Leshem Shamayim: “For the sake of heaven.”

As You sit with me, hand and hand, side by side resting at the end of where our thoughts have rarely entangled; and we share our hearts and the ways in which we have seen the world,
I take hold of that perception You have revealed to me and tug at it, playfully, like a child who
Would capture the pretty thing she likes and take it into herslf, but is unable because another character inhabits the place in my own soul, intuition. While Your heart is always outward reaching, mine within me musing on the things inside which inform this little perspective.
Your are too great for me, I watch in awe and wonder as You umake me, the little way I have folded myself up and hidden within… crumpling the little web of soul in a tighter and tighter wound ball, fainting in its weak attempts to exert and force itself out of this casket that closes tightly each time I try and open it…. And there You are, stretching out Yourself, giving away,
releasing without doubt. You are always stepping outside of Yourself. You look out into the world and see all there is, and feel from the depth of the knowing You have inside Yourself.

Open me to Your gift of love, You who enter into all the world with perception of what is,
With Your conception in the womb of Your mind of all we who are Yours have pledged to be,
Make in me the same likeness of the part of Yourself out of which Your formed me,
To be a piece in the rest of Your Body, a part that sees so little be is shown so much
By the spirit which dwells only in the darkest possible hearts, for there must be plenty
Of dark to see any of Your light. What light have You planted in me, that for my own
Darkness I cannot see… something shining in this woman-form that seeking You seems
To polish and perfect. Yet all the more dull see my eyes, the closer You are , the warmer
I imagine You shine… my dim eyes can only think to see so that nearer to You my hope
May be. Come quicker each day, as that hope slips away and fades into the cracking grey of
Soul dusk, yet that is Your blessing to me, the darkness in which I wander, to find the glory of
Your face… the knowing within me, Jesus, teaches a harder way then the wandering, searching
I am prone to; Within the reach of grace, I still stand, learning the quiet of Your stillness…
How to embrace Your feet with no other care than to be in Your presence and worship You
There, but all the striving and searching has left me penniless in my weeping soul.
When I fall from my feet and land squarely on my knees in wonderment and poverty of heart,
All given out from the miniscule strength I had and sworn to poverty for taking the love-wounds
Of my Jesus… Your love is always leaking out of me, when I let You draw me out and
Overcome the very defensiveness I have bound up myself in to limit the giving, to reduce the
Wearing out and beating down of the daily trodding of the soul. Yet it is in the mud I know You
Best, the beaten pavement where I find Your filthy feet, and dusty hands, healing and working
Among the other sick and weak like me. In the contact of Your touch, I find a reviving stamina
Though no lasting strength is imparted to me, I must remain with You in my little means.
You have made more miracle than water into wine from the filth of my life… You took the clay
From the pit of my flesh… the cavern where should have been a heart, but when You, Word,
Cut open my carcess, You found a stone… I took it out and was just there, empty, waiting and Looking for some other filling… in the darkness of world, the souls all round are hiding,
Guarding, waiting to be found as themselves and drawn out into love as they are.

This all You tell me, again and again… You tell me so that I may know, but my heart, besides
Cold holds weak memory of Your patient grace, so draw me forth again, teach me gently
To see Your face and be whole before You, to show as You are shown… to wholly unveiled
And covered in Your ways that become my own as You teach me to desire and choose
What is right beyond appearance, what is true beyond view.

The road to life seems to bridge on the valley of death, death everyday. And somehow, Jesus, that just isn’t depressing. I see You everyday with Your arms wide open and inviting companionship up on that lonely cross. Your solitude, the stillness and yet the ache You continue to hold inside Yourself because we’re still not on the same page. I don’t understand You, Jesus… Here You are always before me, offering an open embrace, propping those strong arms open so that weariness can’t take Your embrace away from me. So, I see Your embrace and my heart knows that sense of anticipated comfort of those arms, can almost imagine the real presence of those arms and the more that the embrace communicates and assures… that sets the solitude of my heart at rest. I come to You with the aching hands you’ve given me, and I ask You like a child why they can’t look like Yours. You smile. My hands were meant to bear a different death, bear another burden. A garment of praise for the spirit in heaviness. You have deeper wounds in your heart and hands and feet than we could inflict on ourselves, on others, or try and hide all our sorrows in. You smile at us, our joyous Savior with that secret of bursting love breaking out of the blood and water mingling around Your heart, flooding over us so that the darkness doesn’t matter too much… the darkness of all around hides You from us. We see this world, and it glitters… but not all that is gold glitters…and maybe in our wandering we’re not lost.

I think of this world, the one I’m sitting in now, surrounded by pale blue sky, like my little sister’s eyes… bright and eager, wondering. The trees and wines entwining this little café, blowing in the cool breeze that refreshes in the sunshiney… and I feel blessed… sipping a bitter coffee that turns sweet or more sour in the savoring… You refresh me and remind me how much You love me with the little gift that took nothing but all of You and requires only all of me… You implanted in my soul that little gift of darkness… my eyes cried so much in the moonlight because I couldn’t catch glimpse of Your face, but there You were, sitting beside me all night long. You closed me eyes over a book every night, taking away their strength to hold themseves open because You tell me over and over again that I just don’t need my eyes to see You. Hannah, You say, why can’t You just know me in Your heart? Don’t look for me, but embrace me… You will know me less when You look for that comprehension, because it isn’t going to be found. Do you understand yourself, little one? Do you know the needs of your own heart? Can you see all the colors of a rainbow, or every part of each picture? Why do you need to see Me to love me, when Your heart has been grafted into Mine already? I give You the gift of darkness, to make your little faith a little stronger. So Jesus, why are we still so far apart?

You make my life a mystery, a wondering to behold…I have tried to wrap my mind around the reasons of being for everything, the definitions and explanations… what kind of faith is that? The resounding hollows, the empty rippling effects of my echoing voice down the rabbit’s hole. You aren’t going to give me something more impossible for me than You too would walk with me. You made this world a beautiful place, and in it I lose myself in wonder. I realize more and more everyday the delightful danger of this darkness, Darling Jesus. Treacherous to my walk, because the holes come up faster each time. I hardly know what it is to run without tripping. But You help me up each time, because blind as I am, we both insist on me doing the experiential learning…. No robotic movement here. Sometimes You say, close those eyes always trying to see, just listen, just be with Me, stop searching and wait for Me to discover you… be still and know I am with you, because you haven’t escaped that knowing for all Your unseeing eyes have envisioned. If the world is full of shadows, they are beautiful. But this world is just as real as I can see… tangible dreaming, shiny, sparkling. Somehow, here, I need to behold Your face.

My Lord of Love, You come to me with a thick veil, and my unseening being knows that sense of You in each soul You put in my arms. You say, embrace these… know them know me. Your voice is hard to hear…. Must be deaf as well as blind… but Your voice echoes to me in my insecurity and unsurity. It’s the constant that’s changing, the lines I keep erasing, the sounds I keep out-drowing and the words I’m always ignoring. Here You are, lovely Jesus. Here in this world, making Your will known, I believe…deeper than proofs can reach, to an intuited, gifted sense of belief. It’s the faith in the blinding light that we’re struggling for, that to obtain, against me, I fight and struggle. Internalizing and interiorising the journey inward reaching takes what I think You give for me and stretches it beyond me. You see the conflict of all my desires… motivated by fear, I take what You give and run away from You. I am uncertain sometimes if You care about some things I dogmatized as You… You’re so dymanic, but I keep taking away, not just changing, You want me to grow. You took death off my mind the moment I gave myself away, really and freely, but each day I take back and hide me again and in fear I can’t give anything and remain paralyzed unable to open my hands, or arms. Here I am again Jesus, I ran and hid in You, but got ingrown in a way You didn’t intent. So take me back and unfold me, open me up, unroll me, and give me away.

You offered to be my hope, to help me dream again. That old nightmare was a little intense for me… but I’m willing to try if You’ll direct me. So here I’ll be, experiencing what life brings and wondering all the while… where is my Jesus under these veils. Each to embrace for a merit of its own, and then You to cherish, all on Your own. Help me use the gift of blindness and little darkness to let death happen and move through. There is just too much more to You than to fixate there. Show my desires what is good and let them always run in those tracks… following in the life-cycles of living, dying  may be awe… but it is always continuing too.

I almost entitled this “why I joined a Church accused of misogyny.” J Church and its mysterious being is still the subject of my fascinated inquiry throughout this journey of life. On the walk this afternoon, on the walk with the girls, Jesus, I breathed in the fragrence of Your life… the cool air rushed through me, and I felt alive with Your sunshine. It takes a recognition of emptiness to let the rush of knowing in… the empty exhale of clearing out the lungs senses to percieve, the mind to intuit again what was known. Turning the bend down a hill with my girls, I caught sight of a bumper sticker that answers a thousand questions “Life is a mystery to live, not a problem to solve.” I think that was You smiling at my approach; You made me a woman for the sake of the Kingdom of Heavem… You have me a heart and a way of seeing things for Your purposes, and as we’re fumbling in the dark, I try and light a match, You blow it out to increase my faith. How bright You are, and how dark to me, for my eyes are only used to the dim sunlight. Through various conversations and reading precious little St. Therese of the Child Jesus (Lisieux), I have come to the conclusion which isn’t even a hypothesis: that places we tend to assume in the Church, positions which are often classified as diminuative, or gender-sterteotyped, subjugating roles. Its about perspective, and one in which roles of men and women are not naturally the same, and the only existential proof of that is biological. But I’m a woman, and my sense-data is not percieved only by what’s objectively before my eyes.

I tend to believe in something like what is referred to as intution. Looking at this world and trying to understand it through the behaviors of the people all aroud me. I am told society construes a lot of how we understand ourselves and fixes the lense of perspective. So let’s try and reach beyond the lense of skeptical, cynical disbelief which we have only ever known… that women should be verbally given the same freedoms and responsibilities as men, that our positions should be exactly the same… and maybe we’ll look at how that works out: of course, I am juding by appearances from interactions. How did Jesus intend for us to be living out community? There are several levels of analysis, human level, sexual level, and indivudal level. I think at a universal level, most anything has to be confessed as possible, same at the individual. But when it comes to sexual differences, we find ourselves playing a complementing biological game of gender roles. Is there something called nature that comes from more than biology? I rebelled with liberal American feminism for a while against stereotypes, because I think we are women in more than our biology, and I never want our natures to be reduced to reproductive ability… but if soul is the form of the body, we’re looking at the matter of the form, and the possibilities of the matter come from the quality of the soul.

Lately, I’ve heard the gender differences in spirit described as ‘objective excellence’ for men, and ‘relational’ for women. I would have rebelled against that, and the organization of typical roles in societal structures, like Church, even earlier this semester, before considering that intuition is a sense that seems to give reason for a deeper meaning as to why Church structure does not rank women in the public ecclesiastical heirarchy, permit us to celebrate sacraments (except in cases of emergency) and why we are not public leaders in the same sense as our male counterparts. Does the initial cause for male/female separation from the ‘public’ sphere of Church leadership stem from ancient societal taboos and mysogynistic control or a sense of something more that has erroded ove time? What are men, what are women? As I look at the state of the Church today… I see the question of ordination up for debate, who will shepherd as a figure and leader in the public eye of the Church… but I see a deeper searching. I wonder if the question of ordaining women in the Catholic Church does not show us we really have forgotten ourselves. We really have lost touch with what it means to follow in the steps of Jesus.

We have an institutional Church now, as Catholics, which to appearance and sometimes practice kils the relational practice which faith is. We are a family, the sisters, brothers, fathers and mothers of religious orders and the multitude of biological families united in a spiritual bond to a Heavenly Father. I appeal to Church to remember itself… we are the Bride of Christ united together. How do we weave ourselves together? The sense of unity I think we can find is recognizing the integrity of our whole beings before God and one another… seeing that in each other, and letting what is most naturally there be drawn out. How do we discover the ‘naturally there’? That’s still my question, but I can tell you what I ‘intuit’: As a woman, comparing generally to men, I find myself taking particular care for persons… in each situation, I subjectively value and way out the scenario based on what the needs and cares of the persons involved are. In pursuit of  ‘objective excellence’ I am told men care most about the right, the good, the more abstract values that are not as closely embodied. I am not a man, and cannot speak for them other than what I have been told and observe. I think maybe all of this is manifested in how men and women care differently, most keenly in how we love with different emphases (not an absolute statement). That’s a whole other conversation.

Appraoching Church with my constantly evolving perspective, I think the kind of care I have, maybe that womankind has, gravitating to persons first before the situations themselves, is well-balanced by the public authority of men in the Church. I look at the words of little Therese and pray them too: “Let me never be a burden to the community, never claim anybody’s attention; I want them all to think of me as no better than a grain of sand, trampled and forgotten underfoot, Jesus, for your sake. May your will be perfectly accomplished in me, till I may reach the place you have gone to prepare for me…” My personhood in public feels rather exposed, leave me in charge backstage and I will make sure you have all you need to serve publicly. I have a little voice, I was not meant to be using it with a commanding sense. My long-ignored intuiting sense tells me that I don’t need to make a scene to do my work for the Lord… And the center of the scene is maybe where I am most suited, but without having to stop the work of caring to explain it. If I am a preacher by vocation, its not a preacher with vocalization, but with life. I see my care go out into the world and catch on every soul it passes by… so much care that has been given me by the Holy Spirit, that unless directed, it will cling to everyone and all. Too much care for this little heart. So the care takes an anchor before dispersing… my anchor being Jesus, to try and be His arms to welcome any whom He gives me to care and seek after those He might seek after.

Leadership doesn’t come down to power or influence so much as politics… the negotiation of appearance, legislative decisions, etc. Not that I want nothing to do with those, and of course I have to know and learn the abstracts as I become more familiar with my God… but His earthly Body is still incarnate, and it seems to me, my part in enfleshing Jesus here is about building and maintaining that community from within. If I drew a picture of how I see the word “Church” in my mind, it would be scattered and dispersed geographically, but spiritually, like a large wheel, suspended in the public air: the outter spokes of the wheel and rim seem the most glorious, the support and frame for the weight to be bourne. But the inner axis is small, protected and supported by the rim and spokes, but empowering them. That is how I see my place in what I am feeling out to be Church: I fight the battles in my own way, and most of them aren’t outside the walls of my own heart, which works on learning to care for others in the way You would… and all that entails in word and deed. And maybe I have been given as a sister to the rest if my family so You may light Your torch in me, and my willing heart bear Your invigorating breath like a lantern in our darkness. You are so Dark to us. But with the sparks our hope, that seem kindled by a heavenly love, we are moving forward. Iron sharpens iron. So in this Church, I must be a strong woman, confirmed in Your truth, and Your word is truth, so I will drink deep and let my roots creep into the Rock flowing with the river of life itself… and then I will never be moved. What does it mean to be a woman in this Church? To submit myself to You, in the prayerful care of a quaking heart, knowing that in my weakness, genuineness allows the light of Your gospel to shine through and encourage my family to be the parts of the family we are, unique… to form up the whole. So this Church loves me as a woman, in my womanness… for that is the only way I can imitate Christ… not trying to be a man.

This evening at work I had a thought come into my mind as I was working with my six daughters at this little place near Cedar Park that I come “home” to and “mother” every weekday evening. So much life revolves without, but in my invisible little fore-drop to the world… the part filled with dragons, and angels, and nights and ghosts… the little bit of world that usually gets stuck between dimensions… that is only visible at sun-up and midnight…. Or at the very split second when the sun goes green over the ocean. I pictured in my mind, as I looked around the room at my ‘daughters’ that very second from C.S. Lewis’ Till We Have Faces when Psyche’s older sister, Orual, the narrator of the story, invades the space of Psyche’s life… having poisioned her by  planting doubt in her mind that she is not married to a god, but a demon, convinces Psyche to kill the husband who has hidden himself from her; when Psyche visualized the face of her secret Lover by the forbidden lamp, the life she alone has seen… the wine, the palace, the fine foods she has fed off insivibly…all crumble before her; Orual catches the last glimpse of the palace which has not existed before her eyes until it breaks… Psyche is distraught. That moment of the collapsing kingdom that blazes out in front of Orual’s eyes before vanishing flashed through my mind when I thought about conversations I have been having about Jesus recently.

How can I say that I love You? You so invisible and insubstantial to my existential composition… and yet, here I am… You’ve captured and hidden my heart so deeply within Yourself that I have lost all touch. Who are You, Who draws me in and promises never to release me… and yet my mind is this imprisoning confine through which I ask You to draw me. The world around is so open, but just a shadow… somewhere long ago with You, I tasted more. And that lingering flavor ignites this fire, the senseless lost sense wandering as if let loose from a dream with mind still racing faster than heart. The questions roll in faster than can be answered. The inernal knwoing grows, with slower substantiating reason… the sort of thing that must be learned, not understood. God is not a concept to grasp with the mind. He is a Lover who runs to and fro in the heart… beyond the heart… all about, taking us greater distances than could be imagined. He is where the home is, the rest is, the lying place for the heart. The refuge and restoration… the comfort and joy that may be impercievable even to ourselves often times. That’s why I think faith requires imagination. So here we go, imagining:

Here with my six ‘daughters’ is my home… the quite place and stability of a place always kept and returned to, and not just the vacancies of having to care for oneself. The real comfort of knowing one is caring for others and contributing to a pervading sense of peace that is woven tightly in the environment. Here is where I most want to and best fall into sleep… that or in another place where You hold me tangibly, O Invisible Lover. So regarding where I find You, I will come to You, and in the imagination of faith, I become Your Psyche. Thus are my ravings and ridiculous longings justified… You are unknowable anyways, but that You make Yourself known. If we would try and uncover Your Radiance, we would disintegate into ashes and dust at the wonder of Your beauty.

Most Glorious and Intangible of Lovers, Your exiled Psyche seeks You with an openly bleeding heart… my hope bundled in my arms, like a child I am holding… gathering flowers on open fields… vibrant, wild, flowers. The world You gift into my arms is more than I can hold or behold… like the wonder of an almost born infant Hope You have kindled in my soul—whose older sister Faith travels closely in my arms. I am Your Psyche, filled with Your Faith, but in the darkness wait the pregnant heart, confused and bewildered with wonder and awe at the mystery of Love Incarnate descended… only Your whisper have I to draw on for the confidence of Who You are. Wandering barren hills and foreign wastelands searching for the Beloved.

The Invisible whom I have only seen with my heart… until breaking the spell with lamplight, I discarded the image You engraved in my heart with Your presence and gazed upon that which was too bright for my young eyes… Your Face. Tearing us apart with my boldness, I lost sight… sight of You, when full of Your child of Faith…after You had consumed all my heart in that darkness; convinced as I had been that I must know You in the weakness of my flesh, I realized my folly too late and cast myself into exile… decieved by the others I love, I betrayed Him-Whom-my-heart-craves: I broke Your trust… alighting to your side in far- a dagger clenched in my hand to free my hear from a dark, seducing monster… to try and cut You out of my heart, abort this seed of Faith… and claim by a knife of destruction the life You had promised to weave before me; My Darling “demon” of the dark, I knew not who You were. Lord over night, You flew to Your Mother and entrusted me to her care for rebuilding our trust when I was too broken to end the life of our Faith… You left me with Hope. I am Your Psyche, seeking You… an imaginary princess in Your Kingdom of my heart.

First Confession: I was told if I want to understand the Church, this imperfect body of Christ on earth, I must get to know Mary, who I’ve been told again and again is a type of the Church; The feminine imagery for Church, the Bride of Christ, is confusing when the language of Jesus’ body is also used. So Church as our Mother, if somehow invigorated with the Spirit of God, the Holy Spirit… and we compose the body of Christ, then I suppose a sort of comparison can be drawn between spiritual mother in Church and Mary, Theotokos, Mother as much as we are united with Christ and called sons of God through His sacrifice. I still don’t understand Church, yet… I can feel it as a sort of reality, but the thoughts are conflicting: I concede to different facts in my head than seem to make sense when really encountering life reality. Church: the oldest picture is that I have had in my head is an invisible unity… that anyone who was a part of the Body of  Christ manifested this in the fruits of their life, empowered by the Holy Spirit, and that the union of all of us would not occur to the Kingdom of Heaven, when we would be gathered together. That invisible bound of love to Jesus bound us all together. Denomination was irrelevant as long as the truth of Jesus Christ, the incarnate God born of the Virgin Mary, crucified under Pontius Pilate, dying and being buried, but resurrecting from a sinless life… that made us Christians. I never believe the Church was contained under things I grew learning were denominations: groups of people who cluster around particularly favorite styles/methods of worship or pet dogmas… and that was all well and good as long as Jesus was still the center.

I remember inclinations towards ‘denomination,’ but at one point I swore in my heart I would never limit my Jesus to the size of any denomination. I felt to join “a church” would compromise the relationship I had with Jesus… attached by the particular examples I saw of Him in individuals… commitment to individual rather than corporate relationships, and thus just free to be open to loving everyone like Jesus. Besides affiliations and relationships, I have also thought of church as something that one “does”: a specific sort of worship… a gathering together, a living out, a mode of being. I have since encountered a phenomena of a perfect-imperfect Church… paradox in which Church becomes a collection of divinely inspired, humanly transmitted truth. My ecclesiology needs a lot of work, because I still don’t understand my own conception of the Church but I am told it is Mother. Somehow I think (before diving into the books lying scattered around me) that the Church is some embodiment of the Holy Spirit… being spirit, we united provide the Body. But we are an imperfect body, awaiting death and resurrection. Then maybe we will see the Body or be It… but that too is confusing because I will never be Jesus. Jesus is Himself, and I am me—Hannah, and to be one with Him and my brothers and sisters will not erase that identity. Christianity is unique in this, our picture of unity: we believe there is such a relationship that is perfected in union… but we disagree with most other religions that at the base, everything is the same. Sure, all creation is molecularly or electronically the same in nature, yes? But in spirit, we are ourselves. I ask continually for the Spirit of Jesus to fill me. But I am not going to cease being Hannah and having my own characteristics as my heart is filled like His heart… however Jesus would look in me, my particular expressions, desires and gifts and weaknesses, Jesus will be shown in me.
So that is how I see Church still, but I have been confirmed in the Holy Spirit as a Catholic. Part of the Catholic Church. Is it wrong that I think the Church is bigger than Catholicism? I say that because I think Jesus is bigger than Catholicism. I am bringing my first impressions still. But I must say, for all the dimensions of Jesus I see in different predominance in different denominations, here gravitate I, to this communion which is centered around a perptuatingly renewed and reencountered mystery of a sacrament that takes us, if heart is prepared, to the very moment of Jesus’ sacrifice, and kills us there. And what of the life? We live the death as often as we partake in services of mass, and I think it might take even more for us to work out the resurrection of every day. For His Sake we face death all day long. Jesus is still such a mystery… I explain the Jesus I know to those I love by opening up my arms and embracing them, and gushing about this Jesus I have been caught by, my heart ravished by, and now blazes with a passion that sometimes doesn’t make any sense… especially when I step into the world and feel like a stranger for it all, because the love which seems most natural to me, the one I encoutntered too long ago to know how it really entered me… something I can’t explain. He and I speak in stillness and in life. The stillness is rare, and at times, the stillness with another member of His body brings that fuller presence, more body to Jesus. He does move and act in us… the impulses of good, the desires for the pure and holy which have no sensical basis in the world around us… these are Jesus stepping out of us. His blood courses through our veins. And so somehow we are Church, but Church is more.
I have been asking “Why do we need the the Church?” and “What is the Church?” and “Where is the Church?” for so long… that this encounter with the Mother of our Lord and the question in a new frame of asking puzzles me. But I have been told by many dear Catholic friends that to relate with Jesus best, to grasp the concept of Church I am seeking…I need to meet this Mary, mother of Jesus and grasp at the teachings about her… and her as a person, in relation to her Son. So I begin embarking on this quest (officially) with the very words of the two persons with whom my understanding of the Body here in relationship seem concerned:  Seven Words of Jesus and Mary: Lessons on Cana and Calvary by Bishop Fulton Sheen.

So the journey continues. Who is Jesus, how am I to know and love Him, and love and live like Him… in this community of Church and the world all around?

It’s been such a long time since I’ve written most of you… confirmation was the last letter of this sort. Life has been full, the journey continues, and Jesus continues to deepen the life around me, teaching me that some things are more than I make them, and others less. Let’s see.. how to sum up in a nutshell…or how not to. Entering this new walk of life by becoming a real part of a Church was perhaps the most terrifying thing I have done yet. It opened new doors to commitments I hadn’t dreamed of being able to make 2 years ago, and brought me into a place where peace seems possible. The conflict of an overactive mind in futile form wrestling with ideas of absolutes that are far broader than my little heart can picture continues to drive my running… both the physical kind in which I pour out my heart to Jesus, and the sort which seeks a constant activity. My gentle Savior’s constant words to me in each situation are peace, be still.

Since confirmation, I followed Him, in a different sort of relationship with Him, towards trying to embrace the desires of His heart differently. While my mind is still conflicted about the commitment to this Catholic Church, my heart has no doubts, and I know I am part of His Body here. In those final weeks of the semester, I found the interior conversation unable to keep up with the pace without. I am filled with wonder at the way Jesus reopened the hesitant love that had been bottling up inside… well, He did more than open… as I journeyed into a confirmed place, confessing my faith and professing a desire to further do so with my life, I offered the little casket I had formed and insulated and put my heart in out of fear. He took that offering, and crushed the casket in His hands. It seemed for a while that things had never been more radiant that to be in His presence, to receive Him in the Eucharist in a different way that I had received Him before… to offer up praise in weak voice with all my being in unity with the others, singing our life songs in the psalms. It was bliss. I had always loved litrugy, but now I found myself absolutely craving it… perhaps because of the rarity of actually making it to morning prayer on days other than Sunday. Academics became more of a conversation as relationships changed, and in this little world of seminary on holy hill, a sort of veil opened up.

Everything ended in such a rush… the ordinations on May 30th of our Dominican Brothers Fr. Raphael Mary and Fr. Peter Do… the racing off to my first Marathon in San Diego… completing that race used up a kind of frantic attempt at immortality… the superhero way I try and make life, the god-way I try and create time out of nothing but drained adrenal glands… I didn’t hit my limits on that run, it was an amazing experience… that entire week finishing papers and engaging in conversations for most of each day when not at work; come Saturday morning for the ordinations, my soul had reached exhaustion and I got into avoidance mode, seeking to create that sanctuary where I could be still enough to learn the rest my God was constantly urging me to take, to be in Him rather than seek to do for Him… as if I had anything of myself to offer. Less than 16 hours actually in San Diego, I finished my first marathon in 4 hrs, 5 min and 21 seconds…and as soon as I hobbled off the marine training headquarters where the race ended, began looking for the next adventure.

June started quietly; and Jesus began answering the prayer of a weary heart that didn’t know how stop its running, attempts at doing for, and learn to be with Him… in a very strange way. The part of my life that knew it was thirsting for a depth that involved more than constantly skimming across surfaces, to sink in and be lost… that ached for a fire to burn up and never stop consuming to eat up my heart… also realized that I had forgotten how to drink deeply of the cool streams, had ceased to feel the heat of the fire. But of the life-extremes of quenching and burning are fulfillment of grace, I started seeing… my endless questions led me from that brightness and star-struck, enamored confusion of confirmation into the darker labyrinths where closer acquaintance with God became taken for granted though the struggles of daily life arose a little more intensely. With one of my jobs ending for the summer, I wondered and worried how I would find work, and began the first real interviewing period I’ve ever done in my life. My resume was readily received in a lot of varying occupations… I interviewed and visited a Montessori school, a movie rental store, for an administrative position, etc… but my own very part time job at the Hergl Center was where I was brought back to. I am so grateful to God for the Director and Assistant Director at work, and all my coworkers… He has taught me so much about peace and rest and movement that is freed by taking that peace and rest over the year I have worked there. I have really come to love our girls and associate a certain sense of “home” with it; it was one of the first places of stability in my life out here, before I had any sort of religious community, and so it became a way of finding Jesus always drawing me back to Himself there.

Increasing my hours at Hergl, I also found an unexpected opportunity come up in being offered the position of nondenominational chaplain for a hospice care organization called Angel’s Hospice. Being called and asked to interview for the position, my reaction was: Lord, I am so young, how can I offer anything to the dying and grieving? But as I prayed, I felt it was something I should at least give the opportunity to be a possibility to continue carrying learning Jesus’ rest and peace, and to let Him carve me into a channel of His grace. As each worry about survival came up, I had only to look at the places He had integrated into this part of my vocational calling (whatever He makes that into), and see His grace all around me. While as I am called to face death for His sake all day long, the journey of everyday is walk to point of surrender and then dancing in the surrender. His yoke is easy, and His burden is light…He gives me the grace to see that, even if I haven’t fully unburdened my heart into His care. Easy and light are not the same thing. J A friend lent me a book called the Unbearable Lightness of Being… at a time when each day seemed to have so much weight in it… as ridiculous as I found parts of the book to be, it occurred me to that our being was made to be light, in the presence of light, full of light… and for some reason I was finding that acceptance of such a grace as unbreakable.

Grace is such a hard thing to accept, the undeserved gifting of mercy… when one spends all one’s energies fighting for survival… to not let the multitude of thoughts take over too much, to not use more hours than are in the day working, to lie in stillness when the possibility of doing is endless. But post-Marathon, I found something in me breaking. Jesus, the more I ask Him to be close, increases an ache in me, and breaks something more in me. It seems my being must not be light enough for Him. Last week I remembered what it was to hope contemplating Heaven and being enthralled with His love, in a very weary state of being. He watches me take up burdens everyday, and offers Himself… if I would only give in. He asks me to fall in love… to let go of the controlling urges and discipline enough to let Him lead the steps and be still enough and content enough to wonder at His feet that He can really be unexpected. I am relishing the sense He is showing me… when I was weakest and weariest, He held me. I asked Him where home would be for this wanderer, and in my heart, I felt He gave back something of a smile… of course with Him, but what does that mean in a beautiful, but exiled world? Wherever He holds me… that is what rest is coming to mean, to be held… sometimes in retreat, others in the middle of the action.

I am grateful His grace is greater than my weak love and faith… He continues to provide housing and more than I could ever ask for… means of support and thriving, reawakening my spirit to the possibility of dreaming deeper and in more vibrant color in the fire of His love.

Held in His hands,
Hannah

Posted in response to a reaction written by Thomas Reese, S.J. Pope Benedict on Economic Justice: This Catholic’s View (http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/onfaith/georgetown/2009/07/pope_benedict_on_economic_justice.html):

I do wish Reese would respond more to the Holy Father’s thoughts rather than site selected quotes… it is an interesting amalgamation… what Reese grasped from the social/economic teachings were not the things that struck me most… I saw the relational components of our world most glaringly recognized by the urgency of the Pope’s message to love in truth… and that right relationship on personal levels would lead to right relationship on corporate level… and yet we cannot trust governing institutions to do what is right for each individual… what are the responsibilities of political governance vs. spiritual governance? that’s a question that about halfway into a more in-depth reading of the encyclical I haven’t seen yet. Ok, I missed reading the full 2nd encyclical by our Pope and the I hear there is a lot of connection between them (catching up and making up for lost time)… but I was really puzzled to hear the politics Holy Father Benedict expressed… they are indeed ideals…and I think Reese is right to ask so many questions in his critique. If we’re talking about political economics… those instituted and protected by our civil authorities… then the Holy Father is most definitely “to the left of almost every politician in America.” But I am unclear as to the boundaries between spiritual and civil authority. The governing officials must consider the individuals under their guardianship as persons, but in their administrative roles, what sorts of public social ethic should be propounded, and which need to happen at a different sort of level? I don’t think the Pope is making a political appeal… but politics would most definitely be affected if the ethic of fraternity was central to the persons engaged in politics.

Of course, I need to finish digesting the whole piece, and then read through and dialog further, because my perspective is very biased towards relationality!

A fragile thing, this life we live, inside these skins, running from death to our wearying ends
Broken, fragmented pieces of pots… dropped and shattered, skidding across the
Ocean between us, the lake full and wide; the pond with stones always skipping from
Each side to side, to stop in the middle and float on dense waters—we’d rather drop
And sink, plunge down with all the energy we’ve got, trade in the dsiciplines we’ve
Learned and exchange and abandon the surface sphere in which we live, trapped
And enchanted, condemned to continue at my own risk this life off the edge, doomed
To repeat and replay the shallow crevices of detail in the worn out paths, worn down
Into shadows, becoming one with the grass and the gravel under our feet until
Something bleeding inside, the beating pounds like resounding gongs down echo halls—
The calls through the mountains, reverberating; enthralled with the wonder of repetitive
Dreams, we descend and sink just low enough to get out the winds and under the currents
But unmoved in the waters, we float and drift, empty, away, and lost, entirely empty…
We call it a ratrace, the stagnation in life which just keeps moving, whirling.
Empty strife, forlorn questing, we keep forgetting the reason for investing the entirety
Of soul, the full weight which gravitates towards the new, the wonder, but stymied
Out of turn into wearying pieces scattered as we’re digging our way into knew holes and pits
Towards endless abyss of emptying bankruptcy, the tiredness draws and allures into tight traps.
Caught, we just wonder what motivated that surrender of guard and unsatifactory
Path to an endless exile, trapped inside a world, just composed of bubbles and fluff without
A true substance, no essential meanings, absolutely endless circular corridors and
Disillusioning mirrors refracting horrors into answers for the endless questions we seek
To mask and mold the condition of true crushedness, realization of soul, the nothingness
We fear more than terror of death itself; restrung to unravel our peerless stealth
At hiding from our very selves, lost in thick clouds of own creation, we’re wizards and
Magicians and secret magic keepers…just hiding away the hope that we longed for,
The unyielding flame that will devour our souls and crush the silly games
We play with our lives, wasting precious time, when we should learn how to rest,
To give up, to seek a new life. Teach us to rest, holy Jesus.
My life is hungry for Your presence, for Your guidance, but I can’t
Comprehend the love that You’re giving to me without return in the end…
All I’d like to do is give over and surrender, Redeemer and Lover, but I fear you’ll
Have to capture this wayward heart and bind my will fast to You…
Don’t leave me thirsting in the dark, I’d rather break if I can’t bend, then be without You

Just some reflections on the new Papal Encycical Caritas in Veritate…..paragraph by paragraph….

1. Love as a force of movement… in explicating the passage that “love rejoices in the truth,” our Pope discusses how the ways of defending truth are different ways of loving. These two lines beautifully express the heart of what I feel Catholicism needs to continue crusading… “All people feel the interior impulse to love authentically: love and truth never abandon them completely, because these are the vocation planted by God in the heart and mind of every human person. The search for love and truth is purified and liberated by Jesus Christ from the impoverishment that our humanity brings to it, and he reveals to us in all its fullness the initiative of love and the plan for true life that God has prepared for us.” Loving in truth… becomes connected with the face of Jesus, and how imaging that face becomes our vocation when we love one another “in truth” for Christ Himself is Truth. When I read this, I immediately thought of how Jesus would become more real in us, more present on earth… if we are the body of Christ, then H becomes more present on earth as Love in giving ourselves truly to one another.

2. Love being the source and synthesis of the entire Law, since God Himself is love, it is the only substantial factor in all principles and relationships. “Truth needs to be sought, found and expressed within the “economy” of charity, but charity in its turn needs to be understood, confirmed and practised in the light of truth.” How unpin-able is love, devoid of an absolute, defining expression… and even more confusing is love, the Pope recognizes how current society and Western culture relativizes truth. Love as an expression of truth?

3. “charity can be recognized as an authentic expression of humanity and as an element of fundamental importance in human relations, including those of a public nature.” but since love is in need of a direction, a path dictated by the light of truth (which is the directing glow of faith and reason)… without truth, the pope says love is directionless, arbitrary– a shell which will be misdirected without the guidance of truth. Since we live in a culture already recognized as devoid of truth,  the expression of love in our society has been denigrated to emotionalism…. feelings. Chemicals firing in the brain, a searching for satisfaction and comfort.

4. “A Christianity of charity without truth would be more or less interchangeable with a pool of good sentiments, helpful for social cohesion, but of little relevance.” so perhaps the sense of meaning and purpose I keep searching after is that filling-ness of truth; somehow, if the truth sets us free… then we find charity, this ‘true’ sort of love… really freed from a “narrow field devoid of relations.” What is love if we cannot relate it… I remember a song very popular among my friends and I called “Love is a Verb” which spoke of love as active. I believe faith is also active… but both have their senses where they are presences of action.

5. “Charity is love received and given.” I think its presence in us is demonstrated by the two-way path cut by truth through our hearts… to be an “instrument of charity” we are given both an inclination towards receptivity and gifting… I think as long as we remain in truth, those channels the Holy Spirit cuts through us when It baptizes us in the grace of faith. A dynamic grace we are given. The moment we misdirect our eyes from truth, our vision of ability to give or receive love is clouded… I agreed with the sentiment that love in truth might be a sort of “satisfactory solution to the grave socio-economic problems besetting humanity” but I think the realization that heaven is apart from here in its full sense, while we are indeed building it now, needs to be remembered. We will always have the poor… how does that needfully affect our enactment of love? should it just encourage us to never give up heart?

6. What does justice and the common good look like through loving in truth? If every society manufactures its own system, but love going beyond justice tries to erect the kingdom of heaven via just principles, but also moving beyond justice. The Pope defines loving as giving… but I would add that I think its also keeping open the channel of receiving. If we love someone, we will accept from them out of care for their giving. So maybe that just adds to the Pope’s consideration of how the earthly city is not just built by right governance but by care, a transcendent value which brings heaven down to earth.

7. Since “to love someone is to desire that person’s good and to take effective steps to secure it,”  the Pope weaves together the idea of freeing love by the inspiration of truth: “the more we strive to secure a common good corresponding to the real needs of our neighbours, the more effectively we love them;” yet Jesus spoke of coming to divine father from Son, husband and wife, friends… is that seeking of the truth the dividing point? Will we agree to common good? Connecting the seeking of universal human good through earthly activity, the Holy Father introduces the “history of the human family” which offers dimensions which shape the entire community into “a prefiguration of the undivided city of God.”

8. a beautiful picture of the two-way street of God’s gift of graceful love… He gifts the grace of love, and entrusts ” us with the task of travelling the path of development with all our heart and all our intelligence[7], that is to say with the ardour of charity and the wisdom of truth.” I think our greatest enemies in this love-quest are definitely ourselves and the despair we can conjure up… our own realization of unworthiness which is the most present and obvious weight and presence in all Christianity I’ve experienced… even to the point of where we shed our own blood to try and pay rather than accept Christ’s. Guilty.

9. This remark was fascinating: “The risk for our time is that the de facto interdependence of people and nations is not matched by ethical interaction of consciences and minds that would give rise to truly human development.” Recognizing the inability of Church authority to speak into political issues, the Pope maintained that the mission of truth remained for the Pope. “Her social doctrine is a particular dimension of this proclamation: it is a service to the truth which sets us free. Open to the truth, from whichever branch of knowledge it comes, the Church’s social doctrine receives it, assembles into a unity the fragments in which it is often found, and mediates it within the constantly changing life-patterns of the society of peoples and nations.”

Chapter 1: The Message of Populorum Progressio

10. According to the Holy Father’s consideration of the Tradition of apostolic faith, Populorum Progressio maintains roots beyond sociological data.

11. Describing the contents of Populorum Progressio the Holy Father describes two truths:
(1) the public work and presence of the Church is to advance humanity, and
(2) “authentic human development concerns the whole of the person in every single dimension.”
the dimension of this paragraph I especially appreciated was the Pope’s recognition that institutions are not enough “to guarantee the fulfilment of humanity’s right to development” because it is an individual vocation. If we individual persons don’t freely assume responsibility to engage, enforced by institution, the very “right to human development” becomes dehumanizing.

12. “It is one thing to draw attention to the particular characteristics of one Encyclical or another, of the teaching of one Pope or another, but quite another to lose sight of the coherence of the overall doctrinal corpus.” Well said, Holy Father Benedict XIV. I appreciate the overview of adherence to tradition, this idea of patrimony that is continued from Jesus Christ via the Apostles and Fathers following after them. The issue of “meaningless repetition” that I was warned about in my pre-Catholic years of following Jesus is well-addressed in this paragraph: “Coherence does not mean a closed system: on the contrary, it means dynamic faithfulness to a light received. The Church’s social doctrine illuminates with an unchanging light the new problems that are constantly emerging.” God is the Unchanged-Ever-Changing as far as we can see Him: always the same, but how newly we always experience Him, how new His promises are every morning. Our Lord never changes, and yet there is something so dynamic about His relationship with us, the leading and communication of His will, through the same Word.

13. It is very difficult for some of us who are used to living in a culture where two separate lines of thought are expected between Faith and Government to separate our Christian lives from our social interactions. Wrestling through separation of self from the world, and the whole idea of being in, but not of the world these past months of my life, Holy Father Benedict’s emphasis of Pope Paul VI’s social teaching impressed me: “the indispensable importance of the Gospel for building a society according to freedom and justice, in the ideal and historical perspective of a civilization animated by love.” How can all my life be animated by love. How can I carry the Love of Jesus as the burning torch of my heart as I marathon, the same Hannah behind the walls of churches, school, work, and walking these streets of Berkeley. How will I make Your Love visible in me, all the time?

14. Further addressing the idea of “human development” counter to some claims made about tradition today, the Holy Father corrects supposed notions attributed to tradition “as radically anti-human and merely a source of degradation” by stating that “the idea of a world without development indicates a lack of trust in man and in God.” I especially appreciated his recognition of something I feel often in my own nature… “the fact that man is constitutionally oriented towards ‘being more’.” We push our limits if we believe we might have some.. we try, as sojourners to discover ourselves and our boundaries and those of others so we know how the lives may best intertwine. Somehow in this aspiring to be more in the persons we are… notice it is be more not do more. I am still learning the extent of our personhood is not only confined to what we do… nor is our worth as persons.

15. Discussing the other social documents of Paul VI, Humanae Vitae and Evangelii Nuntiandi, Holy Father Benedict brings together the discussions of individual and group ethics with the connection between “life ethics” and social ethics. Quoting John Paul II’s Evangelium Vitae, ‘The Church forcefully maintains this link between life ethics and social ethics, fully aware that “a society lacks solid foundations when, on the one hand, it asserts values such as the dignity of the person, justice and peace, but then, on the other hand, radically acts to the contrary by allowing or tolerating a variety of ways in which human life is devalued and violated, especially where it is weak or marginalized.”’ I was just discussing the strange contradiction of relationships that we have with ourselves in modern American society, and thus with our ability to love itself, with a friend earlier: we are taught to think so much of ourselves, create our own truth, etc… and yet at the root, we find nothing in ourselves that we are proud of, in fact we hate ourselves. Yet we insist on listening to ourselves as the supreme authority, though in our weak times we are self-negligent at best and self-destructive at worst. We seem to be caught up doing everything we can to lose our lives, while with the same manner of intensity, pursuing the activity of life: the opposing passions would appear, to me, to cancel each other out and leave us neutral, relational vegetables in comatose states of loving… apathetic towards true love, and superficially attempting to placate a deeper ache by sentiment and feeling. Diving into the second of Paul VI’s social documents, Holy Father Benedict notes another frequently forgotten element of the Christian life: we are not gnostically all about the ethereal… we are all about the embodied soul! Beautifully put… “Testimony to Christ’s charity, through works of justice, peace and development, is part and parcel of evangelization, because Jesus Christ, who loves us, is concerned with the whole person.”

16. In light of all else he had connected to this point, the Holy Father brings together the ideas of human development as  right of society and a personal calling by highlighting how “In Populorum Progressio, Paul VI taught that progress, in its origin and essence, is first and foremost a vocation.” The Gospel in light of society is the work of continual duty of each successive Christian generation. So yes, we have changed since the time of Jesus, and the expression of “true humanism” as the Holy Father puts it, must continue to espouse the love of Jesus’ heart, which is always open to God, “conscious of a vocation which gives human life its true meaning.”

17. The tension between institutional structures and individual freedom. One might think that any institutional denial of freedom under obligations depletes us of freedom… yet the Pope notes that “the humility of those who accept a vocation is transformed into true autonomy.” Accepting our vocations, our lives as we have been given them and stepping into who we have been made to be sounds extremely freeing on the one hand, but binding as well. Autonomy? Is this an independence of all obligation in favor of an entirely self-directed life? What sort of freedom would that be? I think of life in the sort I am growing into… and note that for me, freedom and greatest capacity is not withholding myself from submission to rules or authorities… those are for my stability in regards to surface structures so that I am not trapped in the surface, aching for depth, but able to plunge deeper.

18. ‘The vocation to progress drives us to “do more, know more and have more in order to be more”. But herein lies the problem: what does it mean “to be more”? ‘ Excellent question. And while the Holy Father explains in a more complicated manner, for the Christian, for every person, Jesus is our more. Being made into the likeness of Christ in our individual vocations… which unite with the world in the development of humanity. Except the Pope notes that Christianity takes this global vision of man becoming more to a greater possibility than that limited to earth…. Jesus as the God-Man requires us to accept truth, boundary and direction… authority… in order to transcend from the natural plane. I think its hard to remember that original nature was inclusive of the supernatural… our natures are just unable to think or imagine the grace which rescues the gaze from only inward to outward…. to upward… the transcendent humanism… to be like the Jesus-more we are going after.

19. Understanding that human development is a vocation, working towards that more in the person of Jesus… it makes perfect sense that charity is central to this development. Yet, I am thinking in relational terms again: If I want to become like someone, reach the transcendent human possibility that is laid out for me in a supernatural plane by the person of Jesus, how can I pursue it, but that I open my self to receiving that gift of love-grace He offers. I must submit to something more than me, accepting shows that I lack what perfect Love holds… and thus I become obedient to learning love. As I read the Holy Father’s words, I see his mind working in a different mode to my own, mine in the central path of relationality readily confesses that “Reason, by itself, is capable of grasping the equality between men and of giving stability to their civic coexistence, but it cannot establish fraternity.” It is not in thinking we learn how to love, but we observe the movements of love… we observe ourselves… others, we calculate. It is in being immersed within, and overwhelmed out of ourselves, flooded until we have love pouring out of the holes in our hearts, hands, feet, and sides that we step into a process of meeting one another as brothers. parallel living is done be neighbors, but we are intersecting as brothers, meeting at points of giving away and accepting in one another.

20. I appreciated the connection between desperation and love that the Pope finds…”urgency is also a consequence of charity in truth.” Urgency not only stemming from the tides of life, but from knowing that we are and should be, brothers and sisters… that is the truth of humanity…. is there not one God and creator of all? Has not the One Son come to redeem all, would it not be best to renew the natures of all in grace so that we are all capable of journeying towards the oneness with God and others, spiritually and economically? If our hearts ache with urgency, they will open of their own accord, to that call of brotherhood, as truth separates us from the selfish and the most desirable. How do we ‘mobilize ourselves at the level of the “heart”’? Thats foreign language in my world. Is it the moving out, reaching out, always? Vulnerability, words we dont like to hear?

The sleep floating through my mind, wafting over thoughts
Is the intoxicating odor of my Beloved, a last
Attempt to call His Beloved into His arms to be still and
Take rest from the load of care she wears about her
Neck, the yoke she cannot bear to part with.
The insufficient self knows it wrecks deprivation, but
Cursed to feed a mandrake-living earth with blood,
It toils endlessly, till falling back in a pile of dust,
It reaches its end and completion in a soul sleep.
Stumbling to the close of antoehr day, the endless
Crucifixion, drawing down to another grave as
Pitch black as the night-consuming starlight;
The dark veil of shame or rest descends, always
Entertaining within it, the Beloved’s hands to draw
Away His Bride to Himself, when she cannot resist—
She is no longer herself when Lost in His arms;
More fully so in the deep rest of dreams, only
Treated to know the first taste of the gift of blessed awarelessness
A quick glance of the numbing soul sleep which
Seems a solace to the life without cease, the peace
To the waking who toil in bitter outcast of heaven… light
Shod in futile works of her hands, being pricked and prodded
And giving over each treasure she had, becoming desolate as
A beggar, spiritless tramp, numb and broken as street-corner whore just to
Live a breath longer, eat a bite of bread, bask in the sun…
But what living death, to continually hate what must be done
And yet continue it instead, ignoring weeping, crumbling soul…
Cries of body inside the self-wrought case of
Coffin-like pride which masks all pain
And allows more exploitation of the Bride—yet from the
Bridegroom’s touch, these shameful things cannot be hidden..
He weeps to embrace faithless Bride in His arms, the joy
Of lost lover, tears mingling as the pain
Is felt strong, flowing from the heart she has broken
Again, her own heart—begging now to please
Be relieved of this sin, hiding, not breathing, He uncovers
Her shame, with His kiss and His touch…
She shrinks back from the love without lust, burning in grief
Even to hear His voice call her name, it resurrects trembling
Knowing of love, conflicting with guilt from actions before.
This night all is forgiven, the love breaks old chains,
She is set free into His embrace again, and in sleep,
He holds her fast to His breast.