Another Angel

On the day I called, You answered me;
You increased the strength of my soul (Psalm 138).

 Today is the feast of the Holy Guardian Angels, especially St. Raphael (his name means "the healing of God"), St. Michael (the Warrior) and St. Raphael (Messenger of God.)

I have always had a great devotion to my own Guardian Angel, who saved me from being kidnapped when I was five years old.  I probably have told that story somewhere along the way of this blog.  The story of St. Raphael's ministry of healing is told in the Book of Tobit which is not in the Protestant Bible, but it is a beautiful story.  

But this is the story of another angel, sent to me when I most needed help and comfort.  And I even know the name of this particular angel -- Chip Lassabe.  I hope he does not mind me telling this story.

From the time my cancer reappeared a year ago, I have not had any anxiety or worry, but only peace and even joy.  After all, I probably should have died in 2010 when my entire right lung was covered with a black mass --- and yet, I have had 16 wonderful years since then.  I figured I had had more blessings than I ever could have expected in that time, and I was ready to surrender now at 84, not really expecting to live much beyond that anyway.  The one issue I had not really thought about and dealt with was the idea of having to go on chemotherapy, although my doctor was willing to try an oral form instead of infusions.

Still, there was one day when I was totally unnerved, mostly due to confusion about what was happening and what to expect.  I received a phone call from "CVS," a name I naturally connected to the well-known drugstore, informing me that my insurance had approved the chemo drug prescribed by my doctor and that I could pick it up from any pharmacy.  This call was delivered by a "robo-voice" and there was no convervsation or explanation along with it.  Confused, I did not know my next step:  was I supposed to go to a CVS pharmacy ?  Our local pharmacy had closed a few years ago, and I did not know if there was a CVS anywhere locally.  I thought they had been  bought by Walgreen's.  

Was I supposed to go to Walgreen's and tell the pharmacist that I had lung cancer and that my insurance company had approved the drug?  I had no prescription to present to them; I did not know what to do, and for some reason that morning, the thought of telling the pharmacist that I needed chemotherapy overwhelmed me.  I started crying just imagining myself trying to explain the whole situation to a stranger.  The idea of being on chemotherapy more frightening to me than cancer itself.

In my confusion, I attempted to stop crying so as not to alarm my husband, and I opened a book lying on the footstool in front of me.  The first thing I read was a quote from Julian of Norwich, a 14th century mystic:  You shall see for yourself that all things will be well, and all manner of things shall be well.  Restless, and trying to get moving for the day, I closed the book and went to a table in my office where i picked up an old notebook, where I used to write notes during times of adoration of the Blessed Sacrament.  The notebook was open to the last entry, made at least a year previously:  You shall see for yourself that all things will be well, and all manner of things shall be well.

And then a third time that very morning, the same words appeared in the meditation book I used each day.  So I finally believed that God was sending me a definite message.  I cannot say I calmed down, but I did stop crying for awhile as I got dressed to go to Walgreen's.  On the way, I kept saying, "If only I had someone to talk to!"  I felt that I needed to release to pressure of approaching the pharmacist and telling him that i needed a chemo drug.  Somehow in the back of my mind, I knew something was wrong with this scenario, and that the pharmacist would know it!

When I got to Walgreen's, I sat in the car, again crying at the thought of trying to actually facing the reality of chemotherapy.  "If only I had someone to talk to," I said again.  At that point, there was a gentle knock on my window, and I saw a sweet looking young man peering in at me.  When I rolled down the window, he said, "Mam, I can't go in there and leave you sitting out here like this!  If you need someone to talk to, I'm here to listen."  

"I have lung cancer," I said, "but that's not the problem."  "Okay," he said.  "And I have to start chemotherapy, but that's not really the problem either," I said.  "I'm trying to understand," he replied through my tears.  "The problem is that I have to go in there and tell the pharmacist to order the drug."  (I never claimed that this would make sense!)  

After he offered to go into the drugstore with me, I realized that I just was not ready; I was still confused about the whole opearation.  Nothing made sense to me without a prescription! My "angel" finally said words that brought me absolute peace:  "You don't have to put yourself through this!  Drive down to the beach and listen to the waves and watch the birds flying in circles.  When you are calm and peaceful, call your doctor and ask what you are supposed to do now."  

I cannot tell you the instant peace and calm his words brought to me!  All of a sudden, I knew he had said the words I needed to hear.  I was taking on a burden that I didn't need to carry.  He wrote his name and number on a card for me --- he is an off-shore drill worker on leave for a few days.  And I drove off with peace in my heart.  His advice was 100% on target!  I arrived home joyful and ready for whatever came next.  And later that day, my doctor's office called me to tell me the drug had been approved and that they would deliver it to my home!  

You shall see for yourself that all things will be well, and all manner of things will be well!  (The words of Jesus to Julian of Norwich).  

On the day i called, you answered me and increased the strength of my soul!  (Psalm 138).

If You Knew the Gift of God.......

 I had just started reading the Bible and did not know anything about it when I came across the words With joy you will draw water from the well of salvation (Is. 12:3).  My heart leaped.  Like Julian of Norwich, who believed that all God's works had been done especially for her, I felt that these words had been written just for me.  Later on, when I read John 4:10,* I immediately connected the two passages.  (* If you knew the gift of God and who it is that asks you for a drink, you would have asked him and he would have given you living water.)

This morning, I was praying and reflecting on the twenty-third Psalm (The Lord is my Shepherd) when for some reason, I had a flashback to being at a Buddhist temple in Singapore.  I had asked the guide what one had to do to reach enlightenment according to Buddha.  He explained the seven tenets of Buddhism, which basically can be achieved by right thinking, ethical living, and meditation.  (These tenets differ according to the forms of Buddhism but come down to purity of heart, mind, and action -- do no harm, do good, and embrace suffering.)  As I listened to the guide, I recognized that some of the "virtues" he described did not come naturally to me and hardly accounted for the greed, avarice, pride, and just plain meanness that are part of the human experience.  

"If these are not part of you, where do you go to acquire these qualities?" I asked the guide.  "No one ever asked me that question!" the guide responded. Later on, I read that one is supposed to meditate oneself into a state of nirvana, or stillness, in order to overcome weakness and suffering.  "And if we fail to reach enlightenment, then what?" I asked.  "The Buddha will give you a second chance," he replied.  "Ah, reincarnation!" I said.  

I have friends who are Buddhists, and I have to say that they do make every effort to live according to the principles of the Buddha.  But when I enter into the twenty-third Psalm, I just have to be extremely grateful for the Gift I have been given:  He leads me beside restful waters; He restores my soul!

The Lord is my Shepherd; there is nothing I shall want; he makes me to lie down in green pastures....He guides me in paths of righteousness for his name's sake.  Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for YOU ARE WITH ME;  Your rod and your staff, they comfort me.

You prepare a table before me in the midst of my enemies.  You anoint my head with oil; my cup overflows.  Surely goodness and kindness will follow me all the days of my life, and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.  

Notice the Psalm begins in with the third person, "the Lord....He..." but switches to the second person, For YOU are with me, when we walk through the valley of the shadow of death.

I AM THE WAY, THE TRUTH, AND THE LIFE.  There is no other name by which men willl be saved; no one has seen God, but God, the only Son, has made Him known......The Buddha would have said, "Live by these principles; follow my teaching.".. but he would not have said, "I am the Way."

We don't have to reach nirvana by our own efforts, knowing that we are "sinners," or "natural men" who struggle with our own weakness; we have Someone Who shepherds us and Who makes us to "lie down in green pastures," Whose Holy Spirit in us leads us to peace and to the love of God for which we are made.  Alleluia! Alleluia!  Thanks be to God!  It is done for us and in us by Jesus who loves us and shepherds us by His Own Holy Spirit!

I Am That Man!

 I just finished reading a book that made me madder and madder the further I read.  The name of the book is Why I Am Not an Atheist: the Confessions of a Skeptical Believer by Christopher Beha.  The reason the book made me so mad was that there was almost no autobiographical information at all throughout, despite the implications of the title.  

As a teenager, Beha left the Catholic church in which he had been raised and then eventually embarked on a ten-plus year long study of philosophy.  The book turned out to be equivalent to a Master's study of the history of philosophy.  Now, I actually like philosophy in small doses, those I can actually digest, but if I had wanted a book on the history of philosophy, that's what I would have ordered.  Surprisingly, Beha makes very few-and-far-between comments on the effects of his study on him personally.

He tells us in great depth what the individual philosophers taught, and even the impact of their teachings on the cultures and times in which they lived. But the in-depth explanations of rationalism, phenomenology, and all the other "isms" left me cold.  "But what does it mean?" I wondered for hundreds of pages, eventually skipping dozens of those pages looking for something either I could relate to or something that Beha himself related to.

The more I read, the more determined I got to give this book an absolute horrible review on Amazon.com. People deserved to know what they were getting in this book, I thought!

Fortunately, and finally, I perservered to the end of the book, and Amazon automatically closed the manuscript the way they do with Kindle books.  But not before I spotted a final chapter of the book, entitled "Postlude,"  (the opposite of Prelude, obviously).  In that final chapter, obviously not important enough for Amazon to consider, Beha finally writes the message I had been ready to read!  In that final word, Beha goes on to tell what happened after he sent his finished manuscript off to the editor.  He began a new novel about a young lapsed Catholic writer and his fascination with an old girlfriend who has converted to Catholicism.  In that book, he put all his quarrels with God, but he also tried to address the fact that he couldn't quite get over him.  After he had sent that book off to a publisher, he experienced the most severe bout of depression he had ever faced.  He was almost paralyzed with dread and though repeatedly about killing himself.  He imagined he would stay in this situation for the rest of his life.  He drank too much and cut himself off from people around him.  He said he wanted companionship but he also wanted to dedicate himself entirely to the creation of his own meaning.  That a life shared with others might play some part in that creation hardly occurred to him.

Eventually he met a young woman who treated his writing as comic novels.  He tried to explain that he was writing about "the indictment of the superficiality of contemporary culture."  She nodded: "It sounds like comedy," she said. Finally, instead of trying to impress her, he tried to make her laugh and discovered that he was capable of making someone else happy --- and that made him happy at last:

        My life was filled t love, but there was something in this love that demanded I make sense of it.  The light and the warmth of this sun were baffling.  Where were they coming from?  What did they mean?

Beha reviewed his 15-year-long study of philosophy and then told himself:  Suppose you start with love.  That was the one and certain thing in my life.  If I took this for true, what else would have to be true with it?

        He and his then wife decided to return to church, just for something to do to have a sense of community, time for reflection, and the experience of ritual.  And then one Sunday morning, he listened to a reading from John's first letter:  Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God,and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God...If we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us.

For the first time, Beha realized that when we love, God becomes a part of us; the warmth and the light he was now experiencing was God!

He also understood for the first time that God exists outside of time and space, beyond the range of human understanding through reason:  "God can well be loved, but he cannot be thought" (from the 14th century The Cloud of Unknowing.)  He finally understood that life is not a problem to be solved by the intellect, a thing that must be mastered by being understood.  And that is why mystics are not trying to convinced anyone of anything!  They are simply saying how it is for them.  Beha discovered that we have a capacity for knowledge that does not come by sense experience, but that comes through love and the grace of God.

Beha eventually stumbled across the Catechism of the Catholic Church, which begins with these words: Faith is man's response to God,who reveals himsef and gives himself to man, at the same time giving man a superabundant light as he searches for the ultimate meaning of life.  Beha commented upon reading those words that they were a "pretty good way to describe what I found when I started going to Mass again."

What I can say is that the path I'd been on all this time had brought me to the place where I was both intellectually and emotionally prepared to listen to the voice within, a voice that I know had been there all along, a voice I had been taking great pains to keep quiet.

And finally, Beha quotes one of his favorite philosophers:  "The Christian religion is only for the man who needs infinite help."  "Over many years," writes Beha, "I have come to discover that I am that man."

Amen, Mr. Beha, I am actually glad I read your book!

When the King Returns

 I recently saw Christopher Nolan's movie The Odyssey, and since then many people have asked whether I liked it.  As someone who has read and loved the original story in verse, the movie version did not have a great appeal to me --- but that is not to say that Nolan did not do a good job with it.  For me, movies do not usually match the printed story, and I suppose that is because they never quite replicate my imagination.  The only exceptions for me so far have been The Secret Garden and Dr. Zhivago, although I must admit that I do not see many movies, so my judgment is extremely constrained.  

The Secret Garden was exactly the way I pictured it in reading; in Dr. Zhivago, the director used the uniques qualities of film to convey more than "the story."  He used color, sound, and motion to convey the "spiritual" and ineffable depth of experience that comes with the reading of an outstanding novel.

To be fair to Christopher Nolan, I cannot imagine anyone capturing the song of The Odyssey on film.  After all, recent research indicates that Homer's original story, much like the way the Bible was written, was added to and enhanced by one generation after another of storytellers/poets, all of whom used Homer's original catch-phrases to link their additions to the original.

That being said, there was one scene in Nolan's film that stirred and moved me -- the scene when Odysseus returns home disguised as a beggar.  I could not help but connect the imagery to Jesus' story in Matthew 25 about His return: For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat; I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink; I was a stranger and you invited me in; I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me; I was in prison and you came to visit me.

 Although I was disturbed at the way the film took liberties with the original ending of The Odyssey, the homecoming scene in which the faithful servants and friends of Odysseus recognized him moved me.  One by one, they knelt, bowed their heads, and began to rhythmically pound their staffs on the floor in recognition and fealty to their Lord.

And I wondered:  will I/we recognize Jesus as LORD when He returns?  Will I/we kneel in homage and fealty to One we love and honor?  Or will I/we cower in fear and trepidation at His return?

I do have to thank Christopher Nolan for the beautiful image of servants and friends who recognize in a ragged beggar the Lord whom they loved and for whose return they have awaited for so many years.

Just for Fun

 I Worried

Mary Oliver

I worried a lot.  Will the garden grow, will the rivers flow in the right direction, will the earth turn as it was taught, and if not, how shall I correct it?

Was I right, was I wrong.  Will I be forgiven, can I do better?

Will I ever be able to sing, even the sparrows can do it and I am, well, hopeless.

Is my eyesight fading or am I just imagining it, am I going to get rheumatism, lockjaw, dementia?

Finally I saw that worrying had come to nothing. And gave it up. And took my old body and went out into the morning,

and sang.

Do Our Lives Matter to God?

 I am presently reading a book called The Mattering Instinct, by Rebecca Goldstein.  According to the author, we all need to know that our lives "matter," that it is worth the energy it takes to maintain our lives.  Goldstein holds that it has nothing to do with how we feel about ourselves --- rather, we need external evidence that our lives matter.  And her book goes into the four principle ways that we strive to "matter" in this life:  the transcenders, the heroic strivers, the competitors, and the socializers.  

Although I am just a little way into the book, I am finding her theory fascinating, and I have asked myself how we know that our lives matter to God.  Is there external evidence that God cares about us, in addition to the internal peace and joy that comes with knowing Jesus Christ: ("My peace I give to you; I do not give as the world gives.")?

As I thought about this question, I realized that of all the religious gurus and teachers in the history of mankind, Jesus is the only one who came with consistent healing along with his teaching.  He was always reaching out to the blind, the lame, the leper, the widow, the poor in spirit --- anyone who asked of Him.  God cares not only about our spiritual progress, the state of our souls, but also about our physical lives and conditions.

The church He established has founded hospitals, orphanages, schools and universities, homeless centers, soup kitchens, etc.  Wherever there are Christians, there is help.  Our lives matter to God; anyone who has ever read the first few chapters of Isaiah cannot help but be shocked at God's outrage against people who ignore the suffering of others.  He does not say, "Close your eyes and concentrate on your spiritual welfare."  He says: 

Your hands are full of blood; wash and make yourselves clean...Stop doing wrong and learn to do right!  Seek justice; encourage the oppressed.  Defend the cause of the fatherless, plead the case of the widow....(Is.1).

He has no taste for the religious ceremonies and sacrifices of those who oppress the poor and suffering --- all of the Old Testament testifies to His anger at injustice.   I have a friend who for years railed at the "angry God" of the Old Testament.  This friend is a loveable but volatile personality, so once I remarked to her:  Cheryl, when someone hurts your children, you become the God of the Old Testament!"  She had to admit I was right!

Recently, I have begun to watch It's a Miracle, an old tv program with Richard Thomas.  When you hear and see what God does/ has done again and again for those who are suffering and desperate, it leave little doubt that He cares about our lives.  Miracles still happen every day; the fact that we don't know about them does not change the fact that they still occur.  

The mercy and goodness of Our Father continues through the same ministry of Jesus Christ in the world today.  Not only our souls, but our lives matter to God!

Living Providentially

 Someone once asked me, "What does it mean to be 'poor in spirit'?  That is a question I have been pondering for years, actually.  But recently, a friend said to me, "I think you live very providentially."  Again, that remark caused me to pause and consider what he meant.  And I'm beginning to think that the answer to that question is the clue to the first!

So, when I first started treatment for cancer almost a year ago, the package information with my chemo pill said that this medicine might cause swelling of the ankles and legs.  Sure enough!  From the very beginning, I've experienced swollen ankles, feet, and legs --- sometimes worse than others, but at the end of every day, my ankles look like bagels. My doctor keeps recommending compression socks -- a real test for someone who grew up barefoot at every opportunity!  (I still kick off my shoes the moment i get in the house.)  I have come to accept this condition as my new reality, even though I have been off chemo for about 3-4 months now; the swelling has never subsided.  

Although I have learned to live with the condition, I am getting ready for a 13-hour plane trip to Japan next week, and I figured that will probably put me over the top with swollen legs, ankles, and feet.  So last week, for the first time, I asked God to let me know if there were any solution to this condition.  The very next day, my sister called about the trip (she will be going also), and I sort of complained about the swelling, mentioning that it was bound to get worse with travel.

She told me about a product she started using after knee replacement surgery, when her swelling refused to go down within the usual time period: Lymphgo!  (This is not an ad for Lymphgo....but she told me that within 24 hours of starting it, she saw results.)  Nothing works that fast!  However, what I am doing is not working either, so I ordered the product for both myself and my husband.  Surprise!  Within 24 hours, I began to see a difference.  After two days, I saw a huge difference for both of us. Could this be such a fast answer to my prayer?  It's hard to believe, but I have to believe what I am experiencing!

Is this what it means to "live providentially"?  My answer to the first question was that being "poor in spirit" meant to have no other resource but God.  And my meditation book this morning says that there are many ways of being "poor in spirit" --- chronic illness, disability, grief, depression, loneliness, regret ---the list is endless.  And all forms of pain  can cause us to turn in on ourselves, to hoard our personal resources for self-preservation.  But what if, instead, we gave from our poverty?  And what if our poverty caused us to turn to God for a solution?

Psalm 46 says, God is our refuge and our strength, an ever-present help in distress. Maybe that's our answer to both questions!