Thirsty?

Before writing this post, I prayed to the Holy Spirit to guide me to the topic, and to speak through me as He wishes, so today I am going to talk about “Spiritual Dryness”

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Imagine you have hiked up a huge mountain, the sun beating down on you at around 30’C, there is no shade and not a pick of moisture in the air, and you realise you ran out of water half a mile back. Your tongue is dry, so dry it feels like velvet. But you see on your map that through the forest visible in the distance there is a small creek...can you make it? Can you go through the motions to get to that source of sustenance? Yes! The answer is always yes! 

This analogy is a reflection of, and the answer to, spiritual dryness. In my faith journey there have been a number of occasions where I have been in a state of spiritual dryness. If you have ever felt distant from God or a sense of disbelief or uncertainty, if you have allowed yourself to fall deep in sin or you simply felt like giving up - then you have experienced what is known as spiritual dryness (AKA a crisis of faith). Let me begin by saying that EVERYONE experiences this once, twice, or even multiple times in their lifetime. The annoying thing is that not everyone wants to talk about it, it’s almost like Catholic taboo. Apart from seeking out spiritual guidance during that time, I told no one else, and therefore, unfortunately, at times felt alone and isolated in the situation that I was in, despite being amidst many Catholic friends and acquaintances.

 

Multiple saints and Catholic figures are noted to have experienced a crisis of faith in their lifetime, including Blessed Teresa of Calcutta, who is quoted as having said in a letter to Reverand Michael van der Peet just three months prior to receiving the Nobel Peace Prize: ‘Jesus has a very special love for you, but as for me, the silence and the emptiness is so great, that I look and do not see, listen and do not hear, the tongue moves in prayer but does not speak...I want you to pray for me - that I let Him have a free hand.” If you want to read more about saints and their struggles, here is a link to another article which details numerous saints and their dealings with spiritual dryness. Just know that in spiritual dryness you’re never alone in that experience, as these saints stories have proven. Christ Himself was even tested in this way, when He spend 40 days and 40 nights in the desert with Satan. But Christ was victorious, and we can be too!

So the question is: How do we tackle spiritual dryness?? If we look back to the analogy above - do you:

(a) sit down and wait for your death
(b) do you go Bear Grylls style and drink your own urine (YUCK!)
(c) persevere, go through the motions and get to the creek?

Answer: (c) YOU GET TO THE CREEK! It is a source of life, it is a source of sustenance, and you know you will feel so much better, despite the physical and mental hardships it will take to get there. 

The answer is the same for spiritual dryness. The best advice I ever received when in a crisis of faith was to keep going and not give up. Two priests on two separate occasions advised this, and it was the best thing they could tell me. Partake in the sacraments - go to mass often, even more than normal; get regular confession; get spiritual advice; surround yourself with people of faith - friends or family; read religious books; study the saints; and lastly, pray. Even if your heart is not in it, pray pray pray. You might feel like God is not listening (He is), but that conversation is vitally important. Don’t cut the ties of the communication, even if it’s a standard prayer or a simple hello. Something has hardened your heart, and He will break through to you, but you have to meet Him halfway. It’s important to also talk it through with a priest, a sister or nun, or a close confidant. Having that support around you is vital - their advice and their prayers are priceless.

Just as Jesus carried His cross, so too are we called to carry ours. But in this Easter Season we are constantly reminded of the hope of the resurrection. We believe that Christ rose from the dead, and while carrying our cross right now is difficult, and at times we are ready to give up, we have that beacon of hope waiting at the finish line for us.

So what now?

Muster up all your energy, run through the forest, get to the creek and jump right in!! The water is pure, refreshing and completely worth the fight!

Do Angels Have a Gender?

Happy Easter everyone! I got to prepare for Easter in a very special way this year, by being a part of our church's ninth annual Passion Play. I wasn't originally planning on being in it, but my choir director managed to snag me after Stations of the Cross one night and convince me to audition. I'm so glad she did, I had such a great time! I was cast as the angel Gabriel, and I gotta admit, I was a bit outside my comfort zone at first when I had to stand up on a platform in front of Joseph and yell at him to go to Egypt. My sister said she got a good laugh out of it every night from her position in the choir loft, she said I was really scary! I also managed to have a not so angelic moment as I hit Jesus in the face with a door just before dress rehearsal was starting, he got a bruise which started swelling and they had to go get him ice and everything. He was very forgiving though, true to his part! Being in the Passion Play brought a lot of new questions and observations to mind about the story of Christ and the supernatural in general, and I'd like to take this opportunity to share a little bit about what I learned.

'The Liberation of St. Peter' by Raphael in the Vatican Museums. One of my favorite depictions of an angel.

1) Angels
When I was cast as the angel Gabriel, my first thought was, wait minute, isn't Gabriel a guy angel? I knew a little bit about angels, that they are God's messengers, and that, despite what many people may think, we humans cannot become angels when we die, we will have a glorified human body in heaven, but angels are a separate creation from us. But what about angels, what do they really look like? It occurred to me that perhaps there weren't male and female angels, just as God has no gender. But this would seem to defy all of the pictures that we normally see of angels, who appear to be either male or female. After opening night, I went to the over 21 get together at a nearby bar, and as I was sitting across from our deacon, who played the part of Nicodemus, I took the opportunity to ask him, 'So, do you think angels have a gender?' He responded, 'No, they don't have a gender because they don't reproduce. They are radiant beings, like Christ himself, who is light.' I said, 'Ok, that's kind of what I thought, but I guess I had always seen angels depicted more like humans with wings.' 'Well,' he remarked, 'they may not be human-like, but God gives angels the ability to personify, to appear in our form before us. I believe that everyone will meet an angel at some point in their life, whether they realize it or not. I met one once, I'm sure of it.' He said that one night he went out to the bar after moving to a new town. His family couldn't come with him yet, so he was lonely and felt like getting out. When he arrived, he saw an average-looking woman who he had never seen before sitting at the bar. She called him out by name, and said to him, 'What are you doing here? You know you don't belong here.' And with that, he left straight away, and never saw her again. He even had another story about his brother, who while on vacation , came back to his boat on the pier and saw a strange man standing in it. He approached the man and asked what he was doing here. The man said, 'My name is Victor. You need to call home.' The Deacon's brother was very confused, but followed the man's instructions and called home to find out that his dad, who is named Victor, was very sick. When they went back to the boat the man had disappeared. I found this story pretty shocking, maybe I'd already met an angel, maybe I'd meet one someday! Deacon emphasized that the line between the supernatural and the natural is very thin, and that God makes miracles all the time and it is our blindness that often keeps us from recognizing them. But what do angels look like if they have no gender as humans do? We won't really know what they look like for sure until we get to heaven, but what I had learned previously from the Catholicism series by Father Robert Barron is that each angel is completely unique, as though each one is it's own species, pretty cool, huh?

2) Pharisees
The Pharisees played a big role in our production this year. As I was watching their scenes, I got to thinking about how much trouble they went through to have Jesus killed by the law. They tried him themselves first, and ruled that he should be condemned to death, but they didn't have the power to execute such an order because, as one of them sang during the play, 'Only the Romans may put a man to death.' He is then taken to Pilate, who realizes that as a Galilean, Jesus' fate rests with King Herod. He is sent to King Herod, who after asking Jesus to produce a miracle and receiving none, turns him back over to Pilate. Pilate was very reluctant to hand Jesus over, but the Pharisees and the crowds pushed and pushed saying that according to their law he must die for saying he was the Son of God. I'm sure that there could have been a much quicker, more efficient, and more secure way of doing away with Jesus. Couldn't they have just hired someone to kill him in secret? But I suppose that what the Pharisees wanted was power, wanted to maintain their position of authority over the people. If Jesus died while he was held in good esteem, or in a way that broke the law, people might have gotten angry, they might have questioned their authority figures. The Pharisees needed to make sure that his reputation was ruined before he was killed. And it seems that they are made even more hypocritical by insisting that he die at the hands of the government when the government ruled him not guilty. They put more emphasis on appearing just than on being just, appearing to follow God's law rather than on what they really mean, to love God, and love your neighbor as yourself.

3) The Tomb
Some more tidbits from our deacon. The kind of tombs where Jesus was laid were hewn out of the rock in the side of a mountain, and the stones that covered the entrances weighed approximately two tons. For the women who were coming to anoint his body after he had already been sealed in the tomb, the fact that the stone was rolled away would have been really shocking! One person couldn't have moved it alone. They must've been very frightened, being unable to put together what happened there, and probably even more frightened upon entering the tomb and meeting an angel there. But imagine their rejoicing when they heard the Good News, that Jesus was risen indeed!

4) Kids are cute
Ok, this really doesn't have to do with theology, but there's this scene where Jesus is on stage with a whole bunch of little kids, and they sing a song called 'God cares about me' in which all the kids jump up and down with joy, and there's this one kid in the front who was trying to jump so high every time, and he just looked like he was having the time of his life. I'm not normally much of a kid-person, but that was darn near one of the cutest things ever. No wonder Jesus thinks so highly of children, they are so unencumbered by useless worries and are so uninhibited in expressing their joy!

Well, those are a few of the subjects I thought about and learned about, and being a part of this production really drew me in to the Passion of our Lord, and the joy and relief of the resurrection after so much suffering. A very Happy Easter to you all, rejoice in the Risen Lord!