don't talk too much about God

Texas sky, September 2013

I was deeply moved by this passage from Rule for a New Brother (by an anonymous author), and thought I'd rock your world, too:

To choose God
is to realize that you are known and loved
in a way surpassing anything one can imagine,
loved before anyone had thought of you
or spoken your name.
...
And so,
don't talk too much about God
but live
in the certainty that God has written your name
on the palm of God's hand.
Live your human task
in the liberating certainty
that nothing in the world can separate you
from God's love for you.

Cedarbrake, 2013

our hearts are burning

Super at Emmaus by Caravaggio

Something miraculous happens when we open up and speak from the heart in complete vulnerability. It’s combustible, a downright explosion of intimacy!

Recalling this encounter of hearts at the “Writing as Prayer” retreat last weekend, my new friend Pat Daniels (Professor of Acting at the University of Texas at Austin) described it perfectly as: 

“the Emmaus model. Christ is here. Our hearts are burning. We are loving each other.” 

This disarming honestly is nothing less than Eucharistic. It is the breaking of the bread —breaking ourselves open to nourish one another. 

My sincere thanks to Pat for allowing me to post her beautiful writing here! 

 PSALM 

by Patricia Daniels

I live restless, disconnected, lost.
The world though ordinary and blessed is upside down and turned around.
What is true is called false.
Doubt and shame are cataracts to light.
The bones of faith are filled with no living marrow.
The landscape outside the gates of Eden stretches barren, lifeless, pathless.
There is no comfortable history or protection of family.
The drug of my created world has vanished. 

Am I being born again, a babe in an older body,
Acquainting myself with what is now,
Letting go of what was then?
Oh God, is this my soul learning to walk?
Was what I thought growth, merely learning to stand?
Is this falling, failing, merely the initiation of a first step to you?
Can the air support me? 

Is your real name the Unknowable?
Is Your real face shadow as well as light?
Is my confusion, sorrow, Your embrace
                     Or
Is it the death of our communion?
Can I let go of longing and be empty? 

God, I find You so difficult to hold.
I fear to open my hand and lose You to nothingness.
And yet I cannot hold You to have You.
You Permeate All. 

Is all that is, only a fraction of all that is?
Oh God, You are too much for me. 

Can you make your home in my fearful, mortal, selfish heart?
Or is my heart already Your heart? 

Heal me. 

Give me strength to live and let go.
Falling let me find my foundation.
My Grace, My Breath, My Beloved,
Save me from death or if not
Be my new Life. 

 ©Patricia Daniels

jump into the river baby

I was barely halfway listening to the indie rock band Local Natives playing in the background, concentrating on the never-ending task of clearing my inbox. Then unexpectedly, a line caught my attention:

“Jump into the river baby

Easy as it sounds

It's never quite as easily done”

jumping into Rio Frio, Leakey, TX

I was so intrigued and thankful for the worthwhile excuse to procrastinate even further, that I took the time to look up the rest of the lyrics to “Who knows, Who Cares.” I found it impossible to resist the insight of the tune and its cleverly misleading title:

“You could let it down

Jump into the river baby

Easy as it sounds

It's never quite as easily done

The current has us now, it's okay

Take into account that it's all about to change

Who knows, who cares”

What a great metaphor for life, and in particular, for our spiritual journey. Easy as it sounds, it's never quite as easily done...

Yet faith is surely the ability to trust the river of life, to trust our loving Father, or paraphrasing Franciscan Richard Rohr, to trust the Flow, and the Lover.

Local Natives, "Who knows, who cares"

recorded live in Stockholm, 2013

a love letter from God

Return to [me], my dear love,

Take with your words, and return to [me]; Say to [me], 

“Forgive all iniquity, and receive what is good, that I may render as offerings the bullocks from our stalls. [The world, others, the government] will not save us… We shall say no more, ‘Our god,’ to the work of our hands; for in you the orphan finds compassion.”

I will heal [your] defection… I will love [you] freely; for my wrath is turned away from [you]. I will be like the dew for [you]: you shall blossom like the lily; [You] shall strike root like the Lebanon cedar, and put forth shoots. [Your} splendor shall be like the olive tree and [your] fragrance like the Lebanon cedar. Again [you] shall dwell in shade and raise grain; [You] shall blossom like the vine, and [your] fame shall be like the wine of Lebanon.

I, the Lord, am your God

+     +     +     +     + 

“Let him who is wise understand these things;

let him who is prudent know them.”

[from today’s readings, Hosea 14:2-10, Psalm 81]

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

+     +     +     +

“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 

+     +     +     +

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

Cravings: A Catholic Wrestles with Food, Self-Image, and God

It is my pleasure to introduce to you my good friend and author Mary DeTurris Poust!

I've had the blessing of knowing Mary since the 1980s when we both lived in Austin and worked as freelance writers for the Catholic Spirit.

Mary is a talented, award-winning author, journalist, and blogger who has written for dozens of Catholic and secular publications. She is the author Walking Together, Everyday Divine, The Complete Idiot’s Guide to the Catholic Catechism, and Parenting a Grieving Child. Poust was a senior correspondent and contributing editor for Our Sunday Visitor newspaper and a regular contributor to OSV’s popular blog, OSV Daily Take. Her award-winning monthly column “Life Lines” has been published in Catholic New York since 2001.

Mary writes about family, faith, and the spiritual journey at: Not Strictly Spiritual. She lives in upstate New York with her husband and three children.

This Q & A with Mary is part of a Blog Tour launching Mary's latest book, 

Cravings: A Catholic Wrestles with Food, Self-Image, and God.

See below how you can win 

a copy of Cravings 

and enter a raffle for a

Williams-Sonoma $100 gift card

maría:   I'm thrilled to have this chance to visit with you about this great topic, Mary! A million years ago, I read a book called "When Food is Love," are you familiar with it? What I remember most about the topic was the clarity it provided for me regarding how I learned growing up to "use" food as a way of giving love, as well as a way of FEELING love. Your book impressed in me the same idea. how did we learn this? Once we're aware of this, how do we change this?

Mary:   I’m not familiar with that book, but I’m all too familiar with that feeling! I grew up with that same attitude. My mother loved to cook and was always making cakes and cookies and fabulous dinners for anyone who stopped by. You could pop into our house any day at any hour and she’d have a pot of coffee on and some sort of goodies to eat. Even when my rock band practiced in our basement (back when I was in college), she’d come downstairs with homemade brownies and cake. No wonder the guys wanted to practice at our house! 

It can be hard to break that connection – food as a reward, as a comfort, as a way to demonstrate love to others. I think what we need to do is understand that it’s not just the food that demonstrates the love or gives us comfort; it’s the community we build around the kitchen table, the conversations we share over cake and coffee, the comfort we give when someone is hurting and we make them a meal and offer them not just physical sustenance but emotional and spiritual nourishment as well. It makes food less of a focus, and we begin to realize that it was never really about what was on the plate but what was in our hearts.

Maybe that sounds too unrealistic. I understand completely what it means to come home from a disappointing or frustrating day and immediately peer into the pantry for something to soothe my spirit. What I try to do in Cravings is help people – myself included – look at why we search in the pantry when what we’re really hungry for can’t be found there but in quiet prayer, connection with God and with our true self. It’s a hard habit to break and one that requires ongoing awareness and vigilance. Even after we become aware of what we’re doing, it’s easy to slip back into old habits. So we have to become more mindful, to stop when we’re grabbing for food without really thinking and reflect on what’s going through our head and heart. Little by little we begin to break the hold food has on us.

maría:   In my Cuban culture -- like your Italian-American one -- food is not only central, it is in a very real way the avenue to building relationship, to grow as family. What are the gifts of this attitude? And what are the difficulties/hindrances of it?

Mary: Yes, in my Italian heritage family revolves around food. Maybe life revolves around food, and around special foods served during certain seasons. The up side is that something as simple as food can bring people together and fill us with joy. You should have seen the smile on my face when I arrived at my grandmother’s 100th birthday party to find that one of my cousins had made struffoli (fried dough, drizzled with honey). I don’t make it, so I was in heaven. The down side is that food becomes so central we can become a slave to it. I love the scene in “Moonstruck,” one of my favorite movies, when Loretta (played by Cher) comes to tell her father she’s getting married. Before they have the conversation, he says, “Let’s go to the kitchen.” It’s perfect. That is where life is lived out in many Italian families – in the kitchen, at the stove, around the table, even at the sink washing dishes. I have to say that it’s way more good than bad, at least in my book. 

maría:   I know you're a pretty creative "foodie" (I've long enjoyed your FB posts and pictures of the food you cook for your family!). I also know that you're a vegetarian. Can you tell me how you connect being a vegetarian to your attitude on food?

Mary: Originally, back in the late 1980s, I became a vegetarian for health reasons. My mother had recently died of colon cancer at the age of 47, and so I was looking for ways to avoid her fate. Cutting out meat and a lot of the fat that goes with it seemed like a good idea. Later I went back to eating meat because it was just easier with young children and a husband who enjoys meat. Then my middle child, Olivia, at age 7, decided she did not want an animal to die for her dinner (she’s pretty hard core), so she became a vegetarian and I joined her. (She is still vegetarian more than four years later.) But even my vegetarian life is sort of lived in balance with other things. For example, when I went to Rome two years ago, I decided that I would eat whatever was put in front of me. And I did – pork, chicken, fish, even veal. I felt I wanted to experience Rome as a Roman would. I think that’s part of who I am – I’m willing to follow certain diets or plans or ideals to a point, but I’m not willing to be someone I’m not. So I find what I like and what I don’t and I make it my own. So I’m a vegetarian 99 percent of the time, but if I go back to Italy, I will eat meat. I think it’s good for people to do what’s right for them when it comes to food because if you try to live according to someone else’s plan and it doesn’t fit you, it won’t stick.

maría:   If food is not the problem, what unique/specific attitude would you want a meat loving eater like me to consider?

Mary:   I’d say eat what you love but keep your balance. I’ve said before that our faith gives us the template. We feast and fast throughout the year. It’s not all or nothing. I think we can find examples in monastic life for this: Good food, whole foods, cooked in season, prepared with reverence and love, eaten mindfully and with a sense of the sacred. Granted, we can’t do that all the time, but even if we do it now and then, it seeps into the rest of life. Suddenly you’ll find yourself eating chips from the bag while standing at the counter and you’ll stop and notice what you’re doing and probably put the bag away. And, even if you don’t, you’re still likely to eat less than you did before you began this food odyssey simply because you are more aware.

maría:   I love the fact that every topic/chapter in your book includes a list of reflections, a practice, and a prayerful meditation. What do you hope the reader will walk away with as they go through your book?

Mary:   My main hope is that readers come to see themselves as beloved by God just as they are and that they develop some real, practical ways to reshape their relationship with food through prayer, mindfulness, and meditation. I tried to give people small practices that can result in big changes -- things as simple as eating a meal in total silence with no phone or TV or email or newspaper. Just you and your food. When you do that, if you’ve never done it before, you may start to realize just how mindlessly you’re eating most of the time, at least that’s how it was for me when I returned home from my first silent retreat. 

And I guess I hope that readers will know that they’re not alone, that so many of us face the same struggles. Change is possible, but it has to start and end with God. When we do that, everything – not just our food issues – can be transformed.

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Readers take note!

I have one copy of Cravings to give away. Please leave a comment below to be entered to win. You may leave separate comments if you share this post/giveaway on Twitter and Facebook. The contest ends at 8 pm CST on January 20, 2013. 

Ave Maria Press is also giving away a $100 Williams-Sonoma gift card. You can enter to win it here and may do so once a day until January 20th!

To see the remainder of Mary's Blog Tour, go here.