What I want

Last week Rachel Mankowitz wrote about hearing and trusting her internal voices speaking of what she does and does not want to do. I resonated.

I learned early on (probably before I was five) that what I wanted or did not want mattered little. I did what I was told—whether I wanted to or not—and rarely got anything I wanted, so I learned to stop wanting.

The depth of the disconnect was made clear to me when I was twelve years old and had my tonsils removed. On the way home from the hospital, my mother stopped at the grocery store and said I could pick one thing I wanted. I had no idea what I wanted and was overwhelmed by having to pick something. I remember standing in the store paralyzed by indecision. What did I want? No idea.

So, I picked something practical, something I thought my mother would like—dill pickles.  

I have spent a lot of my life doing things other people wanted me to do—out of guilt or not wanting to hurt someone’s feelings or some other version of making other people happy—while ignoring my own desires.

Therapy in my early thirties started a process of discovery, and by my late thirties, I began to identify some things I wanted.

I took my first real vacation, a windjammer cruise, when I was thirty-seven. It was thrilling to realize that I knew what I wanted and that I could make it happen.

At the end of a retreat in my early forties, I read Coming Down the Mountain by Thomas Hart, and I have kept a “cheat sheet” of questions from that book that I refer to regularly.

These questions have helped me gain clarity, and after years of asking them, I am much better at knowing what I want.

But I can still fall into the old patterns.

When I turned fifty, I made a “travel wish list” of places I wanted to visit over the next decade. Other than the Holy Land, my destinations were in the U.S. or Europe. Included at the end of that list was a thirty-day retreat, something my friend Jim had done, and he thought it would be good for me to do. I put it on the list more as a reminder because I could not foresee a time in my fifties when I would have the money and time to do it.

My sixties’ travel list included the retreat, along with the Holy Land and some of the European counties I had not managed to visit, but my sixties were full of upheaval, and I did not do much traveling. So my seventies’ list closely resembles the sixties’ list, including the retreat.

Now, I am in a place where I can do the thirty-day retreat, and so I signed up. I told my spiritual director, expecting her to be thrilled, but instead, she asked why I wanted to do a thirty-day. “Because Jim thought I should,” was my first response, and even I could hear how lame that sounded.

She suggested I pray about the retreat and ask God for clarity. So, I prayed, and I got clarity.

I realized that I feel passionate about European travel. I am energized by my volunteer work (especially supporting survivors of sexual assault) and the consulting work I am doing. I am excited about the Internship in Ignatian Spirituality and have clarity around how I want to use what I have learned (mainly in helping people process the experience of pilgrimage or mission trips). I am also drawn to officiating at weddings and funerals.

Where is the retreat in all that? I am indifferent.

Discernment is a big part of Ignatian Spirituality and following the process has helped me gain clarity about where God is calling me, and what I want to do.

Seeking

My morning meditation began with a quote from St. Francis: You are that which you are seeking.

What am I seeking? Good question.

Is that the same as, what do I desire?

That reflection led me to the question, what is my deepest desire?

As I pondered that question, the answer appeared: I want to be accepted.

This is not a new thought. I have long known that rejection is my primary brokenness; l’Arche taught me that.

People often asked me why I moved to l’Arche, a community where people with and without developmental disabilities live together in the spirit of the Beatitudes (Matthew 5:3-12).

What was the draw for me?

At first, I thought it was because I was already working with people who had disabilities, and this was just a more radical way of living out that mission. (I was trying to find the most radical way to live the Gospel, and this certainly seemed radical.)

As time went on, though, I came to understand my connection with people who had disabilities in a different light.

Jean Vanier, the founder of l’Arche, talked about the rejection people with disabilities can experience. Even at birth, a mother can involuntarily react negatively when told her newborn is disabled. She may change her opinion in time, but that initial reaction can be experienced by the newborn as rejection.

After I left l’Arche, I read How to be an Adult by David Richo, which invited me to discover my original wound. For me, it was rejection.

My mother’s first child was a boy, and she was thrilled. He was the proverbial apple of her eye. The next year, she had a girl—me.

I have often wondered if my mother knew beforehand that she did not want a daughter or if she only realized it when I was born. When the doctor said, “It’s a girl,” did she involuntarily blurt out ugh?

That is something I will never know.

What I have always known, though, is that I was not wanted, that something about me rubbed my mother the wrong way and that from the moment of my birth, she rejected me.

The people who lived in l’Arche seemed to intuitively understand this brokenness in me—much more clearly than I did at the time.

I remember praying in chapel one day and two of the men—both named Ross—entered chapel and sat on either side of me. They bowed their heads and joined me in silent prayer. I had never felt so accepted, so safe. It was as if they, and God, were saying, “We know your hurt, and we accept you as you are.”

In that moment, something cracked inside me. It felt like there had been a glass globe surrounding my wound, and their acceptance shattered the glass.

Their acceptance revealed to me this vulnerable place inside me.

Accepting my vulnerability and embracing my brokenness is what I seek.

What are you seeking? What is your deepest desire?

God is in charge

Surrender to God and he will do everything for you. Antiphon in the Liturgy of the Hours Office of Readings for Tuesday of Holy Week.

I can easily forget that God is in charge. In my relationships, my work, my volunteer activities and life in general, I can think that I am running the show and that everything depends on me. And then I can feel burdened, pressured to perform and sometimes overwhelmed.

Breathe, Madeline, I tell myself when I am feeling overwhelmed. You are not God. Everything does not depend on you. Surrender. Let God be God. Trust God.God reminds me all that I do really belongs to God. I have a part, but it is just a part. My job is to add my piece to bringing about the Kingdom—in some small way. I need to remember that God holds the whole picture.

Letting go and believing that God really is in charge challenges my trust and control issues.

I am a doer by nature, someone who jumps in and gets things done. I like accomplishing things, and I like challenges. The bigger the challenge, the more I enjoy it.

There is a line, though, between using my gifts and talents to further a mission and believing that my gifts and talents are the only thing that can accomplish the mission.

My personality type on the Enneagram is the Eight, also known as The Challenger. The Eight is said to be “powerful, dominating, self-confident, decisive, willful and confrontational.”  Oh yeah, that’s me for sure.

God seems to play off my Eightness, my innate love of a challenge. My work life has been a succession of small nonprofits that were facing uphill battles. It is as if God hears me repeatedly saying, “Put me in, Coach,” even though I don’t remember ever saying it. But, once I am in, I am all in, taking responsibility and getting things done.

When I start to feel overwhelmed, though, I know that I have moved from being a doer to being a controller. It is then that I need to surrender to God and trust that he will do everything for me. It is then that I need to remember that God is really in charge.My goal is to keep balance—to acknowledge my gifts and skills while remembering that the work is ultimately God’s. When I can let go and trust that God is in charge, my work and my life run smoother. Obstacles diminish; perspective is restored.

A Biblical image that helps me regain balance and trust is of Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego who were put into a fiery furnace because they would not turn from God and bow to the King. But rather than being burned God sends an angel to deliver them because they trusted God (Daniel 3:95)

Blessed be the God of Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego, who sent his angel to deliver the servants who trusted in him. God, send your angel to me.

Follow the signs

Church parking lots seem to attract people who like to go against the grain—they enter through the exits and exit through the entrances. Signs clearly designating which is an entrance and which is an exit don’t seem to matter. The pastor’s pleas to follow the directional arrows don’t seem to matter. When a car entering through an exit ran into a bicyclist in our church parking lot, I thought for sure that would be enough to change people’s driving practices, but people continued to disregard the signs and go the wrong way.

My suggestion was to install “do not back up” spikes, the kind I’d seen at the exits of rental car lots. I thought that they would definitely keep people from going the wrong way.

As I made that suggestion, I realized I wished I had those spikes installed at different times in my life—times when I was heading in the wrong direction, when I was making a choice that would lead me away from God.

 

I have been blessed by good friends who felt free enough to warn me that I was heading in the wrong direction, but those warnings were often not enough to stop me—not in the way spikes would have. No, I would often continue along some dangerous path and end up in a disastrous situation.

Why couldn’t I have spikes to stop me? What a life-saver they would have been. Imagine all the pitfalls I could have avoided.

Advent is a time to look at the direction my life is taking, to check and see if I am on the right path, going in the right direction.

John the Baptist and Mary are two prominent figures of Advent, two people who had great clarity about what God was asking of them. Each one stepped up in an extraordinary way to answer God’s call.

One of the things I love about Advent is that it shines a light on how God calls each of us to a particular mission. God did not call John the Baptist to do Mary’s mission nor Mary to do John’s.

I can sometimes be tempted to look at the work of others, to compare myself and ask if I should be doing something else, someone else’s mission. My mission can seem to be less important or impactful than what others are doing. My insecurities nip at me all along the path, reminding me of my inadequacies and failures.

But God calls me to ignore those negative messages and listen for affirmation as a sign that I am on the right path.

God calls me to fulfill my particular mission and trust that it is just what God is asking of me. I only need to stay focused on God’s call and keep moving forward; I simply need to follow the lights along my path. If I can just do that, I don’t need spikes to keep me from going the wrong way.