So much to say, so little time

“Pray without ceasing.”
I Thessalonians 5:17

I’ve known a lot of faithful people in my life. And one of the most striking things I have noticed is that it’s frighteningly easy to abuse faith. To turn it into an idol of its own.

Maybe I should be more specific. It’s easy to abuse religious practice. Like prayer, for instance.

I’ve known people who substitute prayer for action. I’ve known people who go for quantity of words, as if they think if they go on long enough, they’ll beat God into submission. I’ve known people who go for flowery language, thinking it makes their prayers more important. I’ve known people who use prayer, consciously or unconsciously, as a way to lecture other people in the room. (I should add that at least once in every category above, “people” refers to me.)

“Some of God’s greatest gifts are unanswered prayers.”
Garth Brooks

And I’ve known people who have bought into the idea of the unanswered prayer. This is one of my biggest pet peeves, because there is no such thing. That lesson, learned in my youngest elementary school days at Catholic school, still forms my world view. God answers every prayer. Every one. But sometimes, the answer is “no.”

And sometimes, the answer is “not yet.”

“If I really wanted to pray I’ll tell you what I’d do. I’d go out into a great big field alone or into the deep, deep woods, and I’d look up into the sky – up – up – up- into that lovely blue sky that looks like there’s no end to its blueness. And then I’d just feel a prayer.”
Anne Shirley

At some point in my life, someone offered this “formula” for prayer:

First praise, then thanksgiving, and then (and only then), petition.

I struggled for years with the difference between praise and thanksgiving, but finally my daughter taught me the answer to that one.

The trouble is with that last bit. The petition bit. The part that overwhelms prayer for most of us.

The trouble is that we grow up with a wrong-headed idea of what prayer is supposed to do. Prayer isn’t about changing God’s mind. I mean, do you REALLY think you’re going to change the mind of the maker of the entire universe? If that was even possible, I’d lose my faith instantly; who can depend on a God that fickle?

No, prayer is about changing me. It is a lesson in humility, an opportunity to stretch my soul by bending my will to someone else’s. It’s about shifting my attitude from what I want, what I need, what I fear, to what God wants. To what God is asking of me.

That kind of prayer is a lot harder. But it’s also liberating.

I learned the power of this prayer during three years of infertility, when all my life was consumed by the desperate desire for a child. It was such a bruising experience, to pray two dozen times a day, every day for three years, for the same thing, and never once to hear a “yes” in reply. That is spiritual exercise of the most powerful kind. I thought I would never know the reason why God said “not yet” for so long. But in time, that question was answered, too.

“Pray without ceasing.”
I Thessalonians 5:17

When I was a kid, I used to hear that quote and shake my head. What a boring life. Are you supposed to just live on your knees? But now I understand that life itself can be a prayer. It doesn’t have to be formal. It doesn’t have to be eloquent. It doesn’t need words at all. It begins with praise, it continues with thanksgiving, and ends with “Thy Will be done.”

And when I manage to live up to it…it works for me.

“Our view of the Holy Spirit is too small. The Holy Spirit is the One who changes the church, but we have to remember that the Holy Spirit lives in us. It is individual people living Spirit-filled lives that will change the church.”Crazy Love: Overwhelmed by a Relentless God

Francis Chan

I think my response was something like, “Christian, sometimes there is only one shoe.”

Twelve hours later, the words Trisomy 21 entered our vocabulary. Somehow, somewhere deep inside, he knew.

It used to happen to me a lot, when my life was simpler, my mind less cluttered. The summer of 1995, I commuted to Columbia to work at Sears. For three months, I drove on too little sleep, and was plagued by a vision that made me cringe—the hood crunched up on the driver’s side. On the last day of the summer, I rear-ended a truck in construction traffic, an accident whose damage was limited to the driver’s side hood.

Call it premonition, call it instinct, call it whatever you want—it’s real. I used to shy away from admitting that I believed this, because it seemed incompatible with Christian faith—like belief in séances, something vaguely demonic.

But I don’t feel that way anymore, because I’ve come to understand something about those feelings. They’re not demonic. In fact, they are quite the opposite. Those feelings are nothing more or less than the whisper of the Holy Spirit.

This makes the Spirit real to me in a way that the human figure of Jesus never has become—something I feel weird about, considering I’m a Christian, but there it is. It’s the Spirit I turn to when I’m reach the end of patience, when I’m struggling with a decision, when I’m blocked, when I’m having trouble sleeping. When the noise of my thoughts drowns out peace and serenity, it’s the Spirit I ask for help in releasing control and chaos. And, perhaps most importantly, I ask the Spirit for wisdom, understanding and inSpiration in parenting. And, as I have written elsewhere, I truly believe that Mother’s Intuition is a manifestation of the Holy Spirit.

This all sounds terribly spiritually mature, but don’t be fooled. Every so often I have reason to thank God for crises avoided, for gorgeous words or melodies. But mostly, the Spirit works in unobtrusive ways in a small radius from me. If I was really tuned in to the divine promptings, what He might accomplish through me?

It was really bad timing for a moment of doubt: right smack dab in the middle of singing the responsorial psalm for a wedding on Saturday. “Bless the Lord, oh my soul, forget not all God’s benefits.”

What the heck does THAT mean, anyway? demanded the practical voice in my head. It’s just a bunch of pious platitudes.

Uh-oh, thought the I-am-a-professional-liturgy-director voice. Danger! Heresy in the house!

It’s amazing, how quickly a mental conversation takes place. Thoughts are complete instantaneously, and responded to just as instantaneously.

Just because you aren’t feeling those sentiments at this moment, scolded the Liturgist, doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. Even you, Miss Practical, have felt what the psalmist was trying to express at some point. I’m sure of it. Think about it for a minute.

She had a point. Upon a split second’s reflection, Miss Practical did indeed recognize the sensation the psalmist was expressing: the sense of being overwhelmed by gratitude and disbelief, the sense of awe at something so beautiful in your circumstances, something so completely beyond your own control that the only possible reaction is gratitude. In fact, there were several:

My first pregnancy, a burst of glory after three years of infertility.

The night I first kissed Christian.

Holding my first publication in my hands.

Unbelievable moments, one and all—and in every case, a moment when I knew that I was merely a conduit for something much bigger. A moment when I felt the Spirit overshadowing me, rushing upon me, and gifting me with…well, awe. A moment when my soul exploded into gratitude, and every fiber of my being expressed it in wordless, tuneless songs with one simple refrain: Praise.

Bless the Lord, oh my soul, indeed.

What has inspired those songs in your life?

Have you ever looked at the Shroud of Turin?

When I was growing up, my mom had a paperback version of the book A Doctor at Calvary on the shelf in the kitchen hutch. I never tried to read it, but I looked at those pictures all the time.

At some point in my young adulthood I chanced across a hardback version of the book at a garage sale, and put it on the shelf in my own house. And still never read it. But this January, after a reflection on the yuck factor of the crucifixion—a reality that we have managed, in two thousand years, to render extremely sterile—my mother suggested that I read the book. And so I spent the early weeks of Lent wading through Pierre Barbet’s extremely dense, and sometimes overly sentimental, prose, a reflection on the five wounds of Christ, as shown by the images on the Shroud.

1. The scourging. It was conducted using “the Roman flagrum, the thongs of which had two balls of lead or a small bone, at some distance from their end,” writes Barbet. These lash hit on the back of the legs and wrapped around the legs, digging into the flesh and causing first bruising, then lesions.
2. The crowning with thorns. It wasn’t some little circlet the way artists have always drawn it. It was more like a cap of thorns, with a band around the head to keep it there. Blood flowed down and pooled above this band. Think about how much a head cut bleeds, how much it hurts. It makes me wince.
3. The nails in the hands. This was the hardest part for me to read. Barbet, who evidently did a lot of amputations, nailed severed limbs repeatedly to figure out how the marks on the Shroud could have come into existence. Right at the base of the hand, just as it joins with the wrist, is a space through which the median nerve travels. He says that a nail goes straight through that no matter how you put it in. Not exactly severing the median nerve—but basically going right through it. And then, the crucified hung from that. And every time he moved—which he would automatically do because otherwise he couldn’t breathe—imagine. Just imagine. I’m not sure there is a word in the English language to express that degree of pain.
4. The nails in the feet. By comparison, this is a cake walk. The feet were stacked, left over right, and a nail driven between the bones.
5. The wound in the side. It seems like an act of senseless cruelty to stab a dead man in the heart, but it turns out that such a thing was legally required in order to release a body to the family. The lance pierced his heart.

Barbet, in the end, paints an excruciating picture of a man, weakened by lack of rest, repeated beatings, and blood loss, who finally became too weak to bear the weight of his own body on the cross, and unable to lift himself, slowly asphyxiated.

**

There is difference of opinion on everything related to the Shroud of Turin. Some think that it is real, others don’t. Carbon dating put it in the Middle Ages, but the Shroud was damaged in a fire long before that, so is it actually a product of the Middle Ages, or something much earlier that got a walloping dose of carbon when the smoke came through? Doctors don’t even agree on the ultimate cause of death. But it doesn’t really matter. Look at the pictures, and connect with an event that we ostensibly reflect on all the time—but which we never really allow to reach the touching place.