and add that your name is dirt

“Stop trying to think out a solution for the moment: there isn’t one. One day there may be; God will then show it to you. In the meantime, accept it all as being the big thing for God and his Church that he asks of you—that, and the depression too. You will find the relief of merely accepting, instead of struggling, wonderful; and I include in this, accepting anything in yourself, during the crisis, which seems to you a failure or fault. Don’t exonerate yourself, but just say you are sorry, briefly, to God, and add that your name is dirt—that’s what is to be expected from you—but you’re sorry, you are forgiven, and it is over. 

During the war I was simply terrified by air raids, and it was my lot to be in every one that happened in London—sometimes on the roofs of these flats, sometimes in the hospital… I tried to build up my courage by reason and prayer, etc. Then one day I realized quite suddenly: As long as I try not to be afraid I shall be worse, and I shall show it one day and break; what God is asking of me, to do for suffering humanity, is to be afraid, to accept it and put up with it, as one has to put up with pain (if it’s not druggable) or anything else. I am not going to get out of any of the suffering. From the time the siren goes until the All Clear, I am going to be simply frightened stiff, and that’s what I’ve got to do for the world—offer that to God, because it is that and nothing else which he asks of me.”

~Caryll Houselander

I sure love it when I read some sort of reflection or essay and find myself laughing out loud at the words—especially when it’s because of the intimacy (with God) and honesty of the author.

“…and add that your name is dirt,” certainly made me laugh… and pay attention to the rest of the essay!

I have been fighting a stiff, painful neck for over a week. In the past decade or so, I’ve had a number of issues with my neck and shoulders, including surgery on my cervical spine, so it is safe to say that I have learned many things that help me when I’m struggling with this type of pain.

But this time, nothing I’ve tried is working. Nothing is making it go away—or even feel much better.

What I hear in Caryll Houselander’s words is the wisdom that comes from knowing – from living – acceptance, rather than struggle.  Surrender, rather than self-sufficiency. And confidence in God’s presence in the every day of life, every single aspect of it, rather than worry or fear.

In other words—why do I think I have to… get over / get better / be better / succeed / try harder / pray harder… before God can use me?  Before I can offer my day and myself to God?

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NOTE: if you’re interested in learning a bit more about Caryll Houselander, check out this blog post by my friend, the talented Heather King.

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"If we only have sense enough to leave everything to the guidance of God's hand, we should reach the highest peak of holiness."

~Jean-Pierre de Caussade,

Abandonment to Divine Providence

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NOTE #2: All photos are from my recent drive and visit to the great city of St. Louis for this year's Catholic Media Conference!

mercy

image from A Circle of Friends

“Our personal lives and the lives of so many people are deeply affected by the staggering lack of forgiveness in our world. People are held captive by revenge and bitterness, by hostility and alienation…
 Lack of forgiveness—the showing of mercy to others—sabotages our ability to love. And without unfettered love in our lives, we distance ourselves from God and from others, often ending in a deep estrangement from the loving person we are called to be by God.”

~Edward O’Donnell, OCD,

 in Spiritual Life, Fall 2012

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Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if I had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great/And would suffice.

~Fire and Ice,

by Robert Frost

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praying at Mass

Santiago Atitlán, Guatemala

“We know now in what way Christ would live in our humanity. Not as One who, having proved his love, has gone back to his Father leaving us a sealed tomb, but as One who, having tasted to the full the joys and sorrows of human nature, having embraced the grief of mankind, having drained death to the last bitter dregs, sets his wounded feet in the dust again, takes bread into his wounded hands again, and seizing a doubting friend’s hand, thrusts I into his sounded heart; as though saying by his every act to all who would ever tremble and doubt: “I did not wipe the tears from the face of sorrow to lay sorrow by. I did not touch pain with fierce redeeming beauty to have done with it; I cannot give myself into the arms of death to cast death aside! I made all these things my own that the glory I gave to them should be yours, that while they remain with you, I shall remain with them.” He has taken all those things to himself, and has changed them all for us.”

~Caryll Houselander, as quoted in Magnificat, April 7, 2013

reevaluating, Lent, and resolutions

Via Dolorosa, Jerusalem

“As to your Lent… I can only tell you my own experience. A mass of good resolutions, I think, are apt to end up in disappointment and to make one depressed. Also direct fault-uprooting: it makes one concentrate too much on self, and that can be so depressing. The only resolution I have ever found works is: ‘Whenever I want to think of myself, I will think of God.’ Now, this does not mean, ‘I will make meditation on God,’ but just some short sharp answer, so to speak, to my thought of self, in God. For example:

‘I am lonely, misunderstood, etc.’‘The loneliness of Christ at his trial; the misunderstanding even of his closest friends.’

…This practice becomes a habit, and it is the habit which has saved me from despair!” 

~Caryll Houselander

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“Prayer is not about changing God, but being willing to let God change us, or as Step 11 in the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous says: “Praying only for the knowledge of his will”… True prayer is always about getting the “who” right. Who is doing the praying, you or God-in-you, “little old you” or the Eternal Christ Consciousness? Basically prayer is an exercise in divine participation—you opting in and God always there!” 

~Richard Rohr,  Daily Meditations 

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It’s been a long day—and, already, a long Lent.

Lake Thunderbird, Oklahoma

Here we are on the third week of Lent, and I could not tell you how well I’m doing with my Lenten resolutions. The honest to God truth is that I’m having a hard time remembering those well balanced and thought-out decisions that I came up with on Fat Tuesday as our family sat around the table and shared out loud our Lenten resolutions.

Please don’t misunderstand me. It’s not that I don’t believe in making them, or that I don’t think having resolutions is an important part of Lent.

It’s more that, in these simultaneously short and very long first three weeks of Lent, I have found myself operating and managing life events around me with very little of me available to give.  Like the widow’s mite, I’m giving from where it “hurts,” if you will.

The blessing of being aware of my own lack, of my diminished supply of self, is, of course, that I know without a doubt that anything that I am able to do or able to give, all I have to offer, is clearly not mine—it’s all God’s grace. 

It reminds me of a memorable story about Catholic author Flannery O’Connor that I read recently. A young writer once asked O’Connor to look over an article that the young woman was writing on O’Connor’s short story, “A Good Man is Hard to Find.”

The young woman wrote that O’Connor’s work merely notes that it is impossible to know how to be one [a good man], but O’ Connor disputed the writer's reasoning.

“Not at all,” Flannery O’Connor said in her characteristic matter-of-fact blunt honesty. “It is possible to know how to be one. God became man partly in order to teach us, but it is impossible to be one without the help of grace.”

~Jonathan Rogers, 

The Terrible Speed of Mercy