The Our Lady of Lourdes Novena

Pray More Novenas has announced the next novena, which starts tomorrow, February 2, this one to Our Lady of Lourdes. This novena is particularly special to me given my devotion to Our Lady, and also because my home parish is Our Lady of Lourdes (or OLOL as the ol' regulars call it). The church is actually doing its own novena to her, with Mass intentions and lots of fanciness.

For the story of the apparition of our Lady of Lourdes, there are lots of good resources, including here, and about Bernadette, to whom Mary appeared, here. Lourdes, France, is now a pilgrimage site and many people have found miraculous cures visiting the water there. I believe it!

I find praying the novena first thing in the morning works best for me, and it's a lovely way to not only ask for intercession, but be reminded of all the good things I already have. 

The novena ends February 11, the feast day of Our Lady of Lourdes. Don't forget to sign up here!

What, or who, will you pray for?

Seeking Truth, Part II

I didn't say quite all I wanted to say in that last post, I realized, because the question still remains, if self-knowledge is the foundation of God's love, how does one find oneself? From what I have read and learned, it turns out the saints are pretty unanimous on this account, too. The answer is best stated by John the Baptist (and how fitting for today, the the feast of the Baptism of the Lord): "He must increase, but I must decrease." (John 3:30)

This is also expressed again in John 12:24: "Unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit." This feels counter-intuitive, but if you think about the purpose of a grain of wheat, it is to cease being itself and to become something else entirely - a growing plant. Unless it is cracked and burst open, it will remain static its whole existence, which can barely be called life. It will never change, and it will not fulfill its purpose. So, it must "die" to create new life. I interpret this dying as the act we all must make, in casting aside our fears and masks, and allowing our egos to die. It doesn't matter to lose one's ego; let's not confuse that with personality or the inner light that makes you you. Rather, ego is the web of self-deceit we gather around ourselves: fear of being inadequate, fear of not being pretty enough or successful enough, the desire to always be first, to fault-find with others, and so on. Removing the ego, as the saints have found, and learning to rely instead of God to hold ourselves together, is what allows us to get to our true self. The ego is never in your corner and it is the least authentic part of you, because it is the most fearful.

Bishop Fulton Sheen wrote quite a lot on the ego and its place as a stumbling block on the path toward Christ: "No one discovers anything big unless he makes himself small." And: "I don't want my life to be mine, I want it to be Christ's. The more ego there is, the less there is of Christ." I see what he means, and that even beyond, nothing really is yours. Your time certainly is not yours, and your talents are not. They all belong to God. “If you do not worship God, you worship something, and nine times out of ten it will be yourself. You have a duty to worship God, not because He will be imperfect and unhappy if you do not, but because you will be imperfect and unhappy.”

Br. Athanasius on Friday night talked about a flower growing (remember, that is the more important part, after the seed has died). He said, a flower does not know how it will grow. It does not sit and plan its own beauty. Similarly, we cannot micromanage our own progress in life because what God has in store for us is so much more unbelievably beautiful and real than anything we can imagine for ourselves. This certainly is true, even when I struggle with it. I struggle with it now, because I like to plan and there are certain things in my life I would like now, in a certain way, the way I see them. But, God must be telling me there is something else. And so I wait, like a flower unfolding, and that is fine, because many saints (known and unknown) have come before me and known this to be the absolute truth, that this is how God works, that we must decrease our egos so that He can increase. That we must make room for him in our lives so that we can be the real person He created us to be. In other words, I must get out of my own way! Truer words have never been spoken.

Lots of prayers on this topic. But, there is one very simple prayer that really covers all of this: Father, your will be done.

Seeking Truth

Last night I had the pleasure of attending a talk given by my friend Br. Athanasius, OP. Full disclosure: it was an event I planned for our young adult group because I knew what an outstanding speaker he is (as it is with the Dominicans) and the topic is heavy on my heart: that of mercy. In true Dominican-Br. Athanasius style, though, he took it to another level: while planning, we discussed mercy as a good and relevant topic, particularly in the context of the Year of Mercy. Yet where I thought of mercy in the general sense of what we show to others, he thought of mercy as it relates to ourselves: self-forgiveness, which equates to knowing oneself. And knowing oneself, as God created us, is critical in order to be close to Him. He asked us: how do we come to know ourselves?

Let me explain: God has made us in a certain way. Each one of us is an individual, so infinitely unique, that it is something of an imperative to be that someone He created us to be, and until we are, we will be miserable. To deny yourself is to deny God's plan for you. Yet for so many it is easier to live behind the mask; it is frightening to go deep, look at your weakness, and see that you are in fact not your successes, you are not the things you own, you are not of this world. In truth, you are not at all the author of your own existence. Can you look at that directly, and see that God's love is the only real thing holding you together? Saints are the people who have come face to face with this knowledge, accepting how dependent they are on God. This is everything. This is what so many saints talked about, this is the point of the Church, this is the purpose of life. It's everywhere. St. Catherine of Siena: "Be yourself and you will set the world on fire." St. Theresa of Avila: "Self knowledge is so important that, even if you were raised right up to the heavens, I should like you never to relax your cultivation of it; so long as we are on this earth, nothing matters more to us than humility."

Br. Athanasius shared how St. Therese, the Little Flower, expressed the dependence on God that is a hallmark of self-knowledge:

"Since He has granted it to me to understand the love of the Heart of Jesus, I confess that He has chased all fear out of my heart. The memory of my faults leads me never to rely on my own strength, which is nothing but weakness; but even more this memory speaks to me of mercy and love. When we throw our faults, with a complete filial confidence, into the devouring furnace of love, how could they not be totally consumed?" St Therese's Letter in 1897

Then we discussed The Great Divorce by CS Lewis, in which characters that represent various incarnations of our own self-deceit in this life get a chance to leave a purgatory-like place for Heaven. But many of them can't, because it's simply too real. It requires of them to drop the mask, to open their eyes, to forgive themselves, and it simply is too much. They can't go deep. They prefer to live a half-life in purgatory.

This is what I am afraid of. If there is anything in this life to fear, it is the possibility of living a life half-lived, in hiding, far away from the light of God's love where you can convince yourself everything is fine, even if it's not real. And you don't care that it's not real. There is a great plunge into self-knowledge, a moment you decide to ask yourself, Who am I in relation to reality?

How strange is it to realize that hell is self-deception? That, truly, to sin is to mask who you are, how God made you?

This is one of those things I will pray on, and turn over in my mind, for the rest of my life. I do not know if I have explained this accurately or have done any justice to what Br. Athanasius spoke, but I know it aches in my heart and must be expressed. And I know there are consequences to taking off the blinders and choosing self-knowledge, but then, I also know God is with me - God is all there is, after all. He is the ultimate reality. Everything else falls away.