Weeds among the wheat

In one of my first posts on this blog, I wrote about over-aggressive weeding. I confessed to a tendency to hyper-focus on trying to pull out every single weed, even when they get so entwined with the garden plants that I do more damage than good.  That happens to be the theme of the parable in today's gospel reading (Matthew 13:24-30). Jesus cautions his followers not to be too zealous in weeding. He says, "if you pull up the weeds you might uproot the wheat along with them. Let them grow together until harvest." 

Now, at the first level (OK, the 2nd level -- the first is my poor garden), I think of this as meaning that we should not rush to judgment of people, not label people as "good" or "bad," "wheat" or "weeds." Not try to exclude the people we consider "bad" from, let's say, our church. I think that's a pretty standard interpretation, actually. But as I've gotten older, and especially as I've been growing into this religious vocation, I have begun to look at it on another more personal level.

I am learning to be more patient and gentle with myself, the weeds in my own character. My  garden needs weeding, and also watering, and pruning, and staking. It needs me to put in a considerable amount of careful effort. But it also needs time, and sunlight and rain, none of which I provide. Likewise my inner garden. It requires me to work at establishing good habits and breaking bad ones, to spend time in prayer, in reading, in housework and yardwork, to get enough sleep, and a decent diet, and some exercise. But it also requires grace, that part of the formula that is out of my hands. Some weeds I have to get down on my knees and pull -- the chickweed and the stiltgrass -- and some, like the bindweed, I can only keep breaking off at the ground because its roots are 10 feet deep and I'll never get them out without plowing up or poisoning the whole garden, or both, and even then it'll probably come back. 

I once told my brother that I struggle with perfectionism, and he startled me by exclaiming, "I would hate to be perfect! How obnoxious would that be?" I assumed everyone, like me, wished to be (and even more to appear to be) perfect. But he's right, of course. Perfection is obnoxious. God Almighty inspires awe and even fear. It's God as needy infant who inspires love, and God the tortured, dying man, who inspires compassion. And it is the mirror of our weaknesses in others that inspires us either to love or hate them, in proportion to how we love our hate our own weak selves. 

So I learn. I'm a better gardener than I used to be, both with my vegetable garden and with my inner field of intermingled weeds and wheat. I spend a little time most days watering and weeding, but I am no longer so apt to damage the crop by attacking the weeds too aggressively. I am less proud, less rigorous, and more gentle with myself. I'm more willing to wait on the sun and rain, in whatever time and proportion they come, and to accept that some plants will thrive and others die off, and that it is not all in my hands. Even, sometimes, I find that what I considered a "weed" turns out to be beautiful or useful, and what I planted on purpose is a waste of space. There is another Gardener who tends me and my garden with infinitely more wisdom and skill and care than my own. 

Cracked

Ring the bells that still can ring

Forget your perfect offering

There is a crack in everything

That's how the light gets in

(Leonard Cohen, "Anthem")

This has been a tough week. It started on Monday with the feast of Saint Maria Goretti -- a little Italian girl, not quite 12 years old, who was knifed to death in 1902 while resisting rape. Worse even than that appalling event, somehow, is the text that the Church in her wisdom (yes, that's sarcasm) assigns to the Office of Readings for that day: it's an excerpt from Pope Pius XII's speech at her canonization, in 1958. "From Maria's story carefree children and young people with their zest for life can learn not to be led astray by attractive pleasures which are not only ephemeral and empty but also sinful. Instead they can fix their sights on achieving Christian moral perfection, however difficult and hazardous that course may prove."  Worse, because that almost unbelievable sermon was inflicted not by some random psychopath but by a 20th-century Pope of my Church, the Church within which I have dedicated my life to God. 

And here's the thing: I didn't have to read that this week. A, it's an optional memorial. B, I use an alternate lectionary anyway. C, if I do want to remember poor little Maria Goretti on her feast day, I have another reading that is really excellent (if long for the purpose): the chapter on "Virgin Martyrs" from Kathleen Norris's book Cloister Walk. And I did that, I read Kathleen Norris instead of Pope Pius XII ... but it didn't help. I already knew. I had read it before, and it hurt and angered me so much that just seeing her name in the calendar was enough to trigger the PTSD. 

I was raped. I was raped three times before the end of high school. I wasn't a saintly child like Maria, and I didn't fight to the death to hold onto my virginity. I was passed out drunk when I lost my virginity, at age 15. I had already been clinically depressed for 6 years by then, but this was before Prozac, and before Prozac "clinically depressed" was not understood as it is now. Neither was "date rape" or "capacity to consent." Anyway, I didn't tell my parents or any other responsible adult about it, since it was all mixed up with my own misbehavior. Which means there was no counseling, either. 

I've had some counseling since, but not much. I have always had a hard time communicating with most counselors. I never feel like they understand me, I get frustrated when they fail to follow my intuitive leaps of thinking. My spiritual director now is a monk, not a professional counselor, has no training in dealing with PTSD -- but I feel like he understands me, and we share the monastic-religious vocabulary and framework of thought, which also helps. And in the 4½ years that I've been talking with him, I have healed and healed. But I'll never be over it entirely -- it is never not going to have happened, it's never not going to be part of my history and therefore part of myself. So this week ... was rough. 

As if to drive home the message that there was some God-sent purpose, for me, in Monday's feast and its emotional impact, it was capped off by a real "act of God." A thunderstorm came through that evening, apparently with a very local microburst or small tornado. Trees and large limbs down all over my yard, and not much beyond my yard. A big limb hit my air conditioner and knocked it out of the window. A limb took down the power line between the pole and the house. I found out the next morning that another big tree had fallen and blocked the road right before my driveway, and brought down the power line there, too. After that crazy intense storm passed, wave after wave of ordinary thunderstorms came throughout the night, and I slept poorly. 

There was no damage to my house or car or chicken coop, only minor damage to the garden, and the road was cleared and the power restored by Tuesday afternoon. The landlord brought over a chainsaw and cleared up most of the fallen limbs, cutting the big pieces down to where I can manage turning them into firewood. But you know ... it all kind of piled on top of the stress from the Maria Goretti story. The depression lasted for days. Rage, grief, and a feeling of sterility in prayer, even at worst, a real aversion to prayer. I felt better yesterday -- the feast of St. Benedict, even though I still can't go to the monastery, was a pretty good diversion. I put so much attention into figuring out the music (using the old 1934 Latin Antiphonale Monasticum) that it was a good distraction, and having managed it better than I expected, it ended up being fun, too. 

And this morning I went to my parish Mass, where the saintly pastor was in fine form. He evidently doesn't much prepare his sermons, which is kind of a charming contrast from my brilliant intellectual Benedictines. He certainly reflects on the readings ahead of time, but then he just gets up and starts talking, and I suspect he doesn't always end up where he had expected to go. (Kind of how I write in this blog!) He's humble and ordinary and vulnerable, weak and flawed, and I think I would not be entirely surprised to see him start to glow, as with a halo, or find him walking a few inches above the ground. Here is a man who sees what is invisible, maybe more clearly than what is in front of his bodily eyes. He believes so passionately and surely, and as simply as a child. It was just what I needed.

And I started to think of those lines from Leonard Cohen, "there is a crack in everything; that's how the light gets in." And I started to think, I am glad to have cracked this week, I want to be shaken out of my state of "recovery." I want to grow, and continue to grow, and I want to be full of life, which is never static. Not scarred and scabbed over, not safe behind emotional walls of self-sufficiency and competence and routine and, you know, tools for cheerful and peaceful living -- I mean, I don't scorn those things, I take them seriously and I'm very, very grateful for what I've learned and where I am compared to where I've been. But sometimes I have to learn how to live, and then sometimes I have to be shaken out of my strategies and reminded that God is God and I'm not the source of my own life. 

I've got to live through all the seasons: slow, green summer is followed by fruitful, decaying fall; frozen dormant winter is when the roots grow deeper underground, and all the lush exuberance of spring comes on winter's heels. The seed is ruptured by the green sprout, flowers wither and fall off when the fruit starts to form, fruit starts to rot as soon as its seeds mature, each stage in its turn, and turn again the next year. And so the seasons of life, of personal growth, of spiritual growth. There is life in death and death in life, growth and fruitfulness in shock and damage, progress in waiting. 

St. Paul talks about this thing in 2 Corinthians 12. He says he had prayed repeatedly to be freed of some unnamed weakness, but God's answer to him was, "My grace is sufficient for you, for power is made perfect in weakness." Paul says that he is content to be weak, both in himself and in dealing with external hardships and persecution, because it is when he is weak that God's power really shines through. "There is a crack in everything; that's how the light gets in." It's when I'm knocked off my foundations that I find myself safe in God's hand. It's when my boot laces break that I realize how futilely I've been trying to lift myself up by them, and all the while I am being carried on God's wings. 

And now it's time for Compline, and I'm going to let this go and move on. Dear God, I offer You my weakness, my pain and grief and fear and anger, my insufficiency, and my false self-sufficiency. Let me breathe Your breath, and let my heart beat with the pulse of Your life, and let me walk in Your steps like a toddler standing on her daddy's feet, my hands held by Your hands. Let me be safe, not behind my own paltry, illusory defenses, but under Your divine and loving protection. I trust You, I love You, I choose You. Amen.

   

 

Twin Thomas

Today is the feast of St. Thomas the Apostle. The gospel reading at Mass today (John 20:24-29) is the origin of the phrase "doubting Thomas." That's not the attribute I'm here to pick on today, however. The reading starts with the words "Thomas, called Didymus." Didymus is the Greek for "twin," and Thomas seems to be the Aramaic for "twin." But it takes two to twin, doesn't it? And the Bible never gives any hint of Thomas actually being a twin, or having a twin. Is it just like nicknaming someone named John "Loo", or someone named Kelly "Green", or someone named Joe "Java"? Yeah, maybe. Or maybe he looked enough like the Teacher, Jesus, to be His twin? Or maybe he and his identical twin brother were oldest sons, and no one was ever sure which one was the firstborn and heir? 

This mysterious missing other twin made me think about duplicity, not in the sense of deceitfulness, but in the sense of being two people within oneself. Lack of integrity, or of integration, between the face we show to the world and the one we see in the mirror. Or even deeper, a split between the face we see in the mirror and the person God sees when He looks at us. Is Thomas, the untwinned twin, called "twin" because he's twice as much man as the rest of them, or because he seems to be only half of a whole? 

I am not speculating on the actual, historical, apostle Thomas. This isn't biblical scholarship. The far-out internet notwithstanding, there are no serious theories out there. It's a riddle. What does it make you think of?

Ask, and you will receive

Today at Mass we heard Matthew 8:25-34. I just love this gospel passage! Jesus comes to the region of the Gadarenes, where he encounters a couple of violent demoniacs, wandering around among the tombs and terrorizing the population, so that the people are forced to avoid that road altogether. But the demons who possess the two men recognize Jesus as the Son of God, and they know He is going to drive them out of the men. So they make a request: "if you drive us out, send us into the herd of pigs." And He does that, and the demon-possessed pigs immediately rush off and drown themselves. 

Now, I'm a little thin on demonology, and I can't think why the demons asked for what they did, or why they immediately drove their new hosts to their deaths, or whether they themselves were destroyed in that death, or if not, what? I suppose, demons must work on our intelligence, and although folks say that pigs are very intelligent animals, it's still not like human intelligence. Maybe they didn't intend to drown their new hosts. 

But what I love about this episode is the fact that the demons made a request of Jesus, and He granted it. It illustrates something that I think we often tend to miss, which is that God is not in competition with the Devil. There is no great cosmic battle between Good and Evil. There is only one God, and God is good, and God is entirely sovereign, everywhere and always. We are weak and fallible, we do stupid and selfish and even cruel things to each other, but that is not because there is this great, powerful Devil, in serious competition with God. Nothing can compete with God, not at all. The Devil and all his minions are creatures, subjects of the sovereign God. The Devil may be stronger than we are, but God is infinitely stronger than the Devil.

God is always there for us, waiting for us to turn to Him. So why are we so weak, so wicked, so vicious? It all comes down to free will. God will never rape our will. We always, day after day, must choose good over evil, God over evil. We ourselves must reject the wrong and choose the right. As an essential part of that process, we have to be willing to examine our conscience rigorously, and to expose our shame and guilt to God, to ourselves, and to at least one other human being. One reason I appreciate being Catholic is because we sacramentalize that practice of confession, and ritualize absolution. On the other hand, we are weak in the follow-up of concrete atonement. It's not enough to say "I'm sorry" to the priest, if we've harmed someone else. We have to say "I'm sorry" to the one we've hurt, and we have to make amends, and we have to make a serious effort to change. 

And part of that effort to change is to reach out for God, to ask for God's grace, to ask God to help us to rise above our baser impulses. If He's willing to answer the prayers of demons, surely He will answer ours? Listen to what St. James says (Ja.4:7-8): "Submit yourselves to God. Resist the devil and he will flee from you. Draw near to God, and he will draw near to you."  God can, God will.  We will always be weak and fallible, but God will always be waiting for us to turn again towards Him. If we're ruled by the Devil, that's our own fault -- the bars are not locked, we can walk out of our dark prison into the sunlight of grace, any time we choose. God is God, and God is good, and there is no other. Amen.

God, the jealous lover?

Today's gospel reading (Matthew 10:37-42) starts with one of those really challenging passages that priests and deacons must dread having to preach on. Actually, Matthew's version is not nearly as tough as the parallel in Luke, who requires us to go so far as to hate father and mother, spouse and children, brother and sister, and even our own life, if we want to be counted as true disciples. Matthew just says we mustn't prefer them to Him.  Still ... where is Jesus coming from with this? It's pretty strong stuff. 

Earliest monastic tradition certainly took it seriously. Monks and nuns were meant to renounce their family relationships along with their property and position. Why, what's the point? I mean, I (with the agreement of my spiritual director) explicitly refuse to do that, as a hermit, among other reasons because family relationships go both ways. I can't deprive myself of my family without depriving my family of me, and I don't feel that I have the right to do that. I honor my father and mother, sisters and brothers, nephews and nieces, and I'm not about to cut myself off from them. Granted, I live at least an hour away from them all, and even before the pandemic, we never got together more than a few times a year. Still, the principle remains -- but what is the principle, then, behind the ancient monastic tradition? 

There's something in John Cassian's Conferences of the Desert Fathers (late 4th-early 5th century, about 100 years before St. Benedict and a major influence on his thought and Rule). He and his fellow monk Germanus, who have travelled from their home monastery in Palestine to learn from the famous desert fathers in Egypt, start to think that maybe they should return to live with their families. They think, with their families' support they could devote themselves to spiritual study and holy living, and in return they would surely be a good influence on their relatives.... Fortunately, they have grown enough in humility and wisdom by then to run their idea by one of the elders, who shoots it down. Why would their families want to support them as idle monks, and what makes them think their families would be grateful for their wise teaching? I think there is something about the way families and land are connected in agrarian economies (just about every economy, ever, except our modern post-industrial ones) that means family ties come along with real, concrete rights and responsibilities that might not be obvious in our modern capitalist system.

OK, then, but there is still, I think, an important value in today's gospel reading, and it has to do with what we call "tough love." It has to do with a homily I heard about 30 years ago, preached by the late Cardinal Hickey. The parish church was packed with mostly Central American war refugees, among whom domestic violence was epidemic. Cardinal Hickey read his homily in Spanish, and it was obvious that he must have spent hours and hours rehearsing. It was obvious that he really cared about what he was saying, and what he said was this: "you men, never for one minute think that because you are married in the Church, the Church is going to tell your wives to stay with you if you beat them. If you beat your wives, sacrament or no, the Church is going to tell them to leave you!" Disgracefully, that has not been the Church's universal message. But it is the message of today's gospel. 

Today's gospel says, you must do the right thing, choose God, even if it means breaking the most intimate family ties. Even if it means pressing charges against your (temporarily, if sincerely) contrite husband or lover for beating you or your children. Even if it means evicting and/or testifying against your own beloved child for dealing drugs. Even if it means participating in having your sister or brother involuntarily committed to a psych ward when they're having a psychotic episode and, lacking insight as a symptom of the illness itself, rage against you for locking them up. Or just tolerating a terrible two-year-old's tantrums without letting yourself be manipulated by them.

You know, there is only one God, and my God is your God, too, and also the God of the abuser and the drug addict, and of every one of us whose thinking and behavior is at times slightly or massively distorted, manipulative, dishonest, wrong, unacceptable. It is not up to me to try to figure out what is the best thing I can do for you. It is up to me to maintain my own prayer life and my own integrity, to examine my own conscience frequently and rigorously, and to make amends whenever I start to go wrong. If I do that, if I do what God leads me to do, it cannot possibly be good for me and bad for you. We have one God, who loves me and you and all of us together, equally. Some choices may seem selfish to us, we may feel guilty for saying "no" or walking away from someone close to us, but if I'm really following God, He cannot possibly lead me to take care of myself at your expense. 

Tough love is not just self-love, it's a more effective way to love its object. Enabling, the opposite of tough love, is crippling. We, and those we sometimes have to be very brave to say "no" to, cannot grow strong and healthy without some struggle on our own behalf. Letting someone get away with bad behavior, even rewarding bad behavior, prevents the person behaving badly from the harder work of confronting their own demons and growing into goodness. Nor does tough love guarantee healing and redemption, but that's not my job. God loves you, and God loves your manipulative child or spouse, but you are not your relative's God. You, I, must learn to "listen with the ear of the heart," and then trust in God to take care of us and of one another, in His own way. 

I think that this is what Jesus meant -- or at least, it's one way of understanding His hard statements in Matthew, and even harder in Luke, about placing God before family. We have to put God, and that still, small voice with which He speaks to us in the depth of our conscience, ahead of absolutely everything and everyone else. It's for our good and for our loved ones' good, too, because the God who speaks lovingly to my heart loves them just as much. We don't have competing Gods, or duelling guardian angels ... we have one God. Trust!

Incarnation

Today is the Catholic feast of Corpus Christi -- the Body of Christ. I was lucky enough to be able to go to Mass. This feast celebrates the doctrine of transubstantiation, which is that the bread and wine at Mass actually become, literally, the body, blood, soul, and divinity of Christ, with only the external appearance of bread and wine remaining. It looks like bread and wine, and it tastes like bread and wine (actually, the bread doesn't taste like anything much), the wine smells like wine, but on a mystical level, in its inmost reality, it IS God incarnate. I can't really come up with a metaphor for this ... the closest that occurs to me is what happens sometimes in a dream, when someone looks and talks and acts like your Aunt Mabel, but you know, somehow, that it's really your late husband. You know? 

Anyway, I wanted to riff on something from my last blog post a few days ago, and I'm going to keep this quick and try to post it before Compline tonight. I said something like, "seen with the eyes of faith and love, this world is my home." I mean my heavenly home. I mean, seen with the eyes of faith, not only is Jesus in "the least of these my brethren," and not only do I see all the power and glory and grace and divinity and love of God in the tasteless little wafer at Communion, but God is all around me. The Rule of St. Benedict says that we should treat all the tools and property of the monastery as if they were the sacred vessels of the altar. What would it be to treat the work of our hands, the work we do with those sacred tools, as if it were all sacramental? What if God incarnates every day, every moment, in the air we breathe, in the water we drink, in all "the fruit of the earth and the work of human hands," as the priest says it at the altar? 

What if He were speaking to you, right now? Can you be quiet long enough to hear? The priest this morning said that when he was an 11-year-old altar boy, he heard his name spoken from the tabernacle behind the altar in church one morning, "Jimmy ... Jimmy ...." Do I believe it? Yeah, I do. I've heard too many similar crazy stories, and I have my own. Listen. See. Feel. Wait. Invite God in, and wait for Him to come. Make time and room enough for Him to move you. And the world will open up, this world will become magical, divine, glorious. It's so real, more real than the world we're used to seeing with our everyday vision. Open the eyes of faith, and rejoice!

Peace be with you.

At Home in the World

There's a gospel hymn that says "this world is not my home," and indeed it's a familiar theme. We're pilgrims in this world, just passing through, with our eyes and our hearts on Heaven. But I want to turn that around, and say that unless we make our home in this world, we can't reach the eternal home later on. I don't mean to contradict that other sentiment, just to point out what it really means and where it falls apart if misinterpreted or taken too far.

So what does it mean, properly, to say that "this world is not my home?" I think it means that we shouldn't get too hung up on worldly prosperity, security, or status. We should be willing to sacrifice everything for our conscience's sake, confident that there are consequences beyond what we can see in front of us. But where it can fall apart is in a tendency to spiritual selfishness. We want to climb the mountain and then stay there. We want to live the ideal holy life, and we want to "keep ourselves unstained by the world," as St. James put it (Ja.1:27).

But this world IS our home, and we can't get to Heaven by cutting ourselves off from it. I think that both the monastic vow of "stability" and the marriage vow of "for better or for worse" are meant to push back against the tendency to blame other people and circumstances for our own shortcomings. Once that vow is taken, we're stuck with each other, and that is where spiritual growth has to take place, not in some imaginary ideal world with imaginary ideal people. There are no shortcuts to Heaven. Jesus isn't going to beam me up.

In Matthew 25, Jesus talks about what is right behavior: "I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, a stranger and you welcomed me, naked and you clothed me, ill and you cared for me, in prison and you visited me." He means, of course, that "whatever you did for one of these least brothers or sisters of mine, you did for me." I'm going to extrapolate a little, and add, "I was annoying and you were patient with me, weird and you didn't make fun of me, weak and you accommodated me, wrong and you didn't gloat." 

And, of course, I'm not walking on water, either. I am no perfect specimen of humanity. I have to put up with myself, too, and love myself just as I am, even as I try to become better. Every time I sit down to write in this blog, I seem to come back to the same thing: the need to 1) see myself as I really am, here and now, in order to 2) love myself as I really am, in order to 3) become more like I want to be. Again, there are no shortcuts.

This world may not be my home, ultimately, but it's the only way home. Lift up your eyes to Heaven, by all means, but then bring them back down to earth again. Jesus said, "whatever you did for the least of these, you did for me." St. Benedict said, "receive all guests as Christ." St. Teresa of Calcutta saw Jesus not only "in the distressing disguise of the poorest of the poor," but also in the distressing disguise of an unfair or incompetent mother superior. We are made in the image of God, we are temples of the Holy Spirit, and as Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote, "the world is charged with the grandeur of God."

The problems and shortcomings of this world and its people are not impediments, they are exactly what we need in order to reach that happy home. Seen with the eyes of love and faith, this world IS my home.