Rote Prayers…

Recently, during a few free minutes I began browsing blogs that I haven’t been able to read as regularly as I normally like. Repetitious on the blog Take the Long Way Home really resonated due to recent events.  I’m coming to the conversation late, but gonna share anyway.

After a year and a half now, things are still not completely settled down yet. Just when my husband was getting ready to start work on this new job and it looked like perhaps, after a year and a half of hell, life might begin to return to normal. Har. Har.  Did I say har? Something I thought I had dealt with, something I thought long behind me, suddenly resurfaced completely out of the blue, and has caused an intense struggle for me spiritually.  A battle of similar intensity to my Temptation post, if on a completely different issue, and in a way this battle involved temptations of an interior choice, a choice of reaction to circumstances.

Last weekend I hit a wall.  I ended up in the Adoration chapel, having been sent to the church by a VERY concerned husband (who also happened to be wearing a large amount of my spiritual viscera from inquiring at just the wrong moment).  Father had to go say a Mass elsewhere but took a moment to inquire if I was alright.  He got the bones of the matter and said that I was in the right place and that I shouldn’t be afraid to shout at Jesus (and he nodded at the Blessed Sacrament in the Tabernacle) if I needed to. 

God bless him.

I sat there in the chapel aware of others cleaning up from and leaving the Mass just celebrated, my throat aching from the extreme control it took to not sob violently and hysterically (in fact, that was pretty much the state I was in when my poor husband spoke to me), feeling completely incapable of indulging in the freedom Father had just offered due to my concern for the impact on others who might hear and be as appalled at my violent honesty with God as my spouse. 

I thought to pray, but there were no words really… In fact, when Father had leaned over to inquire, I shook my head mutely for a few moments not knowing where to start until the guilt of wasting his time when he needed to be elsewhere brought them forth.  Then the Divine Mercy Chaplet popped into my head.  I desperately needed God’s mercy in that moment and it would give me words. 

The Chaplet begins with the Creed.  I began, “I believe…” and suddenly words exploded out of the depths. “Lord, I believe! You know I believe! Forgive my voicing even the temptation that I was feeling and in such nasty language.” Over and over, I cried out to God with all of my interior being.

Incapable of completing the Creed, but believing all that it teaches and trusting God to credit it as said, I began the other prayers.

On the Our Father bead…

Eternal Father, I offer you the Body and Blood, Soul and Divinity, of our Lord Jesus Christ in atonement for our sins and those of the whole world.

Then a Hail Mary bead…

For the sake of His sorrowful passion, have mercy on us and on the whole world.

I lost it again on the word ‘passion’ and once again the words came.  The Chaplet dissolved into a mixture of itself (ie the prayers above) and my own tortured version of prayers about my sin, the wounds of our Lord, and my desperate need for mercy and strength.  The repetitious prayers gave me a voice, a starting place, when in my agony and sorrow I had none. They were there when only the determination to reject the self and sinful reactions that were coming in the midst of my anger and grief and choose what God would have me do instead was left, along with the sorrow for what I had given voice to in a moment of intense struggle interrupted. They were there when that determination intermingled with my struggles against the natural, selfish, reactions to my circumstances, and my failures in that struggle, had immobilized me at the feet of God.

Unlike Joy in the referenced blog entry, I did not exude peace to those around me. My face was set in the rigor mortis of a struggle for silence, eyes swollen and red, hot tears tracing former tracks down my face. Still, like the blog’s author, when I am told the Rosary or Divine Mercy Chaplet are simply vain, repetitious prayer, I will think back on that day when those prayers helped me in battle. I will think back to when those precious prayers gave words to my pain, voice to my pleas, enabling me to cling to my precious Lord, and I will once again pray the Divine Mercy Chaplet and ask mercy, for myself, and for all those who will face such moments, have no such prayer ready on their lips, and be incapable of praying for themselves.

Cost of Ministry…

My parish is having a course for the high school kids this week called ‘Catholic Summer University: A Crash Course in Catholicism’ taught by our priest and our seminarian.  Since I am attending as an Ethics and Integrity adult, all four of my kids are participating (15, 12, 11, 10).  As of the end of this, our second day, we have almost 50 handouts and that isn’t counting the blank paper we have taken notes on.  It has been awesome. 

In one of the handouts on The Christian Spiritual Life I found something under the topic of Prayer and Devotion that struck me as I read our ‘homework’ for the evening.  It wasn’t what was said but rather how it was said. 

“Woe to me if I preach not the Gospel” does not entitle us to forget: “What does it profit a man, if he gain the whole world, and suffer the loss of his own soul?”

I read that, thought ‘yep’ and turned the page.

Then I thought ‘WHOA’ and turned it back.

Rereading it, the meaning broke over me, sort of like the day I realized that ‘bearing much fruit’ as a believer had NOTHING to do with the number of saved souls on your belt (the only interpretation of that verse I ever was taught as a Baptist – though of course, in more genial terms) and oddly enough these two teachings – in their true meaning – dovetail.  Immediately, some in my own experience came to mind.  I would not say for one moment that these had lost their soul.  However, I definitely have wondered if their dedication to ‘preaching the Gospel’ in order to ‘gain the whole world’ had not cost their souls, and many others, more than was ever intended to be paid…

For me, realizing that ‘bearing much fruit’ did not mean I was responsible for the salvation of souls… on the contrary, while we may be used of God, conversion is the work of the Holy Spirit alone and it is presumptious both to assume otherwise and to claim something for which we can take no credit… To realize that, and to understand that by ‘bearing much fruit’ our Lord meant ‘fruit of the Spirit’, left me in tears and left an enormous weight of responsibility and a burden of failure on the floor at the altar.

Similarly freeing, realizing that while God sends us forth to the lost world, He does not expect or even intend for us to neglect our own soul, or the souls for which we are directly responsible (ie my children), by giving so much of ourselves for the sake of others. How much more might we influence the world for our blessed Lord if we cared for our own soul, and those more immediately entrusted to our care, as we have been taught, in that allowing ourselves to be more completely transformed we would be an even better witness than we ever could be in compromising our own spiritual life by a level of ministry involvement beyond what is wise?

The example which came to mind aside, this was an important moment in my own understanding and has given me both great peace and encouragement.  God does not ask more than we can give and the first thing He asks us to give, and give completely, is ourselves… not to everyone else… but to Himself.

Once again, I learn about the importance of priorities and balance. If we want to be of greater service to God, then FIRST we must give more of ourselves to Him in personal spiritual growth through prayer, meditation, the Sacraments, mortifications, fasting, etc… and as we grow in holiness, then we are of greater use in whatever service our Lord asks of us.

Herman the Cripple…

As I said Father recommended some reading material recently.  Here is yet another offering from Stumbling Blocks or Stepping Stones: Spiritual Answers to Psychological Questions by Fr. Benedict J. Groeschel, C.F.R.  This poem was written by a physician admirer of Blessed Herman.

 

Herman The Cripple
by
William Hart Hurlbut, M.D.

I am least among the low,
I am weak and I am slow;
I can neither walk nor stand,
Nor hold a spoon in my own hand.

Like a body bound in chain,
I am on a rack of pain,
But He is God who made me so,
that His mercy I should know.

Brothers do not weep for me!
Christ, the Lord, has set me free.
All my sorrows he will bless;
Pain is not unhappiness.

From my window I look down
To the streets of yonder town,
Where the people come and go,
Reap the harvest that they sow.

Like a field of wheat and tares,
Some are lost in worldly cares;
There are hearts as black as coal,
There are cripples of the soul.

Brothers do not weep for me!
In his mercy I am free.
I can neither sow nor spin,
Yet, I am fed and clothed in Him.

I have been the donkey’s tail,
Slower than a slug or snail;
You my brothers have been kind,
Never let me lag behind.

I have been most rich in friends,
You have been my feet and hands;
All the good that I could do,
I have done because of you.

Oh my brothers, can’t you see?
You have been as Christ for me.
And in my need I know I, too,
Have become as Christ for you!

I have lived for forty years
In this wilderness of tears;
But these trials can’t compare
With the glory we will share.

I have had a voice to sing,
To rejoice in everything;
Now Love’s sweet eternal song
Breaks the darkness with the dawn.

Brother’s do not weep for me!
Christ, the Lord, has set me free.
Oh my friends, remember this:
Pain is not unhappiness.

One Very Ill…

Father recommended some reading material recently.  One of those books is Stumbling Blocks or Stepping Stones: Spiritual Answers to Psychological Questions by Fr. Benedict J. Groeschel, C.F.R.  Close to the end of the book I found several things that really spoke to me.  One of them was a prayer, a prayer of hope but of hope born of pain and suffering.

The Prayer of One Very Ill…

Lord, the day is drawing to a close and, like all the other days, it leaves with me the impression of utter defeat. I have done nothing for You: neither have I said conscious prayers, nor performed works of charity, nor any work at all, work that is sacred for every Christian who understands its significance.  I have not even been able to control that childish impatience and those foolish rancors that so often occupy the place that should be Yours in the “no-man’s land” of my emotions.  It is in vain that I promise You to do better.  I shall be no different tomorrow, or on the day that follows. 

When I retrace the course of my life, I am overwhelmed by the same impression of inadequacy.  I have sought You in prayer and in the service of my neighbor, for we cannot separate You from our brothers any more than we can separate our body from our spirit.  But in seeking You, do I not find myself?  Do I not wish to satisfy myself? Those works that I secretly deemed good and saintly dissolve in the light of approaching eternity, and I dare no longer lean on these supports that have lost their stability.

Even actual sufferings bring me no joy, because I bear them so badly.  Perhaps we are all like this: incapable of discerning anything but our own wretchedness and our own despairing cowardice before the light of the Beyond that waxes on our horizon.  But it may be, O Lord, that this impression of privation is part of a divine plan.  It may be that, in Your eyes, self-complacency is the most obnoxious of all fripperies, and that we must come before you naked so that You, You alone, may clothe us.  

 ~Marguerite Teilhard de Chardin, president of the Catholic Union of the Sick, and sister of the well known Jesuit writer Pierre Teilhard de Chardin