Praise God Almighty! Dr. H. understands. I explained to him when he called this morning, that as much as clinical hypnotherapy is powerfully useful in helping people with all types of problems, just one experience of the numinous of the Holy Spirit, or being plugged into God with all prongs in the socket or even some--the experience and effect supersedes by mega multiples anything that hypnotherapy achieves.
He put it like this, that clinical hypnotherapy and psychotherapy benefit those with secular lives. I pointed out that he and I know that there can also be people who are religious and belong to churches who are more inclined temporally than spiritually. We are all in progression, our souls in progression. But at least he thoroughly understands, and I said I have no issues with concerns about the healing process in my spine.
He gets it when I say that God has it all handled in the way and time and degree and amount He chooses for me. I also explained (since we've not been in such frequent phone contact as this in three decades) that God knows me, and He knows that I can get exuberant over various creative endeavors--good, yes, but not necessarily what He wants. And all the more, now, temporal time plays a part in what God wills of me, wants of me, in fulfilling the mission He has for me while on earth.
I told him briefly of the powerful experience of the Holy Spirit 24 years ago last night when I was confirmed a Catholic. I will not share it here, now; I might at some point, perhaps if I write something other of my conversion experience. A book, not super long, has been suggested for that topic. But I continue in this period of post surgery recovery and of dealing with my and others trying to grapple with just how slow and how limiting is the healing and the bodily movement.
But this is all of God's will and choosing. He knows how to deal with me, and I get excited and am pleased in the knowing and "getting it" of God's using even the set back now, from having over done it getting up 8 times two days in a row and of lifting that toilet seat apparatus that weighs 10-12 lbs.
As my angel or some heavenly saint or the Holy Spirit spoke to me a week or so ago: Pain is not the enemy. Suffering is not the enemy. It is opportunity.
God does not view pain and suffering as we do. But so many of us do not grasp the good of suffering, the opportunities that come from suffering, pain, and limitations. God utilizes suffering as a means of progressing our souls. Dr. H. got that, too. He said so if not for A, B, C, D, happening, we'd not know about or be opened to E, F, G, H that can occur and happen.
The opportunity that pain and suffering provides is that very opening to new "life" that Jesus mentions in the Scripture of the seed that falls to the ground, is crushed, so that new life can begin. This is the on-going, holy metamorphoses of body, mind, heart, and soul. We are being honed to God's will, those of us who desire and of whom God desires for this or that purpose.
Even this painful but hopefully brief physical set back in my post op healing is a gift from God, making Himself yet more clear in telling me He is funneling me into more specialization, into His desire to use me all the more in writing and prayer, in building upon and putting focus into the religious and spiritual life.
Dr. H. said he thinks I'm more the life of a monk than a hermit. He still has some of the usual misunderstood images of what is a hermit. I explained that a consecrated Catholic hermit is like a monk except without other monks all about. I think that helped him get a more accurate mind view. Yet I said that is part of what I am going through currently, in that I'm balking in this time of transition. I had enjoyed the physical and creative activity of constructing and renovating from old to updated and new in dwellings. I had enjoyed vast gardening projects, delighting in the beauty of all from soil to leaves, from roots to blooms. I had come to be in contemplative prayer while doing manual labor.
But God is narrowing the path, so to speak. Or he is more, rather, trimming me, removing clay from my form both inner and outer, to fit me into the path that has increasingly narrowed as is necessary for those who desire union with the Holy Trinity, through, with, in His Real Presence: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
Dr. H. still suggests that in a year or year and a half, when the spine healing is physically complete, we do not know but that God might have it be that I can still do far more in physical movement and tasks than what any occupational or physical therapist could imagine or surmise.
My sense from within on this is, of course God could provide the healing means that could take me beyond the temporal, physical limitations that the medical professionals think possible. But I know from how God has dealt with me all my life, and before that if I trust Scripture pointing out He knows us from before, when He knit us in our mother's womb. And I do trust Scripture, the Living Word of God.
My sense is that God is asking me to relinquish the temporal things and activities that keep me a generalist rather than a specialist, even within my specialized vocation as a consecrated Catholic hermit. Dr. H. is a specialist in clinical psychology and within that field is a specialist in certain aspects of human problems, and within that has a specialization of clinical hypnotherapy and also of the paranormal and of spirituality.
The Lord wants me to narrow down and into the specialization of the spiritual life in various aspects that have been shown me over the years, by the Holy Spirit, in ways that many people are not shown, but that they could grasp and be opened to. My specialization is within the Roman Catholic Church, in mystical theology, and within the eremitic vocation of the consecrated life of the Church. My specialization is in prayer, in love of the Most Holy Trinity, of His Real Presence. My main mode of expressing and helping through the specialization is through medium of of words, of writing and somewhat of speaking.
And this goes for my life of prayer, of communication with God. It is always a two-or-more-way communication involving words and wordlessness, images and non-images, sounds and silence, tangibles and intangibles.
Today I will strive anew to delve into lectio divina and other prayerful and religious reading. I will also continue in prayer--mostly wordless prayer that includes pain as prayer. I will try to get up and walk with the walker 6 or more times today. I will not think much about the future but accept and am fine with reality of moving on from this hermitage in a year after the slow, recovery transition of this surgery, if I'm even on this earth then.
Manual labor is being trimmed off; religious and spiritual life is being focused. Increasing union with God is the opportunity that gloriously evolves from pain and suffering and frees us from ourselves and that which distracts us from God Is Love.
God bless His Real Presence in us! Let us love God above all things and others as ourselves. Love heals!
1 comment:
I would say that you are not being trimmed, but pruned, as in a tree. God wants you to grow and bloom into His perfect image, and for this to happen, He must "trim" away all that does not reflect "Him". In this sense, our pain is divine. But, oh, how difficult this can be to understand and endure. Jesus, King of Love, I trust in Thy merciful goodness!
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