I haven’t written in a long while on here, not that anyone reads my ramblings, for a while it was because I was progressing so fast – then some rough patches, now because I have no one… I write again.
A lot of things have happened. While I won’t go into details, I won’t ever be in spiritual direction again nor will I ever trust a person of the clergy farther then I can pick them up and throw them. They will never again have any depth of knowledge about me, my past, or my life.
You see – according to one, I am just too hard and I am nothing more than a backslider a problem and not worth anyone’s time or effort.
< snark >Because of course healing is linear and someone should never have to revisit something… or deal with a wave of cPTSD or grief or trauma memories when “its been gone through” “we’ve been here already”. < / Snark>
I was blamed for my husband going to this person -regardless of me asking him not to – it was my fault and every part of every argument with anyone was my fault – even my husband lying to me was my fault because I’m not supposed to react and say anything or be angry. I am realizing just how gaslit I was for 3 years. No one can ever be trusted.
I have no desire to go to Mass, to Adoration, or even to pray. I am dead inside, simply waiting for my body to follow one day. I know I will never see my kids in heaven, its not for me. That has been thoroughly communicated and I am never going to try for anything more than just waiting out whatever time clock I have.
I am the vine, you are the branches. Whoever remains in me and I in him will bear much fruit, because without me you can do nothing. John 15:5
Each of us, by the simple virtue of our baptism, are called to spread the Gospel. As terrifying as that may sound, first I ask you to look at your faith as a special gift, your most prized possession, but this gift is something you are called to share with each person you encounter in your life. Some of us may have had times where we didn’t appreciate the gift that is faith, we may have put it on the shelf, and we may have at times had to clear the dust and cobwebs from this most valuable gift, we should be reminded of our child like energy and awe when we received something that we treasured, we should want to show it to everyone with the same desire of an excited three year old with a new toy but with wisdom, grace and compassion.
In this Sunday’s readings we see in the Old Testament the prophet Jeremiah puts to words many of our own frustrations or fears in trying to share the faith with others. Is our faith something that is burning within our very bones crying out to be proclaimed to the world? Or are we hiding our gift because of ridicule or fear?
Some of the common questions or thoughts that come up when we think about Evangelization center on how intimidating it can be to engage in Evangelization. Many of us think we have to be a professional or that the ‘job’ of evangelization belongs to the head of religious education in our parishes or to the priests and deacons, those who went through years of education and training. Our training is given to us in the very words that Christ gave us in the Gospel, our training is the training he gave the disciples – his very message. We must seek out to become stronger in our knowledge of the faith. This knowledge of the faith, is a weapon against the fear that often we must battle when it comes to actively evangelizing and sharing the good news. We must also remember charity in our evangelization, we must be mindful of where people are and attempt to meet them where they are and draw them to Christ and not bludgeon them with the faith. I recall a time in my own life, far from Christ, that I encountered a street preacher in New Orleans he stood on a crate on Bourbon Street with a large sign with a list of all the types of people who he believed were going to Hell and he was screaming at people as they passed by calling them sinners, I don’t know if he ever brought anyone to conversion or to Christ but I know for me he did more to turn me away from Christ then towards Christ. In contrast, one of the times I was greatly and successfully evangelized to was a priest, who is a significant father figure to me, telling me five simple words: “I am proud of you”. We evangelize in subtle ways in the kindness and compassion we show others, in allowing people to see us as people of prayer and faith; from there we can begin to lead others to the prized gift that is the redemption of Christ. Evangelization must begin with the development of our own lives and conforming ourselves to Christ and we must be solidly centered in prayer. In other words, first we must evangelize to ourselves and let others evangelize us for it is in strengthening our own relationship with Christ that we can share his message and love with others.
I invite you to know Christ more fully and to share with other’s the beauty and gift that is the faith.
+++++++++++++++++++
Note: This was originally written for a grad school assignment.
I have been through quite a bit of trauma in my life. I obviously am not going to go into any great detail here, but let’s just say it was pretty ugly. And those sins against me caused a lot of problems in my life and in my relationships. Now, I am in no way saying that I am completely healed and perfect in any way… nope still have a LONG way to go. What I am saying is that I have received a radical amount of healing to my soul.
Because I *finally* LET God reach in to the broken parts and my bruised and battered heart and start to put the pieces that both my abusers and myself had damaged and broken apart through various sins. Now if you are waiting for me to reveal some juicy sins or drama, I am not going to, suffice it to say when I sat down and committed to find some sort of peace or something… I prayed in Adoration, in desperation, I asked God to do whatever he needed to, to use all things in my life, to replace my heart of stone with a heart for love.
I didn’t know what that would mean at the time, I didn’t know what kinds of purification I would endure here in the World, what I hoped for at the moment was just enough peace internally that I could survive my time on this Earth, what I got was far more then that.
What I received from God was that *I* was the pearl of great price, *I* was the one sheep that He left the 99 to go find.
That *I* had worth and was valued and loved.
The damage that had been done to me through sin was an awful burden, one that I can only describe as being weighed down by every darkness I had ever encountered. This weight on my soul took its toll even on my physical body. Recently someone who hadn’t seen me for a few months was around, and commented that I “looked taller”, which is a bit odd because as I am in my 40’s I’m not exactly going to have a growth spurt. But in reality what this person saw was that I did not seem as weighed down, I wasn’t slumping or trying to appear “smaller” in the way I stand or sit.
I was healed by God in a Radical way, by His Radical Love of me and continual pursuit of me. Now what does all of this mean? It means that my tendency to beat myself up over every error or failing of mine has become almost null – its more rare than it’s ever been. Instead I feel genuine sorrow for my sins and the things I do that harm others.
Learning how to LET myself be loved has been one of the hardest things in my life. Learning how to view myself as having value and worthy of love and being treated with dignity is the other. Having those to wounds, my deepest and most painful wounds, the ones that have festered the longest, having these wounds healed in an extraordinary way is breath taking. Like any human I tend to pick at the scab every once in a while, but overall the wounds have been closed.
The medicine for this great healing?
Prayer, not audible rote prayers, but meditative prayer and lectio divina, followed by frequent confession, spiritual direction, and Therapy. Yes Therapy. While the great majority of this post has been about the Spiritual healing of my soul. The physical healing of my mental wounds has also happened.
I have explored in great detail my grief, my trauma, my own issues with anger and resentment, my tendency to beat myself up mentally, my issues with trust and my fear and my PTSD. I still have work to do both in my faith life and with my past trauma. But I have come so far from where I was.
Lord, you have been our refuge through all generations. Psalm 90:1
Very few times in my life have I experienced long moments of peace and joy. Prior to this point in my life, those moments were very brief.
But now, the sense of joy and peace in my life are becoming the default and it has been a little strange in figuring out the new emotional normal, and it has been extremely distracting.
Learning about Tulsa, almost a decade ago, shook me to my core. It caused me to take a good solid look at myself, and my political leanings at the time.
Learn about the history of this country before you judge what has been going on.
Learn about Tulsa,OK; about Rosewood, FL; about post civil war Wilmington, NC.
We tell the black community to “be moral”, “work hard”, “own your own house, business”, “obey the law” and when they have – the white community has bombed them, lynched them, set fire to their churches with their children in them and tried to eradicate the forward movement and betterment of the black community by red lining communities and making home loans more difficult to obtain.
We need to take a look at why the black community has so many problems. And I am going to say it out loud, it is the WHITE community at its origin.
The argument is made about strong families: how can the black community have strong families when they were shown that their families aren’t important for the first 400 years they were in this land? Slave brokers and owners frequently broke up family units. Yet we tout the importance of families for a healthy society. Then there are groups who have targeted black families in other ways, forced sterilization, syphilis experiments, eugenics based reasons to target the black community as undesirable and that barely gets us to the Civil Rights movement and desegregation.
The notion that black men are thugs, perpetually angry or behaving criminally. Usually for no other reason than the color of their skin. Many black defendants receive higher sentences as shown in Florida. But more over blacks are stopped for ‘suspicious’ behavior, by even being in their own homes .
We tell them to ‘pull themselves up by their bootstraps’ and when they do, we do whatever we can to pull them down and destroy what they built. We did it in NYC see Seneca Village where we decided Central Park was more important than a prospering, safe black township. How about Wilmington, NC where blacks were murdered because they were elected to office, over 2000 whites participated in a coup d’état of the legitimately elected government. Tulsa, Ok: A long standing animosity between the white and black communities ignited on an allegation of a black man assaulting a white woman – for this an entire community was wiped out by fire and 36 people died though that number is thought to be too low today. These are just a few
We have lynched, burned, and terrorized the black community since 1565 if you include the Spanish colonies, 1619 if you only consider Jamestown. And we expect them to “get over it” when school desegregation only happened in 1955. This was 65 years ago when legally the Supreme Court handed down their decision in Brown v. Board of Education. However we still occasionally hear about white only proms, racial discrimination in Greek organizations in colleges and other incidents that can be easily googled. Schools, streets, military bases, etc. are named after confederate generals and plantation owners – icons of slavery and brutality. Imagine a Jew having to go to a school named after Himmler.
We expect them to “get over it” when the black community is forced to see the vestiges of Jim Crow every time they look around their cities where there are confederate statues, plantations used as wedding venues where slavery is glossed over if not presented with rose colored glasses, and the confederate battle flag is accepted as “southern pride” or “heritage” where for the black community its a reminder of over 450 years of brutality, degradation and dehumanization.
And yet we cry “never forget” about 9/11.
How do we “fix it”: We don’t. We give them the tools to fix it themselves. We stop over policing/patrolling black neighborhoods we afford black defendants the same determination as white defendants for the same crimes and fines and then we LET THEM “fix” their own communities after leveling the playing field in Education, business and home loans, etc. We stop making school funding be based on property taxes and instead even the funding playing field.
I don’t have the answers but I empathize with the black community and my heart breaks on your behalf.
We all either have had or will have someone who will speak out to others against us falsely in order to detract from us. Who knows why. Calumny is an attempt to murder the spirit of another by false words – it is related to the Jewish term Lashon Hara, they mean the same thing.
Many times it comes from a place of anger, you see someone do something or express an opinion so you go to another person and you call them names, you detract from their value as a Child of God, you attack them and engage in gossip and detraction. It is a pretty grave sin.
I recently encountered this in my own life, I have a former friend who, because I spoke out against the President, his policies and words of late, the police brutality and denouncing my past involvement in groups that I left and quietly distanced myself from over the space of a few years. This person in turn spoke against me to others and I then received messages calling me a liar for exposing what I saw. I was then told by another that I had issues with relationships/treating people and I interpret from other things mentioned that I am supposedly toxic ??? Not entirely sure. I’ve blocked the person I think successfully so I don’t think I can still access the messages to verify exact wording.
Here is where it gets weird. I have spent the better part of the last two years solidly addressing my issues and past trauma, something I have never done quite as intensely, some in the several years before that. And intermittently as I could afford it for previous years. But it is extremely interesting that as I started growing and forming my own opinions and being more confident in speaking up with those opinions, As I grew in self esteem and I deal with my past trauma, As I grow happier and my relationships with those I am around daily grow stronger, and I have actually been forming intentional friendships – Because I disavowed a toxic time in my life and the toxicity I was seeing and didn’t want to become a part of any further then I already had that I am somehow this awful person that needs to be torn down???
I kept my mouth shut for years because I valued my friendship more than the truth because I was extremely weak in my spirit, and the truth is I saw one friend become more and more radicalized, angry, and polarized. I saw her slam Muslims, call into question Obama’s birth certificate and a thousand other typical Tea Party/right wing/extreme right wing items- and man can she argue a point – she has a silver tongue. I have seen her support the actions in Charlottesville, tell me she participated in other right wing protests in other states, that she is building an AR-15 etc. and there is more I won’t go into.
Multiple times over last year and this year, I warned a lot of people I was isolating a bit because I needed to work on my issues, I needed to fix me. That I didn’t have the emotional energy to put out and that I was sorry, that I still cared I just needed to focus on the fact in the last year I lost 2 pregnancies (3 babies) within a few months of each other – one in January and again during Holy Week of last year. And that I had basically had the wall around my heart that held so much anger broken down so that things that had shaped my (almost) life long battle with anger and rage could start to be healed.
Every person who is active in my daily life and daily encounters has said the same thing, I am so drastically different than I was 2 years ago. I am happier, I am able to say “these are my boundaries” and why. I am believing in myself, I am finding my own foundation and learning to see value within myself, and most of all I form my own opinions – I don’t parrot what the strongest personality in the room states just to not have an argument (the term for that is fawning it is a CPTSD response). And most of all I am HAPPY and my marriage is stronger than it has ever been. These folks hadn’t bothered to put energy into me once I stopped doing all the work or check on me during those two losses without me begging for support and love in my grief and pain – I was supported once and briefly and when I tried to reach out at several other times I was not responded to.
Beyond the work on my trauma, CPTSD, other elements in my past on an emotional level, my relationship to God has grown and deepend in ways I can’t quite put into words. As Catholics there is an antiphon “If today you hear his voice, harden not your hearts” (Hebrews 3:15 and Psalm 95:8). I prayed 2 years ago to the month for Christ to break down my hardness of heart and to teach me how to let him love and heal me and to guide me to people who will help, love and support me. Yes as emotional and cheesy as it sounds. From there I found an awesome therapist and a pretty darn good Spiritual Director/regular confessor who gives a good swift kick when I need it along with others who love, care for and pray for me.
But most of all, I PRAY again. Y’all —– I can call God FATHER from my heart in prayer. That – that small piece of healing is worth losing a thousand best friends on this Earth. I find love and joy in talking to God. I find peace in going to Adoration. But I talk to God & Christ and Mary and the Saints multiple times a day in prayer and that prayer is from the heart and I can finally let it touch my heart in return. This is where all my emotional energy has been for the last two years.
While I am still incredibly hurt by the loss, I wish everyone well and I hope that they grow in their love of Christ and that their relationship with him is paramount to everything of this world, I want for each of them to be happy and to have the best in their lives and endeavors and relationships and for them to seek God in all things and pursue him as he pursues each of his children. I hope for heaven for them.
Four little words. You wouldn’t think that four little words could cause so much internal consternation and emotional confusion and lead to healing. But they did. About a year or so ago, give or take a month, my spiritual director said those words to me for the first time. It was also the first time since I was about 5 or 6 that a man who had a role in my life said those words to me. I remember my heart beating fast and blinking at him rapidly and not really responding to that – because I didn’t know how to respond or even how to internally react to it.
“I’m proud of you.”
As a victim of abuse of varying kinds over a large swath of my life, hearing a man I respected and trusted say those words was shocking at first. I didn’t think anything I was doing or working through was “good.” Instead, all I saw was that I was drudging up a lot of garbage, a lot of sins done to me and sins of my own coupled with immense sorrow and grief that was so raw that to this day, I still don’t have the right words to describe it. I had just started seeing the sunlight after a surprise miscarriage, I still had moments of absolute rage at God blaming him for all the wrongs I suffered… in a “if you loved me like everyone says, why didn’t you stop it?” way not only with the miscarriage but a great many things in my past. A way that is perfectly natural to go through in grief and momentary despair, because even in that questioning and asking ‘why’ I was still turning to God in my pain, I was seeking Him out however imperfectly.
When our faith is immature, and even some moments as it matures, we still expect God to act like a superhero in our lives to step in like the Avengers and make it ‘right’, much like a child expects a parent to fix everything and ‘make it all better.’ God doesn’t work that way, he allows things in our lives because of our and other’s free will, but he is always there to walk the journey with us if we will only turn to him. When my Spiritual Director said those four words, “I’m proud of you,” God showed him what door needed to be opened in my heart so that I could let Christ in more fully.
“I’m proud of you.”
Those four words had an immense healing effect – after the shock and initial panic wore off, that is, and in the several more times, I have heard it since then. It was the encouragement that I hadn’t heard in so many years, words I hadn’t heard since I lost my Granddad. People underestimate the need to hear words of encouragement, especially when growing up, but even more so as an adult. Many times that emotional building up gets lost in teaching the young how to do things to survive in the world. It is just as important for young women as it is for young men to have positive male role models. When those who should be role models are lacking or are the source of abuse, it can cause so much damage to self-esteem, as well as the development of healthy relationships with other human beings and in some cases, can even damage our relationship with God when they use religion as a tool of abuse.
As humans, we look to others we trust and respect for examples in life, we learn new behaviors by mimicking what we see in those we respect and look up to. It is no different in the spiritual life, one thing that my spiritual director did, either intentionally or accidentally, was he let me see him on his knees in the church praying. I don’t remember the first time I noticed him in the back of the church after an early morning mass, but I remember seeing him frequently on and off for months. Several mornings after the 6:30 am daily mass, rosary, or breviary in hand, I saw him actively spending time with God in Adoration. These simple acts modeled what it meant to be an active Christian, to worship on a daily basis, to simply talk and be with God. It was his and other’s example that showed me a relationship with God was more than Mass attendance on Sunday or even on a daily basis. Sometimes, as humans, we forget that our actions can be as much an evangelization tool as the words we say to other people. It was in these moments that I saw my spiritual director pray that he showed me God. He introduced me to Christ in a way, with a depth that I had never encountered Him before. He showed me how to let God heal me, and it was through spending time with God and letting Him be with me in the silence of my heart that God showed me that the silence was nothing to fear.
I was evangelized to with four words, “I am proud of you.”
In today’s Gospel, Christ sends out the 72, in pairs, who would go out to towns in various parts of Judea ahead of him. He tells them not to take anything with them, no money or a bag, or shoes. Do you understand how gnarly and difficult that would be today, much less more than 2 thousand years ago?
St. Theresa of Avila is often quoted as saying:
“Lord if this is how you
treat your friends no wonder
you have so few”
I used to joke about this saying quite a bit, and in some ways it is true. The path that Christ is asking us to walk is not easy, it is extremely difficult. One of the paths that I know Christ is asking me to walk is one of healing and forgiveness. For me that path is as difficult for me as the path he sent those 72 out on. Right now he isn’t asking me to go out and teach, preach, or be that “out loud” disciple of his. Right now he is asking me to walk the journey of healing my wounds so that those wounds don’t keep dragging me into darkness and sin. In some ways, emotionally it feels like I have walked across the desert sands barefoot for years, but instead of having the love and faith in Christ at my side/with me I had been trying to force the journey without faith – and that was a disaster.
I have a Spiritual Director now who, thanks be to God, is very no-nonsense and who will tell me to knock it off when I start getting a bit neurotic over things and wrapped up in the current emotional garbage I am dealing with. And I firmly believe we all need someone in our lives who will tell us to knock it off.
Recently I feel like God took a USB Flash drive and plugged it into my brain. A couple things that my Spiritual Director has been trying, a few times, to get me to understand (hey I am slow on the uptake sometimes…) some things are finally ‘clicking’ for me.
The biggest piece that I am discovering and starting to understand is peace. The internal peace and joy that for so many years I saw in others is slowly making its presence known in me, but most of all, it is making itself known without causing its own anxiety- now at least. You see, I didn’t understand what this new emotion was. This internal sense of peace and faith. This new emotion caused a heck of a lot of confusion and anxiety because I didn’t understand it or know how to process it. Because I didn’t know what to do with it I relied heavily on a couple trusted people, and Thanks be to God, he gave them the patience to handle me during that time.
I’ve talked a lot today about the renewed faith in God and Christ I have now, that isn’t to say that I didn’t believe in God and the resurrection of Christ before all this, what I want to say is there is a drastic difference between knowing that God exists and having faith. Many times we equate the two and they aren’t the same thing. Faith is the heart behind the knowledge.
Now , you may wonder what the heck I have been doing differently at this point in my life then in others. Well, the first thing I am doing is I have a Spiritual Director who doesn’t let me get away with any B.S. and whom I have a lot of trust in. Now before anyone thinks I am going to give the guy a big head, I’m not, I trust him because he is always pointing me to Christ – if he didn’t – I’d be running in the opposite direction. The second thing I am doing is I am in therapy to work on my past trauma. Now there is going to be some overlap between the two, because, there just is, as one of my biggest issues is anger and un-forgivness of those who did the biggest damage to me, but I am slowly peeling the onion that is my past trauma and working through it.
The third thing is prayer. Now my prayer life has largely sucked for most of my life as a Christian, a large part of that is due to some of my trauma. For many years I couldn’t say the Our Father without ending up in tears and inconsolable – I am ever grateful to a Jesuit priest who was my college spiritual director for getting me through THAT.
In January when my husband and I had a surprise miscarriage, we were devastated, and it brought a lot of my issues to a head very quickly and dramatically. God used this tragedy to break through the hardness of my heart and the wall I had put around myself to protect me and my emotions. But most of all he used it to break through the hardness of heart that kept me from loving him fully. I spent hours before the blessed sacrament weeping, not crying, weeping and it was weeks before I even spoke to Christ. I spent weeks just in his presence in Adoration at every moment I had. When I finally did start giving to him all the pain, anger and garbage thoughts I was thinking, I started noticing the pain wasn’t as bright, it wasn’t as rough … I wasn’t in agony. This is why I survived our second pregnancy loss this year in April with far less agony. I clung to my budding faith and spiritual direction as a life preserver to get through all of that. Now moving on to using the growing faith and peace along with spiritual direction as a tool to deepen my relationship with my God and to understand what I need to work on as I go. How to abandon myself to the Love of God. How to avoid the darkness and sin in my own life and how to be a witness to my faith and love & honor all of God’s creation.
There is something about travel that makes me anxious. I think it is mainly because of my chronic illnesses/pain. Not knowing what something is going to do to me.
Surprisingly my pain levels as we settle into the hotel here in High Point, NC are fairly low. I almost feel “normal”.
I am currently reading A Guide to Christian Meditation by Fr. John Bartunek. I an not too far in yet but it is very interesting so far.
One of my biggest ‘struggles’ for the last few years has been my prayer life. After quite a few crappy moments in life building up and the resulting emotional turmoil, resentments and anger. In many ways I am rediscovering some of the “basics”. The hardness surrounding my heart has been shattered and I am trying figure out what is “Normal” in my faith life.
The emotional interaction with my God, the relationship with my faith and my religion, my thought processes on forgiveness of not only myself but others has been rapidly changing as my prayer life gets better. I told someone recently, if it was anyone other than Christ, you would consider it an emotional affair.
Basically, I have found myself moving from knowing that God exists, to actually having faith and falling in love with Himself. I am also becoming more comfortable with calling myself a person of faith. It is who I am, this is what I believe, and I am finding peace and healing.
I keep trying to re-start blogging but never quite get there. The last few months have been a whirl wind of activity and emotions.
I suffered two pregnancy losses in the span of several months, losing Ezra in January and then Judith & Anthony in April. I have been working on me quite a lot with all my various issues between therapy and spiritual direction and making a little bit of progress getting healthier mentally and spiritually.
Recently I lost a very dear friend, Sarah Taylor, someone I only knew for a year, that slipped into my life first because of work, then as a friend and eventually as someone I considered family. She and I shared so much in common. We both suffered from anxiety and depression, we both had tough childhoods, we both went through times where we rebelled and returned to faith. We shared our struggles and we were each other’s accountability partner in adoration and prayer, and each other’s sounding boards when anxieties got the better of us… now granted, hugely imperfectly, but we tried. Regardless of her imperfections, there was a Joy that was present in her that radiated from her because of her faith in God. I have had the wonderful opportunity to speak to others who have known her, and we are all saying the same thing, that even though we are praying for her and offering mass intentions for her, each time we have an overwhelming sense of peace and love wash over us as if we are being told, not to worry.
Ironically as I am preparing to travel to NC on Thursday for her Funeral on Friday, I was supposed to be visiting her this week anyway, I was supposed to visit her at her new place just outside Asheville, NC and we were going to hit the brewery and wineries in the area and stay up all night and go to adoration in the middle of the night and just relax and be silly. Instead of visiting my friend and having fun, I am helping to say good bye for now to someone who is dearly loved by many many people who had the privilege of walking this life with her.
May Sarah and all the faithfully departed rest in the peace and presence of God.
