poverty and lust seek each other out and call to each other in the darkness like two famished beasts.

There's some of everything in it, as they say. The howling of a moujik under the rods, the screaming of a beaten wife, the hiccup of a drunkard, and the growlings of animal joy, that wild sigh from the loins--since, alas! poverty and lust seek each other out and call to each other in the darkness like two famished beasts. No doubt I should turn from all this in disgust. And yet I feel that such distress, distress that has forgotten even its name, that has ceased to reason or to hope, that lays its tortured head at random, will awaken one day on the shoulder of Jesus Christ.

Diary of a Country Priest, Georges Bernanos

. . .

Hi Father,

I've acquired a few Carmel related books: Teresa of Avila's collected works I & II (not yet III), the OCDS starter book "Welcome to Carmel," and of course I've got John of the Cross with me and have been working through the commentary on the "Spiritual Canticle." I've also corresponded a bit with Leslie Schadt, the OCDS Formation Director in Moline, and I'm very excited about the propective journey and direction. I think the intensity of the prayer life scared me a little at first--you've seen the list of prayer obligations, right?--but I've been trying it on for size lately, going to daily Mass, attempting to pray the morning and evening Office, and muddling through silent prayer, and I'm feeling a lot less lost than I felt all of this last year under the Brothers' direction. The Brothers are wonderful and I'm very grateful for their teachings, but something very pressing has been missing for me. Structure maybe. A defined path towards spiritual growth. Maybe some of us just need a lot more structure and direction than others?

And why does spiritual frustration imitate despair? They are not the same creatures, but they look alike, are related somehow... Blake would say (I think) that the two actually meet each other where the infinite enters into the finite (in Christ). That meeting place is creative and transitional, a place of choice and of reckoning. I've been thinking about that apex a lot. It's the nailing of God to the cross, the worst of human artifice (an instrument of torture and death wrought from a tree He Himself made with that prolific, vegetable aspect of His Love). Or: it is God conforming His Will to ours. I have always asked: what kind of God would choose the bloody sacrifice of His Son (Himself) as the means for human salvation? But now I wonder if the bloodletting wasn't always already human logic--if it is meant to transform whatever human weakness is inclined to annihilate itself and its children? If God conformed Himself to a bloody death, to human will, as the ultimate expression of the gift of free will to humanity? We cannot be forced to His will, and so he succumbs to ours...?

I'm thinking about this in relation to lust and poverty, too, as it arises in Diary of a Country Priest. I'll send you that passage so you know what I'm talking about. I have more to say about it--the apex between them, the meeting place of Christ--but I'm rushing now to get to Mass--

Thanks for all your advice as of late. I'm very grateful for your help. You're in my prayers.

. . .

repetition's love is in truth the only happy love

THOU: I am haunted by what I cannot remember. I cannot remember you in the living present, or I choose not to all day while I'm busy with all I've given myself to do with what you've given me.

You: like a ghost of yourself flitting in and out of my thoughts.

In just the same way I long to be home while trapped overnight--unexpectedly--in Atlanta, or I long for the monks and their gentleness when I am at the office, or when I am with the monks I ask why I am not at home, or when I am home I look around at the neglected rooms and put them off, or I think of the little papers to be graded, I think of all the Blake I must read and present, of the emails I must write, of meetings to set up, I think of all the cat hair I must vacuum up, and I put it off, all of it--you--for I am partly bored and partly lonely and partly always dwelling either in memory or in anticipation of stuff coming up. As for the present, I rarely bear with its little deaths for long. I open a browser on the screen and spend hours searching for the answer to a student's question. I watch a movie when at last, in the evening, the world I've made pauses long enough to sleep.

Always wanting to be elsewhere--always heading elsewhere. What is this restlessness, Lord? Against my fantasy of staying put? "The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak." We are broken in such weird ways. I'm inclined to think fear is a wakeful state, but no: fear is a sleepy-headed demon with all of its heads heading anywhere but here. I am overwhelmed by my escapes. By how I carry them, by how I use them to carry me, by how I don't recognize them, by how I do. "Watch and pray," you said. And instead, incredibly, they slept.

I am certain that if I am to touch you, it must be Here, where I must be stripped of all I hold close, of all I love, of all that comforts me and lulls me to sleep. I am certain now that terror trounces beauty. That while I go looking for your beauty, you keep bringing me back to how it annihilates every concrete manifestation of itself, to how it erases itself, empties out, and points to the abyss of the genesis. Your vast wound. Which is my wound.

Today, Holy Thursday, an anniversary of my first confession, two years now. It feels like a wound.

I give myself little reminders to keep you from my ghosts and fail. At fasting. At renouncing my stupid habits--diet soda, cigarettes, sloth. And I'm selective about what I'll renounce, too. I will not take cold showers or sleep on the floor, no, for my mind cannot make sense of those particular self-inflictions--I am sure you could do less with me were I crumpling emotionally like wet Kleenex from sleep deprivation--I am sure cold showers are too much like sexual repressions. But of constant or enduring physical discomforts, the ones that call me back to my body, which is your body, I understand, I see perfectly well why the saints put them to work. The cilice, the hairshirt. The fasting. In fact, these are easy compared to what you would have me prune.

Suffering, Fr said once, is a shortcut to the heart. So many times I miss the profundity of what he says because my first reaction is to understand as if I understand entirely. What did he mean? That suffering might be the only experience that is always present-tense. Pain itself is not very imaginative. It is haunted, certainly, but those hauntings produce afflictions in the immediate sense of affliction. Trauma is not recollection or even replication, but repetition in the purest sense of the word. It inflicts again with some of the old and with much that is new, and carries it forward. When Kierkegaard wondered whether repetition was ever possible, he was thinking of love, of happy love, and decided that in fact only recollection, only memory, is available to us, while repetition, which is beyond hope, becomes merely that in becoming, a hope, and is otherwise humanly impossible.

But it seems to me now that pain dwells within your secret, the one that knows what knowing is beyond time and space where again is meaningless against ever.

In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. To God who is, who was, and who is to come, now and forever.

Amen.

***

Repetition's love is in truth the only happy love. Like recollection's love, it does not have the restlessness of hope, the uneasy adventurousness of discovery, but neither does it have the sadness of recollection--it has the blissful security of the moment. Hope is a new garment, stiff and starched and lustrous, but it has never been tried on, and therefore one does not know how becoming it will be or how it will fit. Recollection is a discarded garment that does not fit, however beautiful it is, for one has outgrown it. Repetition is an indestructible garment that fits closely and tenderly, neither binds nor sags. (131-2)

Kierkegaard, Repetition

***

the voice of one crying in the wilderness

THOU: And the days have gone by (full of work) and I have fallen away, as I predicted, from my vigil. I begin to forget my questions, how they press me towards you with urgency and a lot of discomfort, and sometimes with affliction. I get into a passionate rage and read furiously for you. I call Fr and wait for him to bring you to me, cupped in his phone. I write you out. I make a vow.

Like a cry.

But then there is work, and though I am lazy, I am also very focused. I finish and look ahead, finish and look ahead. I keep my head down, write syllabi, email, read 500 submissions, prepare for class, talk and talk, pack, get in a car, get on a plane, fly away, talk some more. In the morning I am too anxious to pray. At night, I am too tired.

When I am tired I am also bored. I say, Lord I am heavy bored. This wilderness is not interesting. I have forgotten my questions. I look around. I see you on the fixed point of the horizon, unmoving, and how far afloat I've drifted. What was I about to say, Lord? Stupid mind: why does it forget what it wants to know? What was my question?

The question is: what now, Lord? What comes next?

(But there is no next.)

***

fiat voluntas tua

THOU: I am a consecrated person! What pride is now available to me! Is it better to say: I belong to you? I am set aside for God? You must help me discover the best way to understand what I am now, so that my happiness doesn't get the best of me and launch into more celebrations of myself. What unforeseeable pitfalls await on the path. I didn't know I would need to sort away from those feelings that make me feel good because of what I tell myself I've done, and towards the reality of knowing that I have done nothing.

Here we are again, with my saying there is so much work to do, Lord, forgive my absence, and with you waiting on me to return. Instead, give me this day in which to do the work you've given me to do, with you in mind, with a reminder that when I see students and colleagues and friends today, I see people you love. And help me to remember, too: I serve.

In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. To God who is, who was, and who is to come, now and forever.

Amen.

...

its connotations are basically not ethical but religious ... moral sanctity cannot be physical

THOU: What should I say to you today? My heart is heavy. The priest on the retreat said, "you are so inclined to give. Try to know God (in the Biblical sense) with vulnerability and intimacy. Try to receive." And for this wisdom, I'm glad I went. I learned something else too: that forgiveness is vulnerable to abuse, that the accuser can wield it and point it at the accused, and transform it from the cutting of a tether to the possession of the lance hitting its mark. I knew this of pity, of mercy, of sympathy (thanks to Blake)--that they can become hierarchical power structures rather than true relationships--but I had never recognized human forgiveness turning on itself this way before.

(--Though this is the same turn I give my father everyday.)

And something else: all those counselors, therapists, psychiatrists who tried to help me help myself. What a burden put on them to diagnose, to discover a treatment plan, to rest assured in their expertise that should the plan not seem (to me) to fit my needs, it is not the structure that fails, but the one placed within it. How many times did I put myself into another human being's hands, accept the course of action, find myself feeling worse, and hear: "you're resisting the process." Somehow, on the other side of side effects and symptoms, freedom awaits. But first I must put aside my sense of reality (for I am the delusional one), trust the more objective sense of the expert, live alienated from myself while I learn "healthy" behaviors and perspectives, let the drugs work their physiological magic, and, at the same time, honor my feelings.

Meanwhile not a thing has been done to address my arrogance. I am certain I can out think my helpers, that of course I know myself best. Only you can provide that realism. Only in you do I see fully that I know absolutely nothing.

I haven't felt this way in many years, Lord: angry with generically imposed structures, embarrassed by what feels facile and sentimental in psycho-spiritual exercises, misread, misunderstood, and already well-equipped from years of therapeutic coaching to cope in healthy ways. "Be gentle with yourself": journal keeping, letter writing, gardening, exercise and sunshine, hot baths, "shop for clothes," "see a movie with a friend," "be a learner as well as a teacher." What possesses the experts to think I don't attempt to do these things already? I might be an asshole, Lord, but I'm no longer a purger, a cutter, a drinker, an abuser, a selfish friend, or a suicide. I might be prone to self-pity, to anger, to manipulating men, to selfishness, to withdrawal, to terrible fears of abandonment, to laziness, to repressed feelings, and to depression. But I'm aware of it. I'm aware that I can lay those things at your feet, that this is the best thing I can do, the only thing I can do.

"Lord I am not worthy to receive you, but only say the Word and I shall be healed": this is not magic, though it is miraculous. This is the eternal utterance of your incarnation and crucifixion, the almost imperceptible movement of grace in my spirit as it learns to give up my utterance for yours, to lean on your chest (as the Beloved disciple did at the first Mass) and to listen for the rhythms of your heart. All I must do is accept the exchange: the rhythms of the profane for the rhythms of the sacred. The river flows to the sea. All I must do is allow it to empty.

All weekend I wanted quiet time to pray. I wanted to be alone with you. I wanted silence. I wanted to be allowed to sleep. Not once did someone say: pray.

Pray.

...

"Matrimony is not sinful. But it is profane. It belongs to the 'things of this world,' to the fleeting realities of our present condition (I Corinthians 7:32). The opposition between virginity and matrimony is not that of purity and impurity. As in the Old Testament, they are contrasted as sacred and profane life. Virginity is 'holy,' that is sacred in the biblical sense of the term: it is qadosh, set apart, and exalted. 'Dedicated' or, rather, 'consecrated' would be the best rendering of the adjective ayios in I Corinthians 7:34. By continence the virgin is made sacred, assumed into the sacred sphere of the divine glory." (81)

--Lucien Legrand, The Biblical Doctrine of Virginity

...

help many to take in more reality.

"Does God hold on to our first shirts? If he does, he never lets us know. His respect for our boundaries is impeccable. But speaking for myself, I wish he was less discreet (or discrete). I really need his presence sometimes, and to hell with my ego, but I really need him so I don’t fall altogether apart. Like an infant.

A baby is born so naked and so bereft and so abandoned to the vicissitudes of existence – and the ineptitude and egocentricity of those who are to take care of her. I wish God would be more available – to the babies in huge big gobs, to the rest of us in discreet but unmistakable bursts. I don’t see his greater availability as any compromise on boundaries. It could help many to take in more reality. But he hides so damn well, it is almost as if he is playing hide-and-seek – with us and with himself. I used to have a problem with God’s wager with the devil over Job, but now I see the truth of it. I really experience that truth.

I am sad and feeling rebellious. There are some difficulties in my immediate family which I am grieving (not to do with baby). And of course I come back to God each night and ask him for an accounting of the mess he’s made. I know, I know, I’m sure it is a sin for me to say that. I am a little demoralized."

...

"I told Fr A I've been angry with God since my miscarriage. He said, 'why are you angry with God? That's like being mad at the sun.'"

...

THOU: Yesterday I drove to Peoria to have a conversation with Fr K. I made the appointment last week when I thought I should start looking around for another spiritual director and meet with a few priests who have seemed up to the task in the past. I made this appointment when I was angry with the spiritual director I have now (the one you gave me), very angry, for I felt certain he'd left me to sink or swim, had chosen to wash his hands of me. And isn't that familiar?

I dare not call him spiritual father anymore. But perhaps--given that I have so many skewed notions of what a father is--of what paternal authority is, of what fathers ought to do for their children--this is best.

So it is: when I fall apart, bereft, stripped of my swaddling, I clench the fist in my heart and shake it at you: "And you! You're in charge! What are you doing about this?!" I want you to act, to sweep the clouds from the face of the sun and let it light up the planet, for you can do whatever you like. You are God.

But I forget: the axis of the cross is access. It is the axle that weds my body to my spirit, my becoming to my being. It is access to (axis of) the secret life of God. It is the secret of God in action, split wide open for me to see. The fault--the divide that opened up between between meaning and becoming--is one that I introduced, that all of humanity introduced, which you sealed again in the crossbeams as you participated concretely in all that my spirit cries out against. It is my fault, but because you are God, I say: "this is your fault." I say: "Do you see this big fat gobbing mess of things? Do you? Do something!" You say: "But child, I already have. Only trust me."

No, Lord. It's not good enough. I want you to do something else. I want you to stop watching the misery of the world unfold in front of you. I want you to dip your hand into its lake of fire. Just enough so that I can see the ripples on the surface of things move across the face of the deep. Then I will trust you.

I want you to acknowledge that from the beginning this whole thing was a set up. I want the good book to say (somewhere) that you knew this would happen to me, because you made me this way, and that you take full responsibility for it. I want you to tell me that you knew freewill was an ambush. An ambush, Lord! It was your discretion: say it! Then I will trust you.

I want you to tell me, tell me, that the wrath of God is the idol of human pride, is human vengeance--is the whining perception of humanity's childhood tantrums. I want you to tell me you could not possibly punish me, take vengeance on me, annihilate me, leave me to writhe and rot alone in a box. Then I will trust you.

But child, I already have. I laid in wait for you in the secret innermost sanctions of time. I have done everything you have ever asked of me. I have called to you from the apex of your becoming, I have acted, I have lived what you live, suffered within you, made a humiliating spectacle of myself, and died--this too. And when you asked me to be God, I rose up again, and said "Fear not." "I am who AM." I gave you a Mother and a Father, an infant to remind you I am as vulnerable as an infant, a full grown man so that you could touch me with your human touch. I gave you the best of my fold: teacher, physician, benefactor, master. And I sacrificed God to you--to you--the little gods of earth--slaying myself, as you demanded, so that you might see nothing is beneath me. Nothing is beneath me. All of this you hear as a whisper or a silence among the noise of the world, the noise of your hurt, but I am telling you: trust me. I am the hurt. I am the silence. Stand back and look around you: I am the axis between my secret and yours: I am access to all that I am. Take it in, me, reality, as I have taken you in. You will find yourself in my secret: your first shirts and your last.

In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. To God who is, who was, and who is to come, now and forever.

Amen.

...

"It is through a secret that one enters into interior silence. There is no other doorway. Exterior silence is an act of willpower: we will to be quiet. We can all be quiet for a half-hour. Not for much longer though, for by the end our willpower begins to wane. It becomes agitated, begins to boil, and overflows ... and we begin to chatter. Exterior silence is a matter of ascesis. Interior silence, on the other hand, arises from love and overcomes us. There are silent souls who safeguard love. Silence is the guardian of love. One knows this when one loves. The Fathers of the Church illustrated this with the wonderful metaphor of perfume (an accurate one since perfume is always connected with love in Scriptural symbolism) which, when not carefully stored, evaporates (like champagne, fine wine, and anything good, qualitative, and subtle). One's heart evaporates if not held by a secret. One's true personality comes together in a secret, in true secrets, and one's interior strength consists in bearing a secret." (140)

--Fr Marie-Dominique Philippe, Wherever He Goes: a retreat on the Gospel of John

...

Dear G,

Thanks for the news. I shall pray fervently that the Lord and His Mother will work in and for you this weekend. I, too, hope that more grieving will not be too much but rather an occasion for on-going healing. Let us entrust this weekend to Our Lady knowing that she will draw good from it for you.

Please keep me in your prayers as well.
It has been good to see you the past couple of times at the Priory!

In Mary,

fr JM


G wrote:

Okay, I'm signed up to do it. I'm ambivalent about plunging into more grieving right now, but I trust that God is leading you in leading me. I leave Friday for Romeoville. Pray for me.

In Mary,

G

...

God wishes us to love ourselves, as well as all created things, in the measure assigned by him, with a view to his pleasure

THOU: What is grief? I have just opened the window in the kitchen where I sit at the table and marvel at the sun warming my back. The birds have returned. The bare trees yawn and stretch into new want. Spring rain is on the way, weeks of cold runoff, wet boughs, weather-beaten flowers, but not yet. Not yet. I wish I longed to be outdoors, elsewhere, traveling, walking, but on the best days I want to be here, watching the light shift all day through the windows, letting the trees float into the house, letting the porch door open the floor of this house wide to the sky. I love my home. I love it too much.

If in some way grief is a response to what I know is lacking, to loss, as we say, then grief makes no sense. Or it resembles immaturity: a tantrum. It resembles misunderstanding: why? If what you say is true, and if I believe you, if I trust you, then grief is always shortsighted. There is no loss, not in reality. What do I honor, then, in grief? My slow self--my own therapy? The pain my friend experienced, her terror?

My grieving is mundane: "I've remained unshaken by all this death and suffering in the past, I've been a strong support to others who expected me to be strong, I've had to carry on with the demands of work, to respond by not falling apart." No: that is the heroic face mask of the stoic. My grieving is more mundane than that: "I didn't know or really love any of those people who died--what were they to me? Just people."

It is easy to see such stoicism as radical detachment--as healthy to a certain extent, since it's true: I didn't know those people, in life as in death. But this is not the sort of detachment you're asking of me is it, Lord. What you ask is far more difficult, in layman's terms: a paradox. Love without possession. I've kept a safe emotional distance from most people most of my life, with few exceptions (that hurt like hell), much of which amounts to a dehumanizing acceptance of the lack of meaning in human experience.

Which is to say, my grieving is as mundane as it gets: I'm beginning to grieve all whom I did not grieve. I'm beginning to glimpse small aspects of who they were, what they experienced, what their lives meant to them, whom they loved, and how you love them. Not all at once. Here and there: not just people, but individual human beings, each with her own life composed of her own days, her own lived out individual moments, her own body, her own consciousness, in which she wondered, questioned, noticed, thought, touched, knew, feared, despaired, hoped again, and loved. It is overwhelming, Lord, how many, how many. How many suffer their own deaths.

There is some very essential connection between this new grieving and a commitment to chastity I cannot fathom. As if chastity cannot be practiced, attained, without all the walls coming down. For it brings me to understand myself as a person among persons, a person who loves others with the love that only a person can give. It is a freedom, but one that should lead beyond grief to the detachment you want me to understand is the greatest form of love, and of this I can make no headway, no sense. Is grieving, too, a form of possessive love?

Is yours a love, this love with detachment, beyond grieving?

In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. To God who is, who was, and who is to come, now and forever.

Amen.

...

"In the language of St John of the Cross, appetites are disordered inclinations or affections for oneself or creatures, tendencies which are, according to their seriousness, more or less contrary to the divine will. God wishes us to love ourselves, as well as all created things, in the measure assigned by Him, with a view to His pleasure and not to our own selfish satisfaction. These inclinations or appetites always give rise to venial sins, or at least to deliberate imperfections, when one willingly yields to them, even though it be only in matters of slight importance. The will of the soul which freely assents to these failings, slight though they be, is stained by this opposition to the will of God; for this reason a perfect union cannot exist between its will and God's. Moreover, if these imperfections become habitual and the soul does not try to correct them, they form a great obstacle to divine union; and according to St John of the Cross, 'they prevent not only divine union but also advancement in perfection.'" (233)

--Fr Gabriel of St Mary Magdalene, O.C.D., Divine Intimacy

...

, looking at ourselves.

THOU: How will I know you, Lord? There is no telling you from accident. In this, the skeptic's mind at last serves a purpose. So long as I notice (with detachment) those things that impress me as making patterns in the story I tell myself is my life in you--so long as I am not too quick to believe this narrative, my narrative, is your narrative--there is still a viable path beyond myself towards you.

But what a plait of thorns faith is. Mine has grown wild, as I suppose happens in mourning and in desperation, when the mind would cling to any order it can discover or arrange. And this easy effusive credulity is the common denominator of your churches. It catches on fast, an invasive weed, the lowest sort of idolatry made base and crude, and even dangerous, by this constant desire to see ourselves--our finite most interesting selves--where we stop short of ever seeing we cannot see your infinity. Here I am, seeing through a crown of thorns, imagining you are there, plain as pain. This is my winter garden.

I ought to put aside looking for signs of you in all of material creation as it breaks and decays and presents its little whispering mirrors of you. What a broken thing hope is: shards looking at shards. Yesterday I asked Br JJ, how do we get out from beneath this idealism? How do we know the difference between the spiritual drive to see the person himself and the imaginative drive to see the person as we think we know him? Loving the ideal is something already spiritual, he said: it is artistic. That's why it's so good for the other to break from my ideal--to do something that bothers me--so that I can begin to encounter reality. But the breakage only produces more mirrors, more surface reflecting images of the things I think I already see. Will the surface eventually be crushed to mere glass? To the smooth round worlds of sand tossed in the depths of the sea?

So you break with my expectations of you, Lord, and but for a fleeting a glance--in which I see what I have formed has been thrown from the heat of your kiln and has cracked wide open from the impact--I am already making sense of you, already conforming the unthinkable into a newly imagined form. Already the potter in the mind takes up her wheel and clay and begins again. What an artist love is. Why have the Brothers never said: of those who struggle against love, the artist will struggle most? Much as the artist is held parallel to you, you Creator, so it is just as likely the two bodies of work might never converge, as the artist is so accustomed to her independent making.

In faith I make idols. In hope I make ideals. In love I make art. No wonder death is necessary.

...

THOU: Wept through another Mass yesterday. Fr N mentions you awaiting your death in his homily, I am thinking of Maribel, full of stab wounds, fighting off her death while her attacker slices her throat.

I ask Fr for reassurance. Nearly two years of practicing an increasingly chaste life, and suddenly even you, Thou (especially you), are sexy: an indication I ought to reconsider?

He looks uncomfortable. There are often temptations before taking vows in religious life, he says, temptations to leave, to act on whatever floats in from your environment or your imagination. He goes on for a bit in the same vein, trailing off, repeating himself a little until I interrupt him, which is our habit.

So it's normal, I say, noting he will again refuse to address directly what most perplexes me about the question, and duly noting too that the coward in me will never push him to respond to anything he's dismissed in the moment as mere anxiety. Or imagination.

He nods. I can read his impatience with such questions, and I used to think that his discomfort stems from whatever indelicate way I have of expressing my concerns. But I'm beginning to sense, too, it is not the subject of my questions that offends him. He is made wary by the fact that I am always living in my head--always imagining I know more than I know or that my experience is in some way exceptionally telling. He sees he is rarely dealing with a sober person. Inebriation offends him. Okay, I say.

Then he says: now let me ask you a question--is it okay for me to ask you about your background?

Of course, I say, thinking: that's never happened before, not recognizing right away this is protocol for a priest who is about to address something left behind in confession.

Have I mentioned Rachel's Vineyard to you? There's a retreat in Peoria this October, but there is also one this weekend in Romeoville. I spoke to some people from the Peoria group and they mentioned many of the women have backgrounds like yours, that it's very healing. He is animated now as he talks, happy.

Outwardly: You mentioned it after my first confession with you. I don't know. Maybe in October. But I don't know if I can take on more grieving right now, Father. (Inside: of course it would be this, what else would I expect of a man so emphatically pro-life? Then: perhaps he is right. Then: perhaps he is only going after what has seemed obvious to him all along. Then: perhaps he's delighted to see he can address your healing through a trauma he thinks he can understand. Then: am I traumatized?)

--I thought of that, he says, still animated, interrupting my pause, but I think you were hit hard by recent events because everything (he gestures in a circular way with his hands), your background and so forth, is related. It could be good to go now, if you can--

We have been sitting on a bench in the grass outside the chapel. The day is full of sun and wind, a rare warm break in winter as it waffles into spring. The Brothers were at their choir practice minutes before, lounging at the picnic table, sipping coffee from thick white mugs, singing. I was skimming a book with two beautiful paragraphs and 150 pages of facile watery outlines. I was calm again and irritated with the book for telling me no more about suffering than I've arrived at--for being no better written than this journal. Fr is beside me. I have seen more of him in the last two weeks than I have in all the months since September, and my confidence in him is growing. I am full of myself.

But now I take off my sunglasses, vulnerable again, crying again, feeling hit where it hurts most. --I used to be able to deal with this. Violent deaths come out of Del Rio all the time, Father, all the time--

--I know, it's so close to the border, they've been finding bodies recently--

--But I mean in my family, too. When my mother calls, I already know, I know what she's going to say. My grandmother died in a flood, did I tell you that? No. Well my mother cared for her for years, getting her up and dressed and fed before work in the morning, spending her lunch hour preparing her meals and keeping her company, and after work feeding her dinner, doing her dishes, washing her sheets, changing her into pajamas, and tucking her mother into bed before ever going home at night. Then one day it rained.

--And she was sitting there.

Yes. And my mother's two brothers died horrible, violent deaths as well. And until now I was able to deal with all of this, able to ... (the word escapes me, I put my palm against the copse of trees across the property--)

--distance yourself.

But I can't seem to do it anymore. That's why Maribel hit so hard. So I don't know, I don't know about Rachel's Vineyard right now. But I'll think about it.

Do. And I will continue to pray for you. What is your full name, did you ever tell me, your middle name? He is animated again, certain, I suppose, that prayer is a priest's greatest gift.

Lynn.

Lynn. No confirmation name?

I was never given one.

No special patron saint...? Oh wait: Regina! Your name comes from Regina.

And he left off with a blessing, for which I knelt into the wet cold earth, and crossed myself, and felt consoled by the thought that he would lift my spirit up to the Mother of the dying Son, in Mass or in silent prayer, and that she would receive his words in her arms like the corpse of the messiah, and clean the body gently in preparation for its return home. I straightened up, wiped my face, lifted my bag to my shoulder, and looked back to see him standing by the chapel, looking back at me.

In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. To God who is, who was, and who is to come, now and forever.

Amen.

...

"We must understand well this total surpassing which the Christian vocation represents (for it is not only true for religious, it is also true for all Christians). There is a way of living Christian life in a lax manner, looking at ourselves. Surely we do not go as far as to deny the sacrifice of Christ; we do not deny the Cross, but we are so much afraid of it that instead of looking at it we look at ourselves and no longer at the Cross--it is we and the human aspiration of our hearts.

These human aspirations of our heart will remain as long as we are on earth; they will not be completely purified, assumed by charity, but in eternity. That is why that on earth there will always be an alternative: do we wish to live that which Jesus expects from us? Or do we wish to live that which we understand as the love of Christ? These are not the same thing! Besides, we know that we live very badly the call of Christ. Not one of us would dare say that nobody can live the call of Christ better than he himself lives it--that would be entirely erroneous! The more we have the sense of the call of Christ, the more we are aware that we are unworthy of it and that there is a total inadequacy between this great call, so imperative--'I thirst'--and our manner of contemplating the sound of the heart of Jesus, of receiving this last revelation, this last manifestation of his heart which for the love of us ceases to beat and still wishes to cry for us and still wishes to give something for us, to show us how much he loves us and manifest to us that he has given everything."

--Marie-Dominque Philippe, Homily for a Mass in Honor of the Sacred Heart, February 8, 1996

...

: and God is charity. The guardian therefore of virginity is charity: but the place of this guardian is humility.

THOU: It comes to this: how chaste is chaste? This morning I am reading around again and remembering that I've put aside the writings of Church fathers whenever they collide in my head with the old wrath-inflicted bruises: the summons to guilt within the romanced ideal of purity. Well, Fr says we must protect ourselves from what we read if it puts our faith in danger--even from the saints. Still, I think I should tell you: there is nothing pure about me, Lord. I believe I am making a sound decision, and I believe you will either accept it or let me know, in some unforeseen trial, that this vocation is not for me. But as for purity, I know I have none to offer.

What's more, I am lazy. What I have is a desire to give myself to you, a desire that I tend to live out abstractly, but that I fail, practically and materially, almost every moment. I know abstract desire is not enough. I recognize that I must carry out my promise to you in the ordinary and mundane sacrifices of the everyday, that this too is the cup of the martyr, that without total surrender, I withhold the holocaust I offer and wreck the union--which I am certain to do. For the vow itself is simply a promise. One cannot suck life from a promise--one can only continually renew the effort to restore the promise through vigilance and love, and this is no honeymoon, Lord. It promises to be painful at best, and (forgive me) dull at worst, because I am a creature of pleasure and leisure.

So the ancients discuss purity as though it is intact, retained, enclosed: they cannot be speaking to me. All I have to offer you is sincerely adulterated by self-interested desire, affect, and powerful illusions of who you are. I am too human to recall that the vow resides in the immediate present towards the future unfolding of my daily remembrances. And so you must help me to remember I am yours, and that to be yours is to be a partner to your enduring passion towards the instruments of your death and torture. This is your end. It must be mine too.

And finally: pain is pain. Hurt is hurt. It is only to easy to be attracted to it when all is fat and comfortable. Such is my life and my attraction to you. I am almost, in my illusions, incited towards the ecstasy of your cross--but what do I know of your humiliation? Almost nothing at all. It is a dangerous unreality, a masochism that puts limits on what you might ask. I am trying to ready myself for the truth, I am trying to prepare for the smallest and greatest things, but in truth I am afraid. It is up to you to pour out whatever lies ahead. You already know I would rather not share your cup. I only hope I will not refuse it when you ask.

In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. To God who is, who was and who is to come, now and forever.

Amen.
...

"Forsooth the hidden gifts of God, which nought save the questioning of trial makes known to each, even in himself. For, to pass over the rest, whence does a virgin know, although careful of the things of the Lord, how to please the Lord but that haply, by reason of some weakness of mind unknown to herself, she be not as yet ripe for martyrdom, whereas that woman, whom she rejoiced to set herself before, may already be able to drink the Cup of the Lord's humiliation, which He set before His disciples, to drink first, when enamored of high place?" (45)

--St Augustine, De virginitate

...

and from the moment one is receptive, one is vulnerable: one is hurt by the person one welcomes,

THOU:

"It’s startling, really. He goes away. Where does he go? It suggests that God absenting himself from the human soul is what sets the stage for the disobedience."

This is always the question, isn't it, Lord? Where did you go? But as Fr J pointed out once, when John Paul II looks at the Genesis telling, he suggests that the first version of the creation story is given to us through an objective (dare I say omniscient?) point of view, whereas the second version, the re-telling, is presented through a subjective lens: the human perspective. So it seems, as well, with the telling of the fall. Where did you go? You dropped out of perspective. Humanity already had begun to absent itself from you, had already begun to look to itself--to other human beings--for company. You were there, all along, withdrawing into our desire for self-sufficiency and self-determination, and all along asking "where are you?" Where is your heart, humanity? Oh, we are busy, Lord, with each other, with the garden of things around us. With this serpent who is chatting me up. Please come back another time.

And out of respect for our boundaries, you withdraw and wait. As always.

The tree is only a concrete symbol of demarcation, a boundary that gives us some understanding of the difference between a loving act towards you and an act that steals from you what cannot be given to humanity without our falling into the (humanly) unlivable reality of God's life--which is a terrible annihilation. To take and consume for myself what belongs to God properly is to attempt to live what I cannot survive. "Humankind cannot bear very much reality." The fruit of those trees--of knowledge, of life--is the boundary that marks where I end and you begin, myself/yourself. My will; your will. My want would consume everything in sight, including you, for my own possession. But I cannot survive the possession of your life, for then I would be you, and not myself, which is nothing more than my extinction. This you will not do: you will not allow me to cease from existence out of utter selfish possessiveness. I will die, yes, that is certain. But I will not cease to exist, for my existence is good, whatever choice I make. That seems equally plain.

So we begin with the invitation to love: do not eat from God's person what, as a human person, you are incapable of possessing and assuming, and you will discover through loving relationship what you are within me. When humanity prefers desire to love, self to relationship, and possession to freedom, we are lost to you and to ourselves, for then we want nothing more than to be our own gods--of love, relationship, and freedom--without you, who is the source of love, relationship, and freedom.

We end with the transformed invitation--even this you give us: you want to eat God? Very well, then, eat God. Possess him for yourself: "take this, all of you, and eat it. This is my body." But our portion cannot be consumed until it can be received within your total reciprocation: not until you deliver yourself to us as one of us, as a human meal prepared from God's human body, can humanity survive the taking.

In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. To God who is, who was and who is to come, now and forever.

Amen.

...

"The vulnerability of Jesus' heart remains somewhat difficult to define because it is of a very interior domain; but we must affirm that this vulnerability is greater than all other vulnerability. It is preferable to use that term than to say that Jesus, in his glory, continues to suffer or to say that the Father suffers. We now hear this said often, but theologically it is not correct, it is purely metaphorical. It is better to use the term 'vulnerable' that directly qualifies love. Love is receiving and it is giving. It tears us away from ourselves (it is 'ex-static'), but it is also receptive of the other, of the loved one. And from the moment one is receptive, one is vulnerable: one is hurt by the person one welcomes, who might not be as considerate as he who welcomes him. Vulnerasti cor meum, soror mea, sponsa, 'You have wounded my heart, my sister, my bride, says the Bridegromm of the Canticle. The vulnerability of Christ's heart remains for us an unfathomable mystery."

--Marie-Dominique Philippe, O.P., I Thirst: Conferences on the Wisdom of the Cross

...

a vow is a nail

THOU: What is it must be nailed shut? A splinter in humanity, a lance through the heart cleft in two. A secret.

Is it true, Lord? That the divide between body and spirit opened up like a separating mandorla when self-determination opposed self-consciousness, and chose having over being? When in that business with the garden the will opposed conscience and said: it is not enough--I will have it all? My will. Wielded about in every direction, I want I want. The whole world ordered towards my want, which is enormous. Infinite, really.

Turns out those innocent little crushes turn devastating quickly, just as soon as reality wounds the idol and reveals what I have done. What have I done? Made vegetable love. "They know not what they do."

The crown of thorns? The longing thicket wrapped around the head and stuck fast in the mind, the idle thorn through which love finds a way. But so often not before the damage has been done. You were like a berry to be plucked for my winery. The ripest, the reddest. Which is why the ancients associated prostitution with idolatry, for it makes a commodity of the body, of the center of the body--which is probing every moment for absolute possession: an end to desire. A resting place.

The body is aroused. It does not turn towards you, Lord. It says: what am I to do with all this? The passion of the Lord does not quell me. I will not be quelled. What do I want with integrity?

I will turn you into the thing that I want. I will use you for my purposes. I will know you so well I will have mastered your want, turned it towards me, and left you trembling for what you know full well you cannot have from me, that's what I'll do.

And if you will not be turned, I will annihilate you.

Turns out I have more in common with the man with the knife than I do with his victim. The chaste mind expunges its red idols, those most secret and dear, the father ones, the angry ones, the murderous ones.

And if in a passion I hold you fast to your passion, you will not complete your crucifixion within me--"It is finished"--I will not let you.

What do I want with integrity? (Another longing:)

Personhood.

In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. To God who is, who was, and who is to come, now and forever.

Amen.

...

6. ... Yet I cannot but remark that it is not only said, As one taken away from milk, such may be my soul's reward; but with this addition, As one taken away from milk when upon his mother's breast, such may be my soul's reward. Here there is somewhat that induces me to consider it a curse. For it is not an infant, but a grown child that is taken away from milk; he who is weak in his earliest infancy, which is his true infancy, is upon his mother's breast: if perchance he has been taken away from the milk, he perishes. It is not without a reason then that it is added, Upon his mother's breast. For all may be weaned by growing. He who grows, and is thus taken away from milk, it is good for him; but hurtful for him who is still upon his mother's breast. We must therefore beware, my brethren, and be fearful, lest any one be taken away from milk before his time....Let him not therefore wish to lift up his soul, when perchance he is not fit to take meat, but let him fulfil the commandments of humility. He has wherein he may exercise himself: let him believe in Christ, that he may understand Christ. He cannot see the Word, he cannot understand the equality of the Word with the Father, he cannot as yet see the equality of the Holy Spirit with the Father and the Word; let him believe this, and suck it. He is safe, because, when he has grown, he will eat, which he could not do before he grew by sucking: and he has a point to stretch towards. Seek not out the things that are too hard for you, and search not the things that are above your strength; that is, things which you are not as yet fit to understand. And what am I to do? you reply. Shall I remain thus? But what things the Lord has commanded you, think thereupon always. Sirach 3:22 What has the Lord commanded you? Do works of mercy, part not with the peace of the Church, place not your trust in man, tempt not God by longing for miracles....

7. For if you be not exalted, if you raise not your heart on high, if you tread not in great matters that are too high for you, but preserve humility, God will reveal unto you what you are otherwise minded in. Philippians 3:15 But if you choose to defend this very thing, which you are otherwise minded about, and with pertinacity assert it, and against the peace of the Church; this curse which he has described is entailed upon you; when you are upon your mother's breast, and are removed away from the milk, you shall die of hunger apart from your mother's breast. But if you continue in Catholic peace, if perchance you are in anything otherwise minded than ye ought to be, God will reveal it to you, if you be humble. Wherefore? Because God resists the proud, and gives grace unto the humble.

--St Augustine, Exposition of Psalm 131

...

chastity means the successful integration of sexuality within the person and thus the inner unity of man in his bodily and spiritual being

THOU: Lord, why do my meetings with Fr leave me with so much doubt? Now I'm in a spin about prayer again. Is keeping a prayer journal inferior to praying the rosary? He didn't say. Should I privatize this journal? I didn't ask. He was silent when I twice brought up the journal but prodded me towards prayers of intervention for my family and a novena in preparation for the Feast of the Annunciation. Why is my head too muddled and defensive to ask the questions I need to ask in those precious few times when I have his attention? Please help me to make these meetings more spiritually fruitful, if this is your will.

...

I've yet to write my vow, Lord, I know. It is not reluctance to give myself to you, but a desire to express the right things in a simple way and some confusion about what must be said.

"Come Holy Spirit, Father of the poor, illuminate my heart and my mind."

"Lord, open my lips and my mouth will proclaim your praise."

...

Almighty and eternal God,
I, _____,
in the hands of Fr______,
(and in the presence of my brothers and sisters?)
wishing of my full and deliberate will to consecrate my body to you
with the grace of Christ
and the help of the Blessed Virgin Mother,
promise (vow?) to you, God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit
my chastity for one year on this Feast of the Annunciation
(according to ... ?)

Receive me, O Lord, according to your word that I might live sanctified within your wounded side, for your purposes and within your love: my body joined to your sacrificed and resurrected body, my wounds closed within your wounds, my heart consumed by your heart, and my thirst razed within your thirst. Grant me the grace to be faithful to you. Let my hope not be in vain.

Lord my God.

...

from a letter to Fr, December 17, 2008

In my rudimentary research I found a number of advice books on the subject of chastity, and many more on celibacy—nearly all of those directed towards the priesthood—but most of the popular advice written on chaste single life is by Protestant authors (I wonder why?), so I’ll keep looking around. Still, I think I’m not looking for advice now, but for something more theological in dimension, something that informs my intention, this desire leading me towards this vow, so that I might have a deeper understanding of what I’m about to do. I went to the Vatican website and turned up little before landing on what seems like the obvious place to start: JP II’s Theology of the Body. Of course. The paragraphs I encountered first were from “Continence for the Kingdom of Heaven,” the virgin as self-willed eunuch, which seems more immediately relevant to my questions than what I discuss below. But I want to parse out one or two points from “The Meaning of Original Solitude” because it speaks to me of what I’ve written about elsewhere in this letter.

“The Meaning of Original Solitude” points to the divide that opens up within original solitude between the formation of human self-consciousness and the formation of human self-determination the moment the first man’s awareness can grasp otherness. Before Eve is introduced as helpmate, and before, therefore, Adam’s awareness of male-female complementarity can arise, he is allowed to make two discoveries: he is alone in his humanity among all the living creatures of the earth, and he is alone in his humanity before God.

Adam arrives at a knowledge of himself—of his being, his qualities, and his human identity—precisely as he arrives at a knowledge of his solitary state of existence. As he compares his body to other bodies, and sees himself as a body among other bodies, he finds no likeness of himself on earth, a radical difference signified by his own corporeality. Within the frame of original solitude, this is what the body means: it points beyond itself to the consciousness at work in perceiving what the body senses, to the intellect observing its own unique movement as it thinks about thought and joins it to act, and to an “I” who forms a conception of himself against whatever is plainly “not-I.” The body thus points to the human person as body-spirit, which is a realization in anticipation of personal unity, and of the giving of oneself to another person, and which reminds me a whole bunch of what the Catechism says of chastity:

"Chastity means the successful integration of sexuality within the person and thus the inner unity of man in his bodily and spiritual being." (2337)

The moral virtue of chastity, then, is the “successful integration of sexuality” within the human person as body-spirit—where corporeal experience is ordered towards personal body-spirit unity. “Successful integration of sexuality,” I’d suggest, is intricately tied to the formation of a healthy personal unity, or of a self-consciousness that respects the reality of human existence as body-spirit. Chastity is also essentially tied to the healthy formation of a person’s self-determination, or freedom of will, in which “the powers of life and love placed in him” are always used towards maintaining personal integrity. Which seems to suggest, I think, that at the core of personal unity and personal integrity, and at the core of human self-consciousness and human self-determination, human sexuality, the gift of the power of life, if not successfully integrated into the unity of the person through chastity, threatens to splinter the unity of the human person irreparably.

This is not the same as the effects of radical difference on Adam, whose primary solitude defines him and threatens to alienate him from the world around him. This solitude creates personal unity, as the first man also learns of his dominion over the earth and its creatures, which begins with his act of naming, and which gives him a sense of his position in the world and of his relationship to the things within it. He becomes aware that his interior life impels him towards self-realization as he encounters external reality, and in ways that the animals do not experience and are not impelled. And, finally, he discovers his personhood as a thinking self attempting to come to terms what he is. “In fact, in relatively few sentences, the ancient text sketches man as a person with the subjectivity characterizing the person” (TB 6:1).

It might seem that human self-consciousness is developed principally through an engagement with the external world—that such experience is sufficient towards the development of self-identity, and that the mind tends toward differentiation primarily as an act toward self-formation. That is, had God planted Adam in the garden and left him to his own devices, Adam would have developed a subjective or personal identity nonetheless. But here I want to emphasize that in the second account of creation, the development of human identity is helped significantly by Adam’s contact with the Lord God—in an intimate interpersonal relationship. Adam is Fathered toward an exploration of his surroundings and encouraged toward language: “So out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field and every bird of the air, and brought them to the man to see what he would call them; and whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name” (Genesis 2:19). All of creation is brought to Adam, so that solitary as he is, he needn’t venture into his world and encounter it alone. Moreover, Adam is not told of his solitude, but led through an experience (the naming of animals) that will allow him to understand what God already knows, and in this way is given the confidence of discovering for himself that, though he cannot grasp all of reality, he can attain to a knowledge of certain truths within reality: “but for the man there was not found a helper fit for him” (2:20). Finally, the Lord God delights in sharing with Adam the world He has formed: in presenting him with the good gift of His material creation, in bringing His creatures before him, in allowing Adam to see His interest in “what he would call them,” and in granting authority to humanity’s baby utterances (“whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name”).

There is so much tenderness, so much joyful giving and receiving in this scene, it is unmistakably about human consciousness being taught, within relationship and reciprocity, what a person is, and what it means to love another person, especially within this original “I-Thou” association, where humanity doesn’t yet know it will separate from God. In fact, this scene, I think, is linked to the other great gift humanity receives—self-determination, or freedom of will—which is the signifying mark of the Tree of Knowledge. The command against eating the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge marks the boundaries of relationship: to accept the gift of existence and friendship with God is to refuse death, which is the opposite of God. Without this boundary, relationship, reciprocity, isn’t even possible, for there is nothing to give back to God unless He provides the means. And of course, without freedom of will, relationship also isn’t possible, for the giving of obedience must be freely given.

It is this I sense: the Lord God’s great reciprocity in revelation and in Christ is about teaching us true personhood, and true Love. While there is no return to original solitude (and no desire to return!), I think the only path to relationship, friendship, daughterhood, and partner to the Absolute (Who can minister to my spirit, heal my splintered person, and teach me what it means to love others) is through the chaste formation of self-consciousness and self-determination, towards my own integrity. So for now, at least, I feel called to that little time allotted to Adam in his original solitude in which the Lord God Fathered his first son, and in which I might discover who I am as His daughter.

...

call no man father

THOU: "So, you are ready." "Yes," I said. "And what brought about this sudden change of mind?" But I couldn't explain without crying again, for there is something very painful bound up with this vow, Lord. I tend to think acceptance is still and small, like your voice after the earthquake, after the fire and the wind. But acceptance need not wait on stillness. It can be very sure of itself even in violent turmoil. Even in pain and fear.

"Why after all ... ?" I don't think Fr expected a straight answer. Nor did he want an account of all I've wrestled with before arriving at this point. He was gentling his way into the conversation--for it wasn't an easy conversation between us yesterday--and confirming that my intention is still plain. Of course, there is one last barrier to this vow, a very human barrier, that in your view (I fathom) is simply to be crossed: this is the man, your instrument, who will receive my vow. Did I choose him? Or did you, Lord? Or did we choose him together? Everything feels right--the date, the preparation, the guidance I've received from him and from you, even Maribel's death--yes, everything feels right, but for my lack of trust in him.

Little of that is his doing, as he well knows. I have leaned on him too much, this man who withstands my leaning by keeping a reasonable distance. When Maribel died it was no different. I had the sense he was waiting out the storm. I understand I am impatient, turmoil has made me impatient with him, with you, though eventually I receive everything I need, and more. Yet: I have questions, I write them out, I send them to him, I spend the several weeks or months until our meeting seeking answers so that when I meet with him, I know what he will say, I have answered my own questions: I have more answers at the ready than he does. In this way our meetings seem fruitless, seem to be there solely as a way of providing closure, corroboration, and lately the challenge of acceptance. I feel I am wasting his time; I feel I am wasting my energy. It takes a day for me to drum up courage to ask to see him, days or weeks of anxiety in waiting to hear back, persistence--for I must usually follow up with a phone call a week later to ask again, weeks again before I'll actually see him, then another day or two fending off anxiety before the time of our meeting: only to arrive in front of him, tongue-tied, distracted, wrenched away entirely from you, Lord, and miserable.

It's a funny kind of reciprocity, that I depend on a man who keeps sending me to see his poverty. Who invites me to trust his poverty just as much as I am unwilling to trust it. So I am asking you: is this what you want for me? If so, then I accept it. But if I am feeling anxious about what often feels like directionless direction because you would like to lead me to someone else, then I need help. I cannot seem to arrive at this understanding on my own, and though I've put the question to him many times, Fr cannot do more (or perhaps better) than to send me back to prayer.

He says I ought not be without direction right now, that I ought to have direction with someone, though it need not be him. He also said that whatever is going on in my head with this question of paternity and trust will likely happen again with another priest. He said St Theresa had two spiritual directors at one point, and then suddenly none at all, and it was clear to her that you had chosen to direct her yourself. But I am no saint. I've entrusted myself to Fr in obedience with the hope that I will find you there, leading him; yet obedience alone does not answer your call. Even trust does not sufficiently respond. In some ways I think your call to chastity, to love others with divine and spiritual love, is what you want of me in this relationship: to open myself chastely towards Fr, to risk loving him with your love. Perish the thought, some little fist in me says. He abandoned you (and called it providential)! Well, Lord. I am clearly attached--not to him--but to wanting to hurt this relationship through unchaste wounded attachments, so as to break it and be done with it. Which means he is right: giving him up for someone else will not dissolve the bonds. Giving him up for someone else will only make them stronger, for it would not be renunciation at work, but the looming of pride.

Why am I making this vow after all? Father, this relationship with Fr is part of my answer. It is only a small part, though it feels enormous and heavy, so again I am saying: you take it. Do something beautiful with it, whatever you will. Teach me to love with your love.

In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. To God who is, who was, and who is to come, now and forever.

Amen.

...

all the symbolical realities of the world came to an end;

THOU: The lilies on your altar wilt and drop. It is time to throw them out. Will it be like this for us, too? With my tending to their cut stems, stripping the blown from the buds when I remember, and within a few days looking up to see I've let them rot in water? I want my prayer to be more vigilant than that, for it seems you require all of my attention. The flowers cannot stand in for my lack of ceaseless prayer, though I tend to think of them as a form of vigil. Now they remind me of what I do not give you, and of how much I refuse to receive, when even the tiniest gift to you (flowers in a vase on the altar) reveals something more of you, in time. There are times I let the dried roses in the vase stand weeks at a time to remind myself that the corpse on the cross is empty. It occurs to me now the empty vase reminds me of the vacant tomb.

There is so much of this in you, the emptying, the filling up, the emptying, the filling up, and always with either vacancy or fullness pointing towards one end: life in death. But what of the interim? In which it seems impossible that one thing substitutes for another? In which I am elided as I die to myself and you take your place in me? Or in which you are negated as I usurp your position with the fullness of myself? No. This is not a metonymical relationship between us, for these are temporal and spatial contingencies, these acts of substitution. --And our relationship is not cyclical, like the cycle of replacing dead blooms with fresh blossoms, though it feels that way to me because I am here, within time, watching change and decay for a sign of things passing away or entering in. The sun rises. The sun sets, as it does now. Another day.

How strange that the vacant corpse and the vacant tomb function symbolically in a precise parallel. Both signify the dark unknown, the terrible stripping place where the accidental layers are taken away and there is nothing to see. There is only the uncertain waiting in which I am certain I might never be answered. And yet the image of the corpse is transformed within the image of the tomb (and I am not forgetting these images are real--that you lived them out, within time, with me), and the image of the tomb is transformed within the image of the corpse. So much so that one does not exist meaningfully without the other. And yet only after the tomb is discovered empty can this be true. The vacant corpse does not reveal the vacant tomb until the tomb reveals itself as vacant, just as the vacant tomb does not reveal the fullness of your bodily resurrection until Thomas is invited to put his hand into your wound to touch your heart. He is transformed, in faith towards love, not because he sees there is something to see rather than nothing, but because he is placed back into your mystery, back into the terrible stripping place where the accidental layers are taken away and he sees there is nothing to see, nothing to grasp, that will lift him out of the incomprehensible and into self-assurance. He is returned to the grim reality of the corpse even as you stand before him, teasing him a little for his doubt. He is emptied out, entirely, and reduced to love, "my Lord and my God," for what could be more empty than the fullness of love?

It goes on and on with you in this way, Lord. Layer upon signifying layer building towards the simultaneous stripping of everything in sight. So that even if I reached out, plunged my hand into your wound, and felt your heart quivering against my palm, I would know far less of you, touching you, as a greater part of you is revealed. This is who we are together. We are not locked in a cycle of wills towards power in which your will is substituted for mine. I cannot take my own will in hand and throw it out or throw it over, and neither will you. For I cannot be forced into emptiness, and I cannot be rushed. You strip me down slowly so that I can see you stripped also, empty me and empty me so that I am full of love, but allow me to love you only a little at a time. Only as much as I can withstand.

In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. To God who is, who was, and who is to come, now and forever.

Amen.

...

"'It is vain for you to rise early' says one of the Psalms (126[127],2). Such were the sons of Zebedee who had already selected a position for themselves, one at his right, one at his left, before they had undergone humiliation in imitation of the Lord's Passion. They wanted to 'rise before the Light'. Peter rose before the Light, too, when he advised the Lord not to suffer for us. The Lord, in fact, had spoken of his saving Passion and humiliation, and Peter, who only a short while before, had confessed that Jesus was the Son of God, was seized with dismay at the thought of his death and said to him: 'God forbid, Lord! Save yourself. No, that will never happen to you!' (cf. Mt 16,22). He wanted to rise before the Light, give advice to the Light. But what did the Lord do? He made him rise after the Light by saying to him: 'Get behind me'... 'Get behind me so that I can walk before you and you can follow. Take the road that I am taking instead of wanting to show me the road on which you yourself want to walk'.

Why, then, sons of Zebedee, do you want to rise before the Day? That is the question we need to ask them. They won't be annoyed since these things were written about them so that we, too, might know how to keep ourselves from the pride they fell into. Why want to rise before the Day? It is in vain. Do you want to rise before being humbled? Your Lord himself, he who is your light, was humbled so as to be raised. Hear what Paul says: 'Though he was in the form of God, he did not regard equality with God something to be grasped. Rather, he emptied himself, taking the form of a slave. Coming in human likeness..., he humbled himself, becoming obedient to death, even death on a cross. Because of this God greatly exalted him' (Phil 2,6f.).

--Saint Augustine, Exposition of the Psalms, 126[127]

...

virginity is love impatient of the mediation of any symbols

THOU: I have a lot to learn about personhood. I suppose I've glimpsed the truth of the matter: the only way to grow more deeply in this knowledge is in espousal, the total gift of self to another. Friendship and teaching are both excellent and beautiful, and I am blessed in those relationships, but they will always allow me to choose myself first, precisely inasmuch as they don't require my trust--my essential vulnerability--round the clock, daily. Proof of this: I withdrew from others for a month or two when Maribel died, showing up only to teach, to meet with students, to complete my tasks at the college, and no one around me was the wiser. This is symptomatic of a deeper problem, yes: 1) my life is structured around my personal freedoms, to which I'm very attached, and 2) everyone I know is overworked, thus weeks go by often without hearing from friends. But it is impossible to for me to grow out of this self-interested isolation so long as I choose to live it alone.

Last year I floundered around for several months trying to understand why the Church doesn't more often take up the task of speaking directly to single lay people. There are very few references in the Catechism to widows and virgins, and even fewer references in the popes' encyclicals to single life in the Church. --Why is there so much help available for spouses and religious and so little for us loners? I've been told in no uncertain terms: because single life is not a vocation. --Okay, but then what are we to do with ourselves? I've been told: you discern, either towards the vocation of marriage or towards the vocation of religious life, and you devote your free time to helping others. --And if I can neither join a monastery nor find someone to marry? Then the reality of your station in life is a kind of limbo: either you missed your calling, or you have not discovered your vocation. That was the word he used, too: "limbo." As a way, I suppose, of recognizing that singles do suffer.

So I asked: why doesn't the Church then provide an option for single lay people? A fully consecrated secular life replete with public vows? To this I could find no answer. Only: some people find a consecrated life available as tertiaries of a religious order, some people make private vows, under discernment with a spiritual director, a year or so at a time...

But these were general remarks, stuff I gathered from reading around and from conference talks at a singles' retreat I attended last fall. Actually, Fr was kinder and more helpful. There is a long and rich tradition of secular saints in the church who remained unmarried, keep reading, look at the literature on virginity, celibacy, and chastity, see what you come up with, he said. My question then became: what is the difference between making a private vow of chastity and living chastely as we are all called to do? Perhaps there is no difference, I thought, and there are attitudes in the Church that suggest a private vow of chastity is a spiritual redundancy--perhaps because the vow can always be lifted should one decide to marry or go religious instead. But this question was the biggest obstacle of all, Lord, for if a private vow is close to meaningless, then why would anyone do it?

As always, faith before revelation: I had to commit in my heart to the vow before I began understand it. There is in fact a radical difference between obedience to the general call to chastity and the greater act of vowing to give--above and beyond a child's loving obedience--that which I cannot give until I have grown to desire (through grace received through loving obedience) Mary's fiat as my fiat: "let it be done to me according to your Word." A vow of chastity is not a verbal acquiescence, not a symbolic utterance, but a living communion, a word that receives the living presence of the Word as it is bound to him: you are my beloved. I was made for you. I give you my body that you might pierce it through and through with your spirit. That you might join my most vulnerable and mortal wounds to yours. That you might consume the veils between us utterly in your fire and make my will your own.

True chastity, then, transforms the letter of the law into the spirit of the spouse and the beloved. It is the marriage between heaven and earth in anticipation of heaven; it is the marriage between body and spirit in anticipation of perfection. Humanity is so prone to living out the beautiful marriage between body and spirit as though it is a great divorce, however, that chastity often becomes mere abstinence. But chastity is not stoic withdrawal. And it is not repression. It is the opposite! True chastity is the full reception of your tree of life, your rod, your staff, your sword, your cross, and your scepter--not as symbols of what you are, but as aspects of your reality. Only then can chastity become an expression of fully integrated human sexuality. Which is why it is a gift and not my own doing. All I can do is say: come, Lord--marry me if it is your will--I'm awaiting the arrival of your heaven within me with love. Only then have I opened myself to receiving you. Only then have I invited your gift to me: your sacrificed and resurrected body within mine.

In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. To God who is, who was, and who is to come, now and forever.

Amen.

...

"Virginity is plenitude of agape: it shows forth the reality which matrimony contains in only a veiled way. It is the full revelation of the 'mystery' still half hidden in sacramental marriage.

Like the love of the Spouse in the Canticle, the agape of the Christian celibate is 'a blazing fire, a flame of Yahweh' (Canticle 8:6). This fire of love make of virginal life a holocaust in which the 'flesh' is burnt up and with it any sign, any reality of the present world. Virginity is love impatient of the mediation of any symbols. In that respect, too, it is analogous to the sacrifice of the cross: the death on the cross was a sacrifice without rites because, in its utter despoliation, all the symbolical realities of the world came to an end; there remained only the naked corpse on the bare wood, in a total holocaust of everything belonging to this world. Virginity, too, is a feast without rites, a marriage banquet celebrated without any external rejoicings because, as on the cross, this marriage is consummated and consumed in a holocaust of self-denying love that raises it above the world.

It is in that sense that virginity is a spiritual marriage. It is a marriage: in the phrase 'spiritual marriage', the adjective does not obliterate the noun. Virginity is love, total communion with the divine agape which is the essence of the life of Christ and the life in Christ." (108)

--Lucien Legrand, The Biblical Doctrine of Virginity

...

a vow is a nail

THOU: Hail holy light! Starlings in the trees fly westward. The churning sweep of low clouds and fog head west in a hurry. Wet streets. Blue morning. Street lights. Last night's storm woke everyone with thunder. We set our clocks forward and lean towards spring. The fire and the rose converge in my heart. Thank you, my Lord and my God.

...

THOU: Went to the Brothers today for Mass for the first time since January 10th. It was time to return, though I might not have gone (given the drive in the hard rain and my own trepidation) had a student not requested to go with me, so I held on to my composure, drove us both into the fields where the monastery lies, introduced my student around, and tried to find a new way of seeing myself there. I discovered I had been missed, though I didn't think I would be, and though it was difficult being there, I fell in love with the place all over again. --Though, this time with a new awareness of having had you all to myself this last week. It is too easy to mistake the things we love for love of you, Lord, even when we know we are doing it. And I have all along dreaded the day I would be weaned from this community and left alone with you, for I felt sure I couldn't face you without the Brothers' company. I felt sure I wouldn't find you without the assurance of Fr's guidance in the background.

Right as rain, suddenly, just as Maribel's death put me into a bad spin, Fr wasn't available. Two months. I sent a series of haphazard emails, one requesting a meeting, one angry and doubting, one plaintive, pleading for some kind of sense, one--at last--letting him know I should let go of spiritual direction with him while he was (genuinely) too busy to get back to me and while I was (too) busy working out my anger and grief. The last gesture seemed like a bad solution all around, but I was feeling abandoned, I didn't want to hurt him somehow, and that anxiety began to displace my sense of what was truly at stake: my relationship with you. My childhood father, Fr, and you (a poor sort of paternal trinity) too often bleed together in my head. As H said, "what would sever you from your dependency on Fr besides an assassin? --Maybe God knew it required an assassin."

I am so sad to know the wound runs that deep.

And the question: will you do this for me then, after all? Will you take up Maribel's suffering, mingle her blood with your own, apply (like a surgeon) the knife that made her wounds to the joints I have forged between my father and all the world, and claim your sole and rightful patriarchy? This, again, is the supplicant's prayer. I am looking for you within it so as to hope it is not entirely ordered towards my own very finite dreams.

Oh Lord. I was about to make this vow for my sake, for the sake of my own healing and my own needs. An espousal to myself! What a mess that would have been. Of course it must be made for you, alone.

Thy will be done.

In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. To God who is, who was, and who is to come, now and forever.

Amen.

...

"Because it is a clear participation in the sacrifice of the cross, virginity represents better the agape which animated it. It not only reflects that love, it embodies it. Virginity is not a sacrament. It does not set the screen of any sign between Christ and man. In it, the divine love is not refracted through the mediation of any worldly feeling. There is nobody who stands for Christ, to represent him: the contact between Christ and the bride is direct. Matrimony turned towards the agape of the sacrificed Christ as towards its fulfillment; virginity shares directly in that agape. The agape lived in matrimony is mediated charity; virginity is love reaching its object directly." (107)

--Lucien Legrand, The Biblical Doctrine of Virginity

...

perpetual virginity is a pure host offered to God, a holy victim

THOU: A week ago I couldn't bear to look in your direction. Two weeks ago today I was working on getting back on the gin. Half a bottle later that night I was hardly drunk, no less aware of my anger, and coming to terms with the fact that I have indeed, miraculously, lost the taste for alcohol.

Then the priest in the Sunday confessional, a stranger, who surprised me. Because he knew me, Lord. Or because he took the time to get to know me as if to confirm what he already knew. He knew I was seeking you, and he knew to remind me I must remind myself of how I came to know you. He surprised me by bringing the you who is concretely within me before me. "Faith," he said, "is the wider view," and then (thank you) I was turned round, asked to put my face up to the glass, asked to look closely for your prints--the ones I've identified before--and asked to study them again, this time with a mind towards retracing the vestiges of my own conviction. Look again, he said. And: "don't let this guy who killed your friend narrow your view so much that this murder is all you can see."

Today I can't stop looking at you, Lord. How can this be? That I (always complaining that I have no words for you) would like to spend all day listening for you within me? That now the letters I wrote to Fr about you (and so oddly exclusive of you), seem clumsy because they were clearly not meant for him, but for you? That now you have joined me to you, pierced me to the quick, wounding my wounds with the very nails that bind me together, body and soul, as one.

So it is: a vow is a nail.

Nail my heart, then, three-personed God. Nail it fast to your cross.

In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. To God who is, who was, and who is to come, now and forever.

Amen.

...

Batter my heart, three-person'd God, for you
As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;
That I may rise and stand, o'erthrow me, and bend
Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.
I, like an usurp'd town to'another due,
Labor to'admit you, but oh, to no end;
Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,
But is captiv'd, and proves weak or untrue.
Yet dearly'I love you, and would be lov'd fain,
But am betroth'd unto your enemy;
Divorce me,'untie or break that knot again,
Take me to you, imprison me, for I,
Except you'enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.

--John Donne, XIV, Holy Sonnets

...

this transforming holocaust is nothing else than the individual application of the sacrificial exaltation of Christ

THOU: Why does the mind forget what it wants to remember? Why does trauma speak to the memory so vividly?

A consecrated virginity is the victim offering of the soul who asks to be received and assumed, entire and living, into your infinite unity. It is the holocaust return of the center of my being to the source of my existence. My body joined to your body, my wounds closed within your wounds, my heart consumed by your heart, my thirst razed within your thirst--like water in water. This is a terrifying and awesome thing, Lord. To touch you, to touch your sacrifice through my sacrifice. To be held whole (which is your gift) within your wounded side so that my body might live, sanctified, set aside, re-membered, for your purposes, and within your love, far beyond the merely human and profane. No wonder the world looks away, Lord. No wonder I don't understand it. Help me to fix my gaze on your incarnation; my God, help me to remember what I see.

In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. To God who is, who was, and who is to come, now and forever.

Amen.

...

within myself is a metaphorical apex of existence at which I am held in being by my Creator

THOU: Where is your silence, Lord? My head is full of noise this morning, replaying days of things I've said. I am listening in as though I have something to say in response. I am trying to speak to you, but it is like speaking in a din. I know I'm sleepless with long weeks of working and talking, this is all. It is nothing to have so many crowded rooms talking at once, I know, though it feels heavy. I cannot hear you. And I am tired. I am tired of the sound of my own voice.

Sometimes teaching is heavy this way.

My body is heavy. I've been carrying it around too long like a sack of groceries. Now I am saying: you take it. I want to watch you lift my body weightless in your grip, carry me through your door to your table, and make your meal of me. I want to watch you eat, Lord, to watch you dip your spoon into my heart while you hold it in your hand, to watch my heart spoon up like rich thick cream. I want to watch the divots your spoon makes in my flesh fill with living blood. Wrench me open with your hands. Consume me with the mouth that utters me. Oh I am afraid Lord. I am afraid. But I know you will come to me, you will not forsake me, even if (remembering myself) I forget giving myself ever to you.

Re-member me, Lord, that I may always remember you.

In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. To God who is, who was, and who is to come, now and forever.

Amen.

...

"It is in affliction itself that the splendor of God's mercy shines, from its very depths, in the heart of its inconsolable bitterness. If still persevering in our love, we fall to the point where the soul cannot keep back the cry 'My God, why has thou forsaken me?' If we remain at this point without ceasing to love, we end by touching something that is not affliction, not joy, something that is the central essence, necessary and pure, something not of the senses, common to joy and sorrow: the very love of God."

--Simone Weil

...

"Yes, indeed I am still ready to receive your vow on March 25."

...

a word will never be able to comprehend the voice that utters it

THOU: Morning light, sun, the trees are still. The train crosses and wails nearby. I am saying: Lord I don't know what a vow is. Maybe I am too young for it. Maybe you weren't the one to put it into my head. I never feel too certain about what you think I must do. It is easy to mistake my own desires for yours, which is what I mostly do all day. But this morning I feel certain you want the effort to come from me, even if the effort falls through. I said: Lord, if Fr calls me at all I will take up my vow. And I knew I was testing you. I said: Lord, I cannot call him, I am afraid. And I knew I was testing myself. Last night I said: okay Lord, I will call him, and if he picks up we will talk, but I cannot leave a message. And I knew I was testing Fr. So, at last, having bargained through every possible angle, and knowing all along you would wait me out, I left a message. We will see now if Fr can make sense of what I said. And we will see if he is available and still willing to act as your witness. I am saying: Lord I have done it. I am offering my word. Accept it with your own Word if you will.

In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. To God who is, who was, and who is to come, now and forever.

Amen.

...