"I Know You! I Know You!"

 A few years ago, I had an experience that intrigued but somewhat puzzled me, and that I continue to think about even to this day.   I had gone to see a friend of mine who now has Alzheimer's Disease.  For several years, she had not recognized her own children, and she was then living in a memory-care residence.  As I came down the hall toward her, she was standing outside her door, as they had told her she had a visitor.  Eagerly, she looked at me, and then gradually broke into a smile as, clearly, some recognition dawned upon her:  "I know you!  I know you!" she cried in some sort of triumph after so long not knowing or recognizing people.

She did not recall my name of course, but there was an instant re-connection of spirit to spirit as we embraced and visited for the next hour.  She and I had been in a prayer group in the 70's, and had additionally spent many hours together visiting, studying scripture, and taking care of one another's children.  She once had walked through a knee-deep flood to rescue my youngest child from school when I could not reach her by car.

What was it that instantly connected the two of us even beyond the limitations of a mind ravaged by Alzheimer's? Why, when she could not recognize her own children, could she recognize me?

Today I was reading the last chapter of a wonderful book by Bishop Robert Barron -- Light From Light: A Theological Reflection on the Nicene Creed.  The final chapter deals with the final statement of the Creed, "we believe in the resurrection of the body and the life of the world to come."  In reflecting on what kind of "body" and what kind of "life" might exist in the "world to come,"  Barron states, "...there must be both continuity and discontinuity between our present world and the world to come."

In speaking of the soul, he characterizes it as "the organizing pattern that guarantees identity over the course of one's life, even as one's body undergoes extraordinary change."  He points out that absolutely none of the atoms and cells that made up the seven-year-old are present in the body of the elderly person.  Yet we confidently affirm that it is the same person, since the selfsame pattern has perdured throughout the changes.

When the person dies, that organizing pattern is subsequently used by God as the template for the resurrection of the person at a higher pitch of perfection.  Ultimately, it is not the literally selfsame matter that guarantees the identity of one's earthly body and one's heavenly body, but rather the enduring sameness of one's soul.

When I thought about that, I remembered that after Jesus' resurrection, no one who saw Him recognized Him at first -- not Mary, not the disciples on the road to Emmaeus, not even the disciples.  They came to know who He was in their interactions with them.  In other words, they knew Him "soul to soul" rather than "body to body."

When I think of Margaret's recognition of me even before we spoke, I think that we must have connected "soul to soul" in that moment, bypassing the limitations of both body and mind.  Barron says, "In seeing God face-to-face, we shall also see all those beings and events that participate in God" (p.174).  I think it was our shared participation in God that sparked her recognition.

St. Paul says, "But our citizenship is in heaven, and we eagerly await a savior from there, the Lord Jesus Christ, who, by the power that enables him to bring everything under his control, will transform our lowly bodies so that they will be like his glorious body" (Phil. 3:20-21).  In heaven, we will all be physically changed, but to the extent that our souls have been transformed by the divine life, we will continue to cry out to God and to one another, "I know you!  I know you!"

Which is Harder?

 One of the purposes of this blog is to pass on some of the ideas that have touched or inspired me.  We love to give what we ourselves love!  This morning I was reading The Little White Book, a daily reflection based on the writings of Bishop Ken Untener and published by Little Books of the Diocese of Saginaw.  

In reflecting on the Parable of the Landowner and the Workers, Bishop Untener writes that this is one of Jesus' parables that people don't usually like.  Our sympathies are usually with the workers who have borne the heat of the day and then received the same pay as those who have worked only an hour.  But the bishop's insight touched me:

Which is harder? To work all day, or to want a job and not get one?  It comes out about even, which is how the owner of the vineyard paid his workers.

Which is harder? To get married and deal with all the challenges and struggles of married life and raising children? Or to want to get married and get left on the sidelines?  It comes out about even, which is how the owner of the vineyard paid his workers.

Which is harder? To earn your wages by the sweat of your brow? Or to want to work but end up on welfare?  It comes out about even, which is how the owner of the vineyard paid his workers.

One reason this reflection touched me is that yesterday I heard from the workers of St. Vincent de Paul Society about people who have all these years been contributing to the charity and are now forced to come for help themselves.  It is very difficult to ask for help now, after years of being able to help others.  

The next time we hear the Parable of the Workers in the Vineyard, our reaction might be sympathy for those who were forced to stand all day in the marketplace hoping that someone would hire them, and a sense of profound gratitude for those who worked all day in the heat!

 

 

 

On Rescue Cats and Other Pets

 One year after Hurricane Katrina, with the Gulf Coast still in the midst of utter devastation, I found 5 newborn kittens in my garage.  We had stored what little furniture could be salvaged from our home in Metairie after the storm in the garage in Long Beach, Mississippi, while we were working on restoring that house.  Every weekend, we drove from New Orleans to Long Beach to work on the house, and while we were there, we would leave the garage open to air out the furniture.  

Evidently, a very pregnant mama cat had found a comfortable place one weekend to have her kittens, and unknowingly, we closed the garage with mama and 5 babies inside and headed back to New Orleans for the week.  The next weekend, we opened the garage again, still not knowing that we had visitors inside.  But we stayed only one day, during which time mama cat, apparently very thirsty and hungry after nursing her kittens for a week, left the garage.  Again, we closed the garage and left for the week, leaving 5 nursing kittens inside without their mama.  According to the neighbors, the poor mama cat returned later and could not get to her babies.  She cried and screamed unceasingly, but the neighbors had no idea what the problem might be.  By the time we arrived the next weekend, mama cat had disappeared.  Opening the garage, we discovered 5 very weak and almost dead newborn kittens.

I scoured the neighborhood for an eyedropper, obtained some canned milk, and began feeding the babies every 3 hours around the clock --- finally taking them back to New Orleans with us that week. One of the kittens eventually died, but four survived.  We gave one to a friend and kept three.  What wonderful and loving companions they have been to us for the past 17 years!  Now they are part of the family and readily come to us for whatever they need or want.

As I reflected this morning about the joy our pets give us when they so trustingly depend upon us for their needs, I was reminded of two biblical verses:  

Open wide your mouth and I will fill it  (Psalm 81)

God gives us all things richly to enjoy (1 James) 

Psalm  81 begins with a song of thanksgiving:  Sing for joy to God our strength....begin the music, strike the tambourine....  The reason for their joy was that God had rescued them from the slavery of Egypt:  

He says, "I removed the burden from their shoulders; their hands were set free from the basket.  In your distress you called and I rescued you.  I answered you out of a thundercloud....  I am the Lord your God, who brought you up out of Egypt.  Open wide your mouth and I will fill it....you would be fed with the finest of wheat; with honey from the rock, I would satisfy you."

As we so love satisfying the needs of our pets, especially those we have rescued from dangerous or deadly situations, so God our Father delights in satisfying the needs of those He has rescued from the powers of darkness.  It is not simply "salvation from sin" that delights God, but actually providing for His children.  He did not rescue them from Egypt to leave them in the desert, but He always planned for them to richly enjoy the land of milk and honey also.

Jesus never upbraided anyone for asking too much; he delighted in answering the requests of those who came to Him.  "Ask me," He says; "Open wide your mouth and I will fill it."  

I love taking care of my pets, and I love when they come to me and curl up by my side in utter contentment, their needs satisfied and now wanting only the comfort of my presence.  So it is with the God and Father revealed to us by Jesus Christ! 

 

 

 

 

 

A Living Thing

 The Word of God is living and active.  Sharper than any two-edged sword, it penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit, joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and attitudes of the heart (Heb. 4:12).

Everything Jesus ever said about the Word of God indicates that it is "living and active."  Not just information or instruction, it is God speaking to me "live."  I am not listening to or reading something God once said.  God is speaking to me now!

John calls Jesus Himself "the Word," the Logos in Greek, or the expression of the mind of God.  We have all experienced the power of words from those around us.  If someone calls us clever, beautiful, funny, or stupid, those words take root in our spirit and begin to shape our future, in some cases in very unfortunate ways.  

Yesterday I wrote about the Room of Self-Knowledge, wherein I imagined seeing myself in all the stages of my life, but seeing through the eyes of Jesus, the Word, the Image of the Father.  In Him, there is no condemnation at all -- He himself said He came not to condemn but to save the world.  So what He sees in us can "always be fixed," in the words of my painting instructor.  Whatever I thought I had supremely ruined as I was learning to paint, the merest touch of the master's hand could transform into something beautiful.  He had the knowledge and experience to take anything I had done and to use it as the basis of a work of art.

Don Quixote called the peasant girl, Dulcinea, a princess.  In his eyes, she was so.  And what is it that God calls us?  What is it that His Word does in us? ---  Redeems us from the ravages of sin and death and transforms us into sons and daughters of God -- and so we are, as St. Peter tells us!

When we begin to believe that God's Word has power in our lives, we begin to transform from what we were into what God sees in us.  Jesus described the Word of God as a seed that "grows night and day without the farmer being aware of it."  When we read, listen to, focus on God's Word, something begins to happen inside of us, whether we are aware of it or not.  Something holy begins to take shape in us.  Thoughts begin to come to us that were the farthest thing from our minds previously.  They may be words of comfort, a flash of insight, or a nudge to do something that would not have occurred to us otherwise.  

In the New Testament, what we translate as "word" actually has two Greek forms, each with a different meaning.  One form is  "Logos," meaning image, expression, the divine wisdom or rational principle manifest in creation, government, and the controlling of the universe.  The other form which we translate as "word" in English is "Rhema," meaning a word spoken in and to a particular situation, a living and dynamic word.  It is not the general principle applied to universal situations, but rather a personal, spoken word applied to our hearts.  It literally means an utterance -- like God speaking to Elijah on the mountaintop.  It is an inspired word birthed within our own spirit for the situation of the moment, a whisper from the Holy Spirit guiding and directing us.  It is spoken by a living entity.

In the desert, in the moment of stress and distress, Jesus said, "Man does not live by bread alone, but by every word (Rhema) that comes forth from the mouth of God" (Matt. 4:4).  That word, Rhema, is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, dividing the soul and spirit and judging the attitudes of the heart.  It has the power to pierce the hardest hard and the darkest mind.  

My prayer is that everyone I know experience Rhema, the spoken Word of God, in their hearts and minds, and through that word come to know the mind and heart of God Himself!

The Room of Self-Knowledge

 St. Catherine of Siena (1347-1380) lived, like all of us, in tumultuous times.  Destined for greatness, she experienced the love of God at an early age, but she did not fit in with the expectations of her parents or of her culture.  When she turned her back on the possibility of marriage, her parents retaliated by forcing her to work as a household servant, but she constructed in her heart a "secret cell" of "self-knowledge" to which she could retreat from her daily drudgery.

To Catherine, knowledge of self and knowledge of God were one and the same. Christ once said to her: You are she who is not; I am the One Who Is!  The entire secret of this woman who never learned to read and who wrote poorly seems to be her absolute knowledge of her own poverty and of God's sufficiency. For her, to know oneself is a form of prayer.

She once said, "Be who God meant you to be, and you will set the world on fire!"  So then, how do we get to the place where we know ourselves and understand who God meant us to be?

When I started thinking about the room of self-knowledge, the image that came to mind was the kaleidoscope room at Disney World.  I don't know if that room still exists, since I experienced it in the 70's, but as we waited our turn for a main attraction, we stood in a circular room surrounded by 20 or more narrow screens that reached from floor to ceiling.  Each screen portrayed for a few moments a different scene, not in a dizzying fashion, but rather peacefully, so that you could gaze at whichever scene drew your attention for a few seconds until your focus shifted or the scene changed. 

When I imagine a "secret cell of self-knowledge," I imagine standing in the center of such a room, with the screens flashing images of myself at different times and stages of my life, or even from moment to moment in the present time.  Over the room and embracing all the scenes, I imagine a ceiling like the ones in the Eastern Orthodox churches, with Christ the Pantocrater--the Ruler and Creator-- hovering over all the images of my life, loving and embracing all of who I am, who I was, who I will be in the future.  What I see as failures to love, He sees as stages along the journey.  Catherine said, "It is only through shadows that one comes to know the Light."

To see ourselves through His eyes is a great grace; we cannot see ourselves through our own eyes, for there are too many false images and too much lack of understanding.  I think we naturally fear to see ourselves as we truly are, but if we could only see the person He made us to be, we would rejoice in His wisdom and strength.  

The Master Has Need of It - Bishop Barron's Sunday Sermon

absolutely stunning!

On Dying and Rising

 Each of us, according to Walter Burghardt, S.J., is a unique authority on our own Calvary.  It is not necessary for anyone else to lay a cross on us, for each of us carries a painful circumstance--or more--- unrecognized by the rest of the world.  And most often we carry it alone.  When we try to explain it to others, there are no words to convey our experience, our suffering.  We recognize the silence of Christ before Pilate: "I cannot explain it to you."

During the last three weeks, my husband and I (at 80 and 87) have been moving to a new house and trying to prepare the former house for sale.  Most people our age are moving into retirement homes, where life becomes more simple and where other people do things for them.  What was difficult and stressful at the age of 50 or 60 becomes extraordinarily more so at 80 and 87, when the body refuses to cooperate with the demands of the situation.  

To make things even more stressful, I was planning to leave the country for three weeks as soon as the move was completed, leaving my husband to deal with an unorganized household of unpacked boxes, unhung pictures sitting on the living room floor, and our former garage full of things that needed to be disposed of.  Neither of us had had a clue as to how demanding it would be to empty a 3100 square foot house, holding 50 years of accumulated treasures.

Under the stress of carrying heavy boxes day after day, my husband developed back spasms and sciatica, leaving him unable to move for about a week.  Concern for him added to my burdens of loading and unloading 3-4 carloads a day, the discovery of mold in our new house, sudden leaks in the house we were trying to sell, exposed hotwires in unexpected places, and the demands of our agent to update and paint an aging house.

Finally, I was sleeping only 2-3 hours a night, eating irregularly the wrong foods since I had no time to cook, and starting each day at one o'clock in the morning --- until my body finally shut down also and I could no longer function at all.  We both desperately needed help!

In my last entry, I wrote about the experience of "solution found!" that becomes the starting point of faith in the presence and faithfulness of God.  As Abraham journeyed from his homeland to a new land, he built an altar whenever he reached a new place, "and there he called on the name of the Lord" (Gen. 12).  From Genesis on, we find those who call on the name of the Lord and find "an ever-present help in distress" (Ps. 46).

When I finally reached the end of my own strength and ability to cope, I had no choice but to rely entirely on the Lord for help -- and I was not disappointed or "put to shame" (Romans 10:11). I began to be amazed at the people who showed up at just the right time to lend a hand or to solve a problem entirely beyond our capabilities.  

Even the small things I had not thought about were taken care of -- someone showed up spontaneously at the chapel one day as I arrived for my assigned hour of adoration.  I had not even considered that I would need a replacement during my 3-week absence.  This person had never before attended adoration and was looking for a time slot to fill.  I had planned to stop on the way for gas and decided at the last minute to get it afterward. That decision put me at the chapel just in time to meet this new person, who was delighted to fill my time slot for the next few weeks.  Solution found!

St. Julie Billiart said it so well:  Let us endure with courage the painful little experiences that Divine Providence allows to befall us.  They are a necessary part of every life, and force us to place all our trust in God, for He alone can support and guide us.

I am not at all sure I have "endured with courage" the pain and stress of the past few weeks, but I will never forget the Lent of this year, when I have come to experience a kind of dying and rising, an overcoming with the help of God the painful experiences that each of us must face in our lives.