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.
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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
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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
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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

SDI Wisdom Teachers

Spiritual Directors International has been featuring these neat little video chats with Spiritual Directors from a variety of backgrounds. The two they have up this week are with Jamal Rahman an Islamic Spiritual Director from Seattle and Dr. Janet Ruffing RSM co-founder of SDI. Both present interesting perspectives not just on Spiritual Direction itself, but of our longing for a spiritual relationship with God, how that longing manifests itself, is spoken about, and how essential it is for us to, at some point in our lives, address this deep need of our soul.

Love Means Balance

"In everyday life, then, I must hold myself in balance before all of these created gifts insofar as I have a choice, and am not bound by some obligation. I should not fix my desires on health or sickness, wealth or poverty, success or failure, a long life or a short one. For everything has the potential of calling forth in me, a deeper response to my life in God."


Balance in all things. This is hard for me to do. Ignatius invites me to examine my life with an eye towards where the scales have been tipped. Where is it that dis-order has hidden? Not those times and places and things to which I am bound by obligation, but those things to which my attachments are the result of choice.

I spend much of my time working. This is not a dis-ordered use of my time...it is essential both to uphold my human dignity as well as to honor my commitment as father and husband to my family. To experience life in the love of God, I do not have to give up these things; job, wife, children. It is not a call to become a hermit in the woods, but a call to seek God out, and God's challenge to respond in love, irregardless of the situation I may be in.

Interesting that these invitations are also a central component of the vows of marriage. In good times or in bad, sickness, health, poverty, wealth, success, failure, life and death. Both the sacramental vocation of marriage, and Ignatius assert that in all of these can be found opportunities to discover and respond the life in love that God is offering.

The question for me then is simple, and the hardest of all to answer honestly; how am I responding today, where I am, in this moment? If I am not responding in love, to love, is it because of some dis-ordered expectation? Did I expect it to be easier? Less challenging? Does the love I express and share depend on good things happening to me?

That's a hard one! Good things aren't happening to me right now. We're in a tight spot so-to-speak through no fault of our own. It's not fair, it sucks, it hurts, it makes me angry (I'll spare you the gory details). Suffice it to say I had expected things to be going much differently this year.

Through it all I continue to hear my director's voice as she echoes Ignatius' own invitation, "Where do you see God working in all of this?"

ARRRGG!

I want to cringe when I think of it. Even though I know it's coming, I want to hide from it, bury my head. Run screaming. Where is God? Where is God?! How the H3ll am I supposed to know? I'm busy doing all the right things, being the kind of nice person you're supposed to be and crap keeps happening (yeah, I say 'crap' when I'm praying sometimes...but only when I feel it's called for).

But when I stop my vitrolic outrage for a moment and start to look, to really search in an honest way, I begin to get hints. I get inklings that perhaps I'm not as abandoned I it feels sometimes. When I close my eyes, two images spring into view flashing simultaneously like the flip-book comics my friends and I used to make at the edges of our notebooks in school. I am standing in a dark space with fists clenched and thrust to the heavens...I am held tenderly by Christ. Fists clenched/tender embrace...screaming outrage/tender embrace. The two images flash over and over until, as in those entertaining books of old, they become one and the same image. Embraced within my rage, loved within the injustice, calmed within the storm.

Peace.

It's the hardest thing in the world to examine with real honesty, and without pride and selfishness clouding my vision, the things I've become attached to, those things upon which I've unconsciously made my own response to love contingent. Short temper, depression, isolation, withholding of affection, silence. These are not the fruits of love, but of attachment to my ideas of how things ought to be. My attachments to perfection, and life isn't perfect. If I save my love only for those moments when everything and everyone is perfect in my life, my response to the life and love of God, my opportunities to move further toward my goal and purpose "to live with God forever" will be few and far between.

The question has been all wrong in my head. "How can I be happy in all of this?" must change into "How can I continue to love in all of this?" In the happy and the sad, in the good and the bad. My goal, always, must be love and if something, anything stands in the way of my loving, it must be let go.

Ignatius puts it all into perspective by calling me to find balance in the embrace of Christ and in so doing discover that all along;

"My only desire, and my one choice should be this:
I want and I choose what better leads
to God's Deepening His life in me."

When I choose this, to love, even when things aren't going well, even when life does not fit in with my image of perfection, God's life deepens. I am filled with an increased desire to love, to reach out, to show affection, to help, to heal. And I learn, over and over and over again, that the fruits of love are found, not in perfection, but in the choice to love in the face of imperfection. The choice to love, irregardless of circumstance.

This is the grace that I desire most of all. It is this grace that I pray for today, and for this week as it begins; the strength, the courage, and the spiritual freedom to choose to love...in spite of myself.

CA

Math and Science as Prayer; Truth, Beauty, and the Spiritual Geometry of the Universe

I'm a science buff. I guess more like a groupie. I don't always understand it all, but I love the beauty of it, because there can be real beauty within science and mathematics and when the two meet, when it's just right, it can evoke a sense of awe and wonder that touches on the spiritual.

Case in point, the E8 geometric diagram and exceptional lie algebra root system spanning 8 dimensions and consisting of 246 points. The various explanations of the system;

What is E8?

Visualizing the E8 Root System

E8 Mathematics

fly well above my head space (admittedly I'm a firm 'C' student when it comes to math...but strong 'B' in physics...hahahaha).

The E8 structure of vector points has been around for close to 120 years or so but it took a surfer dude and self-proclaimed nomad to correlate it's inherent beauty of form and symmetry with particle theory in such a way that it may indeed help to explain the relationships between all possible particles in the universe and how they interact within the bounds of all four known physical forces; strong nuclear, weak nuclear, electromagnetic, and gravity.

Einstein's special relativity managed to pull together three of these, but could find no place for gravity to fit in. Over the years several theories have been proposed with the most 'hip' being String Theory (which always left a weird taste in my mouth). The problem with these others is that they all required numerous extra dimensions and other 'deus ex machina' type devices to make them work and many would be extremely difficult to ever prove.

And so along comes Garrett Lisi who, with his doctorate in particle physics and surf board in hand, began to appreciate how smoothly many of the current working theories of the physical universe (special relativity for one) fit in to the E8 model. As he worked it over in his head, he began to see how each known particle (226 to date) could fit into the 246 points of the E8, he saw how the current E8 was able to hold within it properties and relationships science already expects (such as the fact that E=MC2) and how it had space within it for 20 other as-yet unknown particles. That's exciting because, unlike theories which demand we come up with the ability to perceive and measure properties in alternate dimensions, his 20 missing particles could actually be discovered right here (using the LHC for example), in our own space and time and plugged right into the places that are open and waiting for them in the E8 model.

I know I've completely over-geeked this but for me, it does hit on the underlying nature of the universe as God created it. It's simple, and it's beautiful to behold, yet it contains great and awe-inspiring mystery.

Each point, which would represent each known particle, is intimately connected with each other point. It is not random, it is not haphazard. There is purpose, and logic, and reason...and above all, beauty. Real, honest to goodness beauty.

I am also struck by how the E8 figure, drawn in two dimensions, is in every respect not only a beautiful geometric figure, but is also one of the most common designs used in visual spiritual reflection and artwork and has been for thousands of years. The E8, as you've seen above, presents itself as an intricate mandala (remember my most popular post to date?LOL!) whose every point and every relational vector, draws the eye, the heart, the mind, and the spirit inexorably inward, toward the center of...well of everything. The place where the geometry of the physical, and the spiritual meet, to the crossroads of what is seen, and unseen. It presents to the senses the Truth of the reality that surrounds us, that there is an intimate connectedness between all created things and it is Beauty which binds us all in the very heart and mind of God.

TED Talks: Garrett Lisi On His Theory of Everything -