All About Him

Recently, I shared some thoughts about listening in a column. Ann has asked for thoughts on listening in prayer this week. So, I share them here, with the hope that they may bless.

It’s summertime and the living is easy — at least that’s the theory.Schedules are more relaxed; there is more time for leisure; our calendars aren’t crammed to overflowing. There are spaces, pockets, places of unstructured time. Perfect. May I make a suggestion? Let this be the summer of prayer. Take the gift of those pockets of time and do something genuine with them. Learn to pray on your summer vacation.

So often, our prayer looks like it did when we were 9 years old. Dear God, here I am. I really want a new bike. Please make my grandma feel better. I’m sorry I picked on my little sister. It’s all about me. Me. Me. What if instead this were the summer we made it all about Jesus?

In his letter to the Galatians, St. Paul writes, “It is no longer I that lives, but Christ who lives in me.” Can you imagine emptying yourself of you completely and then being still long enough to fill yourself with Jesus? Can you imagine becoming a completely new creation inside your old body? So often in popular treatises on prayer we are asked to imagine ourselves walking alongside Jesus, to use our imaginations to place ourselves next to Him. What if, instead, we abandoned ourselves entirely and let Jesus Himself fill our very beings?

We need to learn to make prayer about Him and not about us. We need to lose our lives in order to find life in Him. In her excellent book, Come Meet Jesus, Amy Welborn poses this pivotal question: “If I seek to meet Jesus in my prayer, is he at the center of my prayer, or am I? Am I really ready to listen? How open am I?”

The most beneficial prayer of all is probably not the prayer where we pepper God with all our thoughts. The most beneficial prayer might be the quietest, the prayer where we throw open the doors of our souls and invite God to come in and make a home in our very being. Prayer is about emptying and opening.

Pope Benedict invites us to open ourselves to Christ in prayer in just this way. He writes:

“It seems to me that this gesture of openness is also the first gesture of prayer: being open to the Lord’s presence and to his gift. This is also the first step in receiving something that we do not have, that we cannot have with the intention of acquiring it all on our own.

“We must make this gesture of openness, of prayer — give me faith, Lord! — with our whole being. We must enter into this willingness to accept the gift and let ourselves, our thoughts, our affections, and our will be completely immersed in this gift.”

We don’t know how to pray. We seek God constantly, because we were created to seek Him. And the very restlessness of seeking is a prayer, but we tend to flit from thought to thought and rarely to find the union we seek. Prayer is the intentional act of uniting ourselves with God in order to know His will for us and to know the grace and strength He will give to live in that will. But God knew we’d struggle with this. He knew that we would not know how to move from the weakness of restless, seeking prayer to a settled, constant prayer of unity. St. Paul told the Romans, “The Spirit helps us in our weakness, for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with sighs too deep for words. And he who searches the hearts of men knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God.” When prayer is difficult, the Spirit takes our very expression of that difficulty — sighs too deep for words — and makes it a prayer to the Father for us. The Son and the Spirit request from the Father what we need, not what we want. What we need is always, always to be filled with Christ Himself.

Knowing about God is not the same as knowing God. He doesn’t ask us to know about Him; He exhorts us to be still and know Him. So seize a quiet summer pocket of time. Empty your busy brain of all fancies of your imagination. Throw open the doors of your soul to the warm breeze that is the Holy Spirit. Sit with your Bible open (Psalms perhaps?) and let God pour His mercy like oil over your very being.

Gentle Wisdom

after five years, this is best advice i can give to you:  when you areonline, love.   listen.  assume the best.  speak life.  pray.  learn.  leave nothing but traces of grace behind you.   arguing over perfect doctrine, shutting people out because they read the wrong books or like the wrong authors, pointing fingers, pointing out sin, endless discussions over politics and religion, mocking brothers and sisters who don't see things the way you do, all of it is such a waste of time and i believe it grieves our Lord.   please, leave something behind you that testifies to the life and joy of your salvation! ~tonia@study in brown

Do read the whole thing.

The Fine Art of Fingerpainting

A few weeks ago, we had a fingerpainting party in the backyard.

My neighbor came over and brought with her an teenaged exchange student from France who was staying with her family for awhile.

The girls "painted" and we chatted. And a good time was had by all.

 

Our French visitor commented that she had never seen anything like it.

Later that evening, Katie said to me, "Mama, didn't you say that C was from France?"

 

"I did. She lives in France with her family and is visiting to have a chance to practice English."
 

"And don't the French have all that really good art. You know, like Monet and the Versailles and everything?"

"They do. Lots of very fine art."

 

"Then how in the WORLD could she never have heard of fingerpaints? Can you believe that? She's lived her whole life and never, ever, fingerpainted.

Amazing."

Preparing to Celebrate the Feast of St. Anne

Sometimes, a saint finds you.

And those are very, very special times, indeed. Two years ago, around this time, St. Anne found me and I will be forever grateful.   There is no saint more dear to my heart, nor more frequently invoked by me than the grandmother of our Lord. She walks beside me, whispers in my ear, and makes sure I get my laundry done! My binder of St. Anne prayers is well-worn and nearly memorized.

July 26th, the Feast of St. Anne and St. Joachim,was a Sunday last year and it found me in a beautiful new church at the baptism of my godson, John (Marisa never did blog the day--I might have to do that for her;-). And every prayer we prayed there went to Louisiana, too, where Bryce Mitchell was being baptized.

July this year finds me taking up my binder of prayers once again, not for a pregnancy this time, just for the comfort of knowing that such a dear mother is listening and praying and interceding. Tradition teaches us what we know about St. Anne and her husband, St. Joachim. I think though, that some saints come to be known even more dearly in our prayers. It is in praying with St. Anne that I have grown to love her.

I've included here for you a copy of my favorite, now very familiar prayers. There are short daily prayers, a chaplet explanation, a litany, and two different novenas. Depending on whether you want to finish on the feast or the day before, you want to start a novena on the 17th or 18th. My St. Anne chaplet broke a few weeks ago, so I do plan to spend these days of preparation for the feast repairing it. Alice Cantrell provides a lovely illustrated tutorial here, should you want to try your hand a crafting this beautiful aid to prayer. I have found that handwork that aids our prayer are the crafts that are most treasured and beneficial in our home. We don't always bead a chaplet, of course, but decorating a vase to fill with flowers next to a saint's icon, or pouring or dipping or decorating a candle to be lit on the feast are also favorite, simple, meaningful family traditions. And sometimes, there is no craft at all.

In our family, we celebrate a name day on St. Anne's feast. There was considerable argument around our dinner table when we discussed what to name our baby girl. It was settled by giving her both names: Sarah and Anne. (To this day, two of her brothers have yet to call her "Sarah." They only call her "Annie.") My mother, Mike's mother, my stepmother, and I all share Sarah's middle name. But only Sarah Anne gets the extra "e":-). And oh, how we love to celebrate Sarah Annie!

Our family looks forward to feast days with quiet, familiar joy. As a child grows, the day takes on its own traditions because the child begins to make it his own. For instance, the Feast of St. Michael around here always smells like incense and a kahlua devil's food cake baking in the oven. That has been Michael's preference for as long as I can remember. For the longest time, we had pizza on the Feast of St. Patrick because Paddy insisted on it.

St. Anne's feast will begin for me as all days do, with the Liturgy of the Hours. I'll pray the Morning Prayer and Office of Readings by myself in the quiet of the dawn. Both prayers bring me into the celebration of the feast with the universal Church. I will light a special candle, put her statue and her icon on our little prayer desk, and make sure that the children notice when they awaken. Then, it's up and out the door. The true "feast" is the Eucharist and we are fortunate to be able to go to daily Mass on feast days, where we celebrate the feast with the community of God. Father delights our children by always, always speaking about "their" saints. Usually, there is a special blessing after Mass for the name day child, as well. And there might be donuts on the way home, too;-).

Sarah Anne is just old enough that she might be able to express her preference for dinner and dessert as is our family custom. Already the lobbying has begun as certain brothers try to persuade her that her favorite dinner resembles their favorite dinner. Almost certainly, there will be chocolate for dessert. Sarah Anne is a big fan of chocolate. 

The day will end for my sweet Sarah Annie with more of that heavenly scent, this time it's St. Anne soap and lotion (as much a treat for me as for my baby). Sweet dreams, my darling girl; your heavenly grandmother continues to be so very good to us. Blessed, we are, those of us whose name means "grace."

St. Anne prayers and devotions:

Download Prayers to St Anne

Live Like Life's a Gift

This is a repost from four years ago, because, well, Nicole's been on my mind and in my prayers. And also, because Elizabeth deHority and I have had some long talks lately about living and suffering and understanding just how precious time and life itself is. Please pray for Nicole and her family and pray for Elizabeth, too. Your prayers are very dear to her right now.

July 3, 2006

My friend Nicole died yesterday.  A little less than a year ago, shedelivered her third baby a bit early.  It was then that doctors discovered a particularly aggressive and incurable cancer.  Quickly, it became apparent that instead of a babymoon, Nicole would spend her baby's first year planning to die--and planning her children's childhood in a way few of us ever do.

She set about to leave her three children--a four-year-old girl, a two-year-old boy, and her new little girl--little pieces of heart for every occasion she could imagine.  She asked for my help collecting a huge assortment of books.  She wanted books for each birthday, books for each sacrament, books for the first day of kindergarten, of high school.  She tried so hard to think of every possible time in a child's life that he might miss his mother and to have a book for it. Stop for a moment and think of those books.  Which ones would you include--living books that would live on in your place? Each one, she inscribed.  Her bedroom began to look like an Amazon.com warehouse. And with every day, every box delivered, she weakened.

She fought so hard for the simple things.  A couple of weeks ago, she told me the story of her little boy, who had gone for a walk with his dad to get ice cream and stopped to pick her flowers on the way home.  She cried as she said, "I just wanted to see him lick that cone. I'm not asking for big things; it's all the little things I want to have and hold."

Today, do the little things.  Pick your very favorite story off the shelf and read it with your child safely in your lap.  And then have an ice cream cone together.

Please pray for the soul of Nicole and for her young family.