The mornings are the roughest. Today is five weeks out from what I've now read per lesser form of this spine surgery is called "major" and "severe." I awaken to a degree of physical pain that causes corruption of emotions. Yet there is an underlying truth on-going, exposed.
I'm ever honest with the Lord, with myself, and in this blog that is of a consecrated Catholic hermit's progression in life--the temporal, the spiritual, the body, mind, heart, and soul journey.
I tell you, I know why I am as I am, currently. I have the opportunity to be exemplary or to even gloss over the reality of an aspect of how I'm spending the time that God gives me, gives us all. My intentions are in the right place--I love the Lord, I love His Church, I'm living the externals of hermit life as set forth in what the Church requires and sets forth for all Her consecrated hermits. And this means Catholic hermits whether privately or public professed--of which many if not most Catholic hermits yet today privately profess the three evangelical counsels and make private vows.
The poverty, chastity (celibacy in my case), and obedience (to God, to vocation, to the Church) are being fulfilled. My poverty is not that I am financially penniless, although am not flush with funds; I am able to pay the bills which include a mortgage for this hermitage, a house, a dwelling called Solus Deus. I have been broke before, though. My poverty is more, currently, a physical poverty and a spiritual poverty.
The physical poverty is that of extreme bodily limitation and pain. I'm totally dependent upon God and others. Yes, I'm able to get up and use a walker, can cope enough with the pain to get something to eat from refrigerator and cupboards, restocked some yesterday by the lone family member in the area who picked up some fresh fruit and vegetables. A woman from the parish who had signed up via the parish volunteer program to bring a meal, on her own volition called last week and said she'd bring some additional main dish/meat in freezer containers so I could simply thaw and heat and eat.
She stopped by yesterday, also, and had included a share of her family's beef taco ingredients enough for last night and today's subsistence. I'm able to cinch the brace, get up, walker my way to bathroom and kitchen for the morning coffee and bowl of granola with milk, and add some blueberries brought yesterday. Tray on the walker, so back in bed on the icy-cold pad for which I am ever grateful.
In an hour I will need to change out the thawed water bottles and will use the grabber-reacher tool to pull out frozen water bottles from freezer and put into the ice pump container. That will require 3-4 walker trips from bedroom to kitchen and back. The neighbor kids who have been doing this effort morning and night, are now back in school. Bless their hearts--they offered to get up extra early to continue their summer job, but in the mornings I decided to motivate self and attempt this task.
Since I've titled this post "Escapism," I need to get to the point. I've been escaping from the high degree of this spinal pain that radiates to other body areas. I apologize to the Lord (as I did again this morning while waiting for pain meds to take hold enough so that I could get up for bathroom and to kitchen for some food). I add to the apology that for whatever reasons, I am escaping in ways that are weak and not up to the standards I myself have for a hermit's daily life.
I feel as if I'm a bad hermit these days. I'm a bad lover of the Lord. I'm weak and weary, and I know better, but I lack the discipline or whatever it might be, to lay here on the icy pad on the bed and pray and read. I'm escaping my circumstances, the pain, and even escaping the too-much thinking my brain gets into. So I escape by watching a doze-inducing, time-passing, easy-escapism series I came upon on Amazon Prime, on the laptop, this little window to the world.
At night the voices, music, scenery, characters, and plot are such that I can doze enough until I'm dozing mostly until I turn off the laptop and bedside light and hope in God I'm dozed adequately to fall asleep. Off and on during the day I use the drama series to escape the pained the body, the fatigued mind, the tired emotions--but not escape the soul. It would take I'm-not-sure-what to escape the soul. I don't think it possible we can escape our souls. Even in hell we will have our souls, such as they are--taken over by unrepented sins and a chosen, depraved life, turned against Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
This morning I asked the Lord, "How long will You put up with me?" I tell him often that I know I am using this means of escape. I've gone over with the Lord the reasons I am using this means to escape, for I know the reasons, and the reasons are plausible. Yet for me, a consecrated Catholic hermit and as a child of God, it is my choosing this escapism that is so bad.
What is bad is that I choose what I know is easy and in its own way helpful yet content wise is not better or best. (Yes, it is helping for the reasons I've mentioned above, especially the part about keeping my mind from thinking about my temporal situation here.) But my choosing this form of escapism rather than choosing something more spiritually impressive or worthy of a Catholic hermit and more so of me is what sticks out and pokes inward, as well, thus prodding me to ask God how long will he put up with me, and to call upon my late spiritual Da to pray for me and help me get through this phase of wafting in escapism.
I'm so very tired even right now, an hour before the occupational therapist is to come and go through the process of showering in the upstairs shower. The goal is to train me as capable of using whatever bathroom's shower, be it upstairs or down. The pain exhausts even after six hours of sleep in the night, which is better sleep than four hours.
Back to the escapism. I'm escaping from pain, from my current predicament of temporal proportions, from thinking about what is unfolding already in the major changes I must make after the several months it will take for the bone fusion to even heal, let alone to adapt to the added pain for yesterday the nurse pointed out that my pain should be going in a different direction than it seems to be heading. Yet it is too soon to tell if this level of pain is from last week's over-doing in minor way but way enough.
I'm escaping through the drama series, mostly to keep my mind from consciously thinking about this temporal situation which includes the simple reality of not having someone to drop me off at the surgeon's next week as the family member has a conflict taking me but can pick me up. I asked the woman who brought the added prepared meat portion for meals if she could drop me off, but she will likely be working at her job. Then I found out from the parish nurse that they ask volunteers to not transport due to the insurance liability issues. Yes, true enough! I'd forgotten about such realities.
I'm also escaping from the effort it takes to read and absorb such as pages of a spiritually helpful book. I'm able to read the daily Mass Scriptures, fortunately, and to gain great benefit, and to be reminded of all aspects of the Holy Trinity, of His Real Presence, of my Beloved. I'm escaping from the effort of writing that which might be, could be, of more spiritual substance and pleasing to God.
I pray the Lord has mercy on me and can put up with me like this for a bit longer or for how much longer it takes. Even in the escaping via this drama series, yesterday, I clearly noticed that the fictionalized characters, based upon the real life career and experiences of someone still alive and going and doing even though but one year older than I am--the fictionalized characters are focused and passionate about their work, their mission via their careers of bringing good from conquering worldly evil.
They are specialists, and specialists tend to be successful whereas generalists tend to spread thin and wide their efforts, and while they can provide good, they can also tend to waft, to waste, to miss the better and best. Martha in Scriptures is a generalist, busy about many things; Mary is a specialist, focused with passionate focus, on learning from and absorbing all she can of her Lord and Savior, extolling her existence and love upon His Real Presence.
I'm dozing off in my ramblings. But I want to in effect confess that I am not good right now, and maybe have not been much good for awhile. And I'm not sure I have the strength of will to choose otherwise in ceasing this now-conscious and revealed escapism. I know the occupational therapist is a profession and a specialist, focused on arriving at 10 a.m. and conscientiously and professionally doing her job which is to get me to a point of being able to safely and independently shower.
My body and mind are so tired and pained right now, that getting up to refresh the ice for the ice pump seems overwhelming. I just want to escape the realities of a couple of basic tasks this morning that most people do not, would not, think twice about. Even my blog writing is rambling, other than the point I am making in full honesty, is that I am not "doing" what would seem so marvelous and impressive and holy and what is in fact, better and best!
I am not laying here reading books like St. Ignatius did after his life-altering leg injury. (Yes, I've prayed and asked this saint to help me; I've asked Padre Pio to help, I've asked my late parents and anyone out there, to help me stop this more banal form of escapism. Yet somehow I return to it and would now if I did not have to get ice into the ice pump, or my pain will only get far worse.) The effort of praying the rosary and focusing my mind on the aspects of Christ's life and other theological truths within the praying of the rosary is too much effort.
I'm too weary to go through the many letters of my late spiritual Da, as I thought it could be marvelous to write of some of what he wrote over the years. My emotions are not strong enough currently, and my mind and eyes and headache not up for reading them. Instead I just ask him to help me do as even in his last note card to me, said he hoped for my future--to not lose touch with the supernatural and to keep reading the good books.
I find myself apologizing to all these great people I've had the honor and privilege of living with, who have not gone to God in glory. I admit to them and to His Real Presence and to you readers, that I am falling quite short. And to me it seems as if I am choosing to do so, for I certainly am not choosing to read the book on the Holy Spirit I have here on the bed, nor to read the Office of Readings in the Divine Office or Liturgy of the hours, first thing. No, I've been writing of my escapism as this temporarily helps me escape, also, this pain and whatever all else going on, and has been.
The Lord is kind and merciful, but honestly, I'm disgusted with myself for this escapism yet am grateful for it. I'm counting on God's grace to teach me even in this period of what I consider a form of weak-willed depravity of a certain type. I call myself lazy, yet for whatever reason, this is a phase in this time of my life and within my hermit vocation.
I didn't want you readers to think I'm laying here being saintly and holy, praying mentally for hours on end, focusing my mind on reading theology or even this book on the Holy Spirit. Maybe today, though, I will. One thing that does console me, as I interiorly and sometimes outwardly talk this situation over with the Lord and my late spiritual father, and even my parents, is that the drama series will be over; it is temporal and tangible and has an end. And in the meantime, perhaps my will and intellect will strengthen, for I desire to turn to all holiness and exemplary spiritual live in every present moment.
As for my late parents, I admit to them (and I have to God even though He already knows), that I have wafted often enough in my life, made choices and decisions that I thought were good and were going off in certain directions, only to realize they were going to come to a necessary end, as God keeps honing me to His will despite my being a difficult soul, or it surely seems to me.
Being a generalist and having various talents can be a problem. Waft off here and there in creative tangents, and then the Lord deals with such as me through temporal suffering to teach me not only religious truths and insights, but very much to trim me into the narrow path He has His Heart set on helping me traverse, narrower and narrower--specialist, not generalist.
I'll stop this general rambling, yet again. MUST start the ice pump process even though OT coming in a few minutes. She is the specialist to remind me yet again, of what is better. See how she accomplishes in her daily life, in the temporal for that is all I know of her life thus far. She succeeds in what is her job, her passion as she's kept with this career for many years. We can conclude in the temporal aspects, she certainly seems to be fulfilling God's will for her in that.
I appreciate your prayers for my deeper conversions. Deeper conversions will strengthen my weak will to push through this pain and the limitations the body is facing, and the necessary life changes that I must by God's providence, get help in undertaking when I am well enough to orchestrate another property selling off and a move. All that takes such energy and God's time He gives so lovingly, no doubt hoping with all His Being that I will come through and do His will and narrow down for the increasingly narrow path.
At least and most, I do truly love God above all things and others as my self, but guess, in truth, also, I right now have a hard time showing it!
God bless His Real Presence in us!
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