During Lent the elements lift one's heart and mind and soul to reflection. For those of us who desire to be more through, with, and in Christ, we tend to sense the Holy Spirit working in us especially in this liturgical season. We recall what Jesus said to St. Catherine of Siena: You are nothing; I Am All.
Here, in the quiet of this unfinished hermitage, I ponder God's will in my life. I pray for God's will often--to listen to His will, to hear His will, to discern in all that is about me temporally and spiritually of guidance from His will, and to be in His will. I consider the Words of Jesus as perhaps the most pure means of being in His will: Remain in My Love.
My own Lenten illness remains a challenge, mostly in just feeling strong enough to get up and begin some manual labor. I had hoped this week, but the ascent from my cozy sleeping bag will be gradual; perhaps today I can sand, prime, and paint some trim. Perhaps I can paint a final coat on some door trim upstairs. It depends upon my body's resilience from what continues of slowly improving sinus infection; and I know the strep infection within this Lenten suffering was wearing.
Then there has been the increase in phone calls with the aunt and the cousin, regarding the struggle-to-live of the young family member whose flu turned into undetected pneumonia into sepsis into septic shock. She made it through a thoracic-cardio surgery Friday night; the infection needed to be removed from around her heart, lungs, and her chest cavity cleaned out from it so it would not return.
Saturday her condition improved; breathing tube removed, all was trending in the right direction, her organs gaining a must-needed rest from the dialysis taking over for her kidneys. We were uplifted and had a chance to praise God without it being a more willed praising. Then Sunday came the update that overnight her white cell count had doubled, the doctors were worried, Infectious Disease Team being called. So back to the more full-press praying, and I was texting, emailing, and posting this update on social media.
And I had to call my aunt to try to explain to her, and to help her sift through the wordage as she calls her church's prayer chain leader with the updated prayer needs. People inquire; they want to know the teen's progress and what next in prayer needs. I also called later to reassure of what the doctor thought, that the teen's body could work through this hurdle; and she is monitored carefully, of course.
Later in the night--too late to call the aunt--my cousin called and had much to discuss. She just needed to talk and hear my voice, she said. It was all very positive, again; and it does seem the lead doctor's assessment to let the teen's body have more time to work through the white cell spike to improve. Yet the cousin wanted my advice on something to do with finances and asking for money; my advice ended up being much wasted word and energy.
Amidst the increased activity of interacting with many friends, family--the various personalities played out in the situation. This includes the woman who receives the prayer updates to pass onto their prayer chain of the church to which the family is affiliated. Even her personality traits, her idiosyncrasies and need to be in charge, the top dog, erupted as I had been texting immediately the prayer update to another person who would send email to the prayer chain leader. Then I realized my aunt was trying to call in the update to the prayer chain leader, even if the aunt was tiring. Yet she wants to do this, insists; and I know it is therapeutic for her.
Mercy! All situations help in grasping more God's will for us in the present moment. We also can fit the pieces of His lessons in us in order to grasp God's will in the forward progression of our lives.
I've been discerning with the help of someone as far away physically as Fr. V in Nigeria. With a contemporary Catholic hermit's "window to the world" in a laptop, the direction can come easily. Or in a letter from my spiritual father, he helps shed "light". It is all good, all lovely, all being sifted and sorted and flowing in a God-willed direction.
For me, this Lent I've needed many lesson-examples in the tangible and temporal as well as in the spiritual or through mystical means. They all do flow one from into another. The temporal in which our lives seem steeped, flows also very much so in the spiritual. And all the while the spiritual is in and around us if we can be in the mode of pondering God's will, in awareness that His will is ever washing through us and pressing us from moment to moment, giving us guidance, leading us.
I'm yet sorting through the thought that had I not said not a word to my cousin of what the Lord had shown me from the get-go regarding her granddaughter, had I not kept trying to break through to her with the reality of severity of the infection, and to make sure an early suggestion that the teen had beginning of pneumonia and to get her to the renowned hospital for children where specialists can test for all strains of pneumonia--yes, this situation would have been handled sooner than later.
However, all that I tried in communicating and urging, and of how in what I was told many, many years ago is the gift of "inner sight", and all my heightened sensitivity which makes me all the more intent, really did not affect the outcome. It was when the teen's kidneys and liver began to fail and the one doctor who finally caved late at night (perhaps finally facing what he could have in the morning when he discovered her septic shock and kidney issues)--only then was the girl lift-flighted to where I'd been beseeching from the get-go before she was in dire condition.
And I've been reflecting upon the saints and mystics, and of how some or many came to a level of prayer of faith, and would not have details pouring into them from others. And this would be for hermits, as well--the traditional hermits which include the prophets and visionaries of the Old Testament and of such as John the Baptist in the New Testament.
They did not have phone or internet, and not even that many people around them--but one or two if that, for the more ascetic hermits--and their prayer was informed by God through the Holy Spirit. They had such a level of prayer that I can only consider it to be more of the unitive way, of union, or at other times of affection and the transitioning degrees of contemplation. And their prayers were so efficacious! An image might come to their inner senses, or a message, or in a dream--or nothing at all but an infusion deep in their souls; yet they prayed and God's will prevailed as it always does.
It is not that they did not need to pray; they prayed as St. Paul advises, pray without ceasing. And that portion of Scripture in which we are told that the Holy Spirit prays for us when our words limit or are not even possible--our sighs, our groanings: the Holy Spirit is praying for us.
I suppose my present moment summation for what God wills of me is to desire that quiet and peaceful prayer that is affective prayer to prayer of quiet to prayer of union with God in which I am in Him, my self nothing, and God Is All. But I must wait for Him to do as He wills in regard to what He wills in how I pray. In this situation, I have verbal tasks and coordinating skills. Call, text, email. Another text came from my cousin, asking me more about the personality of someone there with them in the hospital who keeps creating difficulties.
So I wrote back some suggestions and gave the names of a couple of personality disorders. If they can learn more the symptoms and underlying causes--just as the doctors needed to find the source of their teen's sepsis in order to treat it--they will better be able to turn frustration and anger into compassion. But also they can learn some strategies to put into place so that they are not in knee-jerk reaction to the person's varying manipulations and behaviors. That effort in providing answer to her inquiry ended up as a murdered carcass dumped out of a car which then speeds off. It is how the Lord is teaching me repeatedly to sort and sift various aspects of interactions.
Perhaps the Lord is willing that I--yes--live in the present moment with whatever way He wishes me to pray, for in this particular situation, it was not charitable to not respond to my cousin's first text of urgency and need of prayers, nor the updates and the added duty in love to call the elderly aunt. For now I must discern the level and degree what of God's will for my involvement in others' crises and requests for prayer: one situation at a time.
And there is a choice to be made, for me in my responses to extraneous requests for advice on this or that. I can kindly but firmly mention that I know the person can pray and listen and be guided in what to do. That will not be difficult for two reasons. The person is not used to my responding that way, and sometimes I do (believe it or not) have experience and insights that are tested, true, as we learn much from our journeys through with, and in Christ.
It is so true that in this situation as well as others recently, I learn much; for I am not much evolved as a soul as well as God wills of each person what He wills. Not to each and all does He will the same, by any means. We see this in the variety of hermits in history and even contemporaneously. Not any of us are on the same "page" at the same time, nor are we given the same set of circumstances in the living out of our hermit vocations, and the variety of inner-vocational constructs seem endless the more we examine the lives of holy hermits.
In other words, do as Jesus asks us: Remain in My Love. We children of God are in process, always (hopefully) learning. Knowledge leads us to better understanding, and when we understand and strive to remain in His Love, we gain wisdom.
All the gifts of the Holy Spirit are in different levels of temporal and spiritual. We do best to progress through all levels of which we can view as two parallel paths, with our temporal situations benefitting from the gifts of the Holy Spirit to help us, and also to be in Christ on the spiritual path, in which the gifts of the Holy Spirit are beneficial all the more in that trajectory.
We can image one path, the spiritual, on higher ground than the temporal path of our situations and ways of thinking and being. Yet the gifts of the Holy Spirit are in each pathway, assisting our beings in our earthly situations that are also essentially spiritual situations, thus. The spiritual pathway remains eternally, though, as being in essence and substance, higher and predominant.
When we do die, it is well to remember that we will not be functioning in the temporal in any temporal capacity. That path will be no more for us to tred. All will be of the spiritual--our thoughts, feelings, senses, means of communicating and movement. The trajectory is always toward God in His Love and Light.
That is why even in the most anchored of temporal situations, to remain in Christ's Love is profoundly best. And while very difficult for us to perceive "how" to do this--how we can remain in His Love--we can simply ask to remain in His Love, desire it with sincerity, and God will do all necessary. We will be in His Love.
Remain in His Love in His Real Presence. God bless His Real Presence in us!
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