Author Archives: Eileen
Same Song…Hoping if I Sing it Enough It Will be Heard and Understood
We are born innocent, but unfinished. We are born totally needy. Our spiritual journey is from need to being able to love an other or others more than ourselves. That was the WAY of Jesus. You can see him grow in understanding and in capacity for love in the Scriptures. His potential was to be perfect in love. We are born with different potentials….not necessarily going to be the same or perfect, but just fulfilling our personal potential for love. My experience has been that my last years have been a time of recognizing my journey from need to love and recognizing how slow it has been and that since I’m still here, I must still need to grow in my capacity for loving others more than myself. And the reality is that people who are different from us are harder to love up close than in theory. And they are having the same challenge!
One of the keys to loving is recognizing we didn’t get a choice about our unfinished personality or upbringing and neither did others. We may disagree strongly and work to bring about our view of a better world, but we cannot judge people as stupid or evil., they are playing the hand they were dealt the best they know how and judging them makes it impossible to ever learn how to work together using a balance of our natural inborn strengths..
Ignorance: The Human Condition
Reflections on Facing our Failures and Ignorance.
I have been sharing some of my struggles with facing particular failures to communicate my love. When I am able to forgive myself for being just a normal flawed human being, I experience a wonderful peace and a moment of sensing the unconditional love of God. This frees me to be real. Matt in our Sunday School class experiences that in his journey through AA. Ever since my conversion at thirty from agnosticism to Jesus as a source of grace for my spiritual journey, I’ve suspected that AA is closer to the early church experience than today’s Christian religions.
I do not agree completely with any denomination, but I may change in my few years left, because it is a spiritual journey with stages of spiritual growth all along the way. I don’t think anyone dies as a perfect human being, but I think we may make it to our personal best. And personal best probably varies greatly between us. This is why we CANNOT judge, because we don’t KNOW the hand anyone is dealt or how a particular life has affected them. We can be against what they do, but we can not write them off as stupid or evil. They may be smart at practical things, but not have the type of mind it takes to see the big picture, to understand those different from them, or worry about a future they have not yet witnessed. Some people may be very logical and not in touch with their own feelings, so they unwittingly tramp on ours. And if we tend to live in feeling mode, we may think they are being intentionally cruel. Ignorance is not the same as stupidity. And we are all ignorant.
Even those of us that consider ourselves intelligent and have minds that can make connections and visualize possibilities are ignorant. Most of us can not fix car engines or make our own clothes, unless that is what our parents emphasized and taught us.
Our politics are controlled by our personal way of being in the world at birth unless our significant others as children were different from us and remain our mentors. With enough LOVING challenges by those whose love we trust, we CAN change, but it’s part of our personal journey and may only happen late in life.
We can only influence those different from us with enough love that it can overcome their fear of change. That usually takes a one-on-one loving close relationship.
I got scholarships to several prestigious colleges. I chose Rice University for practical reasons. Everyone was on a full scholarship there, but at that time it was predominantly a school for scientists and engineers. I hated it! (Except that there were four boys for every girl, and I had gone to an all-girls high school!) I married out with some poor grades. I returned to college in my thirties, majoring in psychology which had changed a great deal by then, and I graduated summa cum laude. (God is in the timing.) My actual knowledge is mostly in what I am naturally good at. That is such a tiny percentage of all possible knowledge that my ignorance is humongously greater than my knowledge. This was also true for Einstein! It’s true for everyone though each generation adds to knowledge. (Not necessarily to wisdom!)
We are all ignorant. Some are considered smart and some intelligent. These are different and we need both. When we consider people stupid and show it and make them feel that way, there is no hope of sharing our different gifts across the gap.
Language is a big part of the problem. And I don’t mean the language of different countries.
I used to argue with my psychology professors about the point of creating/using language that was unique to our field. If psychology was a hope for understanding ourselves and each other, it was counterproductive to make it “technical” and limited to professionals in the field.
One of the kindest, most delightful people I ever knew grew up poor and got pregnant and dropped out of school at 15. She was competent and talented in both practical things and things of visual beauty in life. But after she joined a small Episcopalian church of intellectuals, she would often be sad, because much of the language used in Sunday School was unfamiliar to her. It made her feel stupid, so she didn’t ask what words meant. Often “intellectuals” speak their own language and consider anyone who doesn’t understand it as “stupid.” This woman was not only NOT stupid, she was a person in touch with her feelings who had been poor growing up and she became the “heart” of that church starting clothing drives for the poor and a church flower garden and often fixing delicious dinners for the whole church.
Some of the “saints‘ among us may not understand our language, won’t benefit from our ability to recognize dangers and the solutions to future problems.
As “intellectuals” we may care about immigrants who don’t speak our language, but not recognize how we are alienating our own people with our versions of everyday English.
Our problems are much more complex than just this issue, but I think this is the one we don’t recognize.
Motivation
Here’s my take on motivation in life:
Greed gives the illusion of importance.
Importance brings the possibility of power.
Power is about control.
Because control fosters the illusion of safety.
And we all, even women, want safety for ourselves and our loved ones.
Sometimes, without realizing it, we make faith about our need to feel safe.
But the journey of Jesus, who calls us to follow him, was not about safety,
It was about love and ultimately even about love for our enemies.
“There are these three: Faith, hope and love. And the greatest of these is Love.”
The Mystery of Prayer
Sunday’s sermon was on prayer and I find that my experiences bring me to a slightly different, but possibly important slant on it. My friend, Montez, pointed out that we have a two way relationship with God that is the basis of everything else. A relationship with God is the heart of the matter. And that relationship is expressed, fleshed out in our relationships with others. Prayer is an important aspect of caring about others.
We can’t really understand God, so our relationship with God is always going to be something of a puzzle. (If we understood God, we would be equal to God and the story of Adam and Eve points out the very human, but treacherous path that takes us on. ) Let’s face it, whether we live in a small cave in a world hard to explore on foot or in a world of trips to the moon and other planets, we are still teeny tiny vulnerable limited beings in a immense and scary universe. Our very understandable human desire for power, whether it comes from the illusion of power through knowledge, riches, weapons of destruction, or even our sense of a relationship with the creator of it all, it is to some extent an illusion. Our relationship with God is a dialogue that’s about growing in our ability to love unconditionally. It’s NOT about power.
My experience has been that a simple openness to something far greater than anything we are or know can be life changing. Unfortunately we are naturally limited in our understanding, so once we become aware of the size and power of whatever it is, the temptation is to use it for our own agendas. So it can be a temptation to turn prayer into an illusion of power.
Over and over Jesus turned to prayer for refueling, for understanding, for empowerment to both teach and heal and feed others. Prayer was his WAY of keeping his relationship with God open for understanding, strength, and the gifts of the Spirit, but MOSTLY it kept him aware of his dependence on God. In the end, he was powerless, totally dependent on his faith in the Love of God.
My experiences of both the power and the lessons of prayer have varied in extremes.
Once at a Catholic Charismatic Conference I witnessed the shorter leg of a young woman friend respond immediately to prayer with instant growth. She had to take her built up shoe off and go barefoot that weekend! Ten years later she was still able to wear flip flops and tennis shoes.
Yet, I watched my mother die by inches with Alzheimer’s for fourteen years.
A forty-year-old woman friend, who had not been raised in any religion, was in intensive care on a respirator in the hospital. She had a diagnosis of incurable idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis and was told she would never again be able to breathe off a respirator. She wanted to be unplugged, but a woman stopped to talk to her in the ICU one night and told her to simply give herself to the God of Jesus and trust his Love.. She did this. Three days later she was permanently off the respirator. She became a beautiful witness to the Love of God that was fleshed out in Jesus for all. But she continued to have all sorts of other health crises, even losing a leg. After about ten years she was polishing the candle holders and praying in her Episcopal church and was finally freed to forgive her father, who had been so awful that she had actually been happy that he died in a fire. Shortly after this she had a heart attack and was freed from her earthly struggles.
God is simply beyond anyone’s understanding. So, prayer is also.
I have had many prayers answered so quickly that it was beyond doubting a connection. But also, plenty that seem to fall on deaf ears. This isn’t heaven. And though when we are suffering it seems like eternity, it isn’t even a blip in eternity. My youngest son was seriously ill from a heart defect his first four years, running temperatures that were beyond the thermometer. Every time he had to have a shot; it took three adults to hold him down. I’m sure that few minutes seemed like an eternity to him, because it did to me. At four years of age, he finally was healed without any medical repair. Through the whole four years I had many Christians of many denominations praying with me for him. (Note: Obviously as a child he was not being punished for anything).
My guess is that healings are so we will know that when God or medicine does NOT heal us, that it’s a part of our journey to a new level of faith and capacity for loving God and all others unconditionally.
Many Europeans seem to have given up on God. Most of the small churches have been turned into cafes or theaters. The crowds in Cathedrals are tourists. We in America have not had widespread bombing blitzes, fire-bombs, or nuclear destruction of our homes and cities. When in Holland my brother asked the tour leader if people in Holland thought we were now facing the end times. She said, “We thought it was the end times when we were eating our tulip bulbs to survive.”
Here in the USA, we don’t really realize how spoiled we are. We think it’s the end of the world when groceries cost too much, Hurricanes increase, and Covid makes us reclusive.
If it’s the end of our world, it’s because we killed it, not because Jesus is coming. Though I am seeing what seems to be some seeds of a renewal of faith in our country, as a History major, I’m pretty sure this isn’t the rapture.
Contrary to what Americans still seem to expect, this life is not heaven. As I’ve said before it seems to me to be a school for growing from need to the capacity for unconditional love……like the life journey of Jesus. And obviously we haven’t gotten there yet.
But I could be wrong, since I’m only 87 and God isn’t finished with me yet.
Memoir : A Journey from Need to Love
“Lord, thank you that my baby made it safely and if you want me to come now, I trust you know best. But do I really have to die in a scene from the Three Stooges?”
At the age of thirty-three I had just had my fifth Caesarian Section when my uterus tore and blood was hiding the source of the hemorrhaging. I literally felt like life was draining out of me. Then hearing the crunch of scurrying feet on broken glass, I figured someone had knocked the IV pole over in the panic. I could see the frightened looks on the dozen or so observing medical students as my normally soft-spoken doctor shouted for milk to show where the blood was coming from. Then the heavy metal bar holding the sheet that blocked my view of the surgery got knocked over onto my nose.
I remember thinking “Oh well, according to mom my birth was a Three Stooges act too.” The Doctor had still been on his way as the top of my head came into view and the intern tried to stop me from coming out. Mom yelled “No!” and kicked him solidly in his face. As he grabbed his nose, Mom pushed, and I popped out as one nurse caught me while another staunched the blood spouting from the intern’s nose.
Well obviously, I didn’t die either time. However, the Three Stooges act has been a recurring theme throughout my eighty-seven years. Fortunately, the Love of God expressed in Jesus exploded into my life when I was thirty.
I got my first clue that nobody had a monopoly on God when I was a first grader in a Catholic school and worriedly told my Methodist mother that Sister Rose said that only Catholics got to go to heaven. My mother bent down to eye level with me and informed me emphatically, “You and your dad are going to get into heaven on my Methodist prayers.”
Methodist or not, Mom was our very involved room mother and became good friends with Sister Rose. So, when Sister Rose laughingly told her that when she had scolded some of the boys for fighting, telling them that she knew all our parents and none of them would fight, I had piped up, “Mine do. I saw my mother throw her shoe at my father.” Mom just laughed and said, “Yes, I did, but it was my soft silk bedroom slipper and not nearly as hard as those chalk board erasers she says you throw at the boys when they misbehave.” I think they called it a draw.
Though she didn’t go to church with us, Mom was very supportive of our Catholicism in every way except one. Back when it was supposed to be a mortal sin to eat meat on Fridays, she served us bacon for breakfast every Friday morning. When dad demurred, she insisted emphatically that it was a worse sin to waste food than to eat meat on Fridays. I don’t know about Dad, but I happily bought into her logic.
At that time, we were renting the third floor of a private home in St. Louis, Missouri. It had a wonderful yard with good climbing trees and even sidewalks for roller skating. There was a washing machine in the basement. I helped to carry the wash up and down the three flights sometimes. But the basement was dark with yard tools and furniture stored there, so I was strictly forbidden to go into it alone. But one day after school I had been having so much fun outside that I waited too late to climb all the stairs to use our bathroom. I was desperate enough to brave the dark forbidden basement to pee in the drain there. To my great relief I managed it undetected. Unfortunately, that night when saying my prayers, I remembered that I was scheduled to make my first confession early the next morning. I panicked. It was going to be totally humiliating to confess what I had done. I considered just saying “I went in the basement.” The nice young priest might settle for that, but what did God expect?
After a sleepless night, I nervously waited my turn and when I got inside the dark confessional, I blurted out, “Bless me father, for I have sinned. I peed down the drain in the basement.” There was no response. Would I have to say a whole rosary as penance? Finally, after what sounded like a coughing fit, he said in a strangled voice, “Say three Hail Marys and don’t do it again.” I got out as fast as I could, but when I was saying my three Hail Marys, I couldn’t help wondering, if there was a book with all the sins and their appropriate penances, would peeing down a drain in the basement be in it?
Reflecting on it years later, I was pretty sure that my confession (hopefully nameless) had become a story to be passed down to new priests for decades.
My life story is about my journey from making a religion my God and throwing God and Jesus out when my religion, totally controlled by men who didn’t marry or have children, told me I had to die having babies. Then after years of ignoring the issue of God, finally several years of searching and Christian friends brought me into a relationship with God through His Love fleshed out in Jesus.
Mine is also a history of a personality made vulnerable to wounding by responding to life from emotion first rather than logic and that rebelled against a world full of many rules that made no sense. It is also about the journey through the self-centeredness that comes from feeling inadequate, but that with grace from a Loving God visibly active in amazing ways, includes healing and spiritual growth.
REBIRTH
I hunger to be born again./ To take my hurts and failures/and mulch them into new beginnings./ To turn them into fertile fields/of understanding and compassion./ To experience once more the greening out/ of the frozen landscapes in my life/ and gain a rich new Spring perspective/ that builds on leaves and logs of yesteryears/ to bring forth the ripe good fruit of Love.
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Humility: The Key to the Kingdom of God
Well I finished Rohr’s book. Since I underlined almost all of it and my memory is flakey, I’m going to reread it and probably post small pieces that really hit where I’ve been and where I struggle now. This is a brilliant priest theologian, activist that has been on a similar journey to mine with just timing differences. I’m a eighty-seven year old woman, married for sixty-years, mother of five with a passel of grands and great grands. My life on the surface level has been nothing like Rohr’s. But spiritually we both grew up Catholic, experienced the Baptism of the Holy Spirit, spent years focusing on equal rights for all and a better life for the poor, and recognized that most of Christianity, including Catholicism, has missed the point of Jesus. That point being that every human being, every pitiful failure, mean as a snake, self-centered, lustful, or just lazy one of us is tenderly and unconditionally loved by God.
Dying to self is not a popular goal and it takes at least all of this life time to even make a dent in our focus on self. But we are only called to play the hand we are dealt and nobody’s dealt a Royal Straight Flush. Recognizing that is the key to humility which is the key to experiencing the kingdom of heaven here. That can free us of judging ourselves and others as bad children. We are all unfinished. At eighty-seven I’m still in a process, a life-time journey literally fueled by the grace of the Love of God fleshed out in Jesus. That grace is poured out for a journey that progresses by a mix of inches, temporary stops and occasional leaps. But the journey is for us to fulfill only our personal potential…..no one else’s and has nothing to do with being loved and everything to do with knowing we are loved. When we are open to that we can pass it on and join with God in bringing about His kingdom on earth. But, don’t get too overwhelmed, or too dependent on seeing results………the time line is eternity. This isn’t heaven. And sometimes things have to get worse in order to get better. Our primary challenge is letting God’s grace of Love make us better. It’s a partnership that doesn’t work when we think we are wise and good enough to do it by ourselves. That’s the key and importance of “walking humbly with our God.” It takes focus, listening, watching, and particularly an openness to all the possibilities so God can show us when we persevere in seeking his will.
I want to pass on something important for men and women that I learned the hard way. In fact ,Rohr is the first person I have ever heard say that it is the reason women outlive men. We can allow ourselves to cry. It’s not weakness. We weep, but persevere. Tears are literally healing, emotionally and physically and spiritually. Jesus wept, so should we. There are plenty of things in this world that need to be wept over. We cry our hearts out. Then get up, wipe our tears away and take God’s hand like a small child and keep on keeping on.
Hugs to all you guys. We are not alone ever!
The Call to Change
I am still reading Richard Rohr’s “Jesus’ Alternative Plan …The Sermon on the Mount.” It’s not a simple or easy read. I have to stop and reflect and sometimes write about the awareness he provokes. Part of my delight is his confirmation of so much of what I’ve had to learn the hard way, from experience. But I think that is the best way because it helps facilitate actual change, not just intellectual assent. As I get farther in the book, I am challenged to face the areas in my psyche that have not been transformed yet by appropriation, that are still just intellectual assent. The journey gets harder along the way and I’ve been on it a long time. I’m obviously a slow learner!
Rohr is a theologian, so sometimes his language gets beyond my everyday understanding and makes me feel stupid. Then I have to struggle with both Google and my feelings of intimidation, so I won’t skip over those parts.
I’m in a very challenging part of my journey and I’m really struggling with it. I use various escapes often and don’t deal with issues that involve so much hard, even painful, self-honesty. I really resist being willing to die to what I like about myself. Which is what we have to do to focus on the nitty-gritty areas in order to see what needs to be let go. And then the hardest work is giving up my emotional pain relievers that I hang on to that keep me from experiencing the growing pains.
One of my escapes is depression. At an unconscious level it’s a choice. My other escape is being around other people who are also letting themselves focus on the bad things in the world outside them, rather than the things within us that need changing. There are some things we can do to try to make the world our version of better. But the biggest challenge ultimately is ourself that with honesty and grace we are called to change for the better. For most of us the “Beatitudes” are a greater challenge on the spiritual journey than the ten commandments.
Ultimately our spiritual journey is the same as Oscar, the Grouch’s: admitting it’s our own attitude that needs changing and seeking the grace to do it.
And sometimes I have needed either a Spiritual Director or a group that is also seeking the grace to grow and change. Right now I don’t have either, but I am seeing and hearing God’s call to change. So, I am focusing on that part of the journey and Rohr’s book really focuses on that challenge. God is in the timing!
Challenges for Me
These are two thoughts from Mark Manson’s Posts “Your Next Breakthrough” TWO THINGS FOR YOU TO ASK YOURSELF Would you rather have attention than happiness? Does this explain any of the recurring problems within your life? ONE THING FOR YOU TO TRY THIS WEEK Give up the desire to be right, to be heard, to be appreciated. See what happens. You might be surprised.
The following spoke to me because it makes me feel good about myself to try to help someone else, but it sometimes really may be a way of avoiding the challenges in my own life. This was from a reader who had a breakthrough from Mark’s challenges. “Taking responsibility is very important. But what about the hazard of taking responsibility for other people’s lives? To take responsibility for one’s own life is life-changing, whereas taking responsibility for another (adult’s) life could just be a distraction that we use to avoid the harder things in our own lives. Not only is it a distraction, but it can be damaging to that person. In fact, this is where “enabling” comes on—when you take responsibility for someone else’s problem to such an extent that you make it easier for them to keep committing the same mistakes. Allowing someone we care about to take responsibility for their own issues and mistakes can be incredibly difficult because it requires us to watch that person we love suffer. But by protecting that person from the suffering inherent in owning their mistakes, you rob them of the ability to learn, grow, and find meaning in them.”
Our Delusion that This Life is Supposed to be Heaven
Jesus healed many people, more than the Gospel stories name. But those same people eventually died. And he was not everywhere, so many were not healed. When he said “Your faith has healed you.,” it wasn’t their faith in healing, but their faith in a God that is for us and with us. But that is the same God that let Jesus die on the cross. That is the same God that let Jesus feel abandoned on the cross. But Jesus’ faith ultimately was in a God that loves and wants the best for us in eternity. The best is being like Jesus who ultimately trusts God and says, “Into your hands I commit my spirit.”
American faith often is that God should make us healthy, wealthy, and happy here on Earth. But our journey here is not heaven, it’s a school. It’s a journey from the dependency and need of a baby being transformed into the ability to love another and ultimately all others more than ourself. That takes faith not in healing, but in God’s love for us that will ultimately be grace for that journey.
Jesus had to take that same journey. In fact his journey is the map for ours.
I have experienced and witnessed healings. But my mother died by inches over fourteen miserable years with Alzheimer’s. And I was helpless to make it better no matter how hard I tried and toward the end I neglected her because I couldn’t bear it. Ultimately I was able to be with her as she died for eleven days and witnessed not healing, but some sort of peace. When my husband of almost sixty years was dying, I was able only through grace to take care of him and to not lose it myself. That part of the journey was a gift for me through giving me the grace to love him in ways I did not think I was capable of managing. And God gave me the grace to let go at he end. He died from many health issues, but not from the one we feared most. Suffering and sorrow and growing in love in and through it and ultimately like Jesus trusting in death, our own and our loved one’s, is part of the journey of the school of life. We follow in the footsteps of Jesus. The healings teach us that when we are not healed, it’s part of both the learning to trust God and growing in love and in letting go of our delusion that this life is supposed to be heaven.
Old Age Has Its Wisdom, but Younger Generations Start Off with a Lot of What We’ve Learned: We Can All Learn from Each Other
Idealists are in danger of never being satisfied, which in one way is a good thing since we fight to make the world a better place for all, but it plays havoc with marriages. If you are an idealist without an awareness of the down side, listen up! ONLY with a relationship with a power wiser than you (GOD/ALLAH/BUDDHA/ YOUR GREAT-GRANDMOTHER) will you recognize when you are thinking about ‘trading up” that it may mean you will just have to start over (and possibly over and over, etc.) to recognize that you are unrealistic about life and relationships. Believe me, watch for signals of this, in case that higher power is trying to give you a much shorter way to “growing both wiser and more able to love.” The search for the perfect person is futile. There is no such thing, including yourself. Life is a journey with both challenges and grace (if we are open to it) to become the more loving person we were created to be. (This doesn’t mean you put up with abuse.) God is alive and well and still doing the Jesus thing if we are aware of it. That can make a huge difference in the journey to becoming the best (imperfect) person we were created to be.
NEW INSIGHT
Recently my eyes were opened to the reality that someone who is tuned into the journey of grace going on in both their own life and in their generation can know in their forties what it’s taken us in our eighties a lot longer to learn! I may know some things from those years of learning that they don’t, but they are way ahead of where I was at their age. Yes, we may have gained some wisdom on our life’s journey that even a spiritual and wise forty-year-old may not have yet. But they started from a different place than us old guys did. If they were open to wisdom that our generation and some after us has learned, they are wiser at forty than we were and may not be far behind us where we are even now. Listen to them and put what you’ve learned together with what they know. Both ages have a lot to give to each other.
Laughter: Carbonated Grace 