Chatting about: Prayer and Union with God

Ruth (Guest): And with you, too, Dawn. Thank you for your witness of God’s loving mercy –– how he led you back to himself and gave you important work to do in your local parish.

Ruth (Guest): Hi Carol Ann. How are you?

Ruth (Guest): I wonder if Sr. Susan will be coming back to the chat.

Ruth (Guest): BRB have to get a jacket.

Ruth (Guest): Let’s try –– back to St. Francis de Sales TREATISE ON THE LOVE OF GOD.

Ruth (Guest): Good that the content is more limited, but I’m not sure I even know what an ecstacy is –– although I am very familiar with a sculpture of St. Theresa of Avila in ecstacy.

Ruth (Guest): I don’t think we should seek ecstacy but be open to it. And that generally means being focused on the Lord.

Ruth (Guest): I think Sr. T and St. John of the Cross use the term “unitive” as a higher state of mystical experience, in which, sometimes even the human faculties are suspended. I suspect it is the same thing.

Ruth (Guest): It is an experience of being united with God.

Ruth (Guest): I’ve had some powerful experiences in prayer, positive, but I don’t think any of was ecstasy.

Ruth (Guest): Yes, those are the human faculties that seem to be “put on hold” while God does his work in an individual. But you are right, Carol Ann, if we SEEK such experiences we do run the risk of self-delusion.

Ruth (Guest): I once had three individuals on one psychiatric ward who all were sure that they were God or Christ and that the other two were just impostors who THOUGHT that they were God!

Ruth (Guest): I like that expression, Carol Ann, “the ears of our souls tuned in.“

Ruth (Guest): Yes, Carol Ann. But their delusions started separately before they were admitted. It just became more complicated when they were all living together with more than a dozen other individuals.

Ruth (Guest): My bit about being a physician is, of course, tongue in cheek. ‘

Ruth (Guest): Maybe not so far off topic, Dawn. There is a saying something like: God became Man so that Man could become God-like.

Ruth (Guest): What a difference, though, between the arrogant “gods in white coats,“ the poor deluded, psych patients, and the humble, loving persons who we call Saints who mirror for us some aspects of the True God, a little like Jesus mirrored for us the Father: “He who sees me sees my Father.“

Ruth (Guest): That is what is so special about our Catholic Faith, and all Christian Faiths: God is not ONLY “out there” utterly transcendent, but also within each person, immanent.

Ruth (Guest): We can have a relationship with our God –– even a covenant relationship; and he takes the initiative.

Ruth (Guest): We prepare ourselves by meditating –– best with Sacred Scripture, through which he talks to us –– and by attentively being PRESENT.

Ruth (Guest): Being in his Eucharistic PRESENCE, helps a great deal.

Ruth (Guest): “God shaped hole” Yes, it is what I call being born hungry and thirsty.

Ruth (Guest): Dawn, here it is only about three hours per week that the Blessed Sacrament is exposed in a monstrance. But he is there to be adored in the tabernacle all the time. Trouble is, often the churches are closed, locked, and even those that remain open during the daytime are not on a predictable schedule. So you can drive 14 miles or more to stand before locked doors. Still I’ve sometime just sat in my car in bad weather or walked around outside the church in good weather just to be a little nearer to the Bo

Ruth (Guest): Body and Blood, Soul and Divinity hidden in a piece of bread I do not even see.

Ruth (Guest): That makes sense, Carol Ann –– or at least some sort of mystical experience of his loving presence.

Ruth (Guest): That’s hard.

Ruth (Guest): On Saturday June 2, there will be Adoration all day in the attic of the Lodge “The Guggenheim” donated to the diocese by that family. The Adoration is specifically to help the women attending Rachel’s Vineyard retreat downstairs.

Ruth (Guest): The monstrance at the Rachel’s Vineyard retreat is a carved wooden Madonna holding the host in her arms as she would the Child Jesus.

Ruth (Guest): It truly is moving. And the retreatants go for adoration after the volunteers from outside (we enter by a back way to protect the anonymity of the retreatants). Yes, I am signed up for the 7 PM hour.

Ruth (Guest): I am by nature/life experience inclined to be a little claustrophobic (there are no windows and the air is a bit stale) but I’ve never felt claustrophobic there, except maybe for a second –– more like I am embraced.

Ruth (Guest): The following weekend I expect to participate in a CLM retreat –– Commissioned Lay Ministers’ retreat at the diocesan retreat house that used to be a seminary.

Ruth (Guest): Good observation, Dawn.

Ruth (Guest): Exactly, Carol Ann.

Ruth (Guest): Dawn, I’m not sure.

Ruth (Guest): I was just starting to write, that one of the most startling, wonderful, growth evoking experiences I’ve had was just before my 40th birthday. I had been, in the City of Munich, Germany, during my medical studies, carving out an hour per day for Eucharistic Adoration –– various chapels. I had the schedule memorized, and traveled all over the city, mostly by bicycle, daily to find a chapel that was open.

Ruth (Guest): But it was while bicycling home from a hospital rotation, while crossing a long, narrow cemetary, that suddenly “out of the blue” I “heard” not with my ears, but clear as can be –– innerly –– “Steig ab; ich moechte mit Dir sprechen.“ (Dismount –– get off your bicycle. I want to talk with you!“

Ruth (Guest): I’d found a chapel every day, often in a hospital; but God chose this bit of sacred ground to talk with me!

Ruth (Guest): “Is that YOU Lord?“ I asked while obeying.

Ruth (Guest): It was raining out, and I had on yellow nylon rain cape. The cemetery was only a few hundred feet across, but at least a kilometer long. Normally I just crossed it, but this time he led me to push my bicycle the length of it, although I did not even know if there was an outlet at the end.

Ruth (Guest): He went on: “Forty years I’ve been walking with you.“

Ruth (Guest): I’d

Ruth (Guest): “known” the Lord, and belonged to him –– knew (joyfully) that the rest of my life would have to be given to him, that is made a private consecration, from age 15 at the end of a three year “experiment” in Faith. “Where were you, when . . . .?“ I asked, referring to some very hard, very early experiences.“ I could account for him walking with me for the past 25 years but not before that.

Ruth (Guest): He responded “Ich war da.

Ruth (Guest): “ (I was there.)

Ruth (Guest): Over and over again we went through stations of my life, and he said, “Ich war da.

Ruth (Guest): No Dawn, German. He spoke to me in German –– probably because everything else was in German during my work/study day and when I studied Scripture I always did it in both languages, so that I wouldn’t have to struggle with translating if I were, for example, in a prayer group.

Ruth (Guest): All the flowers seemed to become more beautiful, the air fresher. It was a Polish Cemetery; I didn’t pay attention to any of the stones or anything, only to His instruction. “I was there.“ The voice was gentle, strong, reassuring. He corrected me. I had thought that he’d revealed himself to me when my “experiment” ended as an outcome of the three year “experiment” –– which I’d worked hard at and suffered a great deal in order to persist –– while attending a public school, and with no one to talk with a

Ruth (Guest): about my search for THE TRUTH.

Ruth (Guest): But he made it clear to me that I could not have even sought him had he not given me the hunger and thirst for Truth (the God-shaped hole, I guess you would call it Carol Ann).

Ruth (Guest): Toward the far end of the cemetery, after filling me with so much love and insight –– and assurance that even when horrible things had happened to me as a child ––

Ruth (Guest): He was there. I’d protested a few times; “I’m not even a parent, but I would not allow that to happen to ANY child! But his gentle reassurance: “I was there,“ convinced me. He must have felt the cold kitchen floor on my left side after my mother had shaken me so hard that I could not respond at all(much later she told me she thought she had killed me.) And when I was nearly drowned in New Bedford bay and my brother pulled me out and my father resuscitated me.

Ruth (Guest): I’m Ok. Hard memories. But he was there. I am alive. More lives than a cat!

Ruth (Guest): Thank you. Yes. And we have or had the parents He gives us, too. So it is all good!

Ruth (Guest): Indeed.

Ruth (Guest): Toward the end of this long, very reassuring experience, it seemed to me he asked me: “Will you give me your children?“

Ruth (Guest): I did not have any children. Perhaps I imagined that I might one day get married and have children. We chatted a little about that. But quickly I just told him, I wanted to do whatever it was He wanted me to do. All that I am all that I have, belongs to him. So if I was have children I would know that they belong to Him first and foremost. If he wanted me to become a nun, just make it clear, and I’d be there. If I were to stay single “in the world” that’s OK; the work of a doctor can be life-giving,

Ruth (Guest): too. I think I had to go all the way back to the gate that I normally went out of. I have only a foggy memory of all that followed. But I was planted and watered in his care and I knew it, really, maybe for the first time.

Ruth (Guest): I felt at peace, maybe more so than ever before.

Ruth (Guest): On my birthday I made macaroni and cheese, substituting practically all the ingredients. The mother of my goddaughter brought a salad. There were only four of us in my student apartment. It was a pleasant, very special birthday. I knew even more deeply than ever before, ““Mir gehoeren einander.“ (Bavarian dialect, something that an old married couple might say to one another: “We belong to one another.“

Ruth (Guest): Wow! I’ve/we’ve gone way overtime. Miriam called. I said I’d call her back. Please pray for her, for us. She went all through Catholic schools, and while I was in Europe she converted to Orthodox Judaism.

Ruth (Guest): She is very active in her synagogue.

Ruth (Guest): Good night, dear friends in Christ. God bless your week, ‘til we meet again.