When You Pray…

It’s been a crazy weekend, and today’s slated to be an even crazier day, so I’m pulling one out of the archives today. Be back tomorrow with fresh thoughts!

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“Pray without ceasing.” I Thessalonians 5:17

The Angelus by Millet ca 1857

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.

Published in: on April 30, 2012 at 5:12 am  Leave a Comment  
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Bigger Than Me

After two blissful weeks of uninterrupted sleep, Michael started waking to nurse again. I took it philosophically, because I’d been expecting it–I’ve said often enough that sleeping through the night is a myth–and these days he mixes it up; a night or two on, a night or two off.

This was an “on” night, and his roommate (Julianna) pulled a drama number at 4:30 a.m. and woke him up, so it was, in fact, a double-nursing night…something I don’t take so philosophically. I sat in my nursing chair while he wiggled and pushed his legs against the spindles, mostly playing around while my temper shortened with the dwindling minutes till morning. He needs his nails clipped…badly. And he likes to grab things these days. Sometimes he gets my shirt, but more often he goes for skin, and pulls the breast right out of his mouth. Repeatedly. After he’s torn the skin to shreds, of course.

So as often as he’ll consent, I grab his hand and let him hold my thumb. And as I sat there in the murky quiet of early morning, I suddenly saw the scene from his point of view. I saw the absolute trust, the craving for closeness with something Bigger Than Me. So much bigger, in fact, that his entire hand will wrap around its thumb. So big that it can protect him from the terrorizing of older siblings, and the specter of loneliness. So big that it fills up most of his world.

It occurred to me then that this is the source of faith, the first way in which our longing for God manifests itself. What do we adults have that can compare to that experience of infancy? We long for the security being cared for, too, and we long for Someone so big that we can rest upon that person. But it isn’t the same, because the physical Being is missing. We can’t snuggle up to God and wrap ourselves around a divine hand, knowing because of what we can see and touch that we’re safe. As adults, we have to reach into our souls and our intellects, to see God present in the beauty and power of nature and in the presence of community and supernatural Presence at church. In our “show-me” world, those connections are held suspect, even by those of us who believe them sincerely. We’d like more, and the frustration of knowing we can’t have it leads everyone to question at some point, and many to turn their backs.

It’s good that we grow and become parents ourselves, that we can see these moments in a new way and recognize the truths in them, truths we might otherwise lose touch with.

Published in: on April 18, 2012 at 7:14 am  Comments (3)  
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Ordinary Time Christian

Photo by jameschew, via Flickr

Anne Rice once wrote that Christians are either Christmas Christians or Easter Christians. In other words, they find their faith centered around Incarnation and gift, or around suffering and redemption.

But I realized something on Christmas Eve, in between the annual welling of tears during Adeste Fidelis and nursing a baby in the sacristy throughout the Liturgy of the Word. She’s not entirely right; she missed a category. I am an ordinary time Christian.

I love both Advent/Christmas and Lent/Easter. These central events of Christianity are packed with profound beauty and insight. I know the themes and connection points backward and forward. I tear up whenever I write about them, awestruck by the beauty of what I’m putting into words. But the reality is that on the days themselves, I hardly ever feel the profundity and the awe.

The high feast days can’t hold the weight of the expectations placed upon them. They’re supposed to be idyllic family times, lots of anticipation and the thrill of gifts (at Christmas) and egg hunts and candy (at Easter). On top of that, they’re supposed to move us to renewal of spiritual commitment.

But no one day can do all that–at least, not for me. Maybe occasionally, maybe by chance, maybe for a moment. Perhaps this is because I’m a choir director, and my job on those occasions is to be on top of the minutiae: making sure everyone starts and stays together, making sure the sound is properly balanced and adjusting microphone placement and levels if it isn’t, communicating corrections to members, making sure we lengthen or curtail the music to fit the ritual at hand. If I was sitting in a pew, or even following someone else’s lead, I wouldn’t have so much of my mind occupied by busy work, and perhaps I’d be a bit more present to the moment.

For me, faith and renewal belong to prosaic times. Faith ignites and inspires when glimpses of the divine pop up within the boring routine of daily life–sometimes in a church building, but more often outside it, when what I hear on Sundays and high feasts illuminates my humdrum everyday. My “yay God” moments come on ordinary days, during ordinary tasks involving ordinary externals. Spiritual insight flames most clearly when the profound truths we celebrate on Christmas and Easter come together to show me something about an unremarkable Tuesday morning, something I wouldn’t have seen otherwise.

And it occurs to me that this is “right and just,” to quote the new translation. Because we don’t live in the high seasons–we live in an ordinary world, and if faith is to have any chance of changing us, and through us, the world, it has to live there too. It has to surround our ordinary moments, whisper holiness into them, fill them up with purpose and meaning. More importantly, it has to direct our actions and thoughts–not just on Sunday, but every day. It has to become who we are, inseparable from what we think and do.

I am an Ordinary Time Christian. No longer will I feel inadequate or deprived when the high feasts don’t live up to the spiritual expectations placed upon them. Because God is everywhere at all times, and I will seek him where he is to be found.

Shared with Hear it on Sunday, Use it on Monday at Michellederusha.com

Published in: on December 27, 2011 at 8:12 am  Comments (7)  
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Does Jesus Laugh?

Jesus

Image by glasgow's finest via Flickr

On Saturday night I was singing Julianna through hair washing (“I’ve got that joy, joy, joy, joy down in my heart!”) when Alex turned to me and launched into an unfinished conversation from the day before. “Mommy, we don’t sing that Devil verse at school because it would be wrong.”

I paused in the middle of “If the Devil doesn’t like it he can sit on a tack—ouch!” (Julianna’s reward verse for getting through the rest of the torture. It makes her giggle.) “What do you mean?”

“I mean, we can’t sing that at church!” He looked appalled by the very thought. Somewhere deep in my gut, I felt a disturbing flutter. “Well,” I said, “I don’t know that I ever sang it at church when I was little, either. But Alex, church isn’t supposed to be all gloom and doom.”

He looked at me like I was completely nuts. “It’s supposed to be…” He couldn’t find the word, but I knew what he was searching for.

BORING.

IRRELEVANT.

I wasn’t about to fill those words in for him.

There are so many ways to skew how we approach God. An acquaintance of mine once told me, “A person’s faith ought to be a comfort to them, not a source of misery.” The point being that faith should never require suffering or challenge you to do anything you don’t want to do. There’s a strong movement in the world in which church is entertainment—I heard recently of a church where the cross isn’t even used, because it might “make people uncomfortable, and we want all to be welcome.”

On the other hand, there is a strong reaction to all this which focuses myopically on formality, on sacredness—to the point where it’s viewed as disrespectful at least, and perhaps sacrilegious, to crack a smile, to play an upbeat song, or to speak above a whisper.

Believing that God lies squarely in the middle on this topic as almost every other, I find myself continually frustrated. But to see the dawning of POV #2 in my own child brings me to a whole new level of soul disturbance. God created us as people who love laughter and companionship. And since we’re created in God’s image, doesn’t that say something pretty important about God?

At first, casting about for explanation, my mind settled on the strict regimen of behavior expected at parochial school. But as Alex stood beside me during Mass yesterday, his nose pressed to the shiny lacquer of the piano his daddy was playing, looking at reflections of his face and the ceiling in its depths—and more importantly, as we tried to scold him into paying attention—I realized that we bear a large portion of the blame, too.

Not so long ago, I read somewhere that when we’re trying to make the liturgy “relevant” for our young people, the opposite of boring is not entertaining, but meaningful. That’s what I want for my children. Alex shows some really wonderful early signs of reaching that goal—he’s trying to listen to Paul’s brutally convoluted rhetoric and make sense of it, and when he doesn’t (which is every week, of course), he tugs on my arm and says plaintively, “I don’t understand.” I love that about him.

But I think as his parents, we have a huge role in this too. Guidance and formation might happen without us…but it’s not very likely.

“Alex,” I said, “you know, Jesus didn’t walk around being all solemn all the time. He loved to laugh and tell jokes. Jesus was a human being, too.”

Two little ones screamed for attention then, and we never finished the conversation. But maybe that’s okay. Because this isn’t really a conversation that ever gets “finished,” is it?

Published in: on November 21, 2011 at 6:27 am  Comments (19)  
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Blowing In the Wind

The smell caught me…that distinct, absolutely divine scent that only comes in the fall, the smell of dead leaves. I think of Anne Shirley rhapsodizing over dead fir leaves, and her friends thinking it somehow unholy to think of things dead in Heaven. I think it’s just one of those “Yay God”-worthy moments, realizing that God can take death and make something so beautiful of it.

Alex has been waiting for the chance to jump in the leaves. Julianna has been waiting for the chance to plunge through them and kick them up, just like her mommy loves to do in the fall. Nicholas is ready to follow his siblings’ lead, wherever it takes him.

The sun shines warm, tempered by the chill of a wind waiting to steal the warmth as evening draws near. The smell drifts upward as I crouch close to the ground with the camera.

Time to dig small hands in the leaves, to crinkle them beneath fingernails, and fling them skyward.

Yay God, indeed.

Shared with Wordful Wednesday at Angie’s Seven Clown Circus.

Published in: on November 16, 2011 at 4:43 am  Comments (6)  
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Time, Talent, Pride

“The one who had received five talents came forward
bringing the additional five.
He said, ‘Master, you gave me five talents.
See, I have made five more.’
His master said to him, ‘Well done, my good and faithful servant.
Since you were faithful in small matters,
I will give you great responsibilities.
Come, share your master’s joy.”

(Mt. 25)

“Much will be required of the person entrusted with much, and still more will be demanded of the person entrusted with more.”

(Lk. 12:48)

God is busy, may I help you?

Not long ago, I came across a blog post that asked, “How big is your plate?” She was reflecting on busyness and how we prioritize our commitments. How to set limits, to say enough is enough, I can’t do any more. I thought of my mother telling me, “You can do many ministries consecutively, but not necessarily concurrently.”

Among people of faith, there’s a strong predisposition to encourage women to focus on the vocation, or ministry, of motherhood, and to lay the rest of it aside until that commitment is largely fulfilled. But as I was pondering last week, if we’re given gifts—talents (how interesting it is that the word should be translated that way!)—are we not meant to use them all? And if we simply ignore them for a couple of decades, aren’t we, in effect, burying them?

That is the question each one of us faces. Where do we draw the line between giving back/paying forward the gifts we have been given, and thinking the world can’t possibly get by without our particular charism? One is stewardship; the other is pride. And it’s really easy to stray across the line.

A few years ago I probably would have built a big soapbox and tried to tell the world how to tell the difference. But like another blog friend, the more I learn about God, the less certain I am of anything except that absolute certainty is more likely to be a harbinger of pride than stewardship. I can’t claim to know where anyone else’s line is drawn. I can only do my utmost to stay on the right side of it in my own life…and to correct course when it becomes clear I’ve wandered into the path of oncoming traffic.

Published in: on November 13, 2011 at 8:19 pm  Comments (13)  
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Sometimes, You Need

BIRD FREED

Sometimes, you need inspiration. Or motivation.

Other times, you need a nice long chat with a friend. Sometimes, you need an hour or two in the middle of nowhere, with nothing to distract you from the quiet your soul is crying out for. Sometimes, you need to take a break, no matter how worthwhile the focus of your efforts.

Sometimes, you just need a nap.

Sometimes, you don’t know what you need. You just know something’s off. Out of sync. You feel restless. Discontented. You know the stock answer: “Our hearts are restless until they rest in you.” But somehow that doesn’t really seem like an answer, but a question. Because that quote implies that you’re neglecting your duty to look for God. But after all, if you already seek to structure your life according to what God is asking of you, for how to use the gifts you’ve been given wisely…well, then, you’re already looking for God, aren’t you? You just have gotten out of sync with Him. And having it pointed out really doesn’t help.

Sometimes you have to beat the demon out on your own. But other times, God steps in, and when you arrive home from an outing with little ones, you find emails in your inbox providing direction and just enough inspiration to jar the loose gears back into place. And you begin anew.

Just Write
Published in: on October 5, 2011 at 5:04 am  Comments (4)  
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A Dangerous Prayer

Photo by wenzday01 via Flickr

At 9:55 a.m. on a Sunday morning, we wrestled one unwilling girl and two boys along for the ride up the mauve-carpeted aisle to the empty front pew beside the music area. Christian put a protesting Julianna at the end by the teen ensemble, where she could have maximum exposure to the music. The community hummed around us as the kids unpacked the church books. Alex shoved The Clown of God into my hand, and even though I hate that book, even though we really don’t read to the kids anymore at church, I obliged, since there were still five minutes before Mass started.

When the guitar began—a very distinct strum pattern—my ears perked up. I knew it, but I couldn’t place it until the teens began singing: Open the eyes of my heart, Lord…

I closed the book, but the music peeled off into silence; they were only checking sound. It was Communion before the song resurfaced, and the arrangement of the pew had shifted; after wrestling Julianna up to Communion, she sat at my end of the row. I closed my eyes and tried to internalize the prayer.

Open the eyes of my heart, Lord, open the eyes of my heart. I want to see you. I want to see you.

It took all of three seconds to realize that this is a very dangerous prayer. Dangerous, because to be open to God is to see things that force us to rethink our most cherished convictions. Any philosophy, any belief, any certainty—however pure and noble and holy—can become an idol, fixed in stone and incapable of responding to a reality that is in constant motion. That doesn’t mean it’s wrong, it just means that it’s become self-serving instead of God-centered. The hallmark of spiritual growth is uncertainty, a painful awareness of how much we don’t know, and a longing, a questing, to understand more, to embrace the unknowing.

I’m going through one of those soul-stretching times right now, largely off the radar of this blog, because the subjects are too personal. Insights into the nature of oneself never come singly; they always pile one atop the next until I’m sure the tower must come tumbling down into a pile of rubble, burying me in the collapse.

Of course, it never does. I’m always grateful for soul-stretching…after it’s done. In the middle of it, not so much. It’s more like a scrabble for traction at the edge of a cliff. But, like seeking a fourth pregnancy, even though large parts of my mind cried out, “Enough!”, being open to God is a conscious choice to look big picture, to focus long-term instead of allowing myself to be overwhelmed by the difficulty of the present.

It would be easier to build my beliefs and philosophies around me. But I know that doing so will only trap me inside, until I discover, too late, that God is all around, and I’m on the wrong side of the wall to meet Him. And so I won’t close the door on further stretching. I’ll keep praying that dangerous prayer. I’ll keep questioning, and seeking, and living with uncertainty, in the hopes that as I stumble along, a power greater than me will keep me from hurtling into the abyss to either side.

On In Around button 

Published in: on August 15, 2011 at 7:12 am  Comments (8)  
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Holy Places

This is the Eucharistic chapel at our local Newman Center. It sits outside the church proper, completely walled off, with a door that remains closed at all times, and many would say that for those reasons, it was designed “wrong.” And yet when I think of holy spaces—places where I find God, where His presence wraps around me and fills me up, this place is at the top of the list.

There are other holy spaces in my world, places where the silence catches my breath and lifts the pressure from my mind—my parents’ farm, the top of a mountain in Rocky Mountain National Park, where we ate lunch one day on vacation. But these are outdoors. In all the world, the only manmade place that has ever helped me feel the presence of God this clearly is this small room.

To come here to pray requires effort. I must traverse miles of busy four-lane road past by stoplights, businesses, schools, even Planned Parenthood. Twist around old, beat-up apartment houses, into the shadow of towering parking structures. There’s virtually no free parking, so I even have to plan the time of day. And perhaps that effort prepares my heart, lays it open to be touched.

In this place, I have knelt before the simple wooden Tabernacle, my soul raw with anxiety, racked by questions and doubts too frightening to share with anyone but God. I have leaned my head against rough stone walls that catch the ends of my hair, seeking stillness of mind to hear the still small voice of the Lord. I knelt here on my wedding day.

In this place, the light filters through stained glass and a telescoped skylight and becomes a tangible thing, the presence of God, the touch of the Holy Spirit. You can’t touch it, but you can feel it.

May God bless the hands that built this space, the minds that designed it, and all those who retreat here to find peace and understanding.

On In Around button

Published in: on June 1, 2011 at 5:19 am  Comments (7)  
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Reflections on the End of the World

Taken May 22, 2011

Image by BFS Man via Flickr

If you knew this was your last day on earth, what would you do today?

Usually when people ask this question, they’re trying to get us to think about our lives differently, to rearrange our priorities properly. It’s a rhetorical device used to make the point that a lot of what we spend our time doing isn’t really all that important.

So what would I do, if today was the end of all things? Well, I’d do a lot of things. I’d keep the kids home from school. Leave the computer off (because obviously the novel’s not gonna get finished anyway). Go out in the middle of nowhere and sit for a couple of hours. Take the whole family out for a 5-star dinner and eat whatever I want, as much as I want.

I can come up with quite a few ways to spend my last day on Earth. You know what all of them have in common? They’re all things you can’t do day after day. What I just described is not sustainable. You have to live real life.

The fact is, we’re never going to know when the end of all things is approaching. People may try to nail down an exact date, like Harold Camping, or they may say, “We may not know exactly when, but everything predicted in the Bible is coming true: wars, natural disasters…so I know it’s coming soon!” The trouble is, wars and natural disasters have always been with us and will always be with us, whether we like it or not. I don’t believe we’re in the end times any more now than they were in 1201 A.D., when an earthquake killed over a million people in Egypt and Syria.

I know none of you need convincing on this topic. I’m only bringing it up to point out that we can’t live “like it’s the last day on Earth”—unless we rethink what that means. We can’t spend our savings, ignore our health in the interest of enjoying the bounty of the world. We can’t stop working and paying the bills in the interest of spending quality time with our families. All we can do is live our everyday lives in the best way we know how: juggling responsibility and relaxation, family and work, and striving to discern the path of righteousness through petty squabbles and earth-shattering decisions. And if we’re doing that, then why worry about when the end is coming? We’re already doing everything we can to be ready.

Published in: on May 25, 2011 at 6:55 am  Comments (9)  
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