+Opening the Door

I wasn’t going to write in here until after Easter, but I have some things I really have to get off my chest before I burst.

This Lent has been… strange.  Very very good in some ways, very very unpleasant in others.  What’s more, the "good" and the "unpleasant" are tied together in suspicious ways. 😛

I’ve been returning to my first love this Lent.  I’ve been praying a LOT more, and a lot deeper.  It has been very good and on the whole very satisfying.  The impetus largely came from a book in our Adoration chapel:  "Seven Secrets of the Eucharist" by Vinny Flynn.

They aren’t really "secrets", of course, as the author himself cheerfully admits.  They’re things about the Eucharist which the Church teaches but aren’t nearly widely enough known.  I found the book very interesting, though the first six "secrets" were on the whole pretty familiar to me.  It’s the seventh one that lit a fire under me.

I already knew about the concept of "spiritual Communion", but I’d always thought of it as a second-best, something you do when you can’t receive the Eucharist at Mass for whatever reason.  A consolation prize, if you will.  Flynn tied together a bunch of threads for me that I’d seen individually, but never all in one place before, and the resulting picture was stirringly attractive.

That picture is one of spiritual Communion being a regular, frequent practice with the goal of *remaining* in Jesus’ Eucharistic presence from one Communion to the next.  It was a real eye-opener, and it had an immediate, compelling attraction to me;   my approach is already so focussed on the Eucharist that it seemed a natural and inevitable extension of my existing devotion.  (Though, I don’t know that spiritual Communion is exactly a devotion;  according to St. Thomas Aquinas, it’s basically "Eucharist of desire", much like Baptism of desire.  That comparison has been of tremendous help to me in ‘getting it’.)

Flynn quoted St. Leonard of Port-Maurice as saying if you will practice spiritual Communion several times a day for a month, you will see tremendous changes in yourself.  I can testify that it’s more like a few days!  In the weeks since I read the book, it’s already become almost instinctual for me to reach out for Communion when in any difficulty, and it makes an immense difference.  Not just in difficulty, either, but whenever I’ve got a spare moment.

One "side effect" of all this was that my fears and difficulties in finishing the SOLT application melted away and I got it in.  (Not as quickly as I would’ve liked, as I was positively swamped at work, but it’s in.)

OK, so that’s great.  What’s the problem?  I mentioned half-jokingly in my last entry that I was in "labor pains" over several people, as St. Paul would say.  That was then.  Now, it’s reached a point where I don’t know how much longer I can bear it!

It started at a Lenten parish fish-fry.  I ran across Timothy, the son of a guy I knew on the youth team.  I’ve known the boy since he was seven, and I’ve been praying for him off and on all that time.  (He knows it, too.)  Now he’s sixteen, a sophomore in high school.  "Wow," I said, "you must be getting Confirmed next year!"  (I admit it:  I’ve always harbored a secret desire to sponsor him.)  "No," he replied, "it’s this year."  Oh well, I thought, so much for that.  I put the dream behind me and enthused to him about the sacrament.

Turns out he thinks it’s a complete drag.  He’s going purely because his dad is forcing him to.  The teachings are dull as ditchwater, and he thinks the whole thing is completely pointless.  His sponsor is his grandmother, who just came into the church last year (she was in Keith’s class, in fact).  She (who was also present) cheerfully admitted that she didn’t have the faintest idea what she doing.

My heart just about broke in two and spilled blood all over the floor.  I shared my own experience of Confirmation, how wonderful and how life-changing it was, but I could tell he was just listening to be polite.  You know the look:  Manfully refraining from rolling his eyes.

I went home and prayed, unsure of what to do with this massive pain in my heart.  I don’t doubt for a second that there was a good deal of selfishness, self-regard, and vanity mixed in that pain, but I also can’t believe that was all there was to it.  After struggling with it in front of my "ikon corner" for a while, I finally burst out, "How can You BEAR it?!  Infinite love in a human body and soul, and experiencing so much rejection – how can You STAND it?!"  After that, all I could do was just moan – literally moan, quite loudly.  It made me think of Romans 8 – I simply could not find any words to express the feelings welling up in me.  After a while of that and freely streaming tears, the Lord let me know that my prayer was a very acceptable sacrifice and that I should go to bed.  I felt exhausted.

I started praying and doing other things on Tim’s behalf.  (I’ve hoped to catch him at another fish-fry to talk again, but he hasn’t turned up.)  But now other people are weighing heavily on my heart – including one of the students I mentioned before.

His name is Chris.  He’s a Christian, though not a very well-instructed one, as he himself admits.  He’s just started to get back to church and prayer again, after a hiatus.  Terrific!  But he’s living with his fiancee, and doing his best to deny it’s a sin.  The array of excuses he has on this subject is amazing.  (My ‘favorite’ is "Maybe in God’s eyes we’re married already!")  But he has also admitted to me that at times his conscience bothers him fiercely but "the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak".  (His fiancee is a lapsed Catholic who, as Chris puts it, now "believes more in aliens than in God".)

Chris and I hit it off very quickly fall term.  We talked, we prayed together, we got together for lunch.  *He* suggested doing Bible study together.  But then he dropped completely out of touch over the break, even though he’d said that he’d hire me to catch up on some things.  (He’s extremely bright, but scatterbrained, and missed a lot of stuff in high school.)  Come the beginning of this term, I finally got back in touch with him and he admitted that he got a little "skittish".  After a couple tutoring sessions and a Bible study session, both of which he seemed enthusiastic about, he dropped completely out of touch again for a matter of weeks.

Then he started emailing me again, saying that he did want to meet but was just way too busy.  There’s no denying he’s a busy guy, but it was hard not to believe there was something more going on.  I didn’t see him in the flesh for two months, then he hired me again for a bunch of hours dead week and finals week – catching up with a bunch of stuff he’d slacked off on.  It was as if nothing had happened;  he was as open and friendly as ever.  We prayed together several times, though we didn’t have time for Bible study.  We discussed our plan for next term, which should prove to be much lighter for him;  he promised he wouldn’t drop out of sight again.  He also said that he definitely wanted to hire me over spring break to do some review on a number of things.

Guess what?  It’s now spring break, and all of sudden my emails and phone calls are not returned again.  It’s only been a few days, but I’ve got a bad feeling about it, given that he’d specifically said he’d get back to me about scheduling things days ago.  And my heart is aching fiercely over it.  Oh, I know there’s more self-love bound up in this than there was with Tim;  I admit it.  And there’s some other issues muddying the waters I don’t care to go into in detail.  But again, I don’t think that’s the whole story.  I want so badly to encourage him to follow the Lord wholeheartedly;  I love this kid a LOT.  I have done my utmost to be loving and not overbearing about it;  and I have only brought it up when the moment seemed right, which hasn’t been often at all.  But all the same, it seems (I’m guessing here, but not completely in the dark) that I have become a reminder of his own struggle with his conscience, and that at times he just can’t deal with it.

He’s not the only one.  I’m bleeding over the floor for him too.  And I haven’t even mentioned Mark.

Remember him?  Last year we hit it off in an incredibly major way around Easter time?  Well, a few weeks after I last wrote about him (shortly before he left town), I did something that hurt his feelings.  We were both at fault, I think, though it was more mine.  We forgave each other and reconciled, to my relief, and I thought things would pick up the way they were.

They didn’t.  He’s more or less given me the silent treatment ever since.  When he does respond, it’s usually monosyllabic, uninformative, and completely oblivious to anything I had to say in my mail.  (His parents have similar complaints, but they can get more out of him than I can. 🙂  At one point I confronted him about it (in email), and he said it has nothing to do with our argument, for which he really has forgiven me.  It’s just that talking to me seems to weirdly make all of his existing problems worse.  (Oh gee.  Way to cheer a guy up there, Mark. :P)  When he came back home for Christmas, though, I saw him at Mass and he was very friendly and offered to meet again like old times.  Fantastic!  But as the date we’d set approached, he progressively toned it down and then withdrew the offer entirely, first offering a phone call, then withdrawing even that.  Frankly, it would’ve been a lot less hurtful if he’d just ignored me.

The only really substantive thing I’ve received from him lately is a little letter with an unmistakably smug tone that he’s no longer going to Mass.  I have the impression he’s mainly trying to tick off his parents (it worked), but it’s still very discouraging.

These are not the only cases, just some of the more vivid ones. 😛  I’ll discuss Alex (remember him?) in a day or two, once I know more myself…  Oh, and Juan came back to the Church last fall!  But now he’s severely depressed again and unlike the last time, won’t respond to calls or emails.  He moves so often I’m not sure where he lives, either.

Basically…  I feel alone and discouraged.

Chris (in the People of Praise, not the student named Chris) tells me that I have the heart of an evangelist.  It took me a while to accept it, but there’s truth in it… I really do want, deeply, to tell people about Christ and His Church.  And I know that I shouldn’t look for results;  that one sows and another reaps.  But when even the things that seem to go right turn into ashes a few months later, it’s hard not to be disappointed.

There’s also the more personal issues in this…  Rejection is a hot-button issue for me, as I’m sure anyone who reads my diary can understand.  I’ve been badly hurt by it in the past, and I tend to overreact to things that look like it.  I’m working on it, but emotions are harder to rein in than thoughts.

But I can’t escape the thought and feeling that there’s a deeper dimension to this too, despite the obvious personal stuff.  Selfish as I am, I don’t think it’s wrong to desire a tangible response to one’s love;  I know for a fact that God desires ardently for people to respond to His!

This ache in me isn’t like depression at all.  It’s not like a leaden weight that bows me down.  It’s more like a fire inside me that is desperate to find a way to pour itself out.  And if it’s frustrated, it hurts.  I can distract myself from it for a while, but not for long.  Prayer for the people its focussed on is an agonizing thing, almost;  pouring out my heart to the Lord, begging Him to bless them.

But sometimes… A tremendous peace comes over me, a stillness that isn’t quite like anything I’ve experienced before in prayer.  I’ve had moments of great stillness before (though not recently) where for brief tiny moments I seem to lose the ability to even think.  This isn’t like that.  It’s more like what I think of as the "deeper" part of me (I suspect St. Teresa would call it the "higher" part) is completely still and rapt in adoration, but the "surface" part (St. Teresa’s "lower" part, or "the faculties") is free to pray verbally (though still mentally) – praising God or interceding for others instead of being its usual chatterbox self.  It’s been immensely satisfying to me;  my one loving gripe about contemplative prayer is that I’ve never seen how to include intercession for others in it (or indeed, any other kind of ‘intention’), which *is* one of the ends of prayer.  The verbal prayer has a curiously ‘light-headed’ feel to it, like I’m not totally there;  it really feels like I’m doing two separate things at once that I would have thought were incompatible.  I wonder if St. Teresa would see it as a distraction to be avoided?  Fr. Gerald’s out of town (his mother is dying 🙁 ) but I’ll talk to him about it when I see him next.

During those times, I have peace.  The rest of the time, I’m not very peaceful at all, to be honest.  I can get almost frantic if I allow myself.  And for a while I was getting really down on myself about the selfish, vain side of it all, but I had the impression that the Lord wanted me to know that dealing with all the self-love and darkness in my heart isn’t really something I can directly do anything about.  That’s HIS job.  My job is to do the tasks before me, and to love the people around me.  During those times of stillness, He’s at work in my depths, to heal all that needs healing.

Oh, Beloved.  I don’t really understand what you’re up to this time.  But I know it’s good.  I’ll just "go with the flow" as Fr. Gerald always says… I’ll love those you give me to love, however imperfectly I’m able to do so.  I’ll say what you give me to say, however imperfectly I can hear it.  And You know that I want to be whatever You want me to be, even if it hurts.

It does hurt right now, Beloved.  But you know that too.  You suffered much more on the Cross;  this is the merest fleck of a splinter of its sacred Wood, and even that is mingled with loathsome things from my own darkness.  Keep your Cross before my eyes and I will do my best to trust.  Just be with me, Lord.  Don’t let me go.  Stay with me, not just in spirit but in Body and Blood, from one Communion to the next.  I want all of You!

Draw all those you’ve given me to love fully into your Heart, even if I never have anything to do with it, even if I never see them again in this life.  But, my Love, if it’s for the best, please give me some good solid spiritual friendships.  People who can encourage me, who I can rely on.  You’re my Beloved, but you know you made us for each other, too.

Thank you for coming to me so many times over these past weeks.  If I’d thought it through, I’d’ve been asking much more, long before now!  Maybe sometimes I was asking, without fully realizing it?

I don’t understand why I feel so very lonely lately, even though I know you’re with me.  Is that because you’re at work in my depths, and the ‘surface me’ is confused?

Regardless of how I feel, though, I choose by your grace to live in trust.  I will trust that you’ve got it all worked out.  Glory to your Name.  Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit.

St. Teresa, pray for me.  St. Ignatius, pray for me.  St. Thomas Aquinas, pray for me.  St. John of the Cross, pray for me.

And yes, ‘little sister’, you pray for me too! 🙂

P.S.  I feel a lot more peaceful having finally gotten some of this out on the page.  If anyone’s been listening, thanks. 🙂