MY NEW APPROACH TO AN OLD WAY TO PLACE MYSELF IN THE PRESENCE OF CHRIST, AND WAIT.

One of the phenomena of urban life in big cities is that they simply run out of room. No space anywhere. The only solution is to tear down the old and replace it with multi-storey buildings. That got me thinking about my situation at 85 years old, having accumulated many memorized prayers, and I keep reciting them over and over. This would drive a teenager mad because just repeating the prayers over and over is so dull and useless. Ironically, these prayers are repetitive. What changes in each case is that I make new wine skins using the new wine of Christ, which is expanded in me this day. For behold, says Jesus, I make all things new. In my somewhat naive notion of Catholicism, all I could see was that saying these prayers would help me out, but perhaps others.

After joining the Lay Cistercians in 2014, I resumed the routine of repetition, as consistency and continuity are key to silent prayer, utilizing Cistercian charisms and practices. So, I just kept saying my Lectio Divina, Scripture. The Rosary is a private, spontaneous prayer that is repeated over and over, except for one thing. I began to abandon my fixation on saying prayers to begin the slow and arduous conversion from my false self to my true self as adopted son (daughter) of the Father. I consciously and consistently began to go to that upper room of my inner self, where I locked the door, and just waited on the couch for Christ to show up. Of course, He didn’t. It took the longest time for me just sitting there, seemingly doing nothing, but every day at the same time, to wake up to the reality that God only speaks in silence, and I was so overcome with pride and talking TO Jesus that I could not hear what He was telling me in the silence and solitude of my heart (Matthew 6:5)

I came to the very slow but ever compelling conclusion that to listen to the heartbeat of Christ sitting next to me, I had to play by God’s rules and not mine. Slowly, this repetition gave way to my becoming less and less my old self and more and more attuned to Christ, now by engaging the Holy Spirit as my Advocate.

During one of my Lectio Divina sessions, I realized that my activity is making God in my image and likeness, rather than the other way around. God speaks in the silence of my heart. Not the external silence of going to the bathroom and shutting the door on all the phone calls and interruptions, but the profound silence of abandonment of words, thoughts, petitions of want on my part, or just saying the Rosary or “going to Eucharist and Penance.” This demands the patience that I don’t have by nature, but which I can gain by being an adopted son (daughter) of the Father. Only God’s power can raise me up to newness of those wine skins created in His image and likeness. I abandoned wanting to hurry up my being present to Jesus by impatiently waiting to be entertained or inspired by flowery words.

In this Lectio Divina meditation (lectio, meditatio, oratio, and contemplatio), I speak to God and offer my frame of reference (Rosary, Eucharist, Eucharistic Adoration, Scripture Reading, Spiritual Reading, and prayers for the intercession of Mary in my journey). What I should be doing in all these activities is not to abandon them because they are repetitive, but to grow spiritually ever deeper into the Mystery of Faith to the point where the critical part is not waiting for Christ to talk to me in these practices, but to abandon everything to let Jesus do the talking through the Holy Spirit.

What I learned is how to learn of Christ, for He is meek and humble of heart, and I do find rest for my soul, a rest the world can neither fathom nor provide. As Christ began to grow within me each day because of my repetition and consistency, I consciously started doing something for myself that was beyond my control. I could now relax and not be held hostage to time, or just say the Rosary for the hope of inspiration. Now I was in the process of becoming more like Christ and less like myself, with the realization that all of this begins anew with each new day. Each day is a lifetime, which only I can change.

This combined the mantras of both capacitas dei (growing in Christ Jesus by simply waiting in the presence of Christ with the Holy Spirit as our Advocate) and conversio morae (daily, consistently, and consciously placing my heart next to the heart of Christ, trying to synchronize our heartbeats). Sounds crazy, no? It is. My wake-up was the realization that what I thought was a repetitive prayer, like the Rosary, was indeed fixed and prayed with others or by myself. I could not change that. What changes, because I took the time to acknowledge Jesus is Lord (humility) and Magister Noster (Chief Teacher), then I was the one who changed daily. I was the one who had to make new wine skins. I had to do what Christ bid me do, which is to love others as He loved me. I couldn’t just shrug it off and say God has to do it for me. In essence, making new wineskins in my Catholic Faith was the time I took to realize that Jesus is the Son of God, Savior, and that only I am at the nexus of humanity and spirituality, where I choose God’s will as I know it through the Church Universal.

This, to me, is mCrossss, to take up each day the complexity and consciousness of realizing that my only purpose in life is to know, love, and serve God on this earth by helping others realize how to talk to Jesus in silence, and to love my neighbor as myself. I now focus solely on seeking humility and obedience to what Christ reveals to me through the Church and within the innermost part of my being.

As I deepen my prayer, my thoughts about who Christ is for me as an individual Catholic and how I can recognize Christ in all those around me become increasingly complex, if not impossible, to achieve through my own efforts. With Christ, I break those stereotypes of being Catholic and praying, and I just want to be in the presence of the one I love above all else. Everything else falls into its proper place in life. That is not to say that I won’t have bad days when I let my guard down and Satan gets to tempt me to be independent of God, but my consistency is the Church Universal, giving me the Real Presence of Christ now, each day. I am not able to put into words the deeper penetration I have into the Mystery of Faith, nor the thrill of actually facing that deepest part of my humanity in mind and spirit, one I cultivate on earth so that I can live authentically as a human can live in Heaven forever.

THE PENITENTIAL CATHOLIC AND A LAY CISTERCIAN’S ROSARY OF REPARATION

It was not until I used Teilhard de Chardin’s map (See below), which shows the ever-evolving complexity and consciousness of matter, that it began to dawn on me that I, too, was part of that process of becoming. I had always held that the only evolution was one of natural selection (Darwin), with which I agreed, based on what my reason told me. To make the jump from matter to mind and its evolution was a much more challenging proposition. I found in the archetypal hero story of Jesus of Nazarus how my spirituality (invisible reality) also was in the process of movement from less consciousness and complexity to more and ever deeper evolution, one that took my humanity from matter to mind and matter, to matter and mind that leads to the fulfillment of my humanity, the evolution of the invisible that has neither time nor matter.

Using this Teilhard map and my own interpretation of The Divine Equation (the six questions each of us must ask ourselves to move to that next level of our evolution, movement without matter or time), I began to slowly become capable of recognizing that all this time in my life, I had been sitting on heavenly gold on earth just waiting for me to dig it out. At play in all of this are my human tendencies not to want to be told what to do by anyone and my aversion to digging (spiritual laziness). So, at the age of 82, having a lifetime of thinking all I had to do was know more about my Catholicism, and that was enough to get to Heaven, I realized I had wasted my life all these years by making Christ into my image and likeness, and not a good one, at that. Simply put, in one Lectio Divina session, I asked the Holy Spirit what I looked like, and his answer scared the Hell out of me. As a result of that encounter, I converted myself (once again) to being a penitential Catholic who used Lay Cistercian spirituality to abandon my will to that of God’s and, in so doing, fulfill my evolution of nature to its rightful order (The Garden of Eden before the Fall). I also realized that I had no power from my humanity to reach out in front of me and grasp that next rung of the ladder, one that made no sense just to my reason alone, but was more palatable with faith informed by reason. So, my sole purpose for the rest of my life was to atone for my sins by praying for others, so that I might be forgiven my wayward wanderings. I was a roaming Catholic but not a Roman Catholic.

Besides my Lay Cistercian practices (Eucharist, Penance, Lectio Divina, Liturgy of the Hours, reverent reading of Holy Scripture, and conversation with others in whom the Holy Spirit dwells), I came across an obscure website while searching for Catholic mystics for examples. It was Our Lady of Akita (Japan), where the late Sr. Agnes Sasagawa received an apparition from Our Blessed Lady on June 12, 1973. I read the following URL, and it changed, not my life, but how I grew deeper in Christ (capacitas dei). https://www.ewtn.com/catholicism/library/message-from-our-lady–akita-japan-5167

At the tender age of 85 (and believe you me, that can be very tender), I grew ever deeper in the Mystery of Faith by dedicating myself to a life of penance and reparation for my sins of omission and commission. I do that by saying what I call the Dedicated Sorrowful Mysteries of the Rosary. Notice that the Rosary is one way I can place myself in the presence of Christ and wait. I only speak for myself on this, but dedication means I dedicate this decade to the following intentions:

• Agony in the Garden — in reparation for my sins
• Scourging at the Pillar – in reparation for all those in my lifetime whom I have taken for granted or completely missed seeing Jesus pit encounters
• Crowning of Thorn– in reparation for all clergy, consecrated religions, virgins, monks and nuns, and those who have betrayed their vows by grave sin (and most of all for their victims and their families)
• Carrying the Cross — for all in the Church Universal, the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church
• Jesus dies on the Cross– for the sins and unbelief of all those in the world, both past and present.

This growing fixation is becoming a passion. Not only the above intentions, but I now name each bead in honor of a person and their families, and their families. I would generally tell the person I am dedicating a bead to them and their families. So far, I have ten beads dedicated to Lay Cistercians, family members, fellow Catholics, Non-believers, and monks and nuns. More and more, I dedicate a bead to someone who may be in my heart (in pectore), cherished there until I can talk to them (or until we all meet in Heaven).

One of these days, I plan to post this on YouTube as a video, but for now, I will explain to you how I go about naming every bead, along with some commentary. The commentary is something I do for you to get a flavor of my intentions. We all must try to listen with the ear of the heart. Listen to what? The silence of God as I sit on the couch in my upper room of my inner self and just wait, in faith, in love, and in service to what God wants of me.

Christ is the center of my spiritual view of reality. Christ is the center of the Catholic Church Universal. Christ is the center of Mary’s life, whom she held within her womb, sanctified by the Holy Spirit, the one who created her in His image and likeness. When I think about all of what is, if only I can see it and then dig for it, inside me, waiting to be discovered, then my soul magnifies the Lord. Magnifies! The Church becomes my mother, giving me food for the journey, touching up my boo boos when I get cut and off the beaten path, and preparing me each day to uncover heavenly gold, gold which I can take to Heaven and decorate the mansion my Father has prepared for me. Only the rich can get to Heaven, but it must be God’s riches I must pack in the suitcase of my life. Knowing the difference is what being a Catholic means for me.

In the next blog, I will set forth exactly how I pray the Sorrowful Mysteries of the Rosary.

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