Lenten Breakthrough

Today was the first day that I was able to attend mass in THREE weeks. These have been some of the most harrowing weeks I can remember having endured.... for those of you who know how much I love mass.

I actually came down with an awful stomach bug last night, and since my son is also sick I thought that we had better stay home and not infect people. But something in me reminded me of the great graces we receive when we are there and so I took some Vitamin C, set my jaw, and told Satan he was not going to have my Sunday. I woke up this morning feeling tired but not as sick, so off we went. And God had it all set up for me, as you will soon see. :P

I had recently felt like I needed a refresher course in deliverance ministry. First, because I had been encountering so much to ENDURE since moving into Peter's dad's house that I was-- let's be honest-- a bit depressed, and had frequently felt that I lost HOPE in God's goodness.
Ive felt a bit powerless to help others lately, and in this ministry, that is not a good place to be.

Now, how can someone like me, who has SEEN God move miraculously time after time, lose faith in His goodness? Well, it's called Sin, you see? Although my God has always been faithful, I have a short memory. And when I don't FEEL Him there, I imagine that either He is not there, or that He is there and is simply mean... uninterested in my personal welfare. I imagine that He expects too much of me or doesn't know what I can handle. These thoughts are sinful, to say the least, and I usually recognize them as such and bring them to confession. That's why today's reading was so good for me to hear:
Reading I

Ex 3:1-8a, 13-15

Moses was tending the flock of his father-in-law Jethro,
the priest of Midian.
Leading the flock across the desert, he came to Horeb,
the mountain of God.
There an angel of the LORD appeared to Moses in fire
flaming out of a bush.
As he looked on, he was surprised to see that the bush,
though on fire, was not consumed.
So Moses decided,
“I must go over to look at this remarkable sight,
and see why the bush is not burned.”

When the LORD saw him coming over to look at it more closely,
God called out to him from the bush, AMoses! Moses!”
He answered, “Here I am.”
God said, “Come no nearer!
Remove the sandals from your feet,
for the place where you stand is holy ground.
I am the God of your fathers, “ he continued,
“the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob.”
Moses hid his face, for he was afraid to look at God.
But the LORD said,
“I have witnessed the affliction of my people in Egypt
and have heard their cry of complaint against their slave drivers,
so I know well what they are suffering.
Therefore I have come down to rescue them
from the hands of the Egyptians
and lead them out of that land into a good and spacious land,
a land flowing with milk and honey.”

Moses said to God, “But when I go to the Israelites
and say to them, ‘The God of your fathers has sent me to you,’
if they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ what am I to tell them?”
God replied, “I am who am.”
Then he added, “This is what you shall tell the Israelites:
I AM sent me to you.”

God spoke further to Moses, “Thus shall you say to the Israelites:
The LORD, the God of your fathers,
the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob,
has sent me to you.

“This is my name forever;
thus am I to be remembered through all generations.”

Clearly God is good. Clearly He has given us His name. Clearly this is better than bondage. But that doesn't resolve the problem of still "feeling" this despair. And boy can I have a pity party in my head when I want to.

So I went through this period of total darkness, followed by a period of repentance because I realized that this was wrong- but in which I still didn't recognize His goodness in my heart of hearts. No progress.

Then along came lent, and I prayed about it and felt that I should be responding by removing the one thing that I kept doing that I kept bringing to the confessional: Complaining. I resolved to stop complaining and just offer up whatever was bothering me. And I did.
But even though I wasn't complaining, I certainly didn't feel that I was walking in any kind of "close" relationship with God. I felt rejected by Him, and certainly defeated, particularly when Peter and I had been praying so much about certain things for our family and our prayers seemed to just hit a brick wall.
What was going on?

Something inspired me to pick up a book on Spiritual Warfare-- a book I hadn't read before but one that I had been meaning to glance over for a while. And I did. And it was as if everything fell into place. And even though I had been certain the book would be another protestant attempt to mass market spritual warfare for the spiritually unprepared, I read the entire thing in like, two hours, and was pleasantly surprised.
So surprised, in fact, that a layer of my pride was stripped right out from under me as I recognized that for months now I'd been so caught up in my Carmelite and wifely DUTIES and in accepting that suffering was redemptive that I had TOTALLY missed the part of the Gospel where God sends His Holy Spirit to be with me. This was why I had been floundering so much: I was trying to take on all these battles without the Holy Spirit's ACTUAL guidance, since I had become so prideful that I felt that I knew what the Holy Spirit was going to do next in each situation I was encountering. I didn't seek Him for answers to how to proceed in my battles, I just told Him: "This is a battle, again. I know what to do. Why aren't you helping me?" When I was met with silence, I would convince myself that the battle was won anyways, because I was still in communication with Him. But kinda like how I get mad when my husband watches YouTube WHILE listening to my innermost thoughts, I was doing the same thing to God. I refused to stop and LISTEN to Him because I felt I knew Him so well that I already knew what He would tell me to do.
Duh.

This book, The Women's Guide to Spiritual Warfare, was a great crash course in remembering to let GOD LEAD. It was, in fact, the thing I'd been missing all this time and the reason I kept wanting to go back to my protestant friends for prayer when I felt defeated instead of allowing GOD to work through my Catholic friends (yep, I did that too :P)
Don't get me wrong, there's nothing wrong with asking my protestant friends to pray, it's just that I wasn't trusting that my Catholic friends were "storming heaven" with power, if you know what I mean. Of course they were. And how dare I make fun of , say, pentacostals who say you aren't saved if you don't speak in tongues, if I wasn't trusting that the Holy Spirit could operate in ALL situations, not just the ones where the miraculous gifts were operating. In other words, I was just as bad as anyone who asked God for "signs and wonders." God is there, signs and wonders or not.
Jesus Himself said that the only sign we were promised was the sign of Jonah-- that He would raise from the dead after three days. Hellooooooo, Barbie. Wake up!
So, having read the book and being filled with a sense of remorse for just how stinking prideful I can be, I basically just fell on my face. And God was there and He gave me just what I needed: a firm discipline peppered with unconditional love. Wow.

After I finished reading the book, I prayed, and asked God what I could do to listen to Him more. One of the things He told me was to pray His Word again. Those other prayers, beautiful, eloquent, and perfect as they are that I've been relying on are wonderful. He hears them and He is pleased to answer them. But if I wanted to know His heart I needed to know His Word, and if I wanted to pray His will for people I needed to pray His Word, and since I am a person who has, like, five free minutes in a day... I needed to turn to His WORD and not just rely on other people's experiences of His Word. These are all things I knew, of course, but I guess I'm just as dumb as a box of rocks because I had completely forgotten that His Word is ALIVE. For all my Bible reading and Psalm praying, I hadn't submitted to praying IN the Holy Spirit, who tells us how to pray as we ought, in a very, very long while. I knew why. Because I hadn't recognized a battle I've been fighting since moving in here and had let Satan win for a time. I had been prideful and not prayed for myself....
But after that moment, I discerned that despair had crept into my spirit and it had to GO.

All of a sudden His Word came alive to me again. It spoke to me at every turn. And in it I not only found comfort and guidance but I began to find His presence again, because I KNEW He was good. The binding up of my evil tongue, which speaks from an evil, sinful heart, resulted in a release of power so great that I felt flooded by the Holy Spirit. And my spiritual eyes were opened and I recognized that there was a war over my family that I'd been letting Satan win.

Because you see, we live in a house were negative words, words of death, fear, anxiety, destruction, and despair are common. We live in a house with a big sign over my dining room table that says we serve the Lord, but our tongues (and I'm guilty of this as much as anyone, although this is something I've realized that, in our little family, at least, originated elsewhere in our heritage) our tongues were speaking from the overflow of our hearts. And our hearts were not sanctified by the Word. There was no LIFE in our tongues, which meant that there was very little LIFE in our lives.

It is possible, though you read your Bible every day, to remain unchanged. Not to progress spiritually. That's the beauty of the Sacraments-- they are sources of profound grace which come entirely from outside ourselves. When I received the eucharist today, I received into my person the entirety of God- His body, blood, soul and divinity. It ensured me that I was One with His Body. It covered me and filled me with His blood. It gave me a perfect love for Him and a union with Him. It helped me to become more like Him. All with just one action on my part: a willingness to receive.

I think that if I wasn't a Catholic, it is quite possible that this dark cloud which had settled over me (and by Dark Cloud, I mean this demonic and fleshly despair and not this "dark night of the soul or senses" which is a whole other animal, just to clarify) would have taken up residence for quite a while. The breakthrough came when I realized that there was a lot more going on in this house than just a hard new life. And that no amount of relics, house blessings, and regular bible reading and prayer were going to affect the Spiritual atmosphere if we weren't PUTTING TO DEATH these fleshly tendencies we have to sin. Which is where lent comes in--- it's the reminder we need each year that mortification of the senses, of the flesh, of the "icky" stuff inside us is sooo necessary to living a fruitful spiritual life. And that -- THAT--- was the key.
As soon as I stopped complaining, I can only compare it to unlocking a window to heaven, where light came pouring into our house. I literally FELT better in my body. And everything around me was illuminated-- I saw with spritual eyes again and not physical eyes. I found hope.

Of course, that made the devil mad. Everyone in my house got sick. I practically never slept. I was surrounded by turmoil and drama. But ultimately, I have been equipped, I have seen a glimpse of the reality surrounding us again, and I am determined that when God says "I give you my Name," that will be ENOUGH for me. I will not return to bondage. I will not go back to Egypt. My house will be set free and set on fire with the beautiful flame of His love.