hundredfold.

stormy parenthood

I’ve been fortunate as a parent to have never felt competent. From the very beginning I have felt completely out of my league in both knowledge and skill, to say the least of experience. God threw me a curveball from my very first days of motherhood—and I thank Him for it. It brought me to my knees, and I haven’t risen up since.

Most recently, it has been my eldest son who has caused me the most befuddlement and angst (here, I call him Bear). The poor guy is utterly surrounded by women—he’s flanked by sisters, two elder and two younger. His younger brother is only now beginning to want to play and wrestle, but the 7-year age difference will require restraint on Bear’s part for a while. He’s ten years old, and around the same age and stage with his older sisters, I was equally befuddled because they started to change. It was like human plate tectonics—the hormones, the feelings, the body—everything starts to shift and adolescent natural disasters begin to avalanche. Sure, it’s frustrating and tiring, but most of all I begin to feel helpless. I want to help them through this trying stage, but it’s as though I have to get to know them all over again.

Recently, a friend from my parish wanted to get together with some other ladies and pray aloud for each other’s children. I had low expectations going into it, afraid it would be too like long days past at Quaker camp when we would all cry around a campfire while someone played worship songs. But it was surprisingly moving and powerful to listen to a friend pray out loud for my son, and petition God’s assistance in his life and mine as a parent.

In the weeks that followed, I noticed that when Bear had a blow-up or break-down, instead of reacting, somehow I didn’t. Somehow I remained calm. Somehow I listened. Somehow I tried to figure him out in that moment and do what was best for him. I could feel the grace of God in those moments, knew the words I was speaking weren’t my own. The confrontation would end and I would find myself shaking my head, kind of in awe of what just transpired.

Nothing’s permanently fixed, of course. From experience I know that soon we’ll pass through another confusing and trying stage of behavior. Parenting is forever clinging to a lifeboat at sea, constantly feeling out the movement of the ocean, riding each wave as it comes, learning some from experience, but relying mostly on grace.

finding Jesus in the Temple

What St. John of the Cross describes as “the dark night of the soul” is, as far as I understand it from saints’ writings, a true loss of all consolation, or a sustaining sense of having been abandoned by God. The presence of God, however strong or faint, which had sustained such souls in their vocations, no longer calms their spirit or is their source of strength; they feel quite alone. Most recently, the world was shocked—even scandalized among some groups—to learn of the darkness and silence that had pervaded the spiritual life of the great Mother Teresa, who served God faithfully to the end. The response of holy men and women is not to despair, but to have faith in the darkest time.

Yet one can experience God’s stillness or silence without a dark night of the soul, and it can be unsettling. Though there may not be a temptation to despair, there is a temptation to panic, to act impulsively, or to find consolation elsewhere. Just as Jesus’ time in the desert gives us insight into the trial of temptation, and Jesus on the Cross illuminates the forsakenness of the “dark night of the soul”, an earlier event in His life offers some clarity on that more gentle, but aggravating sense of a loss of His presence.

It’s appropriately labeled a mystery- “Finding Jesus in the Temple”—and the Gospel account can be found in Luke, chapter two . Joseph and Mary head to Jerusalem in a caravan for Passover, and Jesus accompanies them as a boy of twelve. After everything is done according to the law—and undoubtedly beautiful, fruitful moments have passed between Jesus and His parents as they speak of Jerusalem, God’s covenants, and the Mosaic Law—the Holy Family departs. But it turns out Jesus is not with them, and Joseph and Mary are, for three days, left with unimaginable imaginings about their son as they scour Jerusalem for him.

They must have thought they saw him several times, only for their hearts to drop when they realized it wasn’t him. Of course, we know they found him, and in the Temple no less, amazing the scribes with His wisdom. (Some of those scholars must have remembered Jesus when he returned twenty years later.) Both a peace and anxiety must have come over those holy parents—a peace to see Jesus already understanding and fulfilling His mission, and an anxiety that it has begun. What Mary and Joseph felt, thought, and did after that is speculation, or contemplation; we only know what is written in the Gospel account.

Twentieth-century Catholic writers Caryll Houselander and Adrienne von Speyr do just that—they speculate and contemplate what this event meant to the Holy Family. Both writers discuss the trial of trust that Mary and Joseph underwent in those three agonizing days. Von Speyr calls it “the school of noncomprehension”, the act of learning how to surrender one’s intellect in God’s intimate workings. She writes:

        No Christian is spared the collision with God’s ever-greater reality or the blind obedience from man that is included in it and required by it. Christ’s parents, too, must already come to know in their Son the hidden presence of fathomless divine mysteries.

And when His parents confront Him in the temple, Christ still offers no explanation. He only asks, almost rhetorically, “Did you not know I must be about my Father’s business?” This is not a rude retort, but Him pointing the way, the way of not needing to comprehend, but to follow. This is not the first time Mary and Joseph have been asked to obey without comprehension. And they will be asked to do this again, particularly Mary during Christ’s ministry and death, and so preparing all Christians to do the same: obey without comprehension. Through Mary and Joseph’s example, we see it’s not an occasion to grow angry or despair, but is cause for a “greater opening-up of [the] soul to God and, therefore, a new fruitfulness.”

Houselander writes that this story from the Gospel is revealed to us because Mary and Joseph “experienced the loss of the Child because it is an experience which we all have to go through, that our love may be sifted and purified.” Houselander calls this sense of loss “the most universal and most purifying.” She goes on to describe the different ways and circumstances we might experience this sense of loss. She even writes of people who may suffer daily emotional ups and downs, who feel keenly what they perceive to be the loss of Christ’s presence through scruples and irrational guilt—this disposition can walk with Mary and Joseph through Jerusalem.

If it is true that, as Von Speyr writes, “one does not approach the Cross with the understanding but only with the renouncing surrender of comprehension”, then periods of thirsting and seeking—whether from spiritual dryness, doubt, emotional instability, silence in prayer—promise to prepare us for the Cross that unites us to Jesus.

  • Handmaid of the Lord, Adrienne von Speyr
  • Reed of God, Caryl Houselander