Touching the Sunrise

This week is National Marriage Week. The storms of the pandemic have stretched and frayed—and sometimes weakened—relationships between husbands and wives. The storms of having to work from home, homeschool children, and even just be together in new ways have overwhelmed the tiny boats of already fragile marriages and families tossed about in today’s society.

This morning in prayer, I imagined myself sitting at a table made by St Joseph in the tiny home of the Holy Family. I shared with Mary and Joseph what was capsizing my little boat, and soaked in the compassion of the three most beautiful people who ever lived. I imagined St. Joseph putting his hands on my shoulders, sharing his strength and stability that came from witnessing how the providence of Abba saved them, even as they found no room in Bethlehem for the Savior to be born, or as they had to flee from Herod for their lives. I felt Mary at my side, who as Mother par excellence knew the broken heart of one who could not save her child from humiliation and death, receiving him into her arms and sorrowing heart, and worshipping him as the King as he rose and ascended into heaven. I let Jesus comfort me as a child would. How delicate his kindness as he confirmed that life is indeed hard and sometimes filled with tears!

As I directed my vision and imagination to the images of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, as I chose with St. Joseph to hold onto Limitless Love’s providential care for me, as I opened my heart in prayer instead of complaint, I felt my little boat was tied to the pier of the Kingdom of Love. I knew that even though the boat will still rock and be tossed about on the storms of life, it will remain safely tied to the Heart of Love by my desire to be of the Kingdom, and the King’s holding me safe in his arms.

Friends, I invite you to fill your imaginations and hearts with images of the Holy Family strengthening you with their wisdom, experience, and witness. Feel Mary reaching out to you to dry your tears, St. Joseph bracing you against the troubles of life, and Jesus holding your gaze with his eyes that say, “I have you. I won’t let you go. Hold on to me. Hold on to me.”

There is a line that frequently appears on social media when people post about their need and struggle. “You’ve got this!” people comment somewhat reassuringly. Instead, I invite you to remember that, even when your boat rocks in the storm (which it will), God has this. God has you. Hold on to him. Hear him whisper, “I have you. I won’t let you go. Hold on to me. Hold on to me.”

Sr. Kathryn

Today is the 25^th anniversary of the day of prayer for women and men in consecrated life, instituted in 1997 by Pope Saint John Paul II. The Feast of the Presentation of the Lord is a beautiful day to celebrate the gift of consecrated life in the Church. In the liturgy for the Feast of the Presentation, candles are blessed symbolizing Christ who is the light of the world, and those who have consecrated their lives to God are called to reflect the light of Christ to the world. (The observance of World Day of Consecrated Life in the US has been transferred to the following Sunday.)

One of the key figures who appears in the Gospel today is Simeon. Of all the people in the Temple that day when Mary and Joseph brought Jesus there to present him to the Lord, only Simeon and Anna recognized the baby as the longed-for Messiah. Luke states three times that Simeon was a man immersed in the power of the Holy Spirit. “The Holy Spirit was upon him,” he knew that he wouldn’t see death before he had seen the Christ of the Lord “because it had been revealed to him by the Holy Spirit.” And finally, that day, “he came in the Spirit to the temple.”

Simeon lived under the guidance and impulse of the Spirit so he could see things that others could not. He could see and proclaim what God was doing. He could see how grace was at work. “My eyes have seen your salvation,” he cried out. Can you imagine the joy of this old man that the mystery he had waited for decades to touch was now held in his arms.

Last year, on this day, Pope Francis reflected upon Simeon’s words at a Mass celebrated for religious. I want to use them as the basis for my thoughts here with you. In the dark and chaotic situation in our world today, all of us need to be able to see salvation, to see in our life God’s faithful gift, to witness God’s love at work in the world.

My eyes have seen your salvation! God’s gift even in moments of darkness and powerlessness. It is the tempter that tries to keep us focused on what hasn’t been, what we’ve lost, what we’ve been unjustly deprived of.

My eyes have seen your salvation! God’s gift in fragility and weakness. It is the tempter who hides the light and whispers to us: “You are no good. God can’t love you. Look at how little you love God. What have you done for him?”

Pope Francis described what happens to us, “We no longer see the Lord in everything, but only the dynamics of the world, and our hearts grow numb.  Then we become creatures of habit, pragmatic, while inside us sadness and distrust grow, that turn into resignation.”

To see correctly, to see in truth, we need to be like Simeon, we need to be able to perceive God’s grace for us. We need to see salvation, to look at what God is doing.

Instead of focusing on thoughts and feelings about what is happening in our lives and within our hearts, thoughts and feelings that disorient us, Simeon shows us how to be led by the Spirit, inspired by the Spirit, filled with the Spirit. It takes a lot of courage to turn our eyes away from ourselves, to turn our attention away from the tempter and to lift them instead to the Lord. It takes courage to believe that God is at work even when everything we see around us seems to be falling apart.

On this Feast of the Presentation, even if you can’t get to the Church for Mass, light a candle, be warmed by the flame, be filled with the light that burns bravely in the darkness and braves event the wind…. May this candle remind you to see the Lord, the Light of the World, in everything. May it remind you that your life is happiest when it revolves around God’s grace. Courageously hold up the candle to a window, in front of the newspaper or your Twitter account or Facebook page and proclaim, “My eyes have seen, O Lord, your salvation!”

Photo credit: Arent de Gelder, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

O Lord, my heart is not lifted up,
    my eyes are not raised too high;
I do not occupy myself with things
    too great and too marvelous for me.
² But I have calmed and quieted my soul,
    like a weaned child with its mother;
    my soul is like the weaned child that is with me.^[a]

³ O Israel, hope in the Lord
    from this time on and forevermore.

This is Psalm 131. It is titled in my Bible as A Song of Ascents.

Ascents.

These past two weeks I have spent from 3 to 5 hours most evenings or early mornings sitting beside a dear sister-friend who was making her last great ascent. That final walk. The ultimate journey. The loving return.

Each breath of hers was precious and on that last night before she died God helped me to realize that in the end, really, that is all we have…our breath…our current breath. We are not promised our next breath. We already have kissed the last breath goodbye. We cannot cling to it, as we cannot hold onto the past.

And even that breath is a gift. A gift of total gratuitously glorious love from a divine Lover who is supporting us in his arms even as we breath.

On that last ascent, it will not matter what we have created or achieved or known or acquired. The fact that I have written a book, or started a company, or sold an astounding number of widgets, or even loved will not be mine as a monument to me..

I will have only this breath that is a gift to me right now at this moment.

Only this breath.

It is freeing, isn’t it?

What is important to you right now? What worries or angers or burdens you? What frightens you? What dreams are you clinging to?

Listen again to this psalm 131 as it breathes through your soul…

¹ O Lord, my heart is not lifted up,
    my eyes are not raised too high;
I do not occupy myself with things
    too great and too marvelous for me.
² But I have calmed and quieted my soul,
    like a weaned child with its mother;
    my soul is like the weaned child that is with me.^[a]

³ O Israel, hope in the Lord
    from this time on and forevermore.

A child on its mother’s lap has no past built up to which it looks with pride or holds onto as a burden. Jesus called us to be these little children who breathe our past into the heart of God and wait with quiet heart for the future to unfold from his hands. As we cannot hold onto our breath, we actually cannot hold onto our past. It IS gone, and nothing can bring it back. If it seems to be present, it is because we keep it so in our mind to the detriment of our heart. The thought-memories that reiterate, return to, recreate what has hurt us in earlier moments and years end up destroying our joy and peace of heart. They are processed through filters created over years and years of judgments and assumptions, suffering and injustice, desires and disappointment, to name just a few of the factors that determine the way we sift through the information we receive through our sense perceptions. Of course, it certainly isn’t as simple as that because we know that our bodies themselves store past trauma. However, when we are mentally trapped in what has happened in the past, particularly when we don’t realize the truth of how it imprisons us, the whole of us can’t heal.

If a child is quietly at peace with its mother, curiously looking around and trying to figure out what others are doing will only lead to its squirming to break free from its mother’s care or fearfully hiding behind its mother’s protective presence. As adults, when we take our eyes off God and look around at what is happening around us and to us, trying to figure it out on our own reasoning powers, we end up breaking free of the nourishing and creative reality of the One who is our ultimate Refuge. We end up in aggressivity, anxiety, and bitterness.

We can learn from this image presented to us in the Psalm to “see,” instead, with the eye of the heart, to perceive with the faculty of the heart. It is a noetic stance before reality. Instead of attempting to understand what is presenting itself to us through reason alone, it is the “faculty of the heart that is able to comprehend natural and spiritual realities through direct experience” (“Pray Thou Thyself in Me,” Molly Calliger, page 3). The eye of the heart is cleansed through the prayer of the heart, the “practice of interior silence and continual prayer.”

“Hesychia: stillness, quiet, tranquility. This is the central consideration in the prayer of the desert Fathers… on a deeper level it is not merely separation from noise and speaking with other people, but the possession of interior quiet and peace” (Ward 1975, p. xvi.).

Let me end with the Morning Prayer of Metropolitan Philaret of Moscow, a prayer that represents the adult living as a child interior quiet and peace:

O Lord,
grant that I may meet the coming day in peace.
Help me in all things
to rely upon Thy Holy Will.
In every hour of the day,
reveal Thy will to me.
Bless my dealings with all who surround me.
Teach me to treat all that comes to me
throughout the day with peace of soul,
and with the firm conviction that Thy will governs all.
In all my deeds and words,
guide my thoughts and feelings.
In unforeseen events, let me not forget
that all are sent by Thee.
Teach me to act firmly and wisely,
without embittering and embarrassing others.
Give me the strength to bear the fatigue
of the coming day with all that it shall bring.
Direct my will.
Teach me to pray.
Pray Thou Thyself in me.
Amen. (“Pray Thou Thyself in Me,” Molly Calliger, page 1).

To be continued

One of my favorite images of the Conversion of St Paul is found in the Apostolic Palace and is pictured here. It was painted by Michelangelo between 1542 and 1546. January 25 is a big deal for us Daughters of St Paul. St Paul’s conversion is the only conversion celebrated liturgically and it is such a powerful day for us who try to live the experience of St Paul in intimate prayer and courageous evangelization. For this mystery of holiness to happen in our own lives, we too need to go through a Damascus event as did Paul.

At the center of our spirituality is Christ, and his desire to possess us entirely. Every thought pattern and attitude and tendency of our personality. Every desire, preference, behavior…. Everything without exception. This is quite different from making new year’s resolutions at the beginning of January! In the Conversion of St Paul it is Christ who comes to meet Paul where he is, in his frailty (although Paul thought he was someone important doing something significant).

There are several aspects of this painting of St Paul’s conversion by Michelangelo which attract me very deeply. At the top of the image, which doesn’t appear here, is the person of Christ reaching down to Paul through a column of light. There are many people milling around in this image, but Paul is clearly the one who is addressed by Jesus. And Paul is the one who must take responsibility, take the risk, and answer. Isn’t it that way with us, in our unique call from the Lord?

Another aspect of this image which attracts me is the way Paul is almost held by one of the characters in the image. The circular image that is created by the arms of the person reaching down to him, as well as the position of Paul’s body, is almost soft, receptive, intimate. This is not Caravaggio’s strong blinded Paul fallen from his horse. This is a Paul who is being drawn into the mystery of God’s plan for his life and the way God will use Paul to announce the Gospel to the world. It was absolutely moving for me to pray in front of this painting in the Apostolic Palace in the Vatican a couple of years ago, and to see on the other side of the chapel the depiction of the crucifixion of St Peter. Two men who were flawed and frail and human who allowed God to do with them all that he desired.

This is what God desires for you and me. We too have our Damascus event. They aren’t as stunning as what we call the conversion of St Paul, but they can be nonetheless life-changing. I include here a prayer of our community which reflects on the challenge of our own Damascus events.

Light and darkness,
sight and blindness,
power and weakness,
control and surrender.
The “Damascus event” in Paul’s life is often played out in my own,
though in a less dramatic manner.
Lord Jesus, I meet you in so many ways:
sometimes in silence and prayer,
or by stumbling to the ground of my existence.
As I journey through the days of my life,
stop me,
call out my name,
send me your dazzling light,
and take hold of me as you took hold of Paul.
Even when I kick against the goad,
even when I lack courage or when fatigue overtakes me,
even when I fall again or lose my way—
in all these moments I trust that you are with me
and that your grace is sufficient for me.
Like Paul, let me know how to be companioned by others,
allowing myself to be led by those who can point out the way to you.
Help me to be willing to listen to what you are saying to me through them.
As you sent Paul on mission, I ask that you send me forth,
to those persons with whom I am to share your Gospel.
Give me, like you gave Paul, the words and gestures
that will reveal your mercy to me,
and the love you bear for every person you have redeemed.

Photo Credit: Michelangelo, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons