Trusting God's Nearness

Week one of the 19th Annotation is a preparation week. You start off simply, establishing the habit of daily prayer (if it isn't already a part of your routine), journaling , and above all - getting used to grace. It's the grace that has turned out to be my greatest challenge.

Ignatius is big on grace. Each week of the Annotations whether a prep week or the exercises themselves, caries with it an invitation "to ask for what I desire...". Ignatius was convinced that God would give, by means of grace, whatever was needed in life, and in the accomplishment of his Spiritual Exercises. All one has to do is ask.

One of my first realizations as the Annotations began was how little I actually believed this. It was not a lightning out of the clouds moment, but a gradual dawning of realization.

The first week of preparation is a perfect example. The theme is a call to see God as loving mother and father who cares for us in a unique and personal way. The grace is a request for "a deep confidence and trust in God's care and nearness."

Interesting. I figured I already had a deep confidence in that, and intellectually I know God as a parental figure of care and concern.

Yet, my first two days of prayer were difficult, unsettled, distracted. In my journal I write about how difficult it has been to 'get into it' and focus. At the same time I leave these first two days with the distinct feeling that something is building, that God has a plan. Very strange.

The third day of prayer starts off weird from the start. Right from when I wake up. I'm filled with an excited, nervous energy. I keep thinking about when I'll get to pray next. Bits of song, hymns and such keep popping in and out of my head.

When I finally sit down to begin my 'official' time of prayer I am struck immediately by an indescribably palpable sensation of presence. In my mind's eye, Jesus plops himself right down beside me with a great big grin on his face and laughs. In my journal I write about my surprise at such a vivid image and strong sense of presence to which Jesus reply's "What did you expect. it's what you've been asking for isn't it?"

It's a really good question, and one which I will continue to confront as the weeks progress; What did I expect?

FYI, here's what the first preparation week looks like;

Theme: God, who is mother and father to us and so much more than we can imagine, loves us and cares for us personally.

Grace: To ask for what I desire -- a deep confidence and trust in God's care and nearness.

Prayer texts:

Day 1; Luke 11:1-13 Teach us to pray...how much more will my Abba give the Holy Spirit.

Day 2; Luke 12:22-34 Lilies of the field...you are much more precious.

Day 3; Is 43:1-4/Is 49:14-16 If you go through the fire, I will be with you...you are precious in my eyes...I have inscribed you on the palms of my hands.

Day 4; Hos 11:1-4 When Israel was a child, I loved my child.

Day 5; Ps 23 God is your shepherd and welcoming host.

Day 6; Ps 121 God is your guardian and protector. (On day 6, if another reading from the week continues to speak to you, return to it for continued reflection instead)

Additional Readings - For reflection outside of prayer times:

Ps 62 Confidence in God's protection

Ps 63:1-8 O my God, for you I long.

Ps 91 Our Guardian will cover you with wings; you will be safe within God's care; God's faithfulness will protect you.

Ps 95 If today you should hear God's voice, harden not your hearts.

Ps 131 A prayer of trust...as a child in a mother's arms.

Is 25:1-9 The helpless have fled to you; like them we have put our trust in you.

Rom 8:31-39 If God is for us, who can be against us?

Mt 10:29-31 Every hair on your head has been counted.

19th Annotation - A Light in My Darkness?

This Fall, in addition to all of the private hells I have been struggling through, I began journeying with the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius under his 19th Annotation. Normally the Spiritual Exercises would take place during the course of a 30 to 40 day silent retreat under the supervision of a spiritual director. That particular form would be extremely difficult for me to do at this point in my life.

The 19th Annotation allows for the Exercises to take place over a period of ten months or so. It generally involves up to 8 weeks or so of preparation and begins at or around the first week of Advent so that it traces the movements of the Liturgical Year. It also (ideally)involves meeting with a spiritual director once a week.

I had a couple of reasons for wanting to do the Exercises this year, not the least of which was the fact that, in order to direct someone wishing to journey through the Exercises one has to have first done them themselves. As with other decisions in my life, This one was entered into with a particular plan in mind only to have me realize quite quickly that God always has His own plans.

In a past post I let off a bit of steam regarding the burdens we have been forced to bear these past few months in the Cura household. I had agreed to do the Exercises in the early spring when things were still relatively normal. When Fall arrived and the world began crumbling down around my ears, both my director and myself began to wonder if this was the right time to do them at all.

At the same time, I couldn't shake the feeling...the longing to journey with the Exercises at this time...in this spiritual space. My soul cried out daily for consolation, for succor, for -- some sign that God had not forgotten us.

After some discussion with my director, we decided to at least begin the process and take it on a week-by-week basis. Perhaps the best decision we could have made!

The process has quite literally been a godsend. I was speaking with a priest friend of mine just a few days ago explaining that, without the graces of these weeks so far, and the weekly opportunity to visit with my director, these things would have broken me by now.

Many of my Spiritual Journal entries are too personal to post here. I've started more than one post only turf it before it could see light of day. Still, I really feel moved to share at least some of the insights and experiences of grace that I have been strengthened by. If only to assure myself that there is indeed light to be found, even within the deepest darkness.

Summaries and exerpts from the various weeks will be tagged as "19th Annotation".

Peace God Bless,

CA
Sent from my BlackBerry® wireless handheld

New Favorite Question...Mostly Because I Love Lego!

When you take apart a Lego house, and throw the pieces back in the bin...where does the house go?

I think it's a really important question.

Peace and God Bless,

CA
Sent from my BlackBerry® wireless handheld

Discovered Truths

It is the Truth of our human state that we are crucified to those whom we love most; and they are crucified to us.
Sent from my BlackBerry® wireless handheld

Too Much to Bear

For those of you who have followed this blog for some time, you will not be all that surprised that posts seem to fall off...in the fall. ;o)

Fall is a busy time in the parish and this year has been no different in that respect. What has been different is all the other stuff. Crazy stuff, awful stuff, I think I'm loosing my mind stuff;

A totaled car
A child's drug use
Another's potential mood disorder
Psychiatrist's visits
Family counselling
A father with cancer
An ailing mother with mysterious anemia
A home and family in deep turmoil
Adult and adolescent children in pains I cannot fix.

2009 has sucked far more than I could ever have imagined. And it's all felt a little too much to bear.

I had begun a post earlier explaining the past year's events of far more detail. It was a very cathartic process but in the very TMI. I really don't need to bore you with all the gory details.

What I really need are your prayers.
(And maybe a St. Jude devotion or two)

Peace and God Bless,

CA
Sent from my BlackBerry® wireless handheld

Nourishing the Roots of Your Soul

Though on vacation, ironically I find it the most difficult time to put together truly good blogposts. I'm still struggling with dreamwork (great dreams but hard to recall much detail) but one of the things I enjoy most of all is either sitting in my yard or going for walks with TeaMouse and Oliver and listening to the voices of the wind in the trees. When I discovered this article on the SDI blog talking about this very theme, I just had to share it, enjoy and God Bless!

"This spiritual direction meeting was different. I arrived as usual for my monthly visit with my spiritual director. Instead of sitting in a chair, she invited me for a walk around the neighborhood. It was spring, and I had been fretting about how to finance going to graduate school in theology in the fall.

My spiritual director asked some standard questions, Where is God in the resistance? and What's happening in your prayer life? She listened attentively to my responses. Then she did something atypical. She invited me to walk very slowly and notice the trees in the neighborhood. In silence, we walked together, listening for God in a new way: in the breezes blowing through the budding branches. Actually, listening for God in the trees was not new at all. During that extraordinarily ordinary walk on a sidewalk around a city block, my soul reconnected with the way I bonded with God as a child in the woods behind our house.

Years after my first walking spiritual direction session - during divinity school - my spiritual director invited me to find a tree on campus and visit the tree regularly. This was another soul-tending invitation. Spending time with a big, old, oak tree taught me about God's faithfulness and what it means to be related as children of God, no matter what. Silently visiting the oak tree helped me move from classroom head-learning of theology to my soul's understanding of the value of spiritual direction for creating peace and understanding.

Fast forward to July 2009. Thirty-six people gathered at St. Michael's College in Vermont, USA to learn about spiritual direction in the Abrahamic traditions. Muslim, Jewish, and Christian participants remembered our roots and stretched to learn from each other's similarities and differences. Participants were invited to notice the trees on the beautiful campus. Verses from the Bible and Quran referring to trees, roots, and branches offered participants ancient words to nourish their souls. During a closing ritual, we planted a tree to commemorate our time together, Building Bridges of Understanding. Together we offered gratefulness for the opportunity to learn and grow. Who knows! Perhaps a future theology student will find soul sustenance from the serviceberry tree we planted."

Do you have a story about a favorite place or memory that nourishes the roots of your soul? Please share your story by offering comments in the reply section.

PHOTO: George Krol and Liz Mahoney add compost to the serviceberry tree planted on St. Michael's College campus in Colchester, Vermont.

http://info.sdiworld.org/post/nourishing-the-roots-of-your-soul

If you have the chance, and the inclination, take some time to hear the voices of creation and they sing God's Word through branch and leaf this summer.

Peace and God Bless,

CA
--
This article was sent using my Viigo.
For a free download, go to http://getviigo.com

Sent from my BlackBerry® wireless device

Dreamwork - The Unexpected Dream

In the past I've written a number of posts on dreams, both how to have them with more regularity, and a bit on what you can do with them once you have remembered one. I've also relayed a few of my own dreams and done a bit of work with them.



"Dreams Heal Many Hearts" Mosaic Beadwork by Diana Maus





If you care to take a look at some of those older posts you can find them here;

"Into the Dream"
Dreamwork 'How To"
Dreamwork: Touched by an Angel and the Mormons???
dreamwork - 'touched' redux
The Weirdest Thing To Ever Happen To Me
what to do at -52?


As my Spiritual Direction Training drew to a close and summer rolled around, I've found myself returning to dreamwork again. I have a bit more freedom with respect to methods of prayer not being bound by my training course, more freedom too to read stuff I've been meaning to for awhile.

I picked up the book "Dreams and Spiritual Growth; a judeo-christian way of dreamwork" last year during the course of my spiritual direction studies and never really got around to reading past the first couple of chapters. It really is quite a handy tool to have with respect to working with dreams and I would highly recommend it to anyone who is interested in this sort of prayerful inner work.

And so I've been trying these last few days to get back on the dreaming band-wagon. It's not an easy thing, grasping hold of these ethereal gifts. They easily slip through the fingers like trying to hold onto the ocean. But I was surprised at prayer yesterday morning when, in praying Lectio Divina with Sunday's gospel I had an interesting experience that reminded me of dreaming.

I'd never really made the connection before, between visions and images in times of prayer, and dreamwork. I don't know why, both involve taping into the creative unconscious, both can be highly symbolic and both are means by which God has communicated in the past (Jacob's dream of the Ladder, Joseph's dream to marry Mary, Mary's vision of the angel, Peter, James and John and their vision of Jesus on Mount Tabor...honestly the bible's overrun with visions and dreams!). Later that day, as often happens to me it seems, I was reading from "Dreams and Spiritual Growth" and came upon chapter six titled: "Dreamwork and Prayer: Waking dreams and Dreamwork". Right when I needed it, the tools are there to work on my prayer times in different ways! Amazing!

From the book itself;

"If you plan to do dreamwork by yourself, one of the best ways to begin learning dreamwork techniques, oddly enough, is not to practice on your night dreams, but to use dreamwork techniques on material from your meditations and contemplations, especially if that material contains images, feelings and other forms of sensory response...

consider the kind of contemplation proposed by Ignatius Loyola in his Spiritual Exercises. In contemplating a scene from Christ's life or one of his parables, we are asked to bring the scene or story alive in our imaginations - by seeing the persons, how they are dressed, what actions they take; by touching things...by getting in touch with our won feelings as well as those of the persons in the story...

In this Ignatian approach, the biblical scene or story is dramatized in imagination...

Such contemplative material is like dream material in a number of ways; it comes to us in the context of God's presence; it is treated as a gift from God; it involves imaginal experience and affective experience; it often happens in a deeper than normal state of consciousness; ideally, it also gets us involved in the experience."

Meditation and Contemplation as dreamwork (or vice-versa), opens the door to a whole new way of experiencing, and understanding our dialogues with God in prayer and in dreaming. It becomes a way of teaching ourselves to speak the deeper language of the spirit in every form that language takes and has the ability to awaken our conscious self to the on-going Word of God as it is being spoken to our souls in every moment of our lives.

I find the prospect so very exciting!

With this in mind I'll present here the first work that I have done with a contemplative experience as a source of dreamwork;

My journal entry serves as the basis for my 'Dream Report' (see Dreamwork 'How To" for information on two of the techniques I'll use here; The Dream Report and TTAQ; Title, Theme, Affect, and Questions. These are the two basic techniques that all other dreamwork suggested in the book flow out of.)

"Praying Lectio with Sunday's gospel from Mark 6. One phrase really stood out for me at church yesterday and I thought I would spend some time with this particular Word for me;

"You must come away to a lonely place where I can teach."

It speaks so deeply to what I need and what I am craving. That quiet, lonely place where Christ can teach me. I repeated that phrase over and over again to myself and let my spirit quiet down, trying to find that lonely place, but I could not.

I had instead a vision of an annoying little girl pestering me over and over again. I can't recall anything she said, only that she was angry and quite poorly behaved. I remember thinking that this was exactly why I couldn't pray and feeling very annoyed.

But as I'm writing this I find myself feeling a little sad for the girl. She was trying so desperately to get my attention and my efforts to ignore her, while outwardly making her angry, I feel may have hurt her feelings. She has something to say to me, something to teach perhaps, and I refused to listen.

I pray for the grace to listen. To pay attention to those small voices crying out to be heard. I wonder what she has to say?"

It's a pretty brief report, but it doesn't have to be long to fulfill it's purpose which is to get the essentials down is as much detail as I can. It includes words I spoke, images and experiences that stood out, and feelings and emotions I experienced both during and immediately after the experience. The essentials of any dream report.

next comes the TTAQ;

Title: The Girl
Theme: Disturbances or annoyances I need to pay attention to.
Affects: I felt calm and at peace as I began with my mantra, this calm was quickly disturbed by the little girl as she began pestering me during my prayer, I felt annoyed and disappointed, angry. Afterwards I felt sad, a little dissappointed and guilty.
Questions: the first one came out in my dream report;

"I wonder what she has to say?"
Where did she come from?
What is her name?
Who is she?
Does she want to talk, does she have a question for me, is she just looking for attention?
What do I need to pay attention to before I can listen to the words of Christ in my prayer; "You must come away to a lonely place where I can teach." ?

These are all I can come up with right now, but it's enough to move into a third technique, that of Key Questions. Key questions are both functional and relational. They are not concerned with expanding the details of the dream but taking one further into the things the dream might be asking.

My Key Questions begin with the last one on the list; What is this experience asking me to do? What is interrupting my prayer? Where am I being invited to direct my attention? What am I ignoring about myself or my relationships that is making me sad or disappointed?

Ahh. That last one hits a nerve.

Regardless of what anyone else ever tries to tell you, only you know what your dreams mean. Dreaming (or in this case - meditation and contemplation) consists of a private language spoken and known only between the soul and God. No one else can tell you what something means to you, or what questions may be raised.

In this case, as I was writing my key questions, while they all seemed like good ones and ones I might like to spend time investigating, that last one, "what am I ignoring" really hit home. It felt as though my eyes were just opening up and I was finally beginning to see. Someone else may have wanted me to focus on one of the other questions, or may have asked something different entirely, but for myself, these are the words my contemplative experience, my time with God, want me to pay attention to.

If I had the time, I might sit down and actually write out my response to this key question. I may sit with my journal and freely and openly (without censoring my words) write out what I believe the possible answers to it are. Within those possibilities again, something may stand out to me; another 'aha' moment of revelation that speaks to me and my situation on a very personal level.

Alternately (and this is how I will handle it today) I may continue to ponder this question over the course of the day and allow this new awareness; that there are things going on that require my attention and which I am actively ignoring, to help me to see what those things may be and determine how I might respond to these on-going revelations in a way that will foster growth in my relationship with myself, with others and ultimately with God.

I find this such a valuable tool in understanding the Word as it is spoken in the events and experiences of my own day, my own life and such a valuable tool for spiritual growth. Over the next few weeks, as I am able, I will look at more dreamwork techniques using either dreams that I have remembered, or images and experiences from my imaginative contemplations.

Peace and God Bless

CA