Journey of Faith

God designed us so we are naturally inclined to search for Him. God constantly draws us to Himself and we search for Him, whether we are aware of it or not. 

Sometimes we reject God, and there are many reasons why this may happen. We may be ignorant or indifferent. We may be unhappy with the way the world is and want God to change it or blame God. Or we may have been scandalized by those who profess a belief in God and then proceed to do immoral or even evil things. We may be attached to our sin and not want to mess with anything that might lead us away from a life of sin we are enjoying. There are many things that lead us away from God. 

But there are also many things that lead us to God. One thing is the world itself. God created the world – the butterflies, the grass, the mountains, even the cockroaches - all of it can point us to Him. The order, the beauty, the movement, the possibility, it all leads us to Him. The human person also points us to God with his natural inclination toward truth and his desire for true happiness that can only be found in God. The human person also has a natural moral sense that is the voice of God within his soul. It is the soul also that points a person to God because it is a sliver of eternity inside of us that is always straining towards God. Our reason leads us to God and to faith. God gave us our natural reason in order that we may learn more about him; that is the purpose of our reason. So, if we are using reason properly, it will always lead us to Truth.

So, how are we asked to respond to God? 

With faith. 

Faith is a verb and a noun. It is a verb because when we have faith, we let God into our souls – we allow Him to run the show. It is a noun because in order to have faith we must have faith in formulas or creeds that describe what we believe. These formulas or creeds never fully express the truths they communicate: 

The believer’s act [of faith] does not terminate in the propositions, but in the realities [which they express]. – Thomas Aquinas

Faith is different from reason but it never contradicts it. Faith is different because it requires obedience, even if we do not understand in order to have faith we must accept. Obedience is not a popular concept in our culture. But how can we refuse obedience to our Creator? We must obey what God reveals to us through Scripture, and for Catholics through Sacred Tradition (which is also God's Word, it is Tradition with a capital "T," whose source is God).

Faith requires we believe in things unseen, not immediately provable. But our faith is not contrary to our freedom or to reason. God never coerces us to have faith. And if we believe something that natural reason proves wrong, then our faith (the verb) is misplaced and our faith (the noun) is misinformed.

God, in His great kindness determined that our faith would not be entirely blind but would be backed by natural reason and backed by signs of revelation – miracles, saints, holiness, stability throughout time, prophecies, etc – look for these things and you will not be far from the object of your faith. 

 May God bless you on your journey of faith!

 

(Ideas are inspired by and a loose summary of parts of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, it's so beautiful!)

Happy Valentine's Day

Love is the effective willing of the good of the other:

May you love effectively this Valentine's Day and all days!

Follow Your Heart

God is a spring of living water which flows unceasingly into the hearts of those who pray.

                              

                                               ~ St. Louis de Montfort

I recently cleaned out an old email account and as I read through several old emails from my college days my jaw dropped. I was shocked at the person I was. I seesawed between an awe of the saucy, cutting way I articulated myself and a horror of my arrogance that was through the roof.

I also wondered if recent years have led to a serious drop in my IQ as I read articulate emails discussing the intricacies of Kant’s categorical imperative and shot questions back and forth with my professors in a cavalier way that indicated to me that I was really just kind of showing off. 

“Who was this girl?” I wondered.

Even as this thought crossed my mind I smiled, I knew the answer. I have not become any less intelligent. I am just simpler; like a more purified glass of water rather than a complicated cocktail. I am no longer a creation of my own making.

Recently, I got into a discussion with someone who does not believe in the divinity of Jesus. He gave me several arguments for his beliefs and I set off to try and prove him wrong. As I dived into a part of theology I had never really explored before, I felt a certain fear behind my frenetic pod-cast listening and internet browsing.

What was I afraid of?

I sat down in the chapel to discern what was going on in my heart. As I drank in the peace I began to realize that in the back of my mind I was thinking, “Theresa, how could you have joined a religious order, let alone a religion without being able to defend the divinity of Jesus?” I really was flabbergasted at myself for lacking such fundamental knowledge concerning the Christian faith.

When I stepped away from organized religion I was fourteen and at the time I told my mom, “I know plenty of bad Christians. I am going to be a good person. I don’t think I need a religion to do that.”

Spending more than ten years away from the Christian faith I depended entirely on my reason to lead me down the road of life, to help me to act ethically. I thought I was smart so I could make it on my own. I felt I did not need traditions or doctrines to hold me down. I did not need anything to figure things out; I could do it all by myself. Reason was my god. It was the answer to everything.

College life taught me to depend even more on my mind. I learned to disdain anything not well-reasoned. Most liberal arts schools emphasize growth in “critical thinking” but from my experience this often translates to learning not just methods of logical reasoning but the art of harsh criticism, of tearing something apart until nothing remains except self satisfied smiles.

I hope you do not mistake what I am saying for some kind of fundamentalist emphasis on faith, with no respect for the faculties of our mind. On the contrary, I give partial credit to my intellect for leading me back to God. One thing I realized as my conversion grew closer was that since I believed in miracles, unexplained phenomenon in life that science cannot explain, I could not really remain an atheist or even an agnostic. I reasoned that since I believed the laws of nature were able to be bent it meant that Someone had to be doing the bending and I reasoned that it had to be a Someone rather than a something because an inanimate force ruling the universe is too impersonal to work miracles of healing, etc.

But there came a point in my conversion when God asked me to follow Him, not with my mind but with my heart. I made steps toward things that I did not understand. I made changes in my life because of an inner prompting. But when others asked me why, I stuttered and sounded like a fool trying to explain.

I was able to make this step toward my heart and away from my mind because God gave me the grace to have an iota of understanding of the distance between me and God. As humans, we like to build our own personal towers of Babel, shortening the distance between us and God, pretending we have everything figured out. But often, we are only willing to believe that God knows what we can understand and nothing more.

As I began this journey of the heart I felt terrified. I was used to a life where I could articulate why I was doing everything I was doing in a way that would make the person I was talking to wonder if they should be doing the same thing. I could convince others of ideas that were drenched in the perfume of falsehood simply with impressive acrobatic skills of reasoning. I was a con artist of truth because I had conned myself into thinking that truth was whatever I could figure out with the limits of my own intellect.

When I finally gave into following the inner instincts of the heart, it was like being led blindfolded across huge chasms between mountains of understanding. It was at the same moment terrifying as it was liberating. I could see myself making leaps and bounds in the spiritual life, not due to anything I was doing myself but what I was letting God do within my heart. I gave up the power of being able to articulate everything I understood so that God could lead me to levels of wisdom that only the heart could understand.

Recently, when I began my research on the divinity of Christ, I let my mind take control, the mind that has been purified to some extent of secular values and its ultra critical mode of being, but not completely. My mind can still behave like an enemy spy, always ready to pounce, to sew seeds of doubt.  My mind was still not trustworthy, yet I had gone back to depending entirely on it. As I let this anxious mind take over, I shut the curtain on my heart. I did not want wisdom that I could not articulate; I wanted to win an argument.

As I wandered through this heartless desert, I felt tiny and alone, as if I had woken up from a dream and found myself at the edge of a cliff looking down. Somehow I knew that I had been down there in the valley, deep in the mysteries of God but my mind could not connect to them. I was like a millionaire who had traded her bursting bank account for a child’s piggy bank.

When I sat in prayer in front of the tabernacle, I felt as if there was an ocean between me and Jesus. I sat as disjointed thoughts about Trinitarian theology rolled around in my head. I felt smart again, giving myself a pat on the back for delving into complicated ideas, but I was really completely lost and God was again just a distant something.

Now I realize that through this experience God is calling me to build more lines of communication between my mind and heart. He is not asking me to depend solely on my heart forever. On the contrary, I am a Catholic and if you know anything about this faith, it is the religion of faith meeting reason. Thomas Aquinas, St. Anselm, the Church Fathers, St. Augustine, the list goes on and on of the truly great minds in the Church. The Church does not disdain philosophy or any other system of thought that pursues truth. Rather, it recognizes that God uses many things to lead a person closer to Him. Our minds are made for just that reason, to pursue the Truth, which is God, whether we know it or not.

These experiences may resonate with you, or may not, we are all different, but I want to leave you with the prayer I am saying to God as a result of this experience:

God, lead my mind to drink at the waters of my heart where you dwell. And help my heart to take the lead as I engage my God-given ability of reason to pursue you ever further, to the ends of the earth.

May God bless all of the beautiful hearts of those I love and those I do not know.

A Letter from John

Dear Theresa,

At the end of my Gospel I say, “There are also many other things that Jesus did, but if these were to be described individually, I do not think the whole world could contain the books that would be written” (Jn 21:24).  

You have asked me to describe Jesus so that you may feel closer to Him. Maybe you wish you could have seen the way that He interacted with the people He healed. Or maybe you wish that you could have asked Him questions, or received explanations that would soothe your mind. Or perhaps you wish that you could lie against His heart and feel it beating as I did at the Last Supper.

All of these are beautiful and natural desires but the thing that I want to communicate to you more than what Jesus was like is that you already know the Jesus I knew, in some ways better than I did when I followed Him. I know this is hard to comprehend and perhaps you will never really believe me, but it is true. There is a large expanse of years between the time Jesus walked the Earth and your life now, but that leaves you with many examples of what Christ was like, lived through the lives of holy people who followed in His footsteps.

If you combine all of the things that you love about all of the Saints, that tells you about Jesus. If you imagine all of the amazing saints to come, that tells you about Jesus. He has the strength and the unflinching honesty of Padre Pio. He is the tender sweetness of St. Therese. He is the knowledge and intellect of St. Thomas Aquinas. He is the humility of St. Jeanne Jugan. He has the deep and wide love for all humanity that Bl. James Alberione had.  He has the love of justice of Dorothy Day and the love of the poor of Mother Teresa. Jesus is a brilliant diamond with many facets, and you learn more about Him through other people He puts in your path every day. 

You love beautiful things. If everything that you saw was perfect and pleasing to the eye - that would be a little what like watching Jesus was like. He was like a moving piece of art. All that He did spoke of Beauty. All that He was is Beauty. All that He loved, it made it all look beautiful in our eyes too. And you already know what this is like, how the world has opened up like a budding flower after your conversion - that is how the world was when we were with Jesus.

You want to know what He was like, in His mannerisms and way of being. I can tell you that the thirst you have for holiness and perfection, it was found in the most ideal way in Jesus. He never responded to anyone or any situation in any way except love. He loved when He healed, He loved when He chastised. He even loved when He overturned tables. We always could trust that every single action and blink of His eye was pure love.

You have Jesus now in the Eucharist, my dear daughter. I know it is hard to remember this. It is easy to forget, to take for granted, to become lukewarm but Jesus is with you now in His body, blood, soul and divinity and He humbles Himself to become your spiritual food. God becomes your spiritual food. What an amazing miracle. Maximilian Kolbe said, “If the angels could be jealous of men they would be jealous of the gift that we have in Holy Communion,” and he was right. 

So do not envy me, my daughter. Do not envy the time that I spent listening to Jesus’ heart. You listen to His heart every time you sit in prayer in front of the tabernacle. Do not envy me because I was the “beloved apostle” – YOU are His beloved apostle. Rejoice my child because Jesus is with you now, and we will all one day be together without tears or suffering in Heaven.

With eternal love,

The beloved apostle, John

Unfurl My Love

The love of Christ
Waits in my heart.
It is ready to be unfurled.

But my pride
Is like a clenched fist,
Holding it in.

I am no match for Christ's love
And yet He allows
Me to hold Him in.

I'm a stranger to everyone
Without this Love.

Sometimes my eyes open
And I let Him overtake me,
For a moment.

It is then that I am a sister,
To all.

I feel their sorrow,
I don't shut them out.
They are mine.

Mine?

Even then (my) love is incomplete.

I am God's Acorn

When the oak is felled the whole forest echoes with its fall, but a hundred acorns are sown in silence by an unnoticed breeze 
                                 - Thomas Carlyle

Formation has been a journey into the unknown for me from the very beginning. I had no idea what to expect but I knew it would be painful, and good.

Normally these two words do not belong together.

Many people might ask, "If you knew something was going to be painful, why would you do it?"

That is a good question, one that I sometimes ask myself in the ups and downs of living this life. The only answer I can come up with is love. I love God too much to allow myself to remain mediocre. I want to become holy out of my love for Him and out of my desire to share the reality of God with the world. The most effective way to share this reality is through the messenger. People will listen to the Truth of God if the person telling them about God embodies the qualities of God. In other words, I need to allow Christ to be formed in me in order to be able to share Him effectively with the world (Galatians 4:19).

I guess the next obvious question is - Why does it require pain to become holy?

I don't really have the answer to this question. But I do know that God, in His wisdom, purifies us so that we will be ready to join Him in heaven and unfortunately, humans are so full of pride and arrogance that the purification often hurts. But I think it is important to see that the pain is more often caused by our sin, not by God's desire to see us hurt.

And there really is such a thing as good pain. I know this idea is very antithetical to our culture of pleasure at all times at whatever cost but I'm not some kind of masochist in saying this, I think everyone can relate to this reality. We all hurt when we work out until we are red in the face and drenched in sweat. The next day the pain we feel as we walk up the stairs is a sweet pain, a pain that makes us smile. Or the pain a mother feels in childbirth makes the birth of a new human being, her child, that much more blissful and sweet. We all have worked really hard to attain a certain goal and it is that hard work and pain that makes getting to that goal so much more joyful.

So when I say the past few months have been painful, I am not saying anything negative. In fact, when I entered I remember making the prayer to God - "Make me holy Lord, at whatever cost, at whatever pain - Do it and do it quickly."  Some people might think it is insane to make this sort of prayer to God but I have always been a person of extremes.

When I made this prayer, I knew that pain would be in my future and sure enough I started to feel it. Gradually, God helped me to understand just how dependent I am on Him by withdrawing the graces He poured out on me to deal with certain aspects of this life. For several weeks I felt agonizing pain thinking of giving up marriage. For the last few weeks of Christmas, I felt real sorrow because I was not able to go home and be with my family who I love more than anything.

When I feel this pain it challenges my faith. It is easy to say I believe in God when it does not cost anything, but when He asks me to do something that is painful I begin to wonder if He really exists. The cunning voice of the evil one begins to whisper in my ear, "What if it is all not real? What if you give up all of these things and find nothing at the end of the tunnel?" This voice is not just the voice of evil, it is the voice of our culture - "Why give up everything? Why not just do this halfway, hedge your bets? God won't throw you into hell for just living a good life with minimal pain right?"

Then there is the pain of becoming small. Life in California was blissful, I has friends who loved me, co-workers who appreciated me and admired the work that I did. I made a pile of money, had a beautiful little apartment and could do what I wanted. Now in St. Louis, God has made it clear that I cannot be the main attraction at this show. If I am not willing to disappear, to become small, to fade into the background then He will not be able to live in me and use all of the gifts I have solely to do His will. The small humiliations I have experienced have been enough to make me want to run back to my easy life in California. I have realized just how fragile and large my ego is by the amount of pain that this humiliation causes me.

I took a walk recently with this lingering pain and the haunting voices of doubt in my ear. As I walked, I began to recall the many ways that God has touched my life, the ways He has let me know He is here, watching after me in a way that is personal and real. I realized that it takes a larger leap of faith to believe that God does not exist at this point. But that does not take away the pain and even the doubts still linger in my mind.

As I trudged through a path in the woods I reached down and picked up an acorn. For some reason in that instant I was transported away from my thoughts and all of my energy and life was focused on the beauty of that acorn. I audibly gasped in the moment and was transfixed. The acorn was light brown, smooth as a marble. The cap of the acorn was perfectly symmetrical and a deep chocolate shade of brown. I wanted to run and share the beauty of that little seed with everyone around me but I knew they would not understand. God, for a moment, was allowing me to see the captivating, awesome beauty of just a tiny part of His creation.

As I walked on, clutching the tiny acorn I realized that it was likely that no one had seen this acorn before I picked it up. And no one was likely to see it before it disintegrated into the ground. Yet, God created it and created its beauty. It was not a waste. It may not have even served a purpose. But it was beautiful and it served God with all that it was in the simplicity of what it was.

So that is what I will do. I will continue to live my life completely for God, allowing Him to purify me because any pain is worth my love for Him. And some may see this all as a waste, but I don't. I don't care how small He calls me to be, or how insignificant, I will gladly be His acorn.

The Advent of Hope

In this Advent period we will once again experience the closeness of the One who created the world, who guides history and cared for us to the point of becoming a man.   - Pope Benedict XVI

A few weeks ago, I visited the local Science Center with another postulant from the Daughters of St. Paul. The exhibit that most impressed me was the timeline that illustrated the age of the universe and the evolution of man. 

Astronomers estimate the age of the universe to be around 13 billion years, give or take a billion or so. Scientists believe that life began on our planet between 3 to 4 billion years ago. It is estimated that the species to which we belong, Homo sapiens, has existed for only 100,000 years.

Just take a moment to think about that vast expanse of time and the extremely minuscule portion of it that contains human life.

Now think about this. We live in one galaxy that is only one among what scientists estimate to be hundreds of billions of galaxies in the entire universe.

At the Science Center, when I considered this historical time line and the vast expanse of physical space we live in, I have to be honest, I was shaken. In that moment, I understood why a lot of people can lose their sense of God when they study science. I cannot really describe the feeling except that it felt like an overwhelming despair, an understanding of how empty the world would be without God.

I think the enormity of the concepts were what caused the momentary crisis. Humans have a tendency to do this, at least I do. If my brain cannot wrap around something, it shakes my faith. I want answers the moment an idea or concept clashes in my mind and I cannot make sense of it. This is positive in the sense that if something does not make sense, I seek out answers and do not rest until I am satisfied. But unfortunately it reveals that I have an underlying assumption that my intellect has the capacity to understand anything that does not make sense in the world. This is not true for anyone, no matter how intelligent they are, and certainly is not true for me.

But faithful to my inquisitive personality, I returned home from the Science Center on a mission to understand more about evolution. The first thing I was relieved to find out was that the Catholic view of evolution and science in general is very reasonable: 

Methodical research in all branches of knowledge, provided it is carried out in a truly scientific manner and does not override moral laws, can never conflict with the faith, because the things of the world and the things of faith derive from the same God. (Catechism of the Catholic Church,159)

Thankfully, the Church does not automatically reject science that is contrary to the literal interpretation of the Bible. I can understand why atheists and agnostics are infuriated by this tendency in some Christian denominations. When we deny our reason, we are denying a fundamental aspect of our humanity.

But this preliminary foray into the issue of evolution left me with even more questions: "When did the human soul come on the scene? What about Adam and Eve, how do they fit into this? What about the dinosaurs, what were they all about? I continued my research into evolution and I have read online and listened to four podcasts so far and they have been helpful but I am not even close to having an understanding of this issue to write a blog about it, which was my original purpose.

However, recently I realized that this tangent that I have allowed myself to get lost in has been very fitting for the season of Advent.

During this blessed season we contemplate the mystery of the Incarnation. The idea that we as Christians profess: God Himself, the Creator of this vast and amazing universe entered human history and became a man named Jesus.

This idea is ludicrous. Really, if you are bored with Christianity, it is because you do not really let yourself absorb the insanity of what we believe. It is insane, so insane humans could not have made this up. God Himself became a zygote and then later a fetus and then a beautiful child who could not speak. God, the Creator of all, the Omnipotent, All-Knowing God, the force who created the entire universe with its billions of galaxies, became a little, helpless baby born into poverty to parents who were refugees.

Why did God do this? Because He is Love and He could not do anything else.

I encourage each one of you to take one hour (or more!) this Advent to contemplate this amazing mystery, perhaps before the Blessed Sacrament in adoration. It is a mystery that one hour will not exhaust and I am slowly realizing that my entire lifetime will never be enough to understand the height and breadth of God's love for us.

Blessed Advent my dear friends.