The Road To Kingdom Come

One of my favorite performers is Jonatha Brooke. She and her original duo, called the Story, recorded a version of e.e. cummings,” love is more thicker than forget.” I’ve heard it a hundred times yet it never struck me with quite the beauty that it did upon hearing it again last night. Kind of reminds me of the scripture verse that “nothing can separate us from the love of God.” Here it is in verse (below) and with a link to the YouTube version by the Story. Nice harmonies.

Oh, and I heard a tune yesterday that I haven’t heard in many years from Leonard Cohen called “So Long Marianne.” It contained the line, …” we forget to pray for the angels and the angels forget to pray for us.” Not exactly a sentiment I believe in but a provocative lyric nonetheless. It is interesting that Cohen uses a lot of Catholic imagery in his poetry and lyrics.

Lastly, someone said the other night that “faith and fear cannot reside in the same place.” Not sure about that one but I’ll take his word for it.

I went to confession on Saturday, my first in many months. Trust me, it was not easy at all to drag myself the whole 10 minutes that it takes to get to my church. I had absolutely nothing else going on and I was home completely alone so there were no impediments other than shear laziness and an unwillingness to 1.(examine my conscience and 2.(actually confess my sins. To not go would have added spiritual sloth to my list.

It is an interesting contradiction that one of the reasons that I hesitate to go to confession is because of guilt. I am embarrassed, ashamed, chagrined, etc. of/for my offenses and I feel guilty. Yet guilt should be the reason to go instead of a reason not to go. I want to be absolved but I feel unworthy and unforgivable. And I am … but He forgives me anyway. I have to keep reminding myself of that.

There was a long line at the Church and many annoying distractions. Two elderly women cut in line. Another had her two grandchildren with her and they were super-fidgety. She even took them into the confessional with her. The image of the monsignor, this woman and the two little ones in the tiny confessional room made me smile, actually, for the inherent comic value of that scene. “Bless me Father for I have sinned. I have been tempted to murder…2 times!”

But I did go and, painful though it was, I got through it. And the priest did NOT throw me out and he DID give me absolution. I can’t believe how difficult I make these things!

I stayed for the Palm Sunday service and really tried to listen to the readings. What struck me the most was how utterly alone Jesus felt and how utterly alone he actually was. Crucified with two strangers, surrounded by Romans and rabble and scribes and Pharisees. Humiliated in front of his mother and a lone disciple and feeling abandoned by his father. All of this so that I can walk into that confessional in sin and walk out without sin…for a time.

I know that Reconciliation is a temporary condition. I am cleansed for the moment but can’t stay clean for long. It is our nature. But I am glad that I have the opportunity to go kneel in that box, tell on myself, and get a shower of grace and forgiveness…again and again and again. I just have to “keep coming back.”

I received a surprising call on Sunday from a relative that had had a spiritual awakening/healing of sorts during and after Mass this past Sunday. His usual practice was to sit in the rear of the church feeling humble and unworthy. But this Sunday his sister was the cantor and she asked him to come forward so she could see him present at Church. With great reluctance, he did gather the strength and willed himself to the second pew. During the service he had a myriad of experiences especially of Christ’s sacrifice and the attendant forgiveness of all sins. My relative had been carrying much baggage for many, many years and simply had not been able to let it go. But this was different.

After Mass he went to his sister’s house and they talked about their lives and the many challenges they had faced as a family. A sense of acceptance and mercy filled his heart. It was, as I saw it, a healing moment.

It has been quite some time since I have had an uplifting conversation regarding a spiritual matter. I was very happy for him and grateful for his offer to pray for me. One thing we have in common is a lifetime battle with anxiety and depression.

Yesterday I was out running some errands and I made a commitment, before I even left my office, that I would stop at the chapel on the way home. It has been a loooooong time between visits.

I knew that I wouldn’t stay long and I wasn’t sure what to pray for but I did pray for my relative and for a few other people that needed prayers. I felt truly unworthy to be there given my spiritual state but I knew in my heart that it was the right place to be.

While I was there I made it a point to look longingly at the wooden statue of the Blessed Mother at the front of the church. I prayed for the grace that I knew she could provide and I realized what a long way from home that I am. While I was staring at the statue the combination of shadow and dull light created the illusion of movement in the statue. Each part…her head, her arm, her robe…seemed to move ever so slightly, sometimes alone, sometimes in unison. I half expected someone else in the chapel to say,”Is anyone else here seeing this but me?” But I knew exactly what was seeing and I just relaxed and enjoyed it.

I still long for the blessings of the Consecration to the Immaculate Heart of Mary. I pray that my sinful habits will be broken and my broken spirituality will be healed.

Stopping in that chapel was a huge step for me. I hope that I can have the grace to continue and to pick up again on the grace-filled practice of praying the rosary.

I’m not sure that I should write this post, never mind post it. Even stranger, I don’t know what I am going to write. What I do know is that if I write and if I post I feel an obligation to myself and anyone else that stumbles through here to be honest and transparent.

A day or two ago I would have stated that I was in the midst of a crisis of faith. To be more accurate, I am in a crisis of apathy. My belief in all things Catholic and Christian is still very much viable. My enthusiasm and interest in pursuing the truths and practices of my faith is, however, lukewarm and at times frigid. And tepid faith, it seems to me right now, is a worse offense than no faith at all.

I have missed Mass…intentionally. I have purposely avoided adopting any Lenten practices. I have prayed only with a sense of obligation and without praise or gratitude. The only prayer that escapes my lips or heart with any sincerity at all is, “Lord Jesus, Son of God, have mercy on me a sinner!” The darker rooms in the mansion of my apathy compel me to pray this prayer.

Frankly, there are many blessings that I could list here. But a deadness of spirit prevents me from itemizing my gifts or being grateful for them.

I feel distance between myself and those that I love. Maybe it’s noticed, maybe it’s not but I feel it. I take no joy from life and feel only dread about the future. There was a time that I was truly willing to leave all things in the Lord’s hands, no matter what. Now I feel that those reliable hands are not cupped and ready to gather the rains of pending deluge but are open and will allow the torrents to crash through. They have once…they will again. See what I mean about a crisis of faith?

My greatest disappointment is that my precipitous slide began at the moment of my highest hope. As I concluded my Consecration to Mary, my spiritual and psychological base began to crumble. I went into a vortex and when I came out the other side, nothing was the same. I don’t feel the same, I don’t think the same, I don’t act the same. Temptations are fierce and resistance is weak.

Yet I really do yearn for a sense of peace. As always, I am well aware that life is difficult and fraught with challenges. And I want the solace that carries one through these difficulties and challenges to source from the grace that pours from the Sacred Heart through the Immaculate Heart.

I can’t lie to myself or anyone else that I care about. Life is very hard right now and I mean the simple daily tasks of life, not the more lofty and important matters of eternity. Medications seem to contribute to the problem rather than provide a solution. Therapy seems an endless monologue with no breakthroughs or insights. Prayer is like lifting weights without arms.

The bad news is…all of the above. The good news is…I wrote this. And there is so much more that I could write but some things are better left unsaid.

I know that I need to do a lot of housecleaning and I don’t know where to start. But I will have to start somewhere. I just hope that this is one of those passages of life where Jesus carries you even when you don’t know he’s there.

By no means am I writing seeking pity. Just the opposite. I am writing as a baby step in a what I hope can become a healing process. I haven’t written a word from the heart since last October. I was beginning to wonder whether the ability to express myself was another casualty of this all too lengthy episode. But this one item in the list of broken parts still functions to some degree. Let’s hope that there are similar repairs that can be applied by a Good Mechanic.

I am not a big fan of Halloween. Not that I have a problem with it’s celebration at all. Lord knows I have scarfed down my share of treats as I Tricked and Treated through the years. I just don’t like what Halloween has become. Another crassly commercialized minor holiday that has been turned into a carnival rather than a simple cause for youngsters to have some sugary, chocolatey, dressed-in-costume fun.

I enjoy Halloween night when the little and not so little kids come to the door. But now the beer and liquor companies take it over and it is but one more reason to get drunk. Like people need another reason. I understand that Halloween is now the biggest party season of the year. And I detest the slasher movies and gore fest cinema that has also come to be associated with this night. What’s wrong with a good old ghost story? Why all the blood and guts and sex?

Boy have I gotten old ad cranky!

I have come to appreciate this time of year from a religious and spiritual perspective. Halloween, All Saint’s Day and All Souls Day do more to remind me of my own mortality than any Ash Wednesday. A number of birthdays of living and dead family and friends occur in October and November and Halloween stands right in the center of the grey mist that separates us living from the dead.

Prayer still comes hard to me and I have missed Mass a couple weeks in a row due to physical and emotional setbacks. But I still hold onto my faith and will be attending Mass tomorrow (since, for some strange reason I feel better today) and offering prayers to the holy saints and the holy souls. I envy them, respectively, their presence in and nearness to the bliss of Heaven. And I hope the Lord hears and appreciates the little prayer snippets and prayer ejaculations (as the nuns taught us) that make up most of my prayer life these days. They are pitiful yet heartfelt.

I pray for all of the members of my family and my friends that have gone before me, that they may rest in eternal peace in the arms of God the Father.

This is just going to be one of those rants. I have been suffering from chronic insomnia which has become rather acute lately. Zero hours of sleep last night and maybe a couple the night before. Surprised I can even type this. I have tried everything and nothing works except heavy duty meds that leave me in a stupor for hours the next day. Not being able to sleep really, really stinks!

I have also had a relapse on the stomach issues and all of this has triggered a spin back into the nasty anxiety and depression. But I truly am grateful that I had such a long roll of good stomach and mood weather and I need to write that so I can appreciate it even a little more. That period also gives me hope that there may be a longer reprieve down the road.

I was in a mood as grey as the sky overhead today so around lunchtime I headed out to a local Catholic church that has Perpetual Adoration. It was a much longer walk than I anticipated but I was glad when I arrived. I prayed the rosary while I journeyed over and finished in front of the Blessed Sacrament. I simply prayed for sleep, healing and for the grace to be the person that the Lord calls me to be. I also found myself praying very specifically for the grace of final perseverance. I’m not planning on going anywhere but something tells me that when it is your time, Satan comes at you with everything he has. Praying for this singular grace today was as good as any other day. And I have been reading excerpts from St. Faustina’s Diary so Divine Mercy has been top of mind.

It was also a long walk back. Maybe I’ll be a bit more tired when I lay down tonight.

P.S. – I watched Monday Night Football last night (Detroit vs. Chicago)and the producers made it a point to show an aerial shot of Windsor, Ontario across from Detroit. Couldn’t help but think that Owen was down there someplace.

I am writing this post as a method of metaphorically splashing cold water on my face. I have been dragging physically, mentally and spiritually. I keep telling myself (and others) that I want to get back into praying the rosary on a regular basis…but I don’t. I keep telling people how much better I feel after some many years of feeling just plain awful physically. And frankly, I have been feeling in much better spirits mentally/emotionally. But I’m not doing near as much with these reprieves as I should. I think that I keep waiting for something else to happen. Some sort of catalyst that kick starts these formerly infected factors back into some form of activity and usefulness. But I think that the ball is in my court.

I don’t have as much physical, mental and spiritual energy as before but that is no excuse for not utilizing the energy that I do have. If I can’t say the rosary, I can say a Hail Mary. If I can landscape the lawn, I can pull some weeds. And if I can’t read “War and Peace” then shoot for a book more digestible. As a priest friend of mine says, “Fake it ’til you make it.” Those are simple words of wisdom.

I also don’t think I should feel compelled to write 1,000 words on this blog every time I have the urge to write. Maybe 100 will do…maybe 10!

So with that observation I’ll shut up.

I feel as if I should write…something…anything. So I will say this. After moaning and groaning about the chronic digestive problems that have plagued me over the past 4+ years, I must admit that there has been some dramatic improvement over the last few months. The only really obvious source of this improvement is the addition of a couple mineral supplements that the GI physician added a few months ago.

At one of my last appointments, he (almost as an afterthought) sent me down to the lab to have some blood work done. I figured that it was a standard blood panel that I have had done some many times. I waited around for the results and when they came back the doctor told me that there seemed to be a deficiency in a couple of minerals…vanadium and chromium. Apparently, both these trace minerals have something to do with the regulation of blood sugar in the system. A condition that I had heard mentioned with regard to glucose by my nutritionist was reactive hypoglycemia. I won’t try to explain that particular condition but it seemed that both the physician and the nutritionist were focusing on blood sugar.

The nutritionist had placed me on a very strict diet called the Paleo Diet. The ideas is that our bodies evolved originally to digest and metabolize only foods that were readily available in the environment. Meat, fish, fowl, nuts, vegetables and some berries. These foods are naturally high in protein and good fats and low in sugar and carbs. About 4,000 years ago was the dawn of the agricultural era and we started growing and harvesting much of our food. (Grains, cow’s milk, and others.) The theory continues that 4,000 years is not nearly enough time for our bodies to adapt and we are feeding ourselves mostly processed food that we can’t digest and metabolize properly. Thus, I ended up on the “Cave Man Diet.”

On my return visit to the doctor I specifically asked him how deficient I was in the two minerals he identified. He told me that I had “zero” of the minerals available in my system and that would play havoc with by glucose levels leading to all sorts of problems.

The bottom line is this…since I started taking these two minerals and following a very strict diet I have had no episodes of a condition that had regularly plagued me for so very, very long. I prayed and prayed and prayed for relief from this condition that, in no small part, contributed to my breakdown and hospitalization last year. A nun had referred me to this physician and it took me almost a year to contact him. I can only trust that the treatment he prescribed is what is making the difference in my health.

My lesson from this is just to keep hoping and keep praying. I kept going from doctor to doctor and getting test after test and here it looks like these to trace minerals were the culprits by virtue of their absence.

I really needed to write about this because I had just about convinced myself that I was banging my head against the wall and the no one in Heaven above was listening. I still have some serious issues that I am addressing through prayer and I now have renewed hope that with persistence and perseverance I can receive positive results. I continue to struggle with prayer but I am working on it. I sincerely want to bring the rosary back into my life as a daily practice. I did make a full consecration to the Immaculate Heart of Mary in Feb. of 2010 and I want to be true and faithful to that. I believe that the devil would like to see otherwise.

So I am truly grateful that my digestive issues are under control as of this writing and I have no reason to believe that they won’t stay that way. And I thank the Blessed Mother through her Immaculate Heart and to the Sacred Heart of Jesus for the blessing they have provided.

I have not written much lately for a few reasons. Chief among them is the perpetual brain fog that I find myself in. Don’t know what to attribute this to but for some reason I am having great difficulty with cognitive issues like memory, concentration, etc. Maybe it is meds but whatever it is I find myself with plenty of things that I would like to write about but this mental sluggishness really is an obstacle.

A second deterrent is an issue that has developed with my spine. Chronic upper back, neck and arm pain led me to the doctor, into physical therapy and then to x-ray and MRI. Apparently I have spinal stenosis which is a narrowing of the spinal column putting pressure on the spinal cord. The result, for me, is numbness in the arm and hand which makes it much more difficult to type. Don’t know what next steps are but hope to find some type of relief so I can begin functioning more normally (whatever normal is for me anymore).

As I sat in a kind of mental stupor yesterday afternoon, I experienced a minor phenomenon. There had been a consistent rumble of thunder during the afternoon but, for the most part, it remained sunny with interspersed clouds. Finally, around 5PM, it began to rain. I looked out the window and saw that it was completely sunny around our location yet the sky continued to growl with thunder, rain came down in a gentle yet consistent downpour and a couple of flashes of lightning brightened an already bright afternoon. What caught my attention was the rain. From my angle, as the rain reached a certain point between treetop and street, the sun would reflect on each drop just for an instant. The result were soft flashes of light that highlighted the location of each drop at that moment. The effect was like seeing thousands of sparkling stars in the air in broad daylight. Or like seeing thousands of fireflies that had become confused about the time of day and had risen from their daily rest a couple hours too early. The bottom line…I watched the air sparkle outside my window.

The day before I had witnessed an eagle land in a massive oak tree outside of a building in which I was attending a meeting. I am fascinated by birds of prey and had never witnessed an eagle in the wild before. I wasn’t sure what I had seen when the large bird first landed but as I watched it move behind the leaves of the tree I realized that it was hardly a hawk or a large crow. Then the bird majestically spread his wings and lifted into the air and I had not a doubt what I was watching.

I immediately thought of the words to “Eagles Wings.” And He will raise you up on eagle’s wings, bear you on the breath of dawn…”

Kind of makes me want to spread my wings and soar through sparkling raindrops to that place of never-ending wonder.

Yesterday when I got home from work, there was a piece of mail that was hand addressed to me. Upon opening it, I was delighted to find that I had been invited to attend the golden jubilee of Sr. Maria Joseph O.P., the Dominican nun who has been such a blessing to me over the last couple of years. Frankly, I was truly honored by this invitation. To have made the acquaintance, and gained the friendship, of such a devoted servant of God, especially a cloistered servant of God, is something I never could have anticipated.

This nun, and thousands like her throughout the world, are true prayer warriors. They have given themselves wholly and completely to God and pray night and day for his glory and our needs. I wonder sometimes, if I am blessed enough to attain heaven, if I will meet some individual who I never even knew, who’s vocation caused them to toss out a prayer garland for whoever needed it most at that moment and, at that moment, that person was me. Oh, that we all should receive such a gift from an unnamed servant of Christ who has gone to battle on our behalf without even knowing us. Knowing Christ was enough for them and for us.