Category Archives: a Jesus kind of love
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!
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.
Age and Loving
When you have a lot of children, you end up with a lot of grands, great-grands, and a great-great grand when you are turning 87 years old. The world is so different now and at my age I’m limited in money, modern skills, knowledge, and strength to be of much help to any of them. Sometimes it simply breaks my heart and I sit and weep for them and for me too, because I love them all so much that I hurt for and with them and am overwhelmed by my helplessness. And they don’t really know how much I love them, because their lives take up all their time and strength.
I used to take my grands and the older great-grands to the Science Museum in Nashville every few weeks. So many good memories, but they don’t talk about those times, so I sometimes think they don’t remember them or know how much I love them. It breaks my heart.
But this week I got a few moments with Hannah who is my grandson Jake’s dearest love. And she told me that he talks about those trips to the museum often. I am shedding a few tears of happiness as I write this, because that means so much to me. Jake is specially tender hearted. He even cooked my favorite “Shrimp and Grits ” a couple of years ago at Christmas for me at our family gathering. Hannah is a lot like me I think, but I haven’t had much chance to get to know her because Christmases are wonderful, but chaotic with little one on one time.
Some of my children and grandchildren are divorced. And sometimes their estrangement means I have to choose between them and their ex’s whom I had come to love. Marriage is the hardest challenge we have and when they end nobody outside them can judge either partner because relationships are so complicated and difficult in different ways for different people. So ultimately I have had to choose whom I remain close to and frankly right or wrong, if forced to choose, my family will be my choice. Partly because right or wrong, I am part of why they are who they are. But I never stop caring or praying for those I came to love because they loved my child or grandchild.
The older we are the more people we love and the more we hurt and worry and feel helpless when they are hurting or struggling and lost.
The life, losses, and suffering of Jesus are the blueprint of a life of learning to love and the pain that goes with it.
I cannot imagine how anyone makes it without experiencing and clinging to that Love of God for each and every single one of us fleshed out in Jesus.
The words “I am weak, but He is strong.” sum up my life. Sometimes I lose touch with that Love that is the grace to persevere in loving when it’s so painful. But I know it’s there for me to reach out again and hug it close and draw strength even through tears so I can keep caring and loving even when I am helpless to help those I love who are hurting. I KNOW God loves them too, just as much as God loves Jesus!!!!!!!! But I also know the journey is hard and even knowing with all my mind, body and spirit that we are tenderly and unconditionally loved it can seem overwhelming. But I do believe that prayer makes us junior partners with God and no matter how helpless I may feel or be, I can still pray. And though my list is long and I struggle with forgetfulness, God knows who is in my heart and they are always in His.
Pentecost: the Beginning, but Not the End
Pentecost is the Birthday of the Church. Here are some Scriptures that describe our call to be the People of God. John 10:27 Jesus says: “My sheep hear my voice; I know them and they follow me.” How do we hear his voice? 1st, By taking time to listen. 2nd, Asking the questions on our hearts. 3rd, Reading New Testament scriptures either randomly or from the lectionary of that day. 4th, Examining the events of our days for signposts or connections that can guide us. 5th, Respond appropriately to what we hear. God is in the timing: listen and respond. John 13:34 Jesus says: “I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.” How did Jesus love his disciples? Only when they were perfect? Only when they were humble and didn’t want to one up one another, when they didn’t doubt, when they were ready to suffer and die with him, when they understood and agreed with everything he said, when they loved the unlovable, When they were able to do everything he told them to do, when they recognized him in the stranger, when they didn’t want political power more than spiritual grace ? Did he abandon them because of their failures to love? Did he not forgive those that killed him? Did he stop loving God when he felt God had abandoned him? It’s a spiritual journey that takes a lifetime of challenges and grace to become able to love as Jesus loved. John14:23 Jesus says: Jesus says: “Those who love me will keep my word and we will come and make our home with them.” Jesus asks us to keep HIS word. HIS word, is fleshed out by his actions; His journey from thinking He was only sent for the Jews, to hearing God challenge him to love the lepers of his time, to love even the traitorous Tax Collectors, the adulterous woman, a heretic Samaritan, the man possessed by demons, the Roman soldier, even his disciples that abandoned him when they got scared, and the Religious Leaders who killed him, and ultimately even God when he felt abandoned by Him. This is the spiritual journey Jesus call us to make with him. He promises” “WE will come and make our home with them. The WE is God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit. Pentecost did not stop with the first Apostles. It stopped when Christians decided they needed something easier to follow: The law of the minimum ten rather than the beatitudes fleshed out in the life of Jesus. A church hierarchy without accountability from the balance of the gifts of the Holy Spirit in all the followers of Jesus. John 17:20 Jesus prays to the Father “I ask not only on behalf of these, but also on the behalf of those who will believe in me through their word, that they may all be one. Does being one mean we never disagree? There were plenty of disagreements from the beginning. They were a work in progress just as we are. Just as a family is. We are the family, the descendants, of those first Christians. And when you read enough of Paul, you realize it was the same then, just like herding cats! We are not made with a cookie cutter, we are different from birth and the call of Jesus isn’t about agreeing, it’s about loving. John 14.12 Jesus says: Very truly I tell you, the one who believes in me will also do the works that I do and, in fact, will do greater works than these because I am going to the Father. I will do whatever you ask in my name, so that the Father may be glorified in the Son.” Many of us have been turned off by the gifts of the Spirit being used for personal fame and profit. Sometimes it is witnessing insensitivity by people who do not hear the Spirit’s leading about when God is or is not calling us to receive or use the gifts of the Holy Spirit. I have both experienced and witnessed miracles of healing and other gifts of the Holy Spirit. I think the key is first growing spiritually enough to have the fruits of the Spirit. Those take time spent in both prayer and study in a community open to the Holy Spirit. But most of all learning to Love as Jesus loved is the heart and soul of our spiritual journey.
We Don’t Know What We Are Doing
Brian McLaren (One of Richard Rohr’s CAC) invites us to an imaginative experience of the painful reality of scapegoating that occurred on Good Friday:
Let’s imagine ourselves with the disciples just before three o’clock on this Friday afternoon. A few of us have come together to talk about what has happened over the last twenty-four hours…. Why was there no other way? Why did this good man—the best we have ever known, the best we have ever imagined—have to face torture and execution as if he were some evil monster? As the hours drag on from noon to nearly three o’clock, we imagine many reasons…. Jesus has told us again and again that God is different from our assumptions. We’ve assumed that God was righteous and pure in a way that makes God hate the unrighteous and impure. But Jesus has told us that God is pure love, so overflowing in goodness that God pours out compassion on the pure and impure alike. He not only has told us of God’s unbounded compassion—he has embodied it every day as we have walked this road with him. In the way he has sat at table with everyone, in the way he has never been afraid to be called a “friend of sinners,” in the way he has touched untouchables and refused to condemn even the most notorious of sinners, he has embodied for us a very different vision of what God is like…. If Jesus is showing us something so radical about God, what is he telling us about ourselves—about human beings and our social and religious institutions? What does it mean when our political leaders and our religious leaders come together to mock and torture and kill God’s messenger?… Is this the only way religions and governments maintain order—by threatening us with pain, shame, and death if we don’t comply? And is this how they unify us—by turning us into a mob that comes together in its shared hatred of the latest failure, loser, rebel, criminal, outcast … or prophet?… What kind of world have we made? What kind of people have we become?… In the middle of the afternoon … even from this distance, we can hear Jesus, “Father, forgive them!” he shouts. “For they don’t know what they are doing.” Forgive them? Forgive us? Our thoughts bring us again to the garden last night, when Jesus asked if there could be any other way. And now it seems clear. There could be no other way to show us what God is truly like. God is not revealed in killing and conquest … in violence and hate. God is revealed in this crucified man—giving of himself to the very last breath, giving and forgiving. And there could be no other way to show us what we are truly like. We do not know what we are do. If God is like this, and if we are like this … everything must change.
Ordinary Lives Transformed
Father Richard Rohr writes about encountering the Risen Christ in our ordinariness and woundedness. I’ve noticed in the Gospels that even after two appearances of the Risen Christ, the apostles return to their old job of fishing (John 21:3). They don’t join the priesthood, try to get a job at the Temple, go on more retreats, take vows, leave their wives, or get special titles. Nor is there any mention of them baptizing each other or wearing special clothing beyond that of a wayfarer or “workman” (Matthew 10:9–10). When the inner is utterly transformed, we don’t need symbolic outer validations, special hats, or flashy insignia. We can also note that the Risen Christ is never apparent as a supernatural figure, but is mistaken in one case for a gardener, another time for a fellow traveler on the road, and then for a fisherman offering advice. He seems to look just like everybody else after the Resurrection (John 20:15; Luke 24:13–35; John 21:4–6), even with his wounds on full display! In the Gospels it appears we can all go back to “fishing” after any authentic God encounter, consciously carrying our humiliating wounds, only now more humbly. That is our only badge of honor. In fact, it is exactly our woundedness that gives us any interest in healing itself, and the very power to heal others. As Henri Nouwen rightly said, the only authentic healers are always wounded healers. Good therapists will often say the same. True mysticism just allows us to “fish” from a different side of the boat and with different expectations of what success might mean. All the while, we are totally assured that we are already and always floating on a big, deep, life-filled pond. The mystical heart knows there is a fellow Fisherman nearby who is always available for good advice. He stands and beckons from the shores, at the edges of every ordinary life, every unreligious moment, every “secular” occupation, and he is still talking to working people who, like the first disciples, are not important, influential, especially “holy,” trained in theology, or even educated. This is the mystical doorway, which is not narrow but wide and welcoming. Matthew Fox affirms mystical experience as a gift: Deep down, each one of us is a mystic. When we tap into that energy we become alive again and we give birth. From the creativity that we release is born the prophetic vision and work that we all aspire to realize as our gift to the world. We want to serve in whatever capacity we can. Getting in touch with the mystic inside is the beginning of our deep service…. Mysticism is about the awe and the gratitude, the letting go and the letting be, the birthing and the creativity, and the compassion—including healing and celebration and justice making—that our world so sorely needs…. Every mystic is a healer. We are healers all.
