Hugging the Mountain

There is an image I have used for some time now, adapted from St. John of the Cross, to describe the dark night of faith, and the trust that is involved in it.  For me it has always been like driving a car up a mountain in the dark of night, along a winding path.  The headlights only allow you to see so far in front of you, and the dark night for me was always a way of saying that I don't need to see the top of the mountain, I only need to see what's right in front of me, knowing that even if the ultimate goal is not known, the next step ahead is, and so I just take that and trust that I will know when it is time to make a turn.  Something like that.

Lately, however, it has taken on a different characteristic.  It's as if I've been asked to get out of the car and walk the rest of the way.  Whatever little comfort I drew from the light of the headlights is gone, and now I'm walking up this treacherous path, and the only thing left for me to do is hug the mountain and trust that if I do so, I won't fall off the cliff, even if I have no idea where I am going.  The car, I think, represents certain crutches that I have leaned on in bringing me to God, things which in themselves are good - the structures of religious life, the sweetness of the Eucharist, the comfort of community, the beauty of prayer - but ultimately which hold me back from total abandonment to God.  So now in the darkness my relationship with the mountain - that place of my encounter with God - is being transformed, and in the pitch black of night I am feeling the sand between my toes, my hands pressed against the coldness of the rock, the cool damp air pressing against my face, all while my eyes remain totally blind.  There is no sight, there is no God, and somehow in all of this God is being revealed - the perfect paradox.

This is dramatically changing my prayer.  Recently in one of our community meetings we were discussing loneliness, and how ultimately our lives as consecrated celibates means not that we are to experience intimacy in community and with one another, though that is certainly an element of our lives, but rather that we are called to a deeper experience of intimacy with God.  Thus, one thing we often hear is that in the experience of loneliness we are often called to throw ourselves more fully into prayer.  One friar pointed out, however, that even this can be dangerous, because it can be as if we are going to prayer trying to find some special "experience" of God, as if God is a faucet we can just turn on when we need our fix.  Prayer then becomes just like all the other things to which we turn to fill the void, just like some people turn to television, or to alcohol, or to shopping, just a way of creating a kind of buzz that dulls our sense of loneliness.  

For me, though, this isn't the case, and this isn't a danger, precisely because I have been stripped of all expectation that God will show up in my prayer.  God is totally absent, and so now when I go to prayer, when I sit in silence calling on the name of Jesus, I do so knowing that He is not there, that He will not come, that He does not listen - and yet I give myself to Him fully anyway, because somehow I know that this is all I can do. I know this will scandalize some, but the irony is that as faith has left me completely, I somehow have greater faith than ever.  I don't know how to articulate it better than this.

So I keep on hugging the mountain.  It's all that's left to do.

General musing...

I think it might be good for me to come up with a plan and purpose for my online presence. As it is I basically just involve myself randomly in all sorts of social networking sites, with little rhyme or reason. This I believe engenders the sort of ill-disciplined wasting of time, using the Internet and social networking as a means of avoiding the uncomfortable growth of solitude and loneliness - a social addiction that numbs underlying problems in the same way that alcohol and drugs did in the past. I have a tendency to bounce between extremes - austerity on one side, total indulgence on the other. Having a rationally conceived concept of my online interaction, a sense of mission, might help me to forge that necessary middle ground.

Just a thought...


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Confessional

In the confines of a drab and narrow room
he crosses the veil and wanders through my
capacious pain brushed in acrylic hues, a
borderless frontier of self-inflicted wounds
bearing all the weight of gravity. His love
knows no limits, but neither does my sorrow,
and so we race to the outer reaches of
eternity, he with the patience of a lover,
me with sin's delusion convincing me
that I can outrun, only to find myself
buried in his violet embrace, baptized in the
fresh and living waters of my confessional
tears. Gravity doesn't feel so heavy
anymore - if only for a moment.

Embracing the Unknown

Anyone who has known me throughout the years of my movement towards and in religious life has perhaps gotten used to my frequent ups and downs regarding my vocation. In reality, I established this pattern of polarity right from the beginning, when, while certainly engendered by an authentic experience of conversion, my announcement of a vocation to priesthood was ultimately an act of impulse. Having been away from the Church for so many years, after one retreat weekend I not only committed myself to returning to a life of faith, but indeed announced to my family and loved ones that I was going to be a priest.

My initial discernment began with a diocesan formation director, and in reality I can truly say that God was at work in leading me away from that experience. He was a good man, to be sure, but I think his desire to see men enter the seminary formation blinded him to the haste with which I was acting, and he was very eager to push me through the approval process. Fortunately my timing was such that it was too late to get me in front of the vocations board, and so a slowing down was imposed on me that I did not want, but which served me well. It was soon thereafter that I met the Augustinian vocations director, who, in a direct contrast to the diocesan director, kept telling me to slow down, that we needed to take our time, and so forth. It was he who encouraged me to enroll at Villanova, and set me up with an Augustinian spiritual director, who had a similar mindset.

Despite the signals from the Augustinians that I needed to take things slow, I nonetheless outwardly was just as certain as from that first day - it was a tenuous certainty, to be sure, and artificial, too. It was a certainty that I needed to trust, because I was so fearful of falling back into the life that I had lived before, a life that led me far from God and into the depths of despair. The certainty I projected onto my calling to priesthood was in fact rooted in fear, not in any authentic understanding of being called. Because it was so precarious, it was destined to crumble, and indeed it did, when within a year of my studies at Villanova I met a girl, fell in love, and, with equal projection of certainty announced to the world that I was no longer going to be a priest, that I was in love and hoped one day to marry.

This ended up being the cycle of my time at Villanova, always impulsive, always living with a sense of need for a definitive call in life. What I've realized recently is how rooted this desire was not only in fear, but also in a sense of shame. My entire adult life has been dominated by a sense of shame, shame for the life I lived before 2005 when I came back to the Church, shame for falling into those same patterns, albeit more hidden, after my return to the Church. This sense of shame is typical of recovering alcoholics, and in fact is dealt with extensively in the literature we read. But it requires a real sense of awareness in order to release oneself from the suffocating grip it holds on a person, as it has held on me.

This sense of shame is coupled with a real sense of disappointment - a belief, however untrue or unfair, that I have been a disappointment to my family because of the mistakes I've made. My sense of disappointment often puts an unfair and unhealthy pressure on myself to be great, to do something great and admirable so that I can replace the man who has disappointed his family with the man who makes them proud. This then gets further projected onto my discernment, because what better way to please a Catholic family with a sense of doing something good than by becoming a priest? Yet, of course, what more unhealthy reason to become a priest? One of my greatest fears is that when it comes time to profess solemn vows, I will do so not out of an authentic sense of calling, but rather because I fear disappointing my family or putting them through the stress of another change of course at this stage of my life.

For me, then, there are several key components that my formation has necessarily taken on in order to lead me to a true and authentic sense of vocation. One, I need to allow myself to let go of a false sense of self by which I identify myself according to my sins and my past failings. I need to let go of the past and the grip it holds on me, and instead learn to trust in God's unconditional love for me, and let myself be identified by that.

Related to that, I need to learn to trust in my family's unconditional love for me, and recognize that all they want is what's best for me. I can't expect them to understand the ups and downs of my discernment, but I can expect them to love me no matter where my life takes me. They've certainly proven that beyond any doubt already, and so I need to trust in the love they have proven over and over again throughout my life.

Finally, I need to embrace the uncertainty of my discernment - something I am finally just beginning to do. The truth is that the vows I have taken are temporary for a reason. I have not made a commitment to be a priest or a religious for life. I've made a commitment to live a life of poverty, chastity, and obedience for one year only, and to deepen my discernment of God's call in my life and see where that takes me. It is true that I have again entered a phase of doubts about whether this is where I am ultimately being called, but the truth is, these are the healthiest doubts I have ever experienced. Doubts just mean uncertainty, and it is an uncertainty that I need to grow more and more comfortable with in order to break free from the destructive pattern of projected certitude. This is the only way truly to discover where God is calling me, the only way I can be sure that where I end up in life is due to my following the initiative of God, rather than imposing my initiative on a life that I call ordained.

Uncertainty is not natural for me, nor for anyone, I suppose. But the God in whom I believe is shrouded in mystery, is infinite and ineffable, and the only way to attune my soul to God's divine initiative is to allow myself to sit comfortably with the silence of his mystery. Certainly cultivating my prayer life is essential, and in that a certain necessary dedication on my part has been lacking. What I can say, though, is that the effects of a long walk towards healing are starting to become more manifest to me, and I can finally trust that this uncertainty is exactly where I am supposed to be. I can truly say that I do not know where God is calling me, and for once, I'm becoming okay with that.