Month: July 2018

If only I could do things over again….

Published on by Sr. Kathryn J Hermes, FSPLeave a comment

You are busy. Life happens. You can barely keep up. You know that you could be thinking about more important things, but you don’t have the time to stop and consider what they would be, much less do them.

And then something happens. You are stopped in your tracks. A spouse leaves. A friend dies. A job is lost. Opportunities pass you by. A child makes decisions that break your heart. As you absorb the pain of what is happening, the important things begin to surface. What was hidden, suddenly seems so obvious. The knowledge of what you could have done, should have done, for years perhaps, or years ago, leaves you feeling profoundly empty, or guilty, or depressed.

If only you could do things over again…

Regrets come in all shapes and sizes. Navigating the questions, self-doubt, and haunting what-ifs of your life can be difficult. Facing how your regrets may have turned you into a person you never wanted to be is even more difficult. Yet no one escapes this part of life. It’s the nightfall between yesterday and tomorrow, between the past and the future, between sunset and the coming dawn.

You may feel bad about something in your life that has happened to you or someone you love. You may have a number of things for which you are blaming yourself. Perhaps you have given up hope that you will ever be able to retrieve what you have lost in life or fix what has been broken. A woman once shared with me that she still wonders what she did wrong after her marriage ended in divorce over twenty years ago. To this day, she wishes she could go to bed and never wake up. She is not alone in her suffering.

Through a program I designed called HeartWork, I have worked one-on-one with many people haunted by regrets.  The people I have worked with often believe that if they just had just one more chance things would be different, but they also feel that no more chances re available for them. But God always offers second chances.

Hi. I’m the author of the forthcoming book Reclaim Regret: How God Heals Life’s Disappointments. I’m excited about sharing the book with you when it releases in September. But right now I invite you to join me for a five-day journey via email, a journey to inner peace. The email journey has exclusive meditations, insights, and sneak-peaks into the book, along with a special offer. I hope to see you there!

Sr Kathryn J. Hermes, FSP

PS You can get 12 free videos introducing you to HeartWork here

What’s holding you back from living within

Published on by Sr. Kathryn J Hermes, FSP2 Comments

I’m a religious sister, so, you could say, spirituality is an important part of my life.
I’ve always reached for the best in anything I did, and the same is true of “the spiritual life.” In fact, in my younger years, I pursued it with a vengeance.

So I prayed extra. I created schedules for spiritual reading. I tried to imitate the saints. I made lists in my journal of anything that could distract me from a single-minded devotion to God…or so I thought.

One year I was making the 19th Annotated Retreat with a Jesuit Director at Boston College. Each evening I sent an email with a short paragraph about my prayer that day. I struggled through the first month or so, treading water in what were my ideas of spirituality. It was a rocky start to a retreat in everyday life I had hoped would bring me closer to God.

Looking back now I realize how self-willed the exercise had been. The sense of inner violence that was marring my soul’s surface was painful as I tried yet one more spiritual practice. Then one day something changed. I can’t exactly remember the prayer experience I shared with my director which prompted him to send these words in response, but I will never forget what he told me. Somehow, that day, I must have yielded to grace, and he wrote in response to my evening email, “That is the Spirit. The Spirit is a gentle breeze, like perfume on the wind, a light fragrance you can barely catch.”

I remember sitting in my office, deflated and free. The years of soapbox speeches and accumulating spiritual kudos had not of the Spirit. The self-styled aggressive pursuit of holiness actually kept me from the inner life of the Spirit, kept me from living within.

The Apostle Paul was also a professional religious person whose spirit before the encounter with Jesus on the road to Damascus was marred with aggression. He rounded up the followers of the Way to put them in jail. Zealously he pursued his plans and religious career. Just outside the city of Damascus, he was met by Love. “I am Jesus the One you are persecuting.”

In an instant he realized he had been wrong. This Jesus that he had rejected as dead, was alive. The community he had persecuted were the ones who had truly understood the action of God in history.

This “conversion” experience is the freedom that arises from no longer knowing, having one’s plans overturned, becoming the servant instead of the protagonist, moving from autonomous isolation to community interdependence. “Go in the city and there you will be told what you are to do.” Though Paul had pursued perfection as a Pharisee, he had not lived within. He suddenly touched the immense horizons of the life within that were being opened up to him as he walked into the city of Damascus, blind and led by his companions.

Something that both I and St Paul didn’t ask in our early heady days of religious “conquest” was this: is God in all of this bluster? Do I want to see his face or my own?
God wants to shower on us the radiance of his glory. He wants to draw us into his plans for the salvation of the world. To convert us from our surface life to the deep inner wells of spirit, from pride to wonder, from zealous aggression to sensitive discernment, from certainty to the inner depth that can sense the slightest movement within without needing to know.

If you want this inner life, here is a simple practice you can make your own:

Stop and focus.

Calmly center. Ask yourself: What am I feeling right now?

Disengage

from any strong opinions and emotionally driven behaviors.

Ask:

Where is God in this situation? Pray: “Show me your face, O Lord. Show me your face.”

Imagine

God watching you as a dear old grandparent watches a grandchild. With that type of love, hear God speaking to you about what is going on.

God says, “Dear child, this is what I see when I look at you. (Listen as God describes the situation from his perspective and what he sees is your reality.) I hear your heart’s desire…. I can hear what you are thinking…. (Let God tell you from his perspective what he hears.) I want you to know, dear one, that I care about what happens to you. I have plans for you. I understand this event more than you could ever know. This is what I want for you… (Open yourself to God’s wisdom. Have the courage to see the situation through God’s eyes, and to want what God wants.)

Youth is a time for building our identities, trying things out, learning what works for us and what doesn’t. But when the moment comes when God’s face begins to show us what the world looks like in God’s eyes, we can let go of much of what we’ve built up on the outside to begin a new journey, gently deepening our inner life.

I’m excited to be coming out with my new book Reclaim Regret: How God Heals Life’s Disappointments September 1. You can get a special offer right now.

 

 

Set free to love

Published on by Sr. Kathryn J Hermes, FSPLeave a comment

“I will make a covenant of peace with them; it shall be an everlasting covenant with them….” This passage, with its mounting joy and jubilant hope for an eternal covenant, is set in juxtaposition to the seeming darkness and threat of death in the final chapters of the Gospels, which recount the establishment of the New Covenant. What went wrong? Or perhaps we should ask what went right, that this covenant promised through the centuries should be written in the blood of the Son of God? The passion and death of Jesus makes visible to us the extent to which God goes to establish this covenant that sets us free to love him and to live entirely for him. God poured out all his love for us when he sent his Son to become one of us.

From the book Cherished by the Lord

Recognize Beauty in Broken Things

Published on by Sr. Kathryn J Hermes, FSP5 Comments

God doesn’t love me.

Everyone around me is healthy and happy and I can’t seem to make things work out.

God doesn’t love me.

I’m not good enough to be in the popular crowd.

God doesn’t love me.

I can’t feel his love.

God doesn’t love me.

I’ve failed at being really good at anything, especially at being a good person.

God couldn’t love me.

I spent too many hours in my early twenties in the back of our chapel alone. Crying. Angry. Lonely.

Months before my twenty-first birthday, a day surgery on my left foot had extended into a two-week hospital stay. I woke up from simple ambulatory surgery dizzy, unable to speak, remember words, use my hands, or walk. My mother knew the signs immediately, though it took a week to confirm through tests. I’d had a stroke.

The 1984 Winter Olympics flashed across the television screen above me as I lay quietly in my bed trying to take it all in. As the graceful Katarina Witt skated across the ice while my heavy body remained pinned to my bed, I thought, “I will never be able to do that” (not that I could ever ice skate!) The beauty, smoothness and grace of the ice skater’s movements was a sad reminder that I could no longer stand on my own without the nurses’ assistance. The sisters came to help feed me. I tried to practice praying the Our Father but could never reach the end of the prayer.

Within two weeks I was sent home on a walker for a year of recovery.

I prayed to God, “You gave me this stroke, it must be for a good reason. Your will be done.” I pasted on a smile as I relearned how to use a fork, how to stand up, how to bathe myself.

There was a beauty to those days, a childlike wonder. Everything was new to me. But the effort was exhausting. Once the novelty wore off and the grudging work of recovery set in, the fear began to surface “what if God does this to me again,” and the anger, “why me?”

One day I sat in the middle of our chapel, surrounded by sisters praying, and the words came out of my heart, breaking it with each syllable, “I. Hate. You.” They startled me. Shocked and even scandalized me. Here I had been in the convent for six years and… this was all I was capable of when it came to suffering.

No holiness.

No saintliness.

No heroism.

Just anger. For weeks and months I underwent the pressure of the divine hands compressing my heart, puncturing it with his fingers, and breaking it apart, into pieces… at last… before him… in need of him…. Blessedly in need of him….

I had to admit that the twenty-one-year-old who could do anything she put her mind to was now a needy child, at the beginning finally of the mountain of the spiritual life, ready to start the journey, ashamed and yet relieved that the truth was out there.

I was nothing.

I was not a great saint.

I wasn’t even as good a Christian as others.

I was in need of him.

If at some point in your life you find you’re disappointed in yourself, feeling that God couldn’t love you, wouldn’t care, that you’re worthless goods—know that you are at the beginning. Allow the pressure of God’s fingers to hold you, to break open the outer shell you’ve built up to survive in this world, and to expose the raw childlike innocence of your inner spirit that’s so in need of him.

For anywhere God finds need, he gives himself, he takes over and gives himself completely. God can’t not give himself.

So give up the idea of perfection.

Stop striving and dreaming of what should be, what could be.

Immerse yourself where God has shown himself to be, right where you are. Right now, as you are.

Accept the raw sense of sinfulness and the astounding gift of God’s glorious kindness.

 

 

 

5 powerful ways to find the love you’re looking for

Published on by Sr. Kathryn J Hermes, FSPLeave a comment

The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places.
Ernest Hemingway

I sometimes check an app where people are encouraged to leave their secrets, things they wouldn’t tell others. After many months of listening to people’s stories in this hidden way, I can say that the driving force that is at the root of all their stories and my own, is the longing to be loved, known, seen, heard, cared for.

These whispered fears, adventurous stories, and shame-filled confessions may not be my personal experience, but I too weave my own life’s narrative with the yarn of this deep longing for love. I can’t help but feel this strong inner connection with the rest of humanity, for we all struggle, rising and falling, in this arduous search for an eternal love, often getting short-circuited into a situation that promises love but cheapens us instead.

How God must have compassion on our human hearts, so gullible to the flashing promises of love’s allure. After all he created us for Love (capital L), forming our hearts with his own hands. His own heart has been broken by our longing for a “god” other than the One who tenderly bends over us in compassion. His Son’s heart knew the bitter tears of rejection and isolation, the fire of desire and dreams, the soothing comfort at the presence around him of those he loved.

Some of the situations whispered about on this app would arouse in any of us the deepest compassion: the shame and suffering expressed by those who have experienced abuse, abortion, rejection and loneliness in the most difficult of situations.

I want to cheer for others who tell their story: “I’ve been a month without cutting.” “This is my first year anniversary of being sober.” “This is my child’s first day of school. I chose not to abort her and I am so glad.”

People around us are whispering their stories to us all the time. Too shy to proclaim their need or their success, too fearful of ridicule or shame, incredulous that anyone would even care, the people around us leave clues of their desire to be noticed. And we can so easily miss these clues. It’s easy to look at a social media app and flip through the whispered secrets of people’s lives. What would be different if we could respond to the clues all around us that people are leaving in real life?

I have to admit I often miss them. My attention is on my own needs, my own longing to be seen and heard. My drive to finish something important to me. And I can’t see. Am deaf to the beating of the hearts around me. Perhaps too tired to exert the energy to show another the compassion I long for myself.

We are all struggling to get what we feel we need. We find what we long for when we give it away.

There are five powerful ways to give love away and find the love we’re looking for:

  • Listen with your whole body. Look at the person who is speaking. Lean toward them. Hold yourself quietly. Don’t interrupt except to say, “Yes.” “I see.” “Yup.”
  • Be vocal about your appreciation. Make a habit of telling people what you appreciate about them as a person. “I love the way you….” “I’m so grateful when you do…” “You make everyone smile when you…”
  • Ask someone to help you. Use that opportunity to get to know them a little more and to share something about yourself. Your vulnerability will encourage the other to feel comfortable sharing with you.
  • Be observant and sensitive. Ask someone if they are okay when you notice that they are a little down, or quieter than usual, or you notice something else has changed in the way they present themselves.
  • Practice showing your love on your face. Imagine if you couldn’t speak and you had to communicate your concern or interest entirely with your facial expression. Practice and you’ll see how much you are able to communicate without a word. And sometimes with our words, we don’t communicate the intensity of our compassion unless we pair it with the visible expression on our face. It’s the difference between a casual, “Are you okay? And “I really want to know, are YOU okay?” And yes, I am ready to stay here to receive your answer.

When you give this love away, you will find it coming back to you.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Our future is in his triumph

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Christ has risen, and we too rise with him. He has conquered evil and death. We see our future in his triumph over death and in his ascension to the Father’s right hand. In him we are taken into the circle of life and love within the Trinity. We are held and embraced there, hidden and protected. Such awe! God “has spoken to us…. When [his Son] had made purification for sins, he sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high.” He lives and so we will live forever. Jesus, you live and so I will live! Forever! Amen.

From the book Cherished by the Lord

 

Cherished by the Lord