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God disguised as our life

It was Paula D’Arcy who wrote, God comes to us disguised as our life.

Paula D’Arcy wrote those words after a drunk driver killed her husband and one-year-old child, when Paula was just 27, and three months pregnant.

Frederick Buechner echoes a similar insight. He suggests living a spiritual life is to ‘listen to (our) life’.

I share a story from my life, in which I tried to listen to my life.

In 1981, I accompanied a group of young people on a pilgrimage to an Eucharistic Congress in Lourdes, France. In the preceding months, I sensed I might experience spiritual healing during the pilgrimage.

The previous couple of years had been difficult for me. I sensed I needed healing.

In 1979, during my first country parish appointment that lasted only eight months, several traumatic things happened.

First, I had a serious car accident while driving on a country gravel road. The back-right tyre of my vehicle blew out and the car rolled three times.

I survived with only minor injuries.

I was fortunate that the only police officer in a hundred kilometres passed by fifteen minutes later.

Second, I was helping set up a women’s refuge. An anonymous person left a phone message saying there was a contract out on my life.

In speaking to the police, they said they could do nothing until something happened!

I felt very vulnerable, as I often drove along isolated country roads.

Third, I became embroiled in a murder suicide that left three young children orphaned.

Fourth, I contracted a viral illness that incapacitated me for over nine months.

I am grateful to the Mercy sisters who lived nearby. They took me in and looked after me during the acute phase of my illness before I went to the hospital.

The accumulated trauma scarred me. I needed inner healing.

Before departing for France on the pilgrimage, the organisers considered cancelling the trip. A gunman had wounded Pope John Paul II, who was due to lead the main celebrations at the Congress in Lourdes.

Upon arriving in Lourdes, we discovered our prearranged accommodation had fallen through. Later, we found a place to stay.

Mindful of seeking healing during the pilgrimage, I walked to the nearby grotto where the Marian apparitions had occurred.

I wondered, is this where I shall find spiritual healing?

The day was wet and freezing.

When I arrived, it surprised me to find the grotto was a rocky cave on the side of a hill.

The grotto looked shabby. Black soot caked the walls from thousands of burnt candles of pilgrims over the years.

I found no healing here.

A day later, our pilgrimage group walked to the Lourdes baths, famous for miraculous healings.

I wondered, is this where I shall find spiritual healing?

Nothing happened to me.

In fact, the water was so icy that, instead of being healed in the miraculous waters, I caught a nasty cold.

The next day, I attended an outdoor English-speaking liturgy in a nearby field. Thousands of people were present, and I wondered, is this where I shall experience healing?

An African cardinal, who was representing the pope at the Congress, was the main celebrant and an American bishop was preaching.

During the liturgy, we had intermittent soft rain, and the ground became boggy. What I hoped would be a significant spiritual moment did not happen.

While the preacher was speaking, the African cardinal, who had not turned off his lapel microphone, fell fast asleep.

He snored right through the sermon.

To make things worse, he was wearing a high Roman mitre. Every time his head nodded a few centimetres, because of its height, the top of his mitre resembled a flag flapping in the breeze.

After the liturgy, while walking back to my lodgings, I was wondering; what is happening?

Where is God in this dismal turn of events?

In coming to Lourdes, to this special Marian shrine, I thought I would have a significant spiritual encounter; it was not happening.

To make things worse, the road back to my lodgings was boggy and for those of you who know me well, I hate getting mud on my shoes.

Then, walking further along, I experienced a quiet, gentle presence come over me, a healing stillness that touched the core of my being.

In the following months, I reflected on these events.

I realised I was seeking to find my spirituality amidst the extraordinary events of life.

My spiritual healing happened in the ordinariness of my life while walking along a muddy road.

This reminds me of a saying by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, ‘We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience’.

Life is not a dichotomy, nor are we dualist. We do not have two lives, spiritual and real-world.

God comes to us disguised as our life. To live a spiritual life is to listen to our life.

The ripple effect of mental illness

The only time the police ever asked me to identify a dead body, I identified two deceased people laid out in a regional costal hospital morgue. A man drove himself and his wife off a wharf into the sea where they drowned.

Days before, the man turned up unannounced at the presbytery, where I was an assistant parish priest. He complained his wrist watch was speaking to him. I invited him to come inside.

He became agitated. The walls were speaking to him. He threatened self-harm. While trying to calm him, I telephoned the police.

The police escorted him to the local hospital emergency department. The doctor assessed him and sent the man for a three-day involuntary psychiatric assessment to a major hospital in a neighbouring city.

Within a day of being admitted, the hospital released him. His wife picked him up from the hospital to bring him home. You know how the tragic story ends.

Later, after I identified the deceased couple, I accompanied the police to inform the couple’s relatives of their deaths. I still remember their shock and dismay.

One relative who worked in a bakery, she collapsed against the glass display shelves on hearing the tragic news. The woman’s falling brought the shelves and assorted bread crashing to the floor.

I then went to tell the couple’s children. They were staying with relatives while the wife went to pick up her husband from the hospital.

I knew it was important to tell the children their parents were dead, knowing how they heard the tragic news would stay with them for life.

Telling the children their parents had died was one of the hardest things I have ever done.

The man’s mental illness contributed to the couple’s death. The ripple effect of this tragedy scared their children and their extended family and friends.

Even when our best efforts to turn back the tide of tragedy are unsuccessful, take the risk of reaching out to support those living in the shadow of mental illness. Your first step might be to ask, “How are you today?”

Three default approaches to life

Three friends approach a pedestrian crossing near a busy intersection. As the traffic lights change, vehicles hurry through the road junction where they are to cross.

One friend rushes anxiously across, beating the oncoming cars.

Out of self-preservation, another stands steadfast on the curb.

The third fearfully steps backwards.

They look at one another and laugh; they know each other so well. The first took ground, the second held ground, and the third gave ground.

The friends can stand for distinctive life stances within us. Do we recognise and befriend these inner stances as the friends did?

While we might have a nodding acquaintance with these life stances, often we default to one approach, particularly in a crisis.

What is your unconscious life preference? Do you

Take ground?
Hold ground?
Give ground?

While we easily default to a preferred stance, freedom involves choosing not to stay stuck in our default position.

This is not a one-off choice; it is a daily struggle. A tussle to keep returning to a place of interior freedom.

Such freedom invites us to embrace our frail humanity instead of assuming we can be free from our humanness.

To learn more about these three life stances, the forthcoming Introduction to the Enneagram workshop will assist. To register, CLICK HERE

Spiritual direction: Why and how in the digital age

It seems people today are keen to explore their spirituality!

For some, they discover the desire within their relationships, through their yearning to develop or deepen the quality of these relationships, whether with individuals, within groups or within the wider global community.

Other’s desire is born out of their commitment to bring about justice within the social systems in which they live and work.

While it seems, another group discovers in their passion for the natural world the desire to ground their deep concern for the well-being of the environment in a spiritual context.

Traditionally, the desire for spiritual direction is a means to reflect on their inner-self, through meditation or the search for deeper meaning in their lives.

It’s different for each of us and whatever the presenting factor, a director helps the person to explore their human experience to encounter their spirituality within their lives.

In spiritual direction spiritual accompaniers companion people to attend to the life-giving presence of what is ultimate in their life as they perceive it and it is in this sense that we know spiritual direction by many names: spiritual accompaniment, spiritual companioning, spiritual guidance, spiritual mentoring, etc.

Finding a spiritual director

Traditionally, a person seeking spiritual direction meets in-person with a local person, but these days that’s less necessary.

Knowing where to look for a spiritual director is probably just as difficult as finding one.

Then again, for some people who have enjoyed a long association with their spiritual director, either they or their director is shifted. The tyranny of distance now makes it too difficult to continue meeting. What might they do?

Alternatively, either through the onset of illness or disability, it becomes too hard to travel for spiritual direction.

Another possibility is people might transfer overseas where local directors neither speak their language nor understand their culture. Whom might they approach as a spiritual director?

These questions assume spiritual direction can only happen in-person, in a face-to-face environment. Once that was true but no more.

So where do they find a director?

The traditional face-to-face environment within which people seeking spiritual direction is changing.

Spiritual seekers, young people in particular, live in the Digital Age, which has modernised communication processes.

Internet that has issued in unimaginable possibilities of connectivity.

The potential of this radical communication platform has penetrated every part of society and this connectivity offers those seeking spiritual direction a virtual meeting place.

Local means global

In the digital age, the global is the new local.

Location no longer limits the time and place in which people meet a spiritual director.

Global services are as accessible as local services.

The Internet opens endless choices for everything, including spiritual direction.

Supervision, counselling, even making a retreat is possible over the Internet

Privacy

While meeting with a spiritual director in a virtual environment is convenient, is it safe? Is it confidential?

Some spiritual directors use a range of popular and free services, however, we all know that nothing is free.

When something is offered free to us, we know we are the product. Our data, our information, our friends, our location are some of the elements free solutions put up for sale.

But wait, there’s more!

Some major solutions actually record what is said and these recordings are available to society surveillance agencies and the like.

Opening ourselves is a relationship of trust. Opening ourselves to our self is often hard enough, however, it is unwise to share our souls with the world.

Making wise choices

The Digital Age makes it much easier to search for a spiritual director; the person can be in across town, in another city, even in another country. The world’s our oyster.

However, when looking online for a spiritual director, as well as getting the right person, be sure to ask if they meet over a 256bit encrypted video solution.

Failure to use a highly encrypted communication solution means it is most likely means others will know as much about you as you do.

It is like engaging in spiritual direction with a microphone at the local shopping mall.

If a spiritual director doesn’t advertise their video communication solution is secure, it’s probably not and if they don’t know or have scant regard for online security, keep looking.

The experienced and skilled spiritual directors at the Fullness of Life Centre Perth offer a secure, encrypted service.

The not so grieving widow

“Thank God the bastard’s dead!”, the not-so grieving widow snapped back after I offered my sympathy.

I had assumed she was grieving. I came to her home to arrange the funeral of her deceased 42-year-old husband, the father of her six kids.

“Tell me about him.” I asked.

Her years of pain poured out. He was a violent alcoholic whose drinking resulted in him dying young. To live with him was pure hell. She felt trapped in a marriage, unable to escape.

His death freed her from years of systematic abuse. She did not need my sympathy; the marriage had died years ago. In fact, she felt relieved. Her horror story now ended.

This gave me an insight into how we deal with loss and grief. I expected the not-so grieving widow to grieve according to the recognised five stages of death and dying: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance.

While they are tools to help frame and name how we might grieve, not everyone goes through all of them or in a prescribed order.

These five stages can sketch grief‘s terrain, better equipping us to cope with loss.

Often grieving people report more stages. Our grief is as unique as we are.

We can never understand grief only as a five-stage process that arranges mixed emotions into well-ordered packages.

These five stages point to the loss many people journey through but there is no normal response to loss as there is no typical loss.