And All His Empty Promises

At my therapy group last night, one of our members was talking about her relationship with a married man. You know the type. He claims he can’t stand his wife but then goes on a vacation with her, he says they aren’t intimate but then she ends up pregnant, he says over and over again that he’s going to leave but doesn’t. My fellow group member knows that she is nothing but the other woman and that her only future with him is as an unpaid paramour. She also feels terrible guilt about how her behavior is damaging the marriage of another woman. And yet she talked last night about how much of a hold the illicit relationship had on her and how negatively it was affecting her life.

“I cannot describe to you how totally unfulfilling that relationship is for me. I know he’s never going to leave his wife, I hate what I’m doing to his wife, but every day I want to get a text or an e-mail from him that makes me believe that he cares about me. So if I haven’t heard from him, I get really anxious and I text or e-mail him. And then there’s just this cycle of anxiety that I go through as I wait to hear from him the next time…”

I had never had the idea before to look at my life to see if anything was unfulfilling. I gave my life a quick glance and didn’t like what I saw: unfulfilling, unfulfilling, unfulfilling. I felt sick and pathetic. How could I not have seen how much time I spent in unfulfilling ways before? And looking at those parts of my life, why was I hesitant to change in some areas?

My favorite part of Catholic baptisms is when the priest asks the witnesses, “Do you reject Satan…and all his empty promises?” and we say that we reject him. When I was examining my life recently, that was all I could think of, that my unfulfilling behavior was driven by Satan’s empty promises.

Empty promises. I have trouble thinking of anything more terrible than reaching eternity, only to realize that I had led my life guided by the evil one, the master of lies. What if I could see the horrific, demonic driving force behind all of my bad decisions? Would I still make them? No. But I can’t see the full terror of the evil one. As much as I want to treat Jesus as my king, I chase after the empty promises.

I want to be saved by Jesus Christ. Part of me wishes that I were a Southern Baptist so that I would know that I was saved already, but the other part of me realizes that I would ruthlessly question whether I was truly saved or not. As a Catholic, I am supposed to become contrite for chasing the empty promises, confess my sins and repent. Right now I’m still struggling to attain true contrition, and I ask for Mary’s help with this nearly every day.

Empty promises. Has life really come down to this? Ever since I found my personal relationship with God in 1995, I thought I had been pursuing Christ’s promises. Mary’s promises. The promises of saints and popes. The promises of prominent Christians in my life. The promises of God my Father.

I can’t handle the thought of being a slave to the beautiful weaver of deception. I prayed a rosary yesterday, and as unworthy as I feel, I will pray another one today. The rosary is my lifeline, and I feel like I am a lost soul. Jesus, Mary, I’m reaching out to you. You can’t let the evil one have me. Give me contrition where I have no contrition. Help me to make a full confession. Help me to change. I cry out to you from the core of my being, where there is no peace of Christ, only turmoil.

Trudging with Despair

I have been quiet for months. My neck problems have still threatened to kill my spirituality. Church is painful, Bible reading is painful, spiritual journaling is painful and posting on my spiritual blog is painful. I may never get better.

Last night a priest (who I believe is a living saint), came to our home to bless our St. Benedict medals, bless our home and do the sacrament of the Anointing of the Sick for my neck and for my husband's emotional problems. I offered my resentments to the Lord and tried to open myself to the love and healing that was brought to me by a faithful servant of God. This priest is going to Italy in a few months to study mystical spirituality - the kind that I have been privileged enough to experience a few times. His coming to our house last night was an unbelievable spiritual gift.

Yet I woke up today angry, hurting and wanting to give up on life. I am tired of being in chronic pain, tired of fighting with my husband, trying to summon up more strength than I really have. I feel like if I fought harder for spirituality in my life that it would help see me through these trials, but I don't feel well enough to pursue more spirituality. My daughter and I walked to Mass last night, and I cannot tell you what a huge step that was for me. Receiving the Eucharist for the third time in six months...a huge act of longing for the closeness of God. And I had gone to confession the weekend before. I received it with no guilt.

Somewhere in this hazy mess of my life with my failing marriage and the money I'm losing and the deteriorating health is the love I have for Jesus, the saints and angels. But will I ever see it again? Will it ever be more real to me again than the physical pain and emotional suffering?

I stopped posting on my blog for two reasons.

1. It has hurt to use the computer recreationally.
2. My spiritual outlook plummeted in November, and I've felt like I had nothing positive to offer the world through prayerful writing.

But something said to me this morning to post again, not to give up, not to let the Evil One convince me that my growth as a believer is finished. It feels like it's finished...it feels like everything good in my life is over. But today I am here. I can't get any lower, so take this useless, weepy, mess of a wife, mother and Christian and do something if you want to Lord. It can't be clearer to me that I don't have the power. Do what you will with me.

I can't believe that I felt like I was pilgrim on a spiritual mission a year ago. I can't believe that I thought God was taking my life and showing fruits and works to inspire agnostics and struggling Christians to dare to believe. I can hardly dare to believe. I don't have the strength to believe.

Jesus, you have allowed me to be in this position. I say again, do what you will with me.

Today is Day Four of my novena to the Blessed Mother. Mary, I say to you also, I ask for your intercession for the healing of my neck, but I ask for God's will, whatever it is.

Things I'll Do If I Get My Old Body Back

1. Write a book. I won't be such a perfectionist, and I won't write it for anyone but me. But I'll finally write it - something I've been planning on doing for 25 years.

2. Throw away clutter with glee. 3 months ago this would have been a chore. Now it's something that aggravates my neck. I long to do it, but I either can't or know that I will have rebound pain. An odious task has become a privilege.

3. Journal even more than I had been doing. The pen in my hand was like an ignition that took me to God. I will journal every 30 minutes if I want to and won't feel guilty.

4. Put a sound system in my car and take joy rides.

5. Invite more of my children's friends over and not obsess so much about whether the house is clean enough. I can truly understand "good enough" now.

6. Use the public library more and read all of the time. There is so much good writing out there that I can't take advantage of now.

7. Go to 4-5 Twelve Step meetings a week. I already knew I loved them. The hole I've been feeling is painful.

8. Go to church. I love my relgion but have never really enjoyed hour-long services. Still, that's another piece of me that's gone right now.

9. Write freelance articles. It never hurts to try.

10. Buy healthier groceries. My dear husband is buying me groceries that cause me to gain weight. I never thought I would miss going to the grocery store.

11. Fold laundry lickety-split and get it out of my hair. Why did I procrastinate about this? Why did I let it pile up when I wasn't in pain? I don't understand this. I would love to tackle laundry right now if it didn't hurt.

12. Be grateful every day if I don't hurt.

13. Enjoy my children more. I loved them, but was I enjoying them? I didn't realize how many options a healthy body gave me. If I hear, "Mommy's hurting today," one more time I feel like I'll scream.

14. Be a better listener. Talking so much about myself has helped me to realize how much I was already talking about myself. The small stuff really isn't worth talking about. I know that now.

15. Care about my husband's day. Right now I have to pretend I care. There was a time when I really could have cared because I wasn't disabled by pain. I don't know how much I can work on overcoming my self-absorption as I face a life-changing set of physical problems. But when things are returned to a state of normalcy, I am going to take a huge interest in his day-in and day-out experiences. I can't wait.

16. Laugh at myself more.

I write this knowing full well that if I'm healed, I won't do all of this. But this experience has changed my life forever. As a thirtysomething, I had been taking "feeling decent" for granted. I've done a 180 degree turn. I also write this knowing that some of it (such as getting out of my self-centeredness) can be tackled now. Baby steps.

Take away my pain and stiffness, Jesus. As you like, when you like, if you like. I've learned a lot; I know you can see that.

Exposure

Yesterday I had one episode of intense pain and took a painkiller, but otherwise I felt free of them. I had volunteered to read part of my 2006 spiritual journal at my charity's staff Christmas party, and I was nervous all day long. There were two problems: one was that I had written sincerely, so it seemed like I would be letting my coworkers see into my soul. The other problem was that part of me knew that it would touch some people and strike them, and I worried that I wanted to read at the podium for myself and not for God.

Despite my anxiety, I did it. As a preamble to our lighting of the Peace Candle on our Advent Wreath, I read two 2006 journal entries in front of everyone I work with. These will be posted as a separate blog entry right above this one. I told the staff that Christmas Day 2006 was a day filled with tranquility and gratitude, but that as late as December 23rd 2006, I was stuck in self-centeredness and shallow thinking and thought it was my worst Christmas ever. The journal entries showed how God was able to lift me out of my gloom and tell me what a gift my Christmas really was.

People came up to me afterward and told me that they had been moved by what I read. I felt exposed and felt that I had to brush their comments away lest I be making myself too huge. As a few moments passed I started to become able to look people in the eye and thank them when they told me my words had struck to them. One of my friends said, "What you read to me meant so much to me, more than you can ever know - really."

I wondered if my boss would say anything about what I read, and late that afternoon she came into the office to give me my organization Christmas present in it's uniform gift bag. Then she whispered to me, "I loved your story."

"Thank you," I said quietly.

"Will you do some writing for us...please?"

I nodded. "Yes." (Right now I'm a secretary).

"We need anyone who can write as beautifully as you do to be writing for us."

I nodded and said yes again. How peculiar it is to me that in this job that I never wanted to go out and get that God has given me a voice to talk about his glory. How peculiar and marvelous. I love it when I can see God working like that.

Damage

A couple of years ago, I found my spiritual niche. I experimented in concentrated intercessory prayer for other people, and I nearly always saw beautiful things happen. When the outcome was good, I knew the gift had come from God. In the handful of times that I didn't see healing, rescue or deliverance, I began to understand that sometimes life on earth is so difficult that only a higher power could see a plan for ultimate good.

I have been so wrapped up in my neck problems that I've frequently forgotten to pray for others. Intercessory prayer has been so important to me that I couldn't believe I had let it slip out of my life. But last week, I was startled to receive a prayer shawl that had been prayed over and given to me so that I could wrap myself in God's loving care and then a letter in the mail that told me I had been chosen as a person that a prayer group would pray for throughout Advent. That's when I realized that intercessory prayer was still active in my life; I was just on the other side.

I have missed a lot of my normal life since these physical problems started after Halloween. I've missed being able to fold laundry, wash dishes or pick up toys as I saw the need. I've missed being able to read spiritual books and write in my spiritual notebooks by hand. I've missed being able to sort through papers without stopping after a few minutes due to neck pain. I've missed driving my car without pain. I've missed doing my own grocery shopping so that I can buy food that doesn't pack weight on me. I've missed sitting in church pews and the metal chairs in AA meetings without feeling my neck stiffen after a few minutes.

What I miss most about my normal life is knowing that I was on a spiritual journey and feeling like I was constantly growing. On an intellectual level I know that I'm still on my spiritual journey right now as I accept my powerlessness over my pain and my limitations. But do I feel it? No. Not really. I certainly didn't feel it all the time before my neck problems started, but I must have felt it a lot, because I miss it so much.

In October I felt like I was about to start working on something important. I was going to go to graduate school or start seriously writing a novel or begin some other challenging undertaking. Now I am flailing around just to make sure my children are clean and fed and that I show up to work no more than 20 minutes late.

I want my life back, I want my hopes back, I want my spirituality back. In several weeks, with a minor but debilitating physical problem, I've started to think of myself as an ailing person instead of a spiritual person. It embarrasses me to admit how much my neck condition has damaged me, but it's true.

I pray and wait for the day that I include these weeks in my spiritual history but that I have left the self-pity, the self-centeredness and sense of loss far behind me.

When He Was Enough For Me

It is hard to believe that a few weeks ago I felt like I had a spiritual core. Right after Halloween, I developed reactive arthritis from a virus, and I have been on prescription pain medicine off and on since then. I have had chemically induced moments of such peace and optimism that I could not help but rely on painkillers to give me relief from fear and darkness. I do not remember what it was like when God was my Higher Power and when he was enough for me. It does not seem like a relationship with God can ever be enough again.

I know what to do: pray, go to meetings, talk to people and let go. I also know that the feelings I want to escape from – fear, loneliness, sadness and shame - will trouble me until I let them surface. There is one more thing that I know, and it is probably the hardest part to accept. I know that I cannot control when I will feel better. I can pray, I can live in the solution, I can surrender and I can even truly want God’s will. However, I will feel better when I am supposed to, and I have no idea how long it will take for that feeling to get here.

And at a time when I need to feel a spiritual connection the most, reading and journaling cause more neck strain than I can tolerate. So as I wait to become assured of God’s care again, I cannot use the tools that I have relied on so heavily in the past. I can’t read my Emmet Fox books. I can’t read a few paragraphs of my Norman Vincent Peale books. I can’t read the story of a miraculous healing in The Miracles of John Paul II. I can’t read the daily meditations in my Al-Anon books. I can’t write in my journal about the day’s struggles or anything that gave me hope.

I can’t, I can’t, I can’t. That is my reality for the moment. I can’t; this will never work. I said once in an AA meeting that if I miss meetings, not only does my disease lie to me about how harmless drinking is, but it also lies to me about how good God is.

And that is the only faith I have right now. Life seems empty and bleak, I feel like I am in the world all alone, and I cannot imagine ever feeling joy again because I know that God loves me. But a tiny part of me says that this is just my disease lying to me again, kicking me while I’m down.

I hope so.

Bottom of the Boat

A friend of mine calls it the "gerbil wheel." I have compared it to a fish wildly flopping on the floor of a boat. Another person I knows refers to the phenomenon as "attack thoughts."

What we're all describing is when we feel assaulted by fear, and thinking about the problem causes other negative emotions (e.g., self-loathing, guilt, shame, new fear) to start coming at us at lightning speed from other angles. It doesn't seem fair. We think about the problem in our life because we want relief, we want to be sure that it's as bad as we think it is, and several minutes later we have had so many new horrible thoughts that we feel worse. If you ever see me with my head bowed and my fingers in my hair clutching the top of my head, you can assume that I'm overwhelmed by fear.

For years I tried positive thinking to overcome both my painful emotions and hard situations themselves. I would do my best to ignore my fear and think about God's love for me instead. For several years in a row I had incredible results with this approach. I remember talking to my husband in our kitchen and sounding jubilant. "I get it now. I mean I really, really get it." I believed that I knew the spiritual laws of the universe and that I'd rounded a corner and would not have to suffer again.

I don't believe in jinxes, but oddly, after I said that, I seemingly started to fail at positive thinking for several years. God did many incredible things for me during this period, but two grave problems got increasingly worse, and I believed they had the power to destroy my family and ruin my life. Like Boxer in Animal Farm, I took the approach I usually do: "I will work harder." I prayed more. I read every spiritual book I could to make sure that I was not overlooking the tool that would turn my life around. I obsessed about my prayers, trying to make sure that I was using the verbs and phrases that would allow me to access God's compassion and gain his help. I always thought that I was very close to the solution but that God was waiting on me to do something right, and that I had just not figured it out yet. I asked God to guide me. Silence. I spent a lot of time in my pose (head bowed, hands in hair).

At the end of these years where life got harder and harder, I ended up on my front porch. I went out there every night to cry. Not only had I collapsed emotionally from the stress of my husband's illness, his inability to work and the financial stress associated with that, but lately I was unable to sleep, I was hyperventilating during the day, I was having esophageal and throat spasms that I thought signaled cancer, my extremities would spontaneously twitch and tremble and I was losing weight rapidly although I had stopped dieting. I knew I had broken down emotionally, and now my body was breaking down. I never knew how I would get through each day during that period, and by nightfall, once I had struggled through the day and completed it, I cried on the porch.

"You've given me a $hitty life, God," I said one night with tears streaming down my face, "and I hate you for it." That was the first uncalculated prayer I had said in a long time. I wasn't trying to utter the words that would compel God to help me. I was convinced that he was content to see me suffer, so I felt free to be completely truthful. The physical problems I was having felt like God had slapped me in the face. He had seen how hard I had tried to overcome the hard parts of my life, he had heard me begging him to make things better and now he was allowing me to have such a severe physical reaction to stress that simple things like microwaving oatmeal and making 10 minute grocery store trips seemed mountainous. I didn't know how much longer I could survive, especially since he had decided not to help me. So I hated him.

And the help came pouring in. It came in the form of kind, compassionate people sprinkled throughout my life and in a series of events that gave me more and more hope. I was helped by a loving, concerned physician. I returned to AA. I returned to the Catholic church. I wandered into a Catholic bookstore and found two books that changed my life. I told God that I was letting go and meant it. He was not silent anymore. He gave me continual affirmations that I was on the right path and that I was being carried by him. The multiple holes in my faith were filled by the pure love of family, old friends and new friends who linked me to God. Life was too much, it was too painful to bear, but I was not alone anymore. The reality of my life became the love that was present all around me.

Last night some recent financial happenings triggered the gerbil wheel, the flopping fish, the attack thoughts. Our financial future seemed bleak, and as I turned it over in my head, it went from looking worrisome to looking extremely bad. I started hating myself for certain decisions I've made, and I felt shame that told me that I'll always be such a bad person that I'll be beyond God's help. As I type this, I'm still flopping frantically on the boat, wanting to grab hold of the spiritual idea that will deliver me from my fear.

Enough with the struggling. Enough with straining toward grace and trying to get away from fear. Today I submit to fear. As soon as I feel myself panicking and trying to push the feeling away, I will relax back into the fear and let myself live in it in the moment that it surfaces. I will not be alone. The times I have felt God the most powerfully have been the slow minutes that I have entered into my pain and realized, "O God, even here, you are with me."

I welcome your prayers and will post an update later on my submission to fear. Please leave a comment and tell me about anything you're grappling with right now.

Soul Gripping

I work at a charity in a poor urban community. I'd whittled my to-do list down so much yesterday that I decided to work on a mail campaign alongside our volunteers. I like being around our volunteers because most of them are elderly, and they help me to daydream about the person I want to become. I want to believe that even if I were wealthy I would think about people who don't have enough, or that even if I were a widow, I would want to spend some of my time helping others. The volunteers help me to imagine being a financially secure and loving person, and it's hard for me to imagine myself as anything better.

Yesterday morning I was working with one of my favorite volunteers named Betsy, who's smart-alecky and has a story about everyone in the city. Elaine was also with us. I had never actually spoken with her before; she has a soft voice and looked polished but was casually dressed. I was having a pleasant time stuffing envelopes with Betsy and Elaine and listening to them talk about "nickel Cokes" and dating during World War II.

Within an hour, I was trying to keep the two of them from seeing that I was crying. I found out through their conversation that Elaine had had a son with Down's syndrome, and he had been a sweet, happy adult who had proudly volunteered at our charity. Elaine talked about how much he enjoyed his volunteer work and then smiled a little and quietly said, "I prayed and prayed that I would outlive him, and God answered my prayers."

I cannot comprehend loving one of my children so much that I wanted to go through her death so that I could always make sure she was taken care of. But at the same time, I do understand it, and that's why I started to cry. I didn't cry because I pitied Elaine; she didn't seem unhappy. I cried because the love that emanated from her made something resonate in me, and it hurt.

In the spiritual place I have been brought to, love, pain and death exist together. Loving deeply makes me so vulnerable that pain is unavoidable, and death is the only way through the pain. The death of dreams, the death of insistence, the death of self. And somehow the death of Jesus on the cross completes everything. I could barely type the last sentence because I have absolutely no understanding of it. It's something that I believe, but it's not something I can speak about. I've had only the faintest glimpses of what Jesus has really given me, and they've been fleeting. There have been a few moments where I was aware of my life and it's circumstances, but I became more aware of the love of God.

So I cried at the mail table at work yesterday. The part of me that has seen glimpses of God does not emerge very often. But it will burst forth in certain situations, such as after talking to someone and realizing that God wants my prayers for them, or listening to someone and realizing that she knows the same God that I have known. Then that part of me that is buried deeply, that exists in the innermost layer, becomes for a moment my entire existence. If I'm alone I can cry and gasp and thank God for showing himself to me again. If I'm around other people, I blink back tears and try to act like I don't feel like the wind has been knocked out of me. Betsy and Elaine were looking at their stamps and envelopes the entire time they talked; I don't think they noticed.

Do you have people in your life or have you met anyone whose words grip your soul? Have you ever felt like you couldn't talk about God as he really is in your life and then met someone that you thought would understand? I would love to read your comments.