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.