The Birth of Our Savior

Years ago I sat with a Buddhist priest who asked me, “What do you want?” At the time I was preparing to continue graduate studies in psychology that I had postponed after the completion of my Master’s degree a few years earlier, so I said, “I want to be a psychologist,” to keep it simple. He said, “That will make you crazy.”

A few years later, I found myself in pain. I was suffering the effects of a bulging disc in my cervical spine which was impinging a nerve that ran from one thumb through the neck to the other. I tried physical therapy, but the results were negligible as I had gone for over a year with the pinched nerve before making my way there, having had no medical insurance. Living near an ashram, I dropped by to check out what yoga could do. Since this was really an ashram, and not a westernized yoga/pilates studio, I was taught a little something more than asanas. Essentially, the yoga I was taught was meant to liberate me from all suffering. This was its goal.  

Before going any further, it is important that I tell you I did these things prior to my Christianity. I do not now visit with Buddhist priests or continue the practice of yoga. But I am mentioning these things to illustrate the tendency of both to direct people away from suffering.

This is radically different from Christianity, and in radical opposition to the Person of Christ Himself, who entered the flesh and the world precisely in order to live, suffer, and die. Today is the eve of His birth into suffering. And we celebrate His coming, why? Because He came to suffer and die so as to free us, ultimately, from suffering and the bondage of death. We celebrate as well because our maker came to teach us that the way out of suffering and death is through it.

For, Christ, who is the Word made flesh, the first word and the last, the alpha and the omega, changed the character and meaning of suffering and death by taking them upon Himself. Through His taking our suffering upon Himself unto death, and His conquering of death by rising again to new life, He has not only claimed for us this possibility should we so choose it, but God has demonstrated for us the way to transcend our suffering, and it is not by way of fleeing from it. It is in taking up the cross and following Him who did not turn away from human suffering, but entered into the flesh and the world in order to go through it.

So, as we celebrate this great mystery of love in the birth of our Lord Jesus Christ, let us remember that it is His embrace of our suffering for which we are glad, and for which we follow Him in kind, bearing our crosses with trust and hope in joy and in peace.   

In honor and memory of His birth, I wish you Merry Christmas!

The Ever Virgin Holy Mary of Guadalupe

"Do not let your heart be troubled, and let nothing upset you.

Is it not I, your Mother, who is here?

Are you not under my protection?

Are you not, fortunately, under my care?"

Rites of Passage

When I was 16, there came a knock at my door one school night from a girl who was a year older or maybe two, a former friend from whom I’d been separated on the cusp of childhood and adolescence by the jagged break between elementary school and junior high. After that, we lost touch, even though she lived just around the corner from me.

She had been working in the stables of the farm at the edge of our neighborhood because she loved animals and wanted to become a vet. On this night, one of the horses was giving birth, and she came on foot to bring me to see. It was one of those beautiful moments in life that occurs wholly by a response to grace. We had not spoken in five years, yet she thought of coming to get me.

We walked briskly through the night air, over the darkened streets and across the main road, through the fence and up the dirt path to the barn in which this horse was in labor. For hours we stood at the edge of her stall as the foal emerged from the womb of its mother, legs first. And then, we watched as those legs labored to stand, each one giving out in its turn at the effort, the foal crumbling to the hay again and again. 

I am reminded this cold autumn night of that foal’s struggle to be born and to stand on those frail tenuous legs, bearing resemblance to my own passage to new life, this moment that is unfolding over the course of days and weeks in which I attempt to stand again and again… pushing a bit harder and further, each time undertaking something more, mindfully watching for my knees to give way, my legs to buckle, yet remaining steadfast in pressing onward.  

Photo: Courtesy of Shahim Al Nakeeb

All Saints

For All Saints Day, I offer you, in the words of Dom Marmion, “the teaching that our Lord Himself gave to St. Mechtilde” on suffering.

“One day whilst she was thinking that her illness made her useless and that her sufferings were unavailing, the Lord said to her: “Place all your pains in My Heart and I will give them the most absolute perfection that suffering can possess. As My divinity drew to itself the sufferings of My humanity and made them its own, so will I transport your pains into My divinity, I will unite them to My Passion and make you share in that glory which God the Father has bestowed on My sacred humanity in return for all its sufferings. Confide, therefore, each of your pains to Love in saying: ‘O Love, I give them to You with the same intention that You had when You did bring them to me from the Heart of God, and I beseech You to offer them to Him again, made perfect by intensest gratitude…’” “My Passion,” added Christ Jesus, “bore infinite fruit in heaven and upon earth; thus your pains, your tribulations offered to Me and united to My Passion will be so fruitful that they will procure more glory for the elect, new merit for the just, forgiveness for sinners, and an alleviation of their pains for the souls in purgatory. What is there indeed that My Heart cannot change for the better, since it is from the goodness of My Heart that all good flows both in heaven and on earth?” (From Suffering with Christ: An Anthology of the Writings of Dom Columba Marmion, OSB)

As I found myself last week in a very cold place that even sweaters and woolens could do little to help, Dom Marmion emerged from the rows of books in the library of the monastery where I was staying. He is an old friend from before my illness, with whom I sat for a while as my limbs stiffened with chill, and finding this passage in the anthology, sipping apple cinnamon tea, I thought of you.

It is good to remember that as we suffer our sufferings of illness, there are nuns and monks living in voluntary poverty for the sake of penance, freezing in monasteries all over the world! No matter where we are, or what we choose for ourselves, what is chosen for us by God is that we enter into His Passion in some way or other, accepting whatever His way for us might be with trust and gratitude, in order that we may reap the abundant fruit such communion bears.

Subtitles

If you have been following from the beginning, then you have noticed a change of subtitle, not once, but now three times. Names and titles are almost always a struggle for me to choose, and in this case especially, because what I am naming has yet to be written. What I am naming has yet to be known.

In composing an essay or a novel, for instance, an author must have some sense in advance what is going to be said, what is going to happen, what the end will be, why and how it will be the end or point of closure. But even then, it is difficult to choose a really fitting title until after the work is finished.

What has happened here is I have set out with one intention to fulfill, one mission to accomplish, and now find myself being led beyond it. I realize it is not only for me that this is the case, but for you and for the ongoing fulfillment of His purpose in having me exist and be someone who is writing any of this at all.

So, He is bringing us beyond the ideological foundation that has been laid here during the past six months, which I have lived and practiced for many years now, and have tried to convey to you over and over again in various ways, tones and voices… that foundation being composed of writings reflecting a Christian attitude and orientation to bearing the hardships of chronic illness.

As we move now into what would properly be called Part 2 of this blog, I will attempt to name it well in calling it, “The Journey of a Soul in Happy Surrender to God’s Will,” which will simply be, the unfolding of a life in continued fulfillment of its purpose.

Beyond the Boardwalk

Lyme disease is extraordinary in its capacity to utterly ravage a human being, to take every worldly thing we take for granted, away. I have seen the faces of doctors contort with dread in the face of this diagnosis. I have known people to lose their spouses, families, and friendships on account of it. Careers and jobs along with income and then homes have been lost to the debilitation rendered by this disease. The multiplicity of symptoms and effects Lyme can produce within a single individual can cause a person to appear mad when presenting their list of woes to medical professionals as well as those closest to them in an attempt to gain some aid, cooperation or relief. The illness is long and is never really cured. Insult is added to injury in bearing the burden of widespread social ignorance and disagreement within the medical community. Moreover, we live wondering what’s going to happen from day to day inside of us, not knowing when we will ever begin to get better, when illness will stop manifesting in so many ways, when it is Lyme or something else that is wrong with us, knowing that even if Lyme is not the root cause, it’s going to make whatever else we get much worse, for as long as we live.

That said, as I have mentioned before, for me, it is one of the greatest things ever to happen. I harbor this sentiment, I believe, in a manner similar to a veteran’s fond remembrance of his or her formation as a soldier. While it was breaking me down, it was rendering me malleable in the hands of the One to whom I had given myself to form me in holiness. Throughout, I have trusted His choice of ways and the spiritual exercises He has called me to engage, and though I am not quite a saint, I am closer in my becoming than I was before illness.

When I began this blog in April, I intended to wade through the days with you, focused on the business of getting through one after the other, offering the support of a fellow Lyme sufferer and a sort of spiritual touchstone by which to grasp and remember the blessings to be found in illness itself, as that which brings us ever closer to Christ. Yet it seems I have come to a place where the days are not what they used to be… they are not what they were in year one, two, three or four as I am now five months into year five. I have heard from others, it was the fifth year that brought them to a place where they could begin to recover a life that resembled something they had once lived prior to Lyme disease, and it seems this is happening for me. So, it may be that I am blogging now, not only to utter reminders of blessings, but to offer hope.

Before this, I never thought I would have a day ever again where I did not experience at some point in it, crushing exhaustion with or without exertion. I never thought I would be able to eat a cookie again, without my brain swelling, the room spinning, and my thoughts dampening. I never thought I’d fit into my favorite jeans again… and that’s a weight gain I’m talking about! Don’t get me wrong, I’m not the image of health I was before infection, but I am now entering a time where I can get by in ways I have not been able to for years. While I still cannot go the length of the boardwalk without stopping to rest a few times, I can actually make it to the boardwalk and walk without fear of getting stranded, unable from enervation to make it back to where I began. You see, there was a time when I could not even have ventured to try. And though my head is still ringing, and my muscles are not as strong as before, my stamina is improving both physically and cognitively which is opening up a new palate of possibilities for the future… hence, the poem of last Wednesday.

For awhile now, I’ve been traversing and pondering this transition toward something new, which I first remarked on in the August post entitled, “A New Season.” Living four and a half years through changing phases of chronic illness, I am tentative in issuing any proclamations of wellness. Yet my life itself is moving toward a change; I am simply following the promptings of the One who is leading me, to whom I have entrusted myself. I don’t know what’s going to happen from here on, but I hope that my journey brings you hope…

Untitled

Emerging from this cocoon,

this gauze

that has shrouded me for years,

turning me from who I was

into who I am,

I look back,

beyond the beginning of illness

to the past, like a collage,

an old photo album,

a chest full of memories,

artifacts,

diaries…

It is strange,

being on the cusp of something new,

when for so long

and so slowly the movement toward it progressed.

Yet there are fragments of the past that need

remembering, addressing, consulting...  

And there is grace meted out,

to face these things.

To remember, the story of my life.

The Catholic Mass

Therese

"When I was a child, suffering used to make me sad;

now I taste its bitterness with joy and peace."