A Little Birdie

Perspective really does change everything.

This morning was miserable and rainy, the sort that makes it hard to resist pulling the covers up around your ears.

Beyonce's "Single Ladies" blasted obnoxiously from my radio. My stomach grumbled impatiently for breakfast. Bleary-eyed from not enough sleep, I sighed heavily and attacked the snooze button. Nine minutes of precious silence.

I rolled over onto my back, cocooning deeper into the blankets as I began a familiar chat with the ceiling.

"Dear Lord, thank You for the gift of this day. I offer You all of my joys, my worries, my successes and failures..."

It's a morning ritual of mine. The nine minutes of that snooze period are meant for grace to shape me into something semi-capable of charity. It also steels me to face the chaos of the newsroom. I end this way:

"...and help me to see Your fingerprints and the mark of Your presence in my life today."

There are a lot of mornings when those are empty words, but I say them anyway, knowing that I need to. Knowing that it feeds my soul.

But today I just hated the rain and the noise and the day ahead. I would have much preferred shutting everything out and being a recluse.

In the last minute of my snooze time, I cursed the seconds passing way too quickly. Time to get this day over with, I thought.

And then, through the torrents of rain pounding against my window, I heard birdsong.

The little bugger was singing its heart out, bad weather be damned. He was going to be happy anyway.

I couldn't help but smile, then laugh. God's fingerprints are everywhere, all the time, if we're open to seeing them.

Today was a great day, all thanks to a bird.

An Ambitious Lent?

For the first time in ages, Lent was a welcome sight on the calendar.

God in His mercy has done so much for me this year. High up on the list is that I have a clearer sense of my  vocation to marriage and motherhood than I ever have before.

In the past, it was always something I wanted, like a good job. But now I know that it's a true calling. God is asking me if I will serve Him this way when the time is right.

Truly realizing that has drawn both incredible joy and a lot of self-doubt from my soul.

I'm so many things: selfish, immature, insecure and bad at expressing what's on my heart. How in the world am I supposed to love a man with my whole life? And then, with that love, take part in creating new life? Nurturing souls? Guiding people to heaven?


The hugeness of that is enough to paralyze me at times. But it also starts a fire in my bones.

I may not be ready now, but the Spirit is crying out to me just like John the Baptist did. "Prepare the way of the Lord!"

Lent couldn't have come at a better time. I needed motivation to evaluate my life and start taking baby steps toward change.

This year, it feels less like sacrifice and more like stretching my aching muscles after years of laziness. It hurts like hell right now, but at the same time, it feels amazing.

I started with cutting out sweets (including coffee, sigh) and adding gentle exercise in an attempt to rein in the screaming toddler that my body can be. While I've taken huge strides in self-discipline over the past six months, there's still a depressingly long way to go.

Only a few days ago, I stole a second idea from a friend: praying and offering my daily sufferings for 40 people who have asked, one per day. I'm hoping it'll teach me to think a little less about my needs and more about those around me. I'm already starting to see beautiful things happen as a result of those prayers, if only subtly.

On Wednesday, when I took ashes on my forehead and marked myself with His Cross, it was the most natural thing in the world. My brokenness and need for Him is painfully easy to admit. There's no way I'm going to become the woman my future family -- whatever it looks like -- needs me to be without His grace.

The beauty of this season is that if we play our cards right, we get to rise out of this stronger, a little more capable, and a little more like Him.

I'm not going to run or bemoan the challenge this year. Instead, I want to milk it for all its worth.

Bring it on.

Regime Change ... Again

Three years ago, my first true confessor left our parish for a new assignment. At the time, I wrote of my own anxieties about starting over with someone new.

I was getting ready to transfer colleges and live on my own for the first time. Everything around me was changing, and this was the last straw: the steady presence of my spiritual community was shaken.

Soon after Father left, I started talking with great reluctance to a "baby priest" who was given his first assignment here. The last thing I wanted to do was open my soul again for someone else to dig through unwelcome.

God, in His great mercy, knew what He was doing putting that one into my life.

The first few months were hard. At school, I struggled with homesickness and turned to both my vices and my faith to cope. By midterms, I left a long-term, long-distance relationship. My grandmother was fresh out of the hospital from another exacerbation of lung disease, and my love for her fostered a resentment toward God that flirted dangerously with atheism.

There were a lot of frantic emails and calls home to my new confessor that first year. But to his credit, he helped me through it. For the most part, it was just through listening and prayer, but that was what I needed most.

Now, three years later, it seems we've come full circle: I graduated college and moved on into the unknown of adulthood. I'm relearning how to love in this new relationship. The merger that began in my parish when my new confessor arrived three years ago is now complete, and he moved to his new assignment yesterday morning.

I'm moving on. So is he.

But you know what? This time, I was ready for it.

The other thing I learned from Father is to always strive first and foremost after God, for the sake of my own spiritual independence.

While there's still a lot going on in my soul that I need help working through, I'm probably in the healthiest place I've ever been. I'm learning to let God show me where to go. And that's why, as much as I'll miss him, I know I'll be OK.

God has always provided. He will again.

Love is Enough

I would be remiss if I didn't write some kind of silly love post for Valentine's Day.

To be honest, though, the holiday has never been more than another day on my calendar.

A lot of that comes from my preference for simple things. I'm not a flashy girl. Don't get me wrong -- I love presents, flowers are beautiful, and it goes without saying that chocolate should be a food group. Generally, though, flattery leaves me feeling both bashful and humbled. As someone who spends a lot of time trying to look tough, that isn't the most comfortable mix of feelings. ;)

Maybe I just need to get used to it ... the idea that sometimes, we really do deserve good things. That every now and then, we should spoil the people we love.

True love is accepting another person as they are, warts and all. It's not so much about what they say or do, but more about embracing something a lot deeper: the unique, unrepeatable soul that God has made and called not just good, but very good.

He calls us very good. And He loves us with more depth and strength than we could ever love any human being.

If that makes you feel uncomfortable, it probably should. But that's the beauty of true, God-driven love: it's given anyway, with no reservations, whether we deserve it or not.

There's really nothing any of us can say or do to repay that. David knew that well when he asked, "How can I make a return for all the Lord has done for me?"

All I can do is be thankful ... and do my best to love that much in return. That's really all He wanted in the first place.

As for religion, I love it.

If you've been paying attention to the spiritual blogosphere lately or even just Facebook, then you're bound to have seen this spoken word video about Jesus and religion. That original video has spawned dozens of responses from Christians, atheists, and all sorts of others.

There have been a few from the Catholic perspective, but the one I want to share is from Indiana's Fr. Burns, aka Pontifex. He not only serves as a diocesan priest, but he's also an incredibly talented hip-hop artist. I've been one of many touched by his music and ministry in the Phatmass phamily.

The point is this: Jesus didn't hate religion. He hated hypocrisy from anyone, regardless of creed. Dead hearts broke His heart. Liturgy and ritual is only empty if we treat it like a chore and not a real, physical encounter with Jesus.

Check out Father's video, and when you're done, come and talk with us about it. The discussion thread is here.

Needy

I don't often write poems anymore, let alone post them publicly. But when the urge to write one does come along, it's fast and furious,  and more often than not they come out almost ready-made.


This one encompasses nicely everything I took away from the retreat, and the direction I'm trying to go in now. Enjoy.

Needy
January 11, 2012

I need

To think.

To

Slow down,

Breathe in;

To look up and search for those

Little streaks of You

That I see mixed in, just barely,

In the paint of the night sky.

I need

To remember.

To dig deep,

Wake up;

To shake off the haze of this

Complacent status quo

That I built, like a wall

Around my fragile faith.

I need

To let go.

To realize Your love is the strength

Running through my veins

That I receive even if

It’s the last thing I deserve.

I need

To accept.

…That I am not an island in this world.

…That life is never perfect,

…That I am not perfect.

But even so,

I am Yours.

And for that,

I am beautiful.

Little Voice

If I had a nickel for every time someone made a reference to the "still, small voice" of God, I wouldn't need to work anymore.

Most of the time, my skeptic heart has dismissed the phrase. To me, language like that is just a pretty way of saying that God doesn't really speak at all.

But on retreat, I came to a different conclusion that somehow makes more sense, at least in my mind.

One of the seminarians who traveled with us gave a talk about the value of meditation and how to get started. As a Pagan, I meditated often, but the sort Catholics speak of is very different. Eastern-style meditation seeks to empty the mind of all thoughts, but in our spirituality, we open ourselves to whatever wispy ideas come along. Those, the seminarian said, could be God's way of reaching out to us.

Of course, I thought that was a bunch of hokey, too. But when our quiet hour came, I gave it a try.

Walking the grounds of the retreat house is always a spiritual experience in itself. Running downhill with the sun on my back and the wind in my hair, everything around me screamed of Him. I may be a skeptic, but as my father told me once, "You can't look around at all this and not believe there is Someone who made it all, and who cares for us."

God cares so deeply for His creation, for us; so much, in fact, that He's woven Himself so tightly into the fabric of this world that you almost miss it. He's so much a part of our world that His voice is no longer booming, but subtle and saturated into everything around us. We experience Him daily in a million little ways.

This is a new revelation for me. It's like Samuel hearing the voice of God, but thinking it was someone else speaking as we heard this weekend ... those pesky thoughts that "interrupt" our time with Him are often truly His way of speaking. Our supernatural, extraordinary, divine God has chosen to reveal Himself in natural, ordinary, very human ways.

He gave us the gift of the Holy Spirit and the gift of reason. We have an innate desire to do good. And more often than not, intuition will show us where to go. It may not be a burning bush, and He may not appear in flesh, but He does appear and speak all the time. He speaks through us.

All we need to do is listen, like Samuel did.

More like falling in love...

I came back from retreat on Sunday afternoon, and have spent large chunks of time since then trying to unpack everything that happened there.

It was not the easiest weekend, but at the same time, I'm extremely glad I went. Being in an unfamiliar group with a different priest stretched me out of my comfort zone. Thankfully, I'm social and got to know lots of great people.

More importantly, though, the only one I really had to lean on was God.

I ran from Him for the longest time, even after I came back to my faith. I didn't want to change. I didn't want to see everything in my heart that needed fixing. Perhaps the biggest reason was personal: I blamed Him for circumstances in my life that weren't His fault.

For so long, then, I associated God with a host of negative things. I knew that, but was too afraid to face it. It would hurt too much. But this weekend, I allowed myself to get to the bottom of all of that, and when I did, I found Him waiting with open arms.

We are building from the ground up a relationship that began six years ago out of confusion and desperation. It was a broken relationship from the start because, in so many ways, I was broken.

Little by little, I'm finding that brokenness is fading. My flaws are many, but He has healed and continues to heal me of so much.

Retreat allowed me to open myself to His love in a way I was never able to before. At one point, alone in front of the tabernacle, I thanked Him for that ... but the answer I got wasn't what I expected at all:

Thank you for letting Me in. It's about time.

I hope this is only the beginning.


As with most things, this song says it much better than I can.

Thou Shalt Laugh!

Before I leave for retreat, here's a silly video. I typically find "Christian" comedy extremely lame, but this made me smile. This is Michael Jr. of Thou Shalt Laugh. Thanks to Brian for passing this on. :)

Have a good weekend, everybody.

Down the Rabbit Hole

Merry Christmas, happy new year, and apologies for being so quiet over the Christmas season...

I spent the last two weeks with family, friends, and an exorbitant amount of food. And I walked into 2012 a few pounds heavier.

More than that, though, I am a touch holier than I was at the beginning of Advent. Let me explain:

When you really love another person, there's often this compulsion to be different, be better, for their sake. They have given you so much, they deserve so much, yet all the ways you can think of to show your gratitude feel ... inadequate.

That sense of inadequacy hit me hard over this vacation, both in the ways God has loved me and the ways others have. Over and over again, He has given me more than I could ask for.

This new year, I marked six years since I gave my life to Christ. Until recently, I thought I was doing pretty well. Perhaps I am. But lately, I have learned just how abysmally far I have yet to go.

That frustrates me. And I'm thinking it's time for some progress.

This weekend, I'm going on retreat with a group of young adults I've spent only a short time with. I don't know them well at all, and am admittedly uneasy about sharing my heart with mere acquaintances.

Too, there's the daunting realization that, while there, I have to face Him alone once more. Being one half of a spiritual team has become so natural to me -- it is my eventual vocation, after all. The departure from that, however brief, is a bit nerve wracking.

Being alone with God is usually too much for me to handle. If I can avoid Him, I will. And I have.

But this walk is all about seeing ourselves for who we are, and not the puffed-up delusion we imagine for ourselves. It's only when we own up to how badly we need Him that He can truly work.

My only goal this year is to emerge a little stronger, and a little more worthy of the name "Christian." An ambitious goal, maybe, but it's long overdue.

So I'll do what I dread and face this retreat, even if it hurts. Everything worth having is worth the struggle ... and a better, healthier, more joyful me is more than worth it.

Please pray for me.