The Death of Going Back

Marc Barnes over at BadCatholic just wrote a great piece on how he could never “de-convert” from Christianity. I want to share just a bit of it here.

“I confess that Christianity is like a dog at my heels. I can’t shake it. I used to never pray, and was happy. Now, if I don’t pray, I am miserable. The love of Christ is terrifying, because it has changed me into a self for whom prayer is a necessity. Is this weakness? Perhaps, but it is also love! When we love we are changed by the beloved, changed to a person for whom the beloved is an integral part of our being, identity, and existence. Truly loving someone makes the decision not to love them a denial, not a change, a death of self, not a ‘leaving behind.’”

This, I think, is the crux of why most people don’t practice daily meditative prayer. It certainly gets at why I didn’t really take my prayer life seriously for so long, years after I even intellectually assented that daily prayer was necessary.

I, like most people, do just fine without prayer.

It’s important to acknowledge that the danger of ignoring daily prayer is not that your life will fall apart without it; at least, not for most people.

The danger is that your life won’t fall apart without it.

I didn’t really realize I wanted my life to fall apart until I waded further into the stream of Christ’s love. The closer I got to Him, the more often I acknowledged His presence, the longer I went between knowing I wanted a deeper relationship with Him and finally pursuing that relationship, the more I realized I was not satisfied.

Life as is was not good enough anymore. I wanted life, and life to the full.

All the encounters I had with Him and the Church He left us kept hinting at a life bigger and more dangerous and more adventurous than the one I was living, and try as I might, I couldn’t quite access that life until I made daily prayer a priority.

I think my wife can attest to the transformation my life has taken over the last several years, particularly the last 12-18 months, which is when daily prayer became more of a reality than something I just talked about wanting to do.

Things have changed. Things that were once really important to me have faded to the background. Some of my favorite sins are no longer a part of my life. Others are less so. My life, on the whole, is noticeably different than it once was.

I am not perfect. To be honest, I’ve found other sins have become more prominent in the absence of some of my old reliables. But that’s because I’ve been confronted with all the parts of my soul, with all that encompasses my reality, rather than that which I would allow myself and others to really see.

Just like getting married and moving in with my wife made some new faults conspicuous that had once been hidden, as well as revealing some virtuous dispositions I hadn’t previously been aware of inside of me, so has engaging in daily communion with Christ forced out into the light more of me, good and bad, than I had allowed before.

And while this hasn’t been easy, and while at times I wish I could go back to ignoring parts of myself and reality that are unpleasant, I know I can’t. Not really.

Even if I left my wife, the depth and breadth of our relationship has changed me, and I would be aware, not only of those parts of me I was going to try to re-hide from the world, but of what I was missing. I’d be aware that the moments spent falling asleep together were far richer than any late night I might have at a bar. I’d forever know that the feel of my daughter’s skin on my lips just once was a pleasure no number of cigarettes could match. I’d always have imprinted on my memory the board games and the “clean-the-house” days and the car rides whose mundanity still surpassed in rich beauty anything that brief encounters with any number of women could touch.

Just as my wife has forever changed me in a way that even leaving her couldn’t undo, so has He. So has prayer.

Even if I gave up trying to become “good” at prayer, if I stopped making it a priority, if I stopped encouraging others to do it as well, I would always be aware of what I was missing. I think I would even feel guilty, but it wouldn’t be guilt in the sense of “you’re not doing what you should”; it would be guilt in the sense of “you left behind the Love of your Life, even after all the joy they gave you”.

I couldn’t go back, because I am not who I was. And I don’t want to be.

I want to be with Him, I want to become like Him, I want to see Him in all the people and moments that fill my life, because every time I’ve taken a step in that direction, even the difficult ones, I’ve been surprised by the swell of life that sweeps me into His current.

And I want to keep praying, because encountering Jesus in personal prayer, along with a life filled with His sacramental grace, is what has made this washing in joy possible. I can’t stop, not without losing myself, and when I think about what I’ve left behind since embarking on my journey with Christ, I find it to be crumbs from the crust of the feast I am just now beginning to taste.

The Death of My Chair

There are two chairs in my house of which I am the main tenant: the recliner in the basement, and the big chair with the ottoman in the upstairs sitting room. The recliner is in our main living space, and it’s where I sit to watch TV and movies, chart the St. Louis Cardinals’ continued excellence via a variety of websites, and, of course, blog. The other chair is where I sit to pray and read.

Guess which one broke?

I sat in my recliner so often that the right side of the seat simply collapsed. Despite being terribly disorienting (I just walked circles in the basement for a while before curling up in the corner…I’d never sat anywhere else), the chair’s demise also called for some deep self-reflection.

How much time was I spending in that chair? And how much weight must I have gained?

Needless to say, these were questions whose answers I didn’t like.

I like to think of myself as “someone who doesn’t watch a lot of TV”, and I’ve probably said that to a lot of people, but it’s simply not true. I guess I don’t watch a lot of TV shows, but I could watch reruns of my favorites fifty times. And then there’s always sporting events. When the NHL playoffs are on, I try not to miss a game of any of the series if I can help it. During the fall, I watch a lot of NFL. And if the Redbirds are on ESPN? Forget about it. It’s on.

That ends up being a lot of time in front of the tube, especially for a guy who claims not to watch much.

The upstairs chair, on the other hand, is doing fine.

I’ve been better, especially in the last year or so, about making time for my daily meditative prayer. I would say I’m definitely at the point where I do it more days than I don’t: most weeks, I’m probably at least 4 for 7. Now, 4 for 7 would get you into Cooperstown for sure, but this ain’t baseball we’re talking about. It’s preparation for my eternal destiny. So I’m thinking I should step up my game, just in case.

My point is this: I think many people, myself included, probably WAY underestimate how much time we waste, especially when it comes to television. And many people, myself included, probably WAY overestimate how much time they spend specifically devoted to building a relationship with Christ, or relationships with other people for that matter.

The thing is, as I’ve said in other posts, the things I do in the upstairs chair are always life-giving. Reading, praying, writing with pen and paper: those are what make me feel most alive, most aware, most connected with myself and God and others.

The things I do in my downstairs chair are life-passing. Watching LOST or The Office reruns, finding myself somehow glued to Independence Day for the thirtieth time, falling asleep with Cheeto powder still covering my fingers and bare belly; these things pass time without making any demands on me. The time slips by without me having to try at anything. Yeah, Yoda, I know there is no try…so I guess it’s more, the time slips by while I “do not”.

I find myself in the one chair because it’s easier. But every time I make that tiny effort to get into the other one, I find myself refilled, rejuvenated. Not to say there aren’t times I go away from prayer completely clueless as to what God wanted me to hear or that I don’t sometimes sit down to write and shoot blanks, but what it does to me as a person, who I become, is more full and rich and thick with life. Perhaps some individual endeavors leave me feeling frustrated or sad or annoyed or tired, but at least I’m feeling something real! At least I’m not just closer to bedtime or the weekend or the summer or whatever it is I’ve convinced myself will be better or easier than the present moment.

Since beginning this post weeks ago (some just come easier than others), I’ve gotten a new recliner. Let’s hope the upstairs chair is the next one on the curb. If it is, I know my soul and my life will be better for it.

Plus, recliners are super expensive.

Lectio Divina

If you want to learn more about Lectio Divina, or if you know all about it and just want a refresher, check out this website. It’s concise, but rich.

http://www.valyermo.com/ld-art.html

The Birth of Vocabulary

If you read my last post, you know it was about what prayer is not. At least, what it is not for me. It is not a booming voice. It is not a miraculous dialogue. It is not a euphoric or ecstatic personal conflagration sparked by the Divine.

So what is it?

My whole life, I was taught that prayer was “a conversation with God”, but I wasn’t sure how to converse with Someone Whose voice I could not hear. My prayer time seemed much more an exercise in trying to keep my mind blank than anything else.

But as I’ve grown and read and learned from others, I have learned to hear God.

I don’t hear a booming voice like Moses heard on the mountain. I don’t even hear the “still, small voice” that Elijah heard in 1st Kings; at least, not in the way Elijah did.

What I hear is something of a catching in my soul, a sieve that sifts out all but what I need to hear, and then simply, inaudibly, whispers, “Here. This.”

I was taught the process of Lectio Divina by my first spiritual director and have been reminded and rejuvenated in that process many, many times by books and saints and friends and priests over the last seven years or so. It is the most direct way that God speaks to me.

I have always experienced God’s presence in a variety of ways, but there is something unique and intimate and startling about the way He comes to me through this process of prayer. And it’s the piece I find most people are missing.

I’ve heard friends and family talk about how they see God in nature or how music makes them feel a Presence or how the gym or the track or the studio is their “church”. While I of course agree that they likely are having some sort of experience of God’s Truth, Beauty, and Goodness in those moments, it’s just not the same as what happens in prayer.

Being a dad has changed the way I see my faith and my personal relationship with Christ. When I think about hearing God’s voice, I wonder if I will hear it more clearly and maybe even audibly when I “grow up” more in my faith. Right now, my daughter doesn’t understand much of what I say. And what I tell her is probably almost indiscernible from the rest of the noises and sounds and even voices she hears everyday.

But when I slow down and say one thing very clearly to her, her focus sharpens and she understands. I often say it softly and lean into her as I speak. Sometimes, like when I’m teaching her a new sign or trying to get her to stop her whole smack-myself-really-hard-in-the-head-for-no-apparent-reason thing, I will move her hand where I want it to go, make it do what I want it to do.

This is the still, small voice I hear in Scripture. This is the type of communication I experience. Perhaps I will hear a booming voice someday. But for now, the quiet words of the Gospels sink into me as I read them, and that is enough. As a matter of fact, they’re all I can really understand. I think if God started speaking full sentences to me, my broken little soul would implode.

So instead, He whispers to me, gently, repeatedly, simply, like a Father trying to teach His child to understand. He is building the vocabulary of my love.

One day, I believe we will sing to each other, and maybe it will sound something like this.

(The only reason I’m including this is because I love it and it uses the phrase “still, small voice” in it…and I think it’s one of the most lyrically rich songs I’ve ever heard. Plus it’s my blog and I get to do what I want)

The Death of Expectations

I’m sure this will come as quite a surprise to all of you, but I’ve spent a lot of time in Catholic schools.

I went to a Catholic preschool, grade school, high school, college (for my undergrad and then again for my Master’s), and now have taught in a Catholic high school for the last five years.

That’s a lot of Jesus-learnin’.

I could go on for days praising Catholic education and all the blessings it has brought the world (and to me, for that matter), but I won’t. The reason I bring up the deluge of Catholic schooling I’ve received is that, for all the time I spent there, I’m still just now figuring out how to pray.

I have long known that the spoken prayers we Papists say were not supposed to be the extent of our prayer, and that “meditative” prayer was just as, if not more, important. I heard it all through grade school and high school, and after years of exposure to the idea, I finally  really gave it a try my junior year.

I remember distinctly my sixteen year old self sitting on the edge of my bed at night, trying as hard as I could to clear my mind of everything, keep it as blank as possible, and wait for a voice to come. I would crack one eye every once in a while to peek at the clock, because I knew I was supposed to give it at least ten minutes to work, but other than that, I sat really still and was really quiet.

It didn’t work.

It was a frustrating and scary enterprise. I wasn’t hearing anything. I knew my teachers said that it didn’t always work right away, that we had to “learn how to listen to God”, but after weeks of doing this every night for five to ten minutes, I had heard nothing.

Now, there was some definite fruit borne from those times, but I didn’t see it until way later. And in the meantime, I was left wondering, for the first time, whether God was real, whether my faith was true, and whether the way I had always seen the world was about to fall apart.

My faith survived those years, mostly because of the witness of my parents and teachers, but I was definitely left thinking that mental prayer “just wasn’t for me”.

In college, the friends I made and books I read lead me deeper into my faith and inspired me to begin spiritual direction with a local priest. And slowly, bit by bit over the seven years since then, I have begun learning how to pray.

I found the first step to building a prayer life was letting my expectations die.

Now, anything is possible in prayer, and God will speak to each person in a unique way. I know some people have and do “hear God’s voice” in a literal way. I know God still speaks to some people in dreams. I’ve even met several people who have witnessed or experienced personal miracles of healing (one of which is being pursued by the Vatican as a possible support for a canonization cause!).

But that ain’t me.

For me, deep, fruitful prayer couldn’t begin until I stopped waiting to hear a voice with my ears or even my head. I had to quit trying to be a Buddhist, clearing my mind of all thought whatsoever. I even had to quit waiting to feel good about things after leaving prayer.

That’s not what prayer is supposed to be. It’s not how people enter into relationship with Jesus Christ (which is what prayer is all about!). Even those who see miracles or hear voices or have dreams must first till the soil of their souls with the holy mundanity of daily meditative prayer.

In the next couple of posts I will talk more about what prayer is for me (and what it’s supposed to be), but I think many people are stymied at the beginning of their attempts at building a prayer life because they place a set of expectations on God before they enter in.

If you don’t come back for the next posts, I guess I would just leave you with this thought:

Don’t limit what Christ can do or how He wants do it. Just show up, open Scripture, and let Him surprise you with His love.

My Most Important Post on Prayer

Before I say another word about prayer, it ultimately comes down to one thing.

Do it.

Just pray. If you haven’t spent at least ten minutes with the Gospel today, take the time you would have spent reading whatever slop I have to offer and spend it with Him. Right now.

Here’s today’s Gospel if you need something upon which to meditate.

Gospel: Jn 15:18–21

Jesus said to his disciples, “If the world hates you, remember that the world hated me before you. This would not be so if you belonged to the world, because the world loves its own. But you are not of the world since I have chosen you from the world; because of this the world hates you.

“Remember what I told you: the servant is not greater than his master; if they persecuted me, they will persecute you, too. Have they kept my teaching? Will they then keep yours? All this they will do to you for the sake of my name because they do not know the One who sent me.”

Prayer and the Death of Comfort

As I write this, I’m laying on our love-seat, feet up, head propped on a pillow, belly full of milk and my wife’s peanut-butter cookies, Blues playoff hockey on the television, favorite pair of jeans unbuttoned and plain white t-shirt soft on my big ol’ belly.

I couldn’t be more comfortable.

I think Jesus is mad.

If there’s one thing that I think Christ hates, it’ss people being comfortable. When people are comfortable, they get complacent, and when they get complacent, they forget the reality of their situation: we’re thiiiiis close to Hell. Always.

The more I read the Gospels and the more I read and listen to people holier than myself, the more I become aware of the prevalence and importance of paradox in Christianity.

G.K. Chesterton is the master of expressing the paradoxes of Christianity, which is a big part of why I love his writings and quote him so often. These paradoxes are a necessity, of course, because we try to speak of realities which language is not rich enough to express.

We need paradox. Christ is man and God. The Father is just and merciful. The Spirit is within us and around us. The rich are poor. The first are last. The humble are exalted.

There’s just no way to describe the mysteries of God; when we try, we end up with silly words like “consubstantial”, simply because it’s the best we can do. What word could otherwise describe the Trinity, whose infinity our finite brains cannot stretch to contain? So we are stuck with paradox.

Jesus is not part man and part God; such would be a contradiction. One cannot both be and not be something at the same time. To be a man is to not be a God. To be a God is to not be a man. That’s why Christ’s response to His critics was simple:

“I AM.”

That is paradox. An absurdity on the surface that, in the end, simply must be true. The premises of the argument don’t seem to lead to the conclusion, except for the fact that they must.

This is why I have found that I cannot know Jesus without prayer. I can wonder at Him in the Eucharist. I can tremble before Him in the confessional. But I don’t know Him, not really, unless I spend time intimately with Him every day.

He gives me something different every day. When my pride starts welling up within me, suddenly that day’s Gospel is about humility and meekness. When I get down on myself and start to give in to self-loathing, it seems to always work out that the readings those days are about the Father’s infinite love for me.

And part of me wants to cry out, “Which is it, God? Make up your mind! Should I be humble or proud, weak or strong, silent or loud?”

And every day, all he says is, “Yes.”

Yes I should be humble, because left to my own devices I fall into sin pretty quickly and pretty deeply. And, yes, I should be proud, because for some reason God saw fit to make me and allow me to be a temple of His Spirit. Yes, I should be weak and let the Father carry me where He wills, and yes, I should be strong, the upright man God deigned to be worthy of loving a woman and creating human life.

And yes, I should shut up about myself and all the trivial mess I waste words on, and yes, I should shout about Him and His love and His saving plan. Even on the internet, if need be.

The next several posts will be about prayer, because there’s simply nothing more important in this life. The sacraments are our lifeblood, and they keep us from death, but prayer is what makes this life worth living.

Intimacy. Relationship. Vulnerability. Joy. All that is to be found in practicing the presence of Christ through meditative prayer.

If we forget why we live the Christian life, if we get comfortable and think we are saved, if we lose our connection with the person of Jesus Christ, then suddenly our sins seem more attractive. Suddenly God’s plan seems like folly. Suddenly Hell, that awful necessity of God’s loving gift of free will, settles slowly in our souls.

All of the fruits of God’s love are waiting for us. In the chapel, in the yard, in our living rooms…wherever we can spend real, focused time with Jesus. And so also waits Satan and our selfishness: if we don’t build that relationship with Christ, if we decide our own time and our own talks and our own wills are more important than God’s, the alternative is always available. I hear it whisper to me, even now.

This life is a risk. It is the great cosmic risk of the Divine. It is God allowing us to choose Him or ourselves, Heaven or Hell. And if we get too comfortable, if we don’t continually and daily remind ourselves of all the facets of Christ’s person, all the various angles of paradox that make up His shape, we risk losing Him forever. We risk missing out on all that we ever wanted, all that we dreamed of as a child, all that our hearts ache for in the dark watches of the night.

Is that a risk worth taking?