Prayers for Pretenders

With a stony heart,

It was hard to forgive,

the years you pretended

to be my Lord.

You accepted His praise.

You accepted His gifts.

You accepted His money.

You are a thief.

You took His devotion.

You took His love.

You distorted His holiness,

called Him a parasite,

when the real parasite was you.

You are not Him

and you are no mirror for Him,

for me, or for anyone.

Not once did you even try to be,

although you let people 

believe that you did.

You stood in His place.

You blocked His way.

You made promises 

you never intended to keep.

Why do it?

It wouldn't serve you.

It was my crime too,

to believe in you.

I have agonized over

my idolatry,

and how I too

betrayed my Lord.

I will always go against myself

in everything I say and do

because if I don't,

I will stay the victim

of people like you,

who make "all for self"

your golden calf.

I unite this betrayal with Jesus' betrayal by Judas.

And I offer it up for His holy purposes,

for I am His, now and forever-

not yours.

Elijah,

God gave me a natural heart

just like you said,

so

please pray for me to use that heart

to love my betrayers,

leave God to judge them,

and wish for His mercy,

for me and for them.

Amen

Longing to be Still

Jesus, through this frantic world, could you just hold me still?

I don't want to be happy.
I do not want comfort,
for these things pass.

O How I long to be still, still, still with you.

I've had enough,
and nothing else will satisfy.
and there is nothing I won't do
to be still with you.

Let the world keep spinning,
Let it spin until I'm sick,
but Jesus, hold me still.

I want to be unmoving
when life moves lightning fast,
blowing me apart,
and leaving torment in its wake.

There is not much I can count on here.
People lie and use each other.
People die and people leave and
my world spins upside-down.

Just freeze me in your constant stop.
Still my thoughts, Still my heart, Still my being.
Still my all.

Your stillness,
dear sweet stillness,
doesn't have to feel good.
Only make your stillness last.

and Jesus,
Bind me to your cross forever,
for that is where the greatest peace is.

-Laura Marie Hall Paxton,
01/10/15

Why I Cope with Life Better Today

I do not know how I would cope with my life if I were not Catholic. I can easily tell you that I would not cope well. Years of living beforehand would bear that out. 

Here are some differences in how I get through tough times today vs. during my "heretical" years. 

(1) My emotions do not control my decisions as much.

Free will has to do with making decisions without being driven by emotions. I am making more solid, logical and clear choices now than I ever have before. During my "heretical years," I believed that free will had to do with extricating myself from the oppression of moral obligations in order to be free to follow my feelings. How did that work out for me? Hmm.. I'm writing this... so...

(2) I take care to have selfless motives. 

When I pursue being of the greatest service to God above the motives for comfort, public opinion or material things, each decision I make has meaning. When I work to make my life a gift to God rather than a gift to myself, I do not have time to immerse myself in self-pity or resentment.

Good feelings and material things will all pass away. Peace in my heart, mind and soul will never be possible if I waste any time trying to chase any other goal than to serve God. 

(3) Suffering can help me.

A central focus of our faith is how suffering in life can help us. No moment of suffering need ever be wasted. We would all agree that an athlete preparing for competition puts herself through a lot of pain and personal sacrifice towards achieving her goal. A person preparing himself for holiness, in order to prepare for the life beyond, will need to make similar sacrifices and endure pain as a part of developing character. 

When I suffer, I can lift that suffering up to God as a sacrifice for the good of another. I can also use that suffering as an opportunity to surrender my human will to God's will, as Jesus did. I can experience a bond between me and Jesus as I willingly embrace suffering. 

The Catholic practice of penance is also a way to use suffering as an advantage. The evil one believes he can control us with the fear of suffering and death. When we willingly choose suffering, we baffle him. That is why the Passion and Cross of our Lord is the most powerful antidote to evil. 

(4) Comfort? Why?

Many people turn to religion as a comfort when life is painful and challenging, but if I use prayer primarily to make myself feel better, I am using God and not serving God. God's purpose is not to help us feel good, but to BE good- the salt and light of the earth. Although often prayer can be comforting, I do not have to be a slave to comfort when I choose to follow God. Peace is far better than comfort. 

God- Why We Need To Talk

I was at a retreat last year where our retreat master said to us, “You will never make time for prayer until you realize prayer is the most important thing you can do.”

There are many days when I think the most important thing I can do is earning a living, or to have fun playing a computer game or to organize my closet, and yes, there are times when these are important things for us to do. But, prayer actually is the most important thing we can do every day.

Why is prayer the most important thing we can do? Well, for one thing, we are utterly dependent on God for everything, from the air we breathe to whether our hearts beat or not.

Prayer acknowledges that we are unable to do anything at all, much less anything important, without God.

And why is that helpful to know? Because God does listen. He does answer our prayers and he is capable of doing anything. Nothing is impossible for God.

My relationship to prayer has changed. For six years, I prayed selfish prayers. I prayed for my continual happiness, good fortune, fame and success in every endeavor to impress others. I learned to cultivate “feel good” during prayer time, by focusing on the vague idea of what love “feels” like.

I was surprised to learn later that love is not a feeling. I was also surprised to learn that in relationship with God, as in any relationship, it isn't very loving to “use” our friends. Sometimes in life, it can seem that God is supposed to be our “prosperity dispenser,” but that is not His function in our lives.

As my relationship to prayer has changed, my relationship to God has changed. It's been significant for me to begin to know the person, Jesus. Jesus is God in a relatable form. I never used to pray to Jesus, only to the Father. But, since Jesus is my friend now, I want to learn all about his life and about who He is. So, my relationship with Jesus has become a more mature and healthy one now.

When I pray to God, I know God is there. I feel Him there, but that's not how I know He's there. Jesus, like “love” is not a feeling. He's Truth itself in human form. Truth can feel all sorts of ways or no way at all. And prayer is not always my “fun time” anymore. I often don't look forward to it.

In addition to the Liturgy of the Hours and daily mass, Secular Carmelites are supposed to do a minimum of thirty minutes of silent prayer a day. And when you think about it, since the Carmelite charism is prayer and prayer is our true vocation in Carmel, thirty minutes is not much time. Yet, in our busy lives in the world, everyone struggles at times to integrate even that minimum routine. This is my third year into practicing this way of life and I still have some really erratic times.

I can tell you why. It's always pride. It's always that I forget I need him for everything there is and that is why prayer is the most important thing I can do. Our relationship with God is definitely that-- a relationship with a Person. Like any relationship, we need to put the time and effort into keeping it alive and growing.

During good times and bad, we need to talk.  

Help Me Serve You, Lord

Help me serve you Lord, for I am too accustomed to serving mainly myself.

Help me serve you, Lord, with  all my heart and all my mind, for I am too used to the distraction of my selfish interests.

Help me serve you, Lord, for my salvation lies only in your service. To desire and to pursue becoming a master of others, a hero or a show-off is to choose the path taken by the evil one. 

Help me serve you, Lord, for only you can save us, have saved us, and will always save us. I know the path of self-glorification best and I don't have much experience with following your path. 

Help me serve you, Lord, for all you've ever done is serve us, while I complain and am ungrateful, as if you owe me something.

Help me serve you Lord, for you created a beautiful world. We were selfish and ungrateful, so you took on flesh and sacrificed that flesh to show us how there is no greater love than to seek to do your will through service. I am caught up in myself and I actually ignore how you gave me your all.

Help me serve you, Lord, for you are always there to save me, but in my selfish blindness, I demand that others rescue me and do your job as Savior.

Help me serve you, Lord, because all I seem to want to do is prove my worth and importance to you and to others through the "good" and "helpful" things I do.

Help me serve you, Lord, for only you can and have made a worthy sacrifice. Don't accept my gifts when they are tainted by my pride. Please, Lord, don't let me insult you that way.

Help me serve you, Lord. I am no good at this.

Lord, have mercy.

Amen.

Laura Marie Paxton
09/05/14

Mortification- Then and Now

A few nights ago, I saw a picture that was purported to be of a woman who had her mouth and one eye sewn shut by Saudi Arabians because proclaimed Jesus was her savior. The first thought many Christians had was of her bravery, to face such pain out of loyalty to God. Yet, later in the evening, I found out that the story was only a fraud. The picture was a form of "performance art," and a Japanese woman had volunteered for this treatment. She chose it- for art. (I've placed the link to this picture very low on the page. If you think you might be triggered by looking at this, don't worry. Just don't click the bottom link.)

Let's look around and see what people are doing in the world today. As of this moment, if I were to go to a therapist and tell him that I had a corset sewn into my skin for pleasure, that would be considered healthy and okay. As long as I did not have a problem with that, it would not considered mentally ill. I could talk to that same therapist about choosing genital mutilation for myself and he would not blink an eye. I could tell that same therapist that I pierced or slit my tongue, that I or that I walked my boyfriend around with a leash and collar like a dog, and that would be fine too. If I am comfortable and happy and expressing myself in the way I want, that's fine.

The focus in therapy, especially in "pop psychology," tends to be on using only "positive" ways of speaking to and treating ourselves. We are to have "unconditional positive regard" for anything we feel like doing, even in the above examples.

Positive approaches are good but they are not the only approaches that are good.  Practices of discerning judgment are not necessarily unhealthy.

What is the goal of bodily mortification today? Some people want to endure pain because they genuinely like it. Others think it it cool to endure the pain and show off their bravery to others. Some find the practice to be a way to be creative and express themselves. In either case, the motives are purely self-gratifying.

The old way of self mortification was the opposite- It was to help people move beyond the self, into a closer relationship with God, and a life of greater service to others. When bodily mortification for the sake of penance is done today, this is often considered "sick" by psychologists. However, if someone comes into their office with a peeing fetish, (by modern diagnostic manual standards) that is not considered sick.

Furthermore, if I were to intentionally cause discomfort through self-denial for the purpose of becoming stronger to withstand sin, such as Catholics do during Lent, that would be also be considered ill to many modern therapists. For certain mental health professionals, it's considered sick to judge yourself, to feel guilt, to feel fear of any kind. While not all therapists take such an extreme view, the basic structure of this perspective permeates most mainstream therapy. 

Today's Catholics practice penance, such as fasting or giving up something we enjoy, especially during the season of Lent. Most people never practice severe bodily mortification, as was done in the middle ages, because the point of penance is not simply to suffer and hurt. The point is to help us turn our hearts away from the many harmful consolations of the world and towards the loving arms of God instead. It's a form of re-training. The point of mortification is not to suffer for suffering's sake. Today, mortification most often takes the form of fasting and giving up things we enjoy for a certain period of time. It's not what it used to be.

People often think back to medieval practices of penance and bodily mortification and contemplate how mentally disturbed they seem to us now.  I'm talking about the kinds of things people used to do (and some still do, in a few very rare orders now,) like sleeping on hard floors or self-flagellation. Many people don't understand the reason people did these things. It is assumed they must have hatred towards their bodies or that they believed that the body was bad. However, that was not the true reason in many cases. In order to draw closer to God, people practiced self-denial. Today, as well as then, the goal of self-denial is to cultivate gratitude and love for God regardless of pain or pleasure, regardless of whether we get what we want or not.

Another goal in self-denial is to imitate Jesus in offering sacrifice, to experience union with him through "suffering with," which is the heart of compassion for our dear friend, Jesus. Catholics don't see the body as bad. The body is good but we would rather be controlled by our choices than our automatic bodily passions towards things. The practice of self-denial can bring unity and harmony to body and soul, not separation.

Many people today want to separate the body from the soul. This is hatred of the body on a whole new level. "Feminism" has been becoming more and more defined as celebrating all that is not motherhood. We want to deny that our biological bodies have anything at all to do with our "gender," or the societal concept of who men and women are. Many believe it is possible to be born in the wrong body- female instead of male, for example. Yet, the same people who say God puts the wrong people in the wrong bodies will say that God does not make mistakes and that He created gays, so being gay must be the way they were intended to be.

I include no moral perspective in the above comments about bodies and gender. I offer only  logic for reflection. My hope is that whether people agree with what I'm saying or not, people will see a different perspective and know what that perspective involves. It's so odd to live in a world where everything is okay, as long as you are doing it for selfish reasons, but to sacrifice for others is considered ill.

To learn more about the Catholic perspective on suffering, take a look at this really thorough article: http://www.fisheaters.com/offeringitup.html

Do not follow this link if you might be triggered by looking at a picture of a girl with her mouth and one eye sewn shut. (The picture is midway down the page.)

http://motleynews.net/2012/09/26/bagelheads-japans-hot-trend-of-injecting-saline-in-forehead-for-that-bagel-look/

Something Woke Me Up Yesterday- and it wasn't about me.

I learned something great at the Carmelite Monastery yesterday, just as I was dozing off. It was right after our thirty minutes of quiet prayer time and I was groggy.

I'm not sure how or why this came up, but we have been doing Lectio Divina with the encyclical Apostolicam Actuositatem for months now and yesterday, we spent about forty minutes on number 20. I hadn't found this document to be thrilling reading, and it wasn't exactly jarring me out of my stupor.

We were contemplating how the laity is to participate in the work of the Church, because all Secular Carmelites are required to have some sort of lay apostalate, and so we need to understand what that means as well as we can.

Somehow, in our discussion, this verse from Paul came up, "Now I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I do my share on behalf of His body, which is the church, in filling up what is lacking in Christ's afflictions." [Colossians 1:24]

The person who brought up the question that served as my "alarm clock," is a pre-aspirant. She is also a convert, such as I am. She had a question I've often had myself. She wanted to know how anything could be lacking in the sacrifice of Christ. In response, I remember becoming suddenly alert, excited that I knew the answer. I rattled off some sort of response I had heard that technically might have been considered right, when actually I did not fully understand the verse myself. So, my response confused her.

I listened for a while and I heard some really profound and eye-opening things from my sisters in Carmel, people who have seriously contemplated this verse for decades. 

For one thing, we don't actually pray. The Holy Spirit prays within us, for us. For another thing, we don't actually produce any good actions in the world. Only God can do this through us. It's not just that in humility, we give God credit for everything. It's that in reality, He really is the only one who HAS credit for anything. This is the only thing that is actually true.

As Christians, we are not ourselves, or who we were. We are the Body of Christ. Each time we receive the Eucharist, we are becoming one with Him and with each other. So, it is Jesus who sees through our eyes, speaks through our mouths, thinks through our brains and suffers in our bodies. So, Jesus is still here on earth, continuing His joys and afflictions through us. We are the vessels and witnesses of His greatness. Christ's work of redemption is complete, yet we must do our share to continue His work on earth, to complete the work that is "lacking" or still needs to be done in the world.

Apostolicam Actuositatem seems really dry at first. I wondered, how do you contemplate something that keeps talking about our personal relation to "the hierarchy." Well it's really about our personal relationship to the Body of Christ, and the hierarchy is just a term for the way that is structured. There's not a word in it about "me," the individual. It's about "they" and about "acting together." If we look more closely at the verse by Paul, it reads, "I do my share," implying he does his part of the group. It doesn't say, "I, on my own, because I am uber-super Catholic girl, do what Jesus couldn't finish doing." It says, we continue to do His work on earth.

The reason Apostolicam Actuositatem seemed so boring to me for the past few months is that I wasn't hearing things about me, me, me. I wasn't hearing what "resonates with me," or that I can "apply to my personal life." I was hearing about how to be a part of something larger than myself, to continue, through my share in the body of Christ, to make Christ's presence more known here on earth.

Well, I'm not sure if I understood all of this correctly or if it was even explained correctly, but it woke me up. (I was literally nodding off before my friend asked this question and I woke up quickly, seizing that opportunity to attempt to say something brilliant to impress everyone-- which thankfully, did not happen, because the group, as a whole, had a wider message.)

I'm not sure we can read the Bible as individuals with individual interpretation as our guide. I'm not sure it was intended to be read that way. In fact, I'm confident that it's not. The  Body of Christ is not the fragments of Christ, after all. 

It was interesting that our President, Chris Hart, talked about how common it is for people to just give all their energy and work towards what they think is serving God, only to find themselves depleted and exhausted. In that weakened state, God actually has someone there to work with to accomplish His true aims. If we think we're serving Him, we're not. I stand convicted- all the way. I started to ponder what it actually means to let Him accomplish His work through us. There's a profound passivity involved that isn't easy to learn.

Well, I can't hit the snooze button on that.

The Heartbeat of Jesus, Why I Live

I was wandering the woods in my amnesia, 

Following the lights to scattered campfires, wandering to who knows where.

The moon was full

My heart was hungry

Who am I? Where am I?  So lost, confused and crying.

When my father held me as a baby, his heartbeat soothed my every tear.

When I am close to Jesus, I am near his heartbeat too. 

I am a baby in his arms and His Sacred Heart holds my heart in the safest place I'll ever be.

As I grew older, my dad and I camped by the river. The heartbeat of the river soothed me in the intoxicating laurel thicket where we slept.

Every evening, my dad's friend would say, “This is the life.” 

Years passed when I could not hear that heartbeat. 

All I could hear were chaotic sounds of need and fear, 

frantic crickets and cicadas seeking quickly fleeting mates.

The moon was full

My heart was hungry

Starving, all alone.

One day, I will find myself, floating on my back, nailed to my cross.

I won't move there but I'll be freer than in all my life, alongside of Jesus in that river of peace. 

Indifferent to my pain, my peace will deepen, more than I have ever known. He has shown me that. 

Jesus, floating with me, will say to me, with all delight, “My child, this is the life.”

The Cross, it is the Life, the life that pulls me back into the rhythm of His heart at His breast and the waves in their joy, “My child my child, this is the Only Life.”

My heart is full

As the moon fades into dawn.

Amen.

-Laura Paxton 11/02/2013

St. Teresa, Shock and Trauma

I've thought a lot this week about a class Father Stephen Watson, OCD taught at our last secular Carmelite meeting. He was teaching us about “St. Teresa and the Resurrection,” from Volume 1, Testimony #12 by Kieran.

In this example, St. Teresa of Avila had emotionally merged so much with the passion of our Lord Jesus and identified so much with the experience of His mother that she was unable to be happy and celebrate the resurrection on Easter Sunday. St. Teresa was still deep in mourning for what our Lord had experienced. She even said her “hands grew numb in affliction.” Her soul became suspended. St. Teresa experienced something known as a “rapture of affliction.”

I had never heard of this, but a “rapture of affliction” is an experience that takes us beyond ourselves but not in the sense of ecstasy. While in this state, St. Teresa contemplated Jesus and Mary. In her contemplation, she saw Jesus with Mary after the resurrection. Mary was in such trauma after the experience of watching God, her son, be tortured to death, she could not shake herself out of it. She stared, numb, as if “shell-shocked” even when her son returned from the dead in his glorified body. She needed help, and he stayed with her a long time, St. Teresa said. So, St. Teresa let Jesus “stay with her a long time” as He did with His mother, helping her to recover from all of that agony in order to celebrate new life.

Nowhere in the Bible is there reference to Jesus going to visit His mother, but that was a personal thing and not a public one. I can imagine the disciples would not feel this relevant to include while recording Jesus's public mission. Perhaps this was one of the many things that happened that was not written? Regardless of whether Jesus was there to help comfort Mother Mary in her trauma, He will always be there for us.

How often does that happen to us, after an occasion such as the Boston Marathon bombing or one of the many school shootings or other mass murders our nation has faced? Trauma is a fact of life. Our Blessed Mother may have gone through it. It is during our deepest trauma that Jesus comes to us and wants to help heal us until we are able once again, to celebrate His resurrection and the miracle of life. He is always there, patient and waiting, even if we are too in shock to see Him there.

No matter how you hurt, God is not a drug.

Lately, I've had a lot going on in my head. For those who remember, in my last blog post, I was stressed and overwhelmed. I have good news for you that I've been resolving things. When I first published that post, I wanted to take it down. It seemed too personal. Yet, when I received comments on Reddit that people really related to what I was going through and that it helped them, it was worth it.

I thought I was doing too much, pushing too hard. I even thought I was on the verge of hypomania. I saw my psychiatrist yesterday and he said I'm doing better than he's ever seen me. He said the last thing I need to do is worry about how I'm doing. But, growth hurts sometimes. It's tough.

Last week, I wrote about trying to learn how to stop myself from driving myself crazy. The odd message I felt God wanted to give me is that I didn't need to stop His love. What I felt Him say confused me. It made no sense and wasn't the answer I was looking for. But, now, I understand. Let God out, let Him run free through my body and soul. Give God unbridled access to living through me. Then, I don't have to worry about stopping. I just need to let Him start and not stop HIM.

This doesn't mean I don't take breaks, rest, meditate, pray, know when I've gone too far and quit activity. It means exactly that I DO need to do all those things. I need to do those things because if I don't, I put limits on God and what He can do. Just like He told us, His yoke is easy and His burden is light.

I'm an intense person, no doubt about it. I have the wide feeling range of a bipolar, the laser like focus of an autistic and sometimes, anxiety attacks on top of it all. So, I can relate to just about anybody who is a little crazy.

I remember years ago, when I worked as a mental heath case manager, I had a client who called me up and said, in a terrified, gasping voice, “Laura, I NEED you, I need you, come here.” I asked her why and she just cried and repeated, “I need you.” So, since I made home visits, I drove way out to her trailer in the Appalachian mountains. When I opened the door, there was my client, with a shotgun pointed at her mother. I won't say much further except to say that all survived, she went to jail and I quit my job.

Sometimes, I have felt that way myself. Now, I don't mean I've felt like I would point a gun at anybody, but I've felt that desperate, terrified need. So many times, I pray to God in that voice, “I need you! I need you!” I will often flash back to that client when I feel that, thinking, “Wow. The pain!” Anyone with anxiety disorder can relate, I am sure. It isn't even logical.

I used to approach communion like that quite a lot. I wanted to be fed with God's comfort and love. I would return to my pew and sometimes cry with joy. Jesus became a drug. So, my spiritual director asked me, “What kind of way is that to treat anyone you love? Next time when you receive communion, pray that the sacrament will give you the strength to serve Him.”

Wow. That was around nine months ago that we had that conversation and I have always said those words in prayer before communion and after. It's made a huge difference in my life. I've learned things this year about the great sacrifice Jesus made for us. He gave us everything. My job is to learn to give everything back, to learn to give as He did.

I've had thoughts spinning around in my head this week about how Jesus told St. Peter that if he loved Him, he would feed his sheep. In other words, if St. Peter loved Him, he would show mature love and give until it hurt.

Over the past nine months, I've learned more every day about how to grow in maturity and love. The secret to my happiness is to push forward instead of sliding into anxiety verging on despair. For instance, instead of crying, “Jesus! Jesus! Jesus!” as if in panic from the bottom of a well, awaiting rescue, I've learned something that feels really novel and unique to a former Protestant.

I've learned how to offer Him up. I can lift up my arms to God and hold Him high and say to God, “Behold, your son. Jesus! Jesus! Jesus! There is nothing worthwhile I can offer you except for this.” Jesus died because we had nothing at all to offer God without Him. If I don't offer Him up, I still have nothing. To give Jesus to God, as the gift Jesus wants to be, is amazing. We do it every time in the mass. We do it every time we pray the Divine Mercy Chaplet.

Jesus is the only worthy gift to give to God, but if we seek to merge our lives with His, we will grow in holiness and love. How do we merge with Him? Give like Him. Give like he does, and that means all we have and all we are. Yet, I have to remember that when I'm keeping myself insanely busy, trying to justify myself and prove myself, impress people and get approval, I'm not making any room for Him to live in me. Everything I do is absolutely worthless without Him. Remembering this is a constant challenge for me.

There is so much pain in our world, so much tortured misery. We have extreme violence erupting all over our planet and we have since the day we left Eden. We cry out to Jesus, “We need you,” and then we make ourselves crazy with activity to try to kill the pain, when really, we need to learn to serve Him. Only then can we have peace.