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?

Belonging

Small events make up my life. Gathering with family and friends, work, hobbies. Nothing to write home about, as they used to say.

I’ve never had a major impact. I’ve not filled a concert hall or invented a gadget or discovered anything scientific or won a Pulitzer Prize (or any prize for that matter, except that time I won second place in a 10K race).

I wonder how it feels to stand before a large crowd and hear their applause, accept their praise.

Praise comes to me in small doses. “That was so kind of you,” a friend says. “How thoughtful,” says another.

I collect them—these acknowledgements that someone has seen me, that I made a difference—and savor each one.

When I let the dog out early on fall mornings before the sun has risen, I look toward the lake where the sky is dark and see in that black sky the moon and stars extending forever.

I am part of the vastness of the universe.

The Mystery of God’s Love

Why God chose me is a mystery—inexplicable and unimaginable, really—but a truth I have known my whole life. Visions, dreams, and intense prayer experiences have all revealed God’s presence in my life and the depth of his love for me.

Living with mystery—accepting it and embracing it—is the invitation God extends to me every day. And I have tried to live by accepting the mystery of how God interacts with me and the ways he intervenes in my life.

Until recently, I have held my “God moments” as private, but now I feel invited to share them. This is a shift in my thinking, and as I reflect on it, I think of Moses in the desert for forty years. I was twenty-one when I started having mystical visions and sixty-one when I started blogging about my spiritual journey.

As a child, I felt a strong connection to Jesus and a deep desire to grow in my relationship with him. But at twenty-one, I went through a very dark period in my life and was in deep emotional pain. Unhealthy relationships and overindulging in alcohol were the outward signs of my pain, and, at the same time, I started to attend daily Mass to pray for a conversion.

“I want to be zapped like Saint Paul,” I told my pastor. He was quite certain that would not happen and encouraged me to be diligent in daily prayer and to keep turning away from unhealthy behaviors and relationships.

Then at the end of Ash Wednesday Mass, the priest said, “Go now, cleansed in mind and body, to love and serve the Lord.”

Cleansed in mind and body was exactly what I was not.

I began to cry and knelt to pray: “Please, God, cleanse me.” As I prayed, I saw in a vision a large sword cutting me open, and I watched as all kinds of darkness and filth spilled out. It was like a river flowing out of me until I was empty.

I felt gutted, as though there was nothing left to me. The space that had been filled with so much darkness was now ready to receive light.

All of a sudden, I felt free, and I knew God had zapped me with grace.

“God zapped me,” I shouted to my pastor as I left church, tears of joy running down my cheeks. He conceded that God did sometimes “zap” people, but he cautioned that I would still need to be diligent in prayer and monitor my behavior.

I remember the reactions of people at work that morning. Apparently being “zapped” by God’s grace was visible because all day I was asked what had happened to me. “You are glowing,” people commented.

I wish I could say that experience signaled the end of my dark days, but it took years before I could completely turn away from destructive behaviors—years of prayer and lots of therapy.

But that Ash Wednesday vision and the experience of knowing God’s love and compassion stayed with me and helped me trust the mystery of God’s love.

Live in the calm

My friend Jim and I stayed at the New Jersey Shore for much of the winter he had brain cancer. Friends had generously given us their oceanside condo, and in between cancer treatments and visits to Jim’s mother, we made the Shore our home.

Jim had always loved being at the Shore. He saw God’s grandeur in the vastness of the ocean and God’s power in the roaring waves. “Look how big our God is,” he would say.

I saw it, too, but I don’t think as manifestly as Jim.

Until that December, when for five straight days, the ocean was completely calm, a sea of glass stretching out to the horizon. Every day, we marveled at the sight of the ocean without waves.

To me, it was miraculous and a sign.

Every day that week, I pondered God’s power in the undisturbed water meeting blue sky at the horizon—a portrait in blue.

On the fifth day, as I walked along the shoreline, stepping on the remnants of seashells that the surf had deposited there, I heard God speak to me.

This is how you are to live. Leave everything that is sharp and broken at the edge and move out into the calm of the ocean. Live in the calm.

That memory came back to me the other day when a friend recounted her amazement at being at the ocean. She had just come back from a week’s stay at the Jersey Shore and was in awe of the sight of water stretching out forever and the unrelenting waves.

It was the reminder I needed at that moment because my mother had just been released from hospital.

During her hospital stay and its aftermath, I have been feeling like the tumultuous ocean. Being in the emergency room took me back to the hours I spent in a similar room when Jim got sick.

The worst day of my mother’s hospitalization was the one where she clutched at her throat all day, clearly in distress, and we wondered if she would survive. She did, and her doctor decided not to do any more tests. To what end? She is ninety-three.

We took her home the following day, and she is regaining her strength. Like Jim, my mother hates going to the hospital where she has so little control over what happens to her.

She is in God’s hands, I have repeatedly reminded myself since the day the ambulance came, in the same way I used to say Jim was in God’s hands.

I don’t know what God is doing with my mother, but I am clear that God is inviting me to let go and to trust that my mother is in God’s hands.

God invites me to live in the calm, beyond the raging emotions, the drama of relationship dynamics and my own fears of being vulnerable. God reminds me that I will find peace in the calm.

Let go, God says to me. Live in the calm.

Live radically

Planted in my heart early in life was a desire to live the Gospel as the early Christians had, to live in community and share my possessions. This early Christian way of life was different from what I saw around me, radically different.

For a few years after college, I was affiliated with a congregation of Catholic Sisters, thinking I might become a nun. But when I decided not to enter the community, I was unsure what was next for me.

At the time, I was working for a small nonprofit, matching volunteers with people who have developmental disabilities for one-to-one advocacy relationships. It was important work that had a big impact on the people who were involved, but it did not feel radical enough for me.

Living in community as the early church had (or as a nun might) shaped not just work hours, but every hour of the day, and I wanted that—for my life to be wholly lived for God, to have God be the number one priority in my life. I wanted to invest every day in my God relationship and to be submerged in the spiritual, like a fish in the ocean.

During my garden year, I was continually led to pray with Matthew 25:31-46, the Final Judgment, and I gained greater clarity about how Jesus inhabits vulnerable people so that what we do for “the least” is what we do for Jesus. I remember replacing the word “for” with “to,” and seeing Jesus as the person who is hungry, thirsty, naked, ill, a stranger and imprisoned. “I am doing this (or not) to Jesus,” I would say.

That realization affected how I interacted with every vulnerable person. If I walked by a homeless person without at least saying hello, I knew I was bypassing Jesus, being rude and unfriendly. If I let an opportunity pass to visit someone in hospital or another institution, I knew I was neglecting Jesus, and I imagined Jesus tsk-tsking at me for my lack of concern.

It was not just some poor person I was neglecting; it was Jesus himself; I was deliberately choosing to ignore Jesus.

After a year of discernment as to how to live Matthew 25 in the most radical way, I moved to a l’Arche community, which seemed pretty radical. Then, perhaps even more radical, I lived and worked with Mennonites.

And what I learned from four years of trying to live some radical way of life was that no one way of life is more radical than another and no one way is better. I had left everything familiar only to discover that the outer structure of my life had very little to do with my interior spiritual journey.

It turned out that the nonprofit work I had been doing was radical enough.

I realized that what helped me live the Gospel most radically was to make God my priority and to spend time in prayer every day; and I could do that anywhere.

What is unique to you?

I have started thinking about retirement, and I know myself well enough to know that even though I will stop going to an office every day, I will need to do something, because I am not good at being idle.

I have been asking in prayer what God wants me to do in the next chapter of my life and have made lists of possible ways to fill my retirement—from dog walker to non-profit consultant.

Some days, I long to do something that requires very little thought or preparation, and other days, I feel a responsibility to pay forward what I have learned from my work.

“What is uniquely yours?” my spiritual director asked when I raised the subject of my next chapter. She believes I have a responsibility to pass on what God has given me, a message I have heard from her before and others throughout my life.

I have had so many “unique” experiences—from living in l’Arche and serving as a Mennonite volunteer to leading a lay mission program that took me to different parts of the world. I have been blessed!

Since that conversation with my spiritual director, I have tried to be more attentive to what might be uniquely mine and how God may be inviting me to share what I have been given.

Each fall, I co-facilitate a day of reflection for our local Jesuit Volunteers, a group of post-college young adults who are dedicating a year to service in Detroit. My talk is on the spirituality of community, and I base most of my talk on my experiences in l’Arche.

I talk about my failures in community living and how my unrealistic expectations got in the way of being a good community member.

Lots of people fail at living in Christian community, so that is not unique to me, but being willing and able to talk publicly about my failure might put me in a more rarified group.

Prayer is another part of that talk, and I share some practical tips about theological reflection and Lectio Divina—also not uniquely mine, but perhaps my take on prayer is unique to me.

Then, two weeks ago at my book group, the topic of spirits came up. We were discussing The Turner House by Angela Flournoy, the story of an African American family living in Detroit. One of the sons in the story encounters a haint, a spirit that is part of some Southern traditions, which led to the discussion of spirits and our experiences of the supernatural.

I shared one of my mystical experiences, something I rarely do, because I have spent my life trying to seem normal, typical, ordinary—and having mystical experiences is anything but normal, typical or ordinary.

It was an aha moment—my mystical visions are unique to me. Throughout my life, God has given me intense prayer experiences and visions that have helped me, but which I have rarely shared with others. Is that my next chapter?