Tag: Julian of Norwich

“Happy” New Year

ocean in maui
As anyone who reads this blog knows, I question everything, I resist, I am a seeker. My soul howls and it cries.

My heart is frequently conflicted, questioning, keening, searching, longing than finding and being at peace.

This causes me to doubt.  This brings great fear. This causes me to wonder if I’m any further along than I was last year.  This brings great heart ache.

This is a spiritual state of being and it is how I wake, with a daily, heart racing state of mind, filled with wonder, yes full of hope but always longing for perfection. And as I have been coming to know myself better this year and accept these things about myself, it’s been a hell of a year.

This I know.
This life we’ve been given is a long miracle.

This life is full of heartache and pain. I feel it, not only in my own life but in all that surrounds me. I wish I weren’t emotionally absorbing the bitter and acrid, heartache, loss and sorrow of others. I carry it all internally and it weighs on me, it hurts inside and sometimes even physically.

This I am learning, to feel it and not allow it to crush me.

I’m learning, surely, that God does not promise us happiness; all the while we continue to pursue it. How can we not, it seems we were created to long to be happy?

We’re owed happiness?

Or we can embrace our lot, and find a sense of joy amidst life’s hardship and pain?

And I have asked many times, where is God in the midst of it all? Why does God seem so silent? Why do I so quickly move to doubt, when I am or those I love are suffering?

It was Julian of Norwich who said this:

See that I am God.
See that I am everything.
See that I do everything.
See that I have never stopped ordering my works, nor ever shall, eternally.
See that I lead everything onto the conclusion ordained for it before time began, by the same power, wisdom and love with which I made it.
How can anything be amiss?

(Revelations of Divine Love)

The Holy One is working, if only I can slow down, listen, and discern the movement in my life.

And this is happiness —  a spiritual life. This is real more than ever, in the middle years of great sorrow, heartache and pain as I am slowing down, I am full of longing for God

to speak. All that Jesus did or said, all the pains he suffered and sorrows he shared, our sorrows and suffering, he took in obedience to his Father.

This is my heart’s longing and prayer, to be more like Jesus.  To be able to listen well to others, to love deeply and to take on other’s pain.  This, I know is a part of what I am being called to and as I learn to be strong, not in myself but in Jesus, this is a holy and happy life I am being called to, but it’s a long obedience and it is not, at all, what I imagined.

In this new year, and as I lay down the old year, I know that this will be a quiet place of contemplation and solitude.  It is something I never imagined.  It is, even so, full of joy and hope.

May you find the things the Holy One is calling you to in the new year.

On Paying Attention

At times like these.

When I am feeling so poignantly this illness depression, which is chronic and confusing and feels a lot like failure, at times like these  … I have learned to wait and pay attention.  Taste the bitter in this moment.    And see what God intends.
Henri Nouwen says of this patience:
“The word patience comes from the Latin verb patior which means “to suffer.”  Waiting patiently is suffering through the present moment, tasting it to the full, and  letting the seeds that are sown in the ground on which we stand grow into strong plants.  Waiting patiently always means paying attention to what is happening right before our eyes and seeing there the first rays of God’s glorious coming.”
I know intellectually that God wants me to let go of this grip I have on my pain.  He says “I will take it — your sadness, pain, fear, and hollow heart and make life out of it.”   This is the promise which gives us our hope.  This is everything.  Julian of Norwich says in Revelations of Divine Love:
 “God sees our wounds and sees them not as scars but as honors. . .”
It is possible to thank God for our weaknesses, our broken hearts, our frequent “failings,” even our sickness?  I think it is not only possible but necessary.

I believe He has something good he intends to come out of my heart falling over the precipice, shattered.

Yes, I’m weary of being so feeble and human.  Is it possible to thank him, yes and I am waiting expectantly as Nouwen says:

“Waiting patiently for God always includes joyful expectation.  Without expectation our waiting can get bogged down in the present.  When we wait in expectation our whole beings are open to be surprised by joy…, “Brothers and sisters … the moment is here for you to stop sleeping and wake up, because by now our salvation is nearer than when we first began to believe.  The night is nearly over, daylight is on the way; so let us throw off everything that belongs to the darkness and equip ourselves for the light” (Romans 13:11-12).

I am paying attention and I choose to be grateful nevertheless, which I wrote about over at Provoketive this week.

My cup is always half empty.  At least, without Jesus it would be.  Even with the Holy Spirit active it is an effort to be positive.   ….  Even in the midst of the hell of depression I am grateful.  God gives us this one life and we are charged to sort it out.   He guides us, truly he does, but much of life is us sifting through the good and the bad.

Life is choices.

… (more)

As we begin the season of advent it feels right amidst our clamoring to wait on Him.  In the fear, wait.  Anxious furtive thoughts, wait.

Pay attention and wait with joyful expectation.

MHH

Quotations from Everything Belongs by Richard Rohr and from Bread for the Journey by Henri J.M. Nouwen.