The Girl in Yellow: Behold, You are Loved!

Dear Reader,

There are two things I want you to know today:

     1) God makes room for himself inside us.
     2) You are loved.

Pt. I
This week, I've been trying to think about dwelling in the middle of nowhere. I'm learning to be comfortable waiting, and I've learned waiting is often more about the formational process of waiting than about the things waited for.

For the last 2 1/2 years or so, my life has neatly paralleled the Israelites' wandering in the desert. After several months of examining this metaphor, I've learned that feeling lost, being in-between, having questions but not answers, living in the still barrenness of winter, is OK. I've learned that the wilderness is a place of preparation, a place that disabuses you of former treasures, visions, and joys. The wilderness creates a longing for the Promised Land, that is, walking through the wilderness results in a deeper desire for God.

I have learned that even Moses' time tending sheep in Midian, all 40 of those years before he became the champion of his people, before any bushes burned, were not wasted. God doesn't waste time, he uses every second of it, even when for us each second feels like Chinese water torture. Moses slowly learned to tend sheep, and then he slowly led a stiff-necked and wayward people through the wilderness. Even in the desert, God provides and leads: there are pillars of fire and cloud, piles of manna waiting on the ground, and the law, lovingly revealed. God never, ever goes away.

I have heard God say to me, over and over again, "Have courage, and say yes." I have often felt, reflecting on these words, that God is preparing me for something big, something that will take a lot of courage to face. This new thing is something that will require absolute, full, trusting obedience: the kind that dwells in furnaces of fire and lions' dens and does not let the cup pass.

My perspective is focused on earthly measures of success. It's as though I'm waiting for God to make me richer, or prettier, or more widely loved. But really, as I've been walking through this awful wilderness of being, or my twenties, I've learned that one of the most important things to have is an open, empty heart.

We think of emptiness as a bad thing. It's bad when your fridge is empty, when your wallet is empty, when your brain is empty, when your schedule or womb or stomach is empty. We are so focused on being and staying filled. In the short span of time I call my Grown-Up Life, the most important thing I have learned is that God is carving out a big space inside of me for Himself.

At least, I used to think this big space inside of me was for Himself. Sometimes I think that the big, empty space is just for the sake of emptiness. All I know is that this big, empty space is one of the most important things about me. I've become a large receptacle, and I'm waiting to be filled.

Kathleen Norris, in Cloister Walk, though married, writes about celibacy from the perspective and insight of her monastic friends. Norris writes about how, in celibacy, the heart grows large and opens; there is room enough for the entire world, because there is no room designated for just one person or one exclusive type of love. I don't know if I'm going to be celibate my entire life, but I am celibate now. And I do find, when I look deep inside myself, that there is all this room and space, waiting for something. Sometimes, being empty inside feels horrible, and I run around frantically, trying to fill that hole with something  anything  that will remove the feeling of hollowness I bear. But more often, I feel and know that this space is good; it means that there is room in my heart for lots of people, it means that there is a lot of room in my heart for the love of God.

I want to be a person who is comfortable with space and silence. When you think about a cathedral, or a chapel, you think about empty space. Those spaces we call sacred are nothing but concrete cavities for love and worship. If there is one thing I know about God, it is that he loves it when we make room for him. I have become a room entirely. It is not that I have room for God, but that I am room for God.

"Aubade for a Friend" was written by Fr. Gregory Elmer, O.S.B. of St. Andrew's Abbey. You should read the entire poem, it's wonderful. I'm copying the relevant parts of it here.

Whoever excavates a deeper bay
In your heart, so that you can the better
Yearn to love Him more, Who carves
Out this most precious space in
Your soul, a wound that curiously
Comforts you, a cave of the heart
Now being painfully excavated to
House more God, more love, to build
Within the middle of that heart, not
Only a more capacious pilgrim hostel,
On the shores of your spirit, but digs
Deeper the secret pilgrim road to the
Bottom of our heart, where. . . .we pass
Over the world, and set forth to cross
The wilderness. . . .We stumble down a way ever more interior. . . .
which leads on, in this life. . . .to the life eternal.

Becoming a temple of the Holy Spirit is painful and takes time.

&

Pt. II
Today I went with my roommate to Urth Caffé for breakfast while her tires were being replaced. Over our multi-grain waffles and tea lattes, roommate and I talked about the weeks we'd had, both of which were full of unpleasant people doing and saying unpleasant things, to put it mildly. While we were eating, two deferential, hipsterish twenty-somethings approached our table and apologized for interrupting us. They said they had a word from God for a woman in yellow, and that I was the only person matching that description in the restaurant (I was wearing a yellow cardigan). I can't remember every word they spoke, but by the end of that encounter, both roommate and I were wiping tears away.

The content of their message was that God sees me and wants me to know a new season is being ushered in, that a lot of changes are coming all at once which will be hard to understand. But God is leading you, they told me, like Dorothy down a yellow brick road in the Wizard of Oz. And, speaking even to this wilder-wandering time, they said that God has seen me in the shadows.

Every time God speaks it is always good news. I keep forgetting this, but it's true. Every time God speaks, it is always good news. 

The pinnacle of encouragement is to hear another person say that God loves and delights in you. God sent someone today I didn't know to just the right place at the right time, because he wants me to know I am loved. I am dearly loved.

Roommate bought me a Rifle Paper Co.-esque art print to commemorate the day. Do you know what it says? It says, "You are loved."

Dear Reader, you are becoming room for God, and you are dearly loved.


Oh! How he loves us! 

Grace: A Beautiful Punch in the Face

My word of the year is grace. I’m living this year trying to understand what it means when we say that God is gracious, that we are transformed and renewed by grace, that grace is free and present and abundant all of the time. One thing I’ve been learning is that sometimes the working of grace in my life looks like a punch in the face—it shocks me, hurts me, makes me take a look around and reconsider my expectations. But other times, grace is like a warm hug, a spicy samosa shared with a friend, a cup of Earl Grey, laughing in the midst of a field of poppies, an infant’s little fingers wrapped around my pinky, breathing.

God gives us grace, in the packaging and dosage we most need, at the times when we most need it. I’m learning to recognize the presence of God in the everyday. I eat a strawberry: its sweet redness, its heart-shaped perfection, reminds me that God is good.

And then there are those other moments. The moments when what I most want is to just walk out of the room, out of the door, into nothingness, because existence feels futile, and frustrating, and impossible to bear. Then I think grace is like a sharp slap across my face, because it makes me remember that I have been created for something more: for something good, and true, and lovely. The me who was satisfied wandering around in circles pretending to live is more desperate than the me who is sitting on the ground, rubbing my sore jaw and wondering what just happened.

Grace is supernatural. That means that grace intervenes in nature—in the ordinary, the mundane, the status quo, the expected. Grace is wholly unexpected, wholly undeserved, and dearly needed. My natural self cannot get anywhere without God’s cosmic karate chop. I need God’s power not just to make all of my dreams come true, but to shatter the dreams that are built on false and shaky hopes, and to build new dreams on substantial foundations.

Grace meets me where I am, and then, like a whirlwind, it picks me up and whirls me around until I lose my bearings—leaving me somewhere else. The land may look barren—broken rocking chairs strewn about the desert, someone’s dazed cat stalking by on wobbly feet, but it is here, in this place, that I can meet God, because there is nothing else I expect to see. I have been taken out of myself to meet him. To meet God on his own terms, in his own timing, on his own fruitful soil.

To find one’s self in the economy of grace is to find that you do not have enough money for the journey. In fact, you are a thief and a stowaway and you have been found out. But instead of being tossed off the train, with your raggedy carpet bag tossed behind you, you find that you are invited to dine in the first class coach, provided you admit to the other passengers that your fashionable clothes are borrowed, and that your fare has been donated, not earned. It is in grace that we learn how poor we are. Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. This means, blessed are you when you can’t pretend anymore that you have anything to give, anything left to bargain with, anything to cover the fact that left to yourself you are only naked and mean and ugly.

Grace takes this ugly unkindness and dresses you up, beautifully, generously. Suddenly, you are the belle of the ball, and you remain here—in twinkling crystal slippers and a blue gown—until you forget that your carriage is really only a winter squash and that rodents alone will befriend you. Then, here comes grace, like a clock chiming twelve, to remind you that all you can claim for yourself are rags and woes and a bed made of ash.

Thank you, God, for the punch in the face that reminds us of how good you are, and of our poverty without you.

As Anne Lamott says,

“Remember, God loves you exactly the way you are, and he loves you too much to let you stay like this.”

A Vocation of One's Own

Sometimes I hate my job because it means that I am the only non-specialist in a world full of experts. I was not made to function as a maid of all work. I'm not a generalist by nature. I want to throw myself into some highly-specialized, creative and desperately needed, utterly meaningful work of my own. 

I've said it before and I've said it again: I want to be George MacDonald and Amy Carmichael smushed together into one person. This is who I am. You figure it out. 

She sees the realities of this world and alleviates human suffering with a sacrificial love. 

He sees the realities of the world to come and communicates them to others with the creative power of his soul. 

I need a vocation. 


This thought that is getting me through the desert of now:

"His Kingdom is Upside Down and in Him your part is large and lovely and needed and art."

Surely, I was created to be more than a Teacher's Assistant.

The Giving Tree

Listening to the Pride & Prejudice soundtrack at the day's end with my hairpins removed makes me feel so spiritual. I'm sitting here, trying to write honestly. Right now,  I feel the lack of God's presence in my life. This week I've felt so. . .heavy laden. My soul feels as though it has been tied up in knots, twisted and gnarled, my psyche is suffering from Indian burn.

In moments like these, days like these, I see how hard it is for me to be even superficially pleasant. I don't know what makes me feel so badly, and I am aware, almost every moment, of my own inability to live a life of love. At work, one of the instructors read the book "The Giving Tree" by Shel Silverstein. She asked all of the students, and some of the staff, to choose one thing they would like to give others throughout the school year. I decided that I would give love, because that is the best gift I could think of, and the most costly. That gift mocks me every day, as I sit in my classroom looking at the Mother Theresa prayer for those serving the sick pinned to the bottom left corner of my bulletin board. It's hard to love, I tell you! But sometimes it's hard merely to want to love.

Today I feel full of despair again. It's so hard, sometimes, to believe that righteousness is possible. It's very easy to believe that the road to happiness is getting my own way, or the removal of every difficulty: it isn't though. When I pray, it feels like I'm begging an indifferent passerby on the street for sacks of gems. I don't expect anything, because I feel like a) I don't deserve it, and b) giving is not in the nature of the one I am beseeching. This is a lie of course, well, not the first part. I don't deserve anything beautiful, true, or good, but I'm expected to expect these things anyway. It's so hard to pray for joy when I feel like it never comes. It's so hard to pray for faith when you don't believe anything. It's impossible to believe that God is happy when I am so miserable. Or is it?

I need to be re-taught that God is a giving tree, that he hears us, hears me, when we pray, that he gives benevolently out of the overflowing goodness of his own excellent nature. But I doubt it; I doubt.

God is a giving tree. He gives conditionally, in that he gives us what is good even when this is not what we have desired. He gives conditionally, in that he gives when he ask according to his will. Is God deaf to my prayers? Have I sinned against him in a way that would cause him to stop-up his ears? Oh, God, grant what you command, and command what you will.

I have been thinking a lot about St. Augustine, Dante, George MacDonald, John Donne, Plato--everyone who writes about ordinate love and the beatific vision. It is so easy to love inordinately. 

"If ever any beauty I did see, Which I desired, and got, 'twas but a dream of thee." 

It's hard to be good. Part of the difficulty of being good is believing that God will make you good when you ask.

But God is a giving tree, he loves to give, to bless. He gives pain and he gives great joy.

Oh, I wanted to relate this back to George MacDonald. I'm re-reading At the Back of the North Wind, and I'm re-remembering (again) all that MacDonald says about being at the still point. Do you remember the still point? The still point harkens back to Boethius, to Dante, to lots of people. The point is this: at the center of the universe is God, a Being supremely perfect and happy. Evil happens around him, and he uses the good and the bad to shape human events while he himself remains wholly uncontaminated and unchanged. If I keep myself at the still point, where God is, I will not be shaken by the things in this life, small or great, that threaten to tie knots in my soul. I need to understand this because it is so easy to tie a knot in my soul. I am derailed by weather changes.

But God is a giving tree. He is a giving tree, and he loves us. He loves us. O! How he loves us!




Turn my eyes from looking at worthless things, and give me life in your ways.

The Valley of Vision: On Desire

O Thou that hearest prayer,

Teach me to pray.

         I confess that in religious exercises

the language of my lips and the feelings

of my heart have not always agreed,

that I have frequently taken carelessly upon

my tongue a name never pronounced above

without reverence and humility,

that I have often desired things which would

have injured me,

that I have depreciated some of my chief mercies,

that I have erred both on the side of my hopes

and also of my fears,

that I am unfit to choose for myself,

for it is not in me to direct my steps.

Let thy Spirit help my infirmities,

for I know not what to pray for as I ought.

Let him produce in me wise desires by which

I may ask right things,

then I shall know thou hearest me.

May I never be importunate for temporal blessings,

but always refer them to thy fatherly goodness,

for thou knowest what I need before I ask;

May I never think I prosper unless my soul prospers,

or that I am rich unless rich toward thee,

or that I am wise unless wise unto salvation.

May I seek first thy kingdom and its righteousness.

May I value things in relation to eternity.

May my spiritual welfare be my chief solicitude.

May I be poor, afflicted, despised and have

thy blessing,

rather than be successful in enterprise,

or have more than my heart can wish,

or be admired by my fellow-men,

if thereby these things make me forget thee.

May I regard the world as dreams, lies, vanities,

vexation of spirit,

and desire to depart from it.

And may I seek my happiness in thy favour,

image, presence, service.