Incarnation

I find myself looking at her often and thinking a million and one different things about the Holy.

But lately she's had me contemplating the Incarnation -- the act of word made flesh, the moment God became a man, of the infinite emptying Himself and becoming an embryo.

She's so vulnerable. She's needy. She's entirely dependent on her father and I for her care and sustenance. She needs to be fed. She cannot dress herself. If we do not change a soiled diaper for her, it will not get changed. If she is sick, she cannot take herself to the doctor. If she needs anything, she cannot articulate it for us.

Jesus was the same way as a baby: vulnerable, needy, dependent. It's hard to think of the man who multiplied loaves and fishes, commanded the waves, and wielded the power to undo even death as vulnerable as she is. It's almost impossible to wrap my brain around the fact that God would condescend to become someone so utterly defenseless to care for himself as a baby: needing to be fed, dressed, and to have his soiled diapers changed. To be rendered mute but for His cries, to trust two of His own created for His every need.

This is the God of the universe.

In caring for her, I see Him anew and am in increasing awe of His humility.

My Sorrowful Mysteries :: Tales of a Spiritual Life After Death (Part 5)

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And then one day, He was back.

It wasn't all glory and trumpets and flashes of light. It was one of those mornings where I was awake well before I wanted to be. Unable to slip back to sleep, I rubbed my eyes and rolled out of bed, wandering into the living room. I had just finished reading through the book of Luke and decided maybe this would be a good day to start the book of John. So I opened my Bible and started reading. And I didn't stop reading until I finished.

The Transfiguration

By then I was sleepy enough to try closing my eyes again to see if sleep would return. I reclined on my left side on the couch, Bible wrapped up in my right arm. I woke up about an hour later, and there He was.

Oh. There you are, I said out loud.

He was back -- just as if He had never left.

Having a sensed experience of His presence again infused my prayer and study life with new vitality. My prayers no longer boomeranged off the wall and fell at my feet. My frustration and anger had dissipated. After a couple of weeks like this, I dared to ask Him about the past year. Why the silence and darkness? What was the purpose and good of leaving me in the dark when I needed Him? Every time I asked, I got the sense it wasn't time for me to know. It was easy for me to be thankful for what we had together again. Though my curiosity continued to seek satisfaction, I let it go when I saw the answer I sought could not be forced.

It was just a couple weeks later that I was practicing lectio divina in a passage of John 10 -- the one where Jesus identifies Himself as the good shepherd. I had spent time focusing on various aspects of the passage and the one I found myself drawn to initially had to do with Jesus seeking out others who weren't there, but that He still counted as part of the fold.

But in spite of my efforts to focus there, I kept getting tugged back to a few verses before that:

I am the good shepherd. I know my own and my own know me, just as the Father knows me and I know the Father. And I lay down my life for the sheep. 

Sensing that Jesus had something for me here, I followed Him, directing my attention to the words on the page. I read these words slowly over and over again and in the middle of one of my readings, He interjected all of the sudden: I know you, Kirsten. I KNOW YOU. If I could have seen His face, I imagine it would have been just inches from mine. I would have been able to feel the warmth of His breath. I imagine His hands would have clasped mine to keep me from turning the page, to make sure I heard what He was saying to me. I'm sure I could have felt the nail marks in His palms myself.

I know you.

I stopped. And I burst into tears. For a whole year or more, I felt like He had forgotten me. Like He had really, really forgotten me. And here He was telling me -- not just every one of His sheep, but me -- that He knows me. He knows me. It was as personal as it could be. There was no mistaking He saw me, that He heard me -- and not just now, not just in this present moment, but the whole time.

A week later, I was practicing lectio divina again, but this time in Mark 10 when Jesus rebukes the disciples for speaking harshly to those who would keep the little children from coming to Him. I found myself drawn to the last verse of the passage:

And he took [the children] up in his arms, laid his hands on them, and blessed them.

When it came to the oratio portion of the exercise, I knew I had nothing to lose. So I told Him: This is what I wanted from You this last year. This is what I needed from You. I was hurting so deeply and I felt so alone -- I just wanted You to wrap Your arms around me and love me. I ...

It wasn't long before a very clear picture formed in my mind. I was still in my rocking chair in the sunroom, but this time He was holding me. In this picture, He had taken me up in His arms and held me, my head resting against the warmth of His chest, hearing His heartbeat, letting the tears come. He didn't say anything, but simply held me there.

I fell into tears again. After a year of feeling not only invisible to Him, but untouched and untouchable, I saw Him holding me -- not only in that moment, but for the whole year before. He held me. And that's all it was. That is exactly what I needed and what I had been asking for. And finally, there it was. There He was.

Those two experiences with Jesus brought a healing to my heart that I don't know how to describe. Though I still don't have many clear answers as to the why of it all, I do know that my year of darkness brought a hard-won and much needed purification. In that year, my sin was always before me in a way it had not been before. I saw my own ugliness all the time. The act of taking it to confession helped me to experience healing in those dark things inside me that whether I knew it or not, were damaging my soul.

A visual prayer exercise I completed after my two very personal experiences with Jesus.

And it was a trial of my faith. In that year, it became so very much more than words and doctrines and giving my agreement to a list of things I believed to be factual or true. My spiritual life had been a life of the heart before this year of darkness, but now it was fuller. It was more. My heart had stretched and expanded, and the muscle had grown stronger through repeated testing. It was an act of the will and it was an act of the heart.

I realized very early on that it was not anything I had done or didn't do that caused the darkness and similarly, that it wasn't anything I had said or done or didn't say or didn't do that brought Him back again. He came back when He knew it was time, and when it was time, He communicated those things to me that my heart most needed to know. Even so, there are still so many questions. I still am not certain if this was a true dark night of the soul, or of it was something else. Though I can see plenty of the good fruit that came out of it, my curiosity regarding the question of why is still somewhat unsatisfied. But I can let that go. Not only is He back, but He was here the whole time. He showed me that.

And now I know with unshakable certainty two very important things:

He knows me. 

And He picks me up in His arms like a small child, never to let me go.

My Sorrowful Mysteries :: Tales of a Spiritual Life After Death (Part 4)

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For all the true good confession and the other sacraments brought me, there was still one big problem: I was still covered in darkness where my relationship with God was concerned. He still felt remarkably absent. When I imagined Him with me, I saw Him sitting in a corner curled in on himself like a comma, holding his elbows, looking down. Present, but not engaged. Aware, but not acting. Hearing, but not answering.

This continued on for months and months: through my early days of grieving, through going back to work, through James coming to Florida three months ahead of me, through learning we were expecting our second child. So I kept praying; I continued to go to confession and I knew I could always find Him in the Eucharist. These weren't small things, I knew -- objectively, they provided me with the communion I knew I needed. But I still felt the loss of Him.

When James and I were separated by some 3,000 miles -- him beginning a brand new job in Florida, me wrapping up my eleven-year career in telecommunications and our life and home in Seattle -- people told us that a three months separation "wasn't that bad" and that it would "go by quickly." It was easy to say when they weren't the ones suffering the separation. Yes, I was still married. James was still my husband and I was still his wife. We Skyped, we talked on the phone, and took advantage of those means available to us to stay in communication. But we lacked the experience of intimacy that we had enjoyed through our entire marriage up until that point. I don't care how much we spoke on the phone or saw each other's faces via webcam: it was not the same thing -- not even close.

My relationship with God felt so much the same way during this period of silence: like we were a married couple separated by too many miles, but with no end in sight to the separation. I might still be God's child, and He might still be my Father, but I felt a million miles between us. I lacked the experience of intimacy we had once enjoyed. He never reached out and touched, He never offered His arms even when I begged for them. My feelings suffered. It was not the intimacy we once enjoyed -- it was not even close.

One night not all that long ago, it reached a boiling point. It had been over a year since this divine silence had started and I was talking to James about how all of this felt. The floodgates opened and I let loose all my pent up feelings without the least care to edit them. I'M SO SICK OF THIS!! WHERE THE F*** IS HE?? I screamed. My face was flushed and I clenched my fists against the side of my head, pulling at my hair. I kept swallowing back the same large painful and bitter lump. Searing hot tears sprung into my eyes. I MEAN, SERIOUSLY -- WHAT THE HELL DOES HE WANT FROM ME?! 

There were no answers waiting for me on the other side of that question -- not even difficult ones.

I had remembered that during another dark season of my life, I had turned to the book of Job. Though he is patient both with God in His silence and the friends who would have done better to remain silent in the ashes with him rather than postulate as to the many things for which God might be punishing him, Job reaches his breaking point, too. He's had enough and he wants an answer. And who can blame him? After losing all his property, possessions, and his entire family, God has remained completely silent. If he's not being punished and he hasn't cursed God, turning his back on Him like the devil had tempted him to do, then what gives? What's the point in God permitting Job's suffering to extend so far as it has?

It is about the point when we're all really getting tired of the friends insisting on Job's sin and with Job countering their claims in insisting on his rightness that Elihu shows up and (finally) injects some sanity and wisdom into the scene. His answers don't come neatly packaged, and while as answers they are true, they aren't terribly satisfying. What it really boils down to is that as good a guy as Job is (and he is!), he isn't perfect. And because God loves Job, He cares about sparing his life from what Elihu refers to as "the Pit."

Read Elihu's words:

"In a dream, in a vision of the night,
when deep sleep falls on mortals,
while they slumber on their beds,
then [God] opens their ears,
and terrifies them with warnings,
that he may turn them aside from their deeds,
and keep them from pride,
to spare their souls from the Pit,
their lives from traversing the River.
...
"God indeed does all these things,
twice, three times, with mortals.,
to bring back their souls from the Pit,
so that they may see the light of life."
(Job 33:15-18, 29, 30)

 And again ...

"He does not withdraw his eyes from the righteous,
but with kings on the throne
he sets them forever, and they are exalted.
And if they are bound in fetters
and caught in the cords of affliction,
then he declares to them their work
and their transgressions, that they are behaving arrogantly.
He opens their ears to instruction, 
and commands that they return from iniquity.
If they listen, and serve him,
they complete their days in prosperity,
and their years in pleasantness.
But if they do not listen, they shall perish by the sword,
and die without knowledge.
The godless in heart cherish anger;
they do not cry for help when he binds them.
They die in their youth,
and their  life ends in shame.
He delivers the afflicted by their affliction,
and opens their ear by adversity.
(Job 36:7-15, emphasis mine)

It is God who, in the opening pages of the book of Job, affirms Job's righteousness (1:8, 2:3). Elihu here says that even the righteous have transgressions and sins -- that even they need instruction and to "turn from iniquity." So really, neither Job nor his friends were entirely right -- but they weren't entirely wrong, either. While Job wasn't without fault, it wasn't the case that God was punishing him. God was, in fact, doing the most loving thing in weeding out any further iniquity and pride in the man He affirmed to be "blameless and upright."

The phrase that hit me over the head like a mallet was "He delivers the afflicted by their affliction." Think of it: suffering is not the thing from which Job needs to be delivered. Rather, suffering is the means of deliverance: from sin, from the pit of hell. God wants Job to be truly holy, to keep him from going to the place to which unholiness leads.

God wants Job to be holy because He loves him.

Well, then. That was interesting. That was very interesting, indeed. It wasn't at all what I was looking for, but it was a point of much-needed light.


To Be Continued & Concluded in Part 5

My Sorrowful Mysteries :: Tales of a Spiritual Life After Death (Part 3)

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Bitter. Hard and bitter and resentful and hurt. Anger. Fury. Resentment and bitterness and hardness. Bitter bitter bitter, hard. Self-righteous. Selfish. Hard bitter bitter bitter anger and fury.Violent. Hateful. Hate hate hate resentful bitterness.

This grief and its cousin, my spiritual darkness, were incredibly good at one thing: bringing up in me every remotely dark and evil thing that was then or ever had been in my soul. They burned under me like a fire, melting me to a molten liquid and making all the vile and dirt in me rise to the surface. It was horrid to look at and even worse to taste in my mouth. But like David, I could not ignore it: For I know my transgressions, and my sin is ever before me (Psalm 51:3).

Ever before me. Ever. Before. Me. Swirling round me like gnats. Ever before me.

And it drove me to the confessional. Perhaps I didn't go as often as I should have, but every time I went it was a welcome relief to spew out the sin I had confessed to God a hundred times in private, but that somehow still left a foul film in my mouth. Perhaps it was because instead of being met with the hollow echo of my own words and His resounding silence, it was a chance to hear sound counsel and receive compassionate understanding instead. Most of the time, my confessors knew my circumstances and could put in perspective for themselves where this was all coming from. When this wasn't the case, I explained what had happened.

"My son, my firstborn, died of a heart defect recently. Everything went wrong. Everything. God made my baby with a heart too broken to sustain his life. How does a loving God do such a thing? And now God is gone and my friends are having perfectly healthy babies and I hear complaining about such entirely stupid and trivial things -- they didn't have to live in the NICU and just days after giving birth to their first child, wait up all night while blue-smocked surgeons with long faces kept coming to tell me my child might not make it. I did everything right and I know it doesn't matter, but damnit, I DID EVERYTHING RIGHT! I never got to take him home and dear God, I wish my worst problem was spit-up or a diaper blow-out or having him cry in the middle of the night, but he's dead and he won't be crying anymore. And it's not fair and now I feel so bitter and hard against people who have what is normal and I don't say anything to anybody about it -- I don't say anything to them because anything I do say to them about their experiences with their children will probably make them feel guilty and I'm not sure that even if I try my best to say something kind that instead it will come out full of the hard and bitter lump in my soul that is growing stronger and developing sharp teeth -- so I don't say anything. I don't say anything to them, but ..."

I struggled for words.

"It's corrosive, isn't it? Like an acid."

"Yes! Like an acid that is burning a hole in me, and ..."

This is how it went most of the time for me. It wasn't the contained and outwardly pious exercise so often portrayed in film -- I spewed out all the filth and ick that had been building up in me that I couldn't stand to carry with me anymore -- that, in fact, I feared would burn a hole through my soul that wouldn't ever close up again. I preferred my encounters face-to-face instead of from behind a screen, even with my face all puffy and red and wet, mascara streaking down my cheeks. It wasn't required of me, but it was part of me being honest, part of being utterly transparent. After so much time of feeling hidden and invisible, I needed to feel seen, even if it was like this -- especially if it was like this.

My confessors never excused the things they heard from me -- they never sugar-coated it or treated my sins as anything other than they were. They never told me that feeling hateful and bitter and resentful against God and my neighbor were okay because of what I had been through. But they did put it in perspective for me, encouraged me to continue speaking with transparent honestly to my God of the empty chair about how it all felt. I knew they were right.

I walked away each time feeling like what I imagine the woman caught in adultery and brought before Jesus felt -- her sin was publicly on display, her shame obvious. There was nothing and no one at all she could hide behind. But the one person who had a right to do it if anyone did didn't condemn her. He knew exactly what she had done and yet extended grace to her when she had cause to fear that she would be dragged to a bloody death in a pit of stones.

And it felt like a little bit of me came back each time I walked away from the confessional not only unscathed, but seen. I had not only escaped death, but was given a chance at an entirely new life.


To Be Continued

My Sorrowful Mysteries :: Tales of a Spiritual Life After Death (Part 2)

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I know it feels like He's gone. You feel alone, abandoned, ignored. You feel like you inhabit the blind spot that goes unchecked: that He doesn't see you and doesn't care to see you. You feel punished. But that's not what's real. It feels like He's gone, but He actually is here. I know you want to fall apart in the safety and boundary of His arms. I know that it feels like you are dissolving, falling to pieces without anything to catch the fragments as you are pulled apart. I know it feels nothing like it, but He actually is here. I know you're afraid, that you feel like you're falling and dying, but you are safe. 

Much of the time over this period of a year or more was spent with a relentless internal dialogue attempting to keep a lid on my emotional blender. Though I knew my feelings of abandonment and anger were valid enough and permitted those emotions to churn and stir as they may, I also kept reminding myself they weren't the final arbiters of reality. In other words, just because I felt like God had abandoned me to my sorrow did not mean that He had. And so I lived in that exquisite tension between the opposites of what I knew by faith and what I felt, reason and emotion each pulling against each other in a tug-of-war that had me at the middle, threatening to pull my limbs from their sockets, and send my mind well beyond the bounds of sanity. It was mentally, physically, and emotionally exhausting.

I knew there was only one place I could go. 

I turned to the One who all my feelings protested had left me behind -- an irony not lost on me. I felt a bit like Peter in John's gospel. Offended at His teaching that if they do not eat His flesh and drink His blood they have no life in them, a large contingent of Jesus' followers leave His side. Jesus asks Peter if he is going to leave as well, and Peter says, "To whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life." There is a sense of resignation and acceptance in what he says; a sense of "I don't understand this eating Your flesh and drinking Your blood thing. Frankly, it sounds more than a little crazy. But I know too much now. I've seen too much now. I believe too much to leave now. I know who You are."

And so it was with me. This feeling of Christ being absent had heaped the pain of abandonment and neglect upon the still raw pain of my loss, but honestly -- where else could I go? He was the only one who had what I needed. 

So every day, I went to Him in the sorrowful mysteries. 

I had taken up the practice of the rosary shortly before becoming Catholic, having found there what many Catholic faithful had found before me: among other things, an experience of deepened intimacy and union with Christ. But in this season, time spent in the sorrowful mysteries did not mitigate the intense feelings of aloneness. They did not serve to lift the heavy fog in which I was mired, nor did they bring to me the God-hands that I hoped would keep me from separating like newsprint left in water too long. But I did find in them someone who knew what it was to feel abandoned and alone, someone who in a moment of intensest agony cried out loud, asking why God had forsaken Him -- and even in proclaiming that, did not sin. 

And so I prayed through those mysteries just as one might sit down and direct the most intimate concerns of her heart out loud to an unoccupied chair in an empty room. It always felt as though I was talking to no one, that my words boomeranged off the wall and came back to me, falling into a jumbled heap at my feet every time. I related to Jesus in His passion as you might relate to an historical figure in a textbook, finding commonalities in our feelings about what we suffered, but unable to forge a real relational connection.

No matter how many times I picked up my piles of words again, I never got a response from the One to whom they were directed. I heard only the words themselves and the sound they made as they echoed back at me from the emptiness of that room, clattering against each other and falling to the floor in front of me with a loud metallic clang. But continuing to offer them was all I could do. I found no comfort in offering them, but I did find what I presumed to be comfort's distant cousin: an allowance to grieve and a permission to feel abandoned -- and to say so. It was knowing that the Christ who felt so absent to me -- who seemed no more present to me than George Washington -- felt the same thing at one time, too.

I didn't like this reality at all, and often let my God of the empty chair know exactly what I thought of it. I expressed anger and frustration. I told Him I felt neglected and forgotten. And like a small child, I just as often said nothing at all, but stretched out my arms, expressing my desire to be held and comforted, to experience the promises of solace and healing that seemed to leap from the pages of Sacred Scripture. But just as with my grief, I didn't see what choice I had. I decided to lean into the reality I had rather than the one I wished for, knowing I could no more make God show up in the way I desired Him than I could will the earth to stop spinning or make the sun move around the earth. There were no secret magical incantations or prayers I could offer, no list of bullet points I could follow that would change any of it. He is not anyone's puppet. I knew it wasn't anything I had said or done that caused His seeming disappearance and in the same way, there was not anything I could say or do that would bring Him back to me.

But I still needed Him, and it still hurt.

And so I set up camp in the sorrowful mysteries. I was utterly alone and in the cold there, but it was the only place I seemed to belong. As I held each moment of His passion in my mind, I wept and prayed with Him, felt the rending and tearing of flesh from bone with Him, and felt with him the mockery of the gawkers. With Him, I carried my cross and cried out in agony as we both hung there, our arms pinned down wide, wondering out loud where was God now.



To Be Continued