Category: Reception

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Learning to Saunter

Have you ever had that experience of always assuming you knew what a word meant, only to discover that it actually bears quite a different meaning?

I had one of those moments with the word “saunter.” I had encountered it often in books, usually with the same phraseology: “He sauntered in.”  To me, in context, it always felt synonymous with “strutted,” and I never bothered to look the word up.

But one day I was on vacation, a guest at the home of friends, reading one of those life-coaching plaques in their home (I’ll leave it to your imagination to guess which room of the house it was in).   The plaque gave dozens of tidbits of advice for joyful living.

One of those sage counsels was “Saunter aimlessly.” It didn’t seem to fit with the rest of the phrases on the plaque. “Strut aimlessly”??  I suddenly found myself hearing the admonition of Inigo Montoya:

“You keep using that word – I do not think it means what you think it means…”

So I got out my dictionary. Actually, let’s be honest – I got out my smart phone, which is ironic, because the smart phone is quite possibly one of the greatest disrupters of sauntering in all of human existence.  But it gets the job done as a dictionary. The scales fell from my eyes as I read the following:


saun·ter
/ˈsôn(t)ər/
verb
1. walk in a slow, relaxed manner, without hurry or effort.

It was so much more than an “aha!” moment. It was one of those divine taps on the shoulder. Perhaps I had misunderstood this vocabulary word all my life because I am not so skilled at sauntering.

Well actually, that’s not entirely true. Deep down, my heart LOVES to saunter. Have you seen those Family Circus installments that trace little Billy’s meanderings with a dotted line? I definitely have a little child inside that absolutely delights in sautnering – exploring the nooks and crannies of God’s creation in a spirit of curiosity, awe, and adventure. But many other parts of me rise up to squelch that childlike longing.

My workaholic and perfectionistic tendencies don’t tend to leave space for little Derek to saunter. I experience restless urges within me – an urge to “get caught up,” and urge to be constantly productive, and an urge to meet the impossible expectations of others. My inner critic warns me that there is no time for such childish pursuits. If I stop to smell the roses, an inner alarm goes off, warning me to move on to the next thing or raising my internal level of guilt about being selfish or lazy.

I apparently did not know the meaning of the word “saunter” during my four years living in Italy, but it was often right there in front of me. I recall feeling frequently annoyed at the locals, stuck behind them as they strolled aimlessly down the sidewalk – on those few Roman streets that are actually wide enough to have sidewalks. Somehow one Italian could effectively block an eight-foot wide space, always walking down the middle, often smoking a cigarette, and veering randomly to the left or the right as they sauntered along without a care in the world. Italians are not exactly known for efficiency or industriousness, especially the further south one goes. There I was, descended from neurotic Northern Europeans – and even among my own people bearing a legendary reputation for productivity and overachieving. Needless to say, I did not blend in, nor did I try to. I found ways to beat the system and accomplish the tasks I felt driven to do – but not without resentment and frustration. I could have learned some lessons from those Italians.

In truth, we cannot live as humans without sauntering sometimes. Our ultimate purpose in life is to abide with the Lord forever. Each one of us carries deep within us a yearning for rest. If we do not honor that yearning, it will find ways to express itself – often in fruitless fantasies or mindless escapes that do not actually refresh us.

Desiring our happiness and wellbeing, God commands us to engage in Sabbath rest. He rests on the seventh day and invites us to participate in his rest. Easier said than done!

I remember the summer of 1995, at the end of my freshman year of college. I felt a conviction that, as a student, my labor was academic – which means observing Sunday as a day of rest from my studies. I made the decision not to do homework on the Lord’s Day. I thought it would be incredibly hard to “get my work done” without utilizing Sunday. I was wrong there. Those adjustments proved easy to make, and helped me be more intentional about my time the rest of the week. There was no challenge academically. Rather, what surprised me was how exceedingly difficult it proved to spend the newly found time on Sunday in real rest and rejuvenation. I found my heart restless as it tried to indulge in various kinds of entertainment or pleasure.  My prayer felt scattered and distracted. It surprised me that rest could be so hard!

I remember a similar restlessness on many of my retreats over the years – worrying about “doing it right.” I eventually learned that the Lord would bless me regardless, and now I cherish my retreat days each year. They are one of the rare times in the year that I seem to feel greater freedom to saunter. At so many other times, there is something inside of me that seeks to sabotage authentic rest. It doesn’t feel safe to be blessed and to receive. There is a vulnerability in it that is so wonderful and so terrifying at the same time.

I think “sauntering” can be even harder for me, because sauntering still includes a certain sense of movement and purposefulness, albeit in a more carefree manner.  I tend to set myself up with impossible tasks and then always feel in a hurry, always under stress. I walk fast. I drive fast. I plow through tasks. I am disciplined and driven. In that setup, there is little permission to move at a slower pace, to welcome interruptions as opportunities to receive, to wonder at and delight in the amazing beauty that surrounds me.

These moments of sauntering, puttering, meandering – whatever the right term is – are so essential for me to feel safe, to be open and receptive, to notice and to care, to be in awe and to wonder, to learn, to grow, to be generous, to appreciate, to be grateful, to affirm and encourage others, and to praise God. I am so much less human if I do not allow space for sauntering in my life.

Thankfully beauty often breaks through in spite of my defenses. It sneaks in the back door and catches me by surprise.  At those moments I have a choice to make. Will I rush on to the next thing and miss an opportunity to abide with the one who loves me so much? Or will I be kind to myself, allowing myself to take in the goodness and beauty, to savor it, to delight in it, and to praise the God who gives such good gifts?

Jesus, teach me to “saunter aimlessly” and to learn to be at peace when I do so.

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The Descent of Jesus

We enter another Holy Week. Jesus’ hour has come. Although he begs his Father to allow the cup of suffering to pass, in the end Jesus freely and willingly plunges into his Passion for our sake. He drinks the cup to the dregs, descending fully into the depths of human misery, indeed into the very hell that our misused human freedom has “created.”

I love this quotation from Charles de Foucauld (taken from André Daigneault’s The Way of Imperfection):

“All his life, Jesus only descended: descending in his incarnation; descending in becoming a small child; descending in obedience; descending in becoming poor, abandoned, persecuted, tortured; descending in reaching the last place.”

All this descent of Jesus is “for our sake” – as we profess in the Creed.  He desires to redeem us and save us. The redemption he brings is so much more than standing in our place and paying the price on the Cross. Some Christians have a rather narrow or distorted view of atonement that almost paints God as a vengeful and petty deity whose wrath can be appeased only by blood. Jesus reveals our Father to be eternally kind. To be sure, there is a great sense of justice in Jesus paying the price, but that standing in our place says much more about God fully respecting the gift and dignity of human freedom (and its real consequences) than it says about him being in any way demanding.

Jesus tells us why he has come from heaven “for our sake” – to seek out and save what is lost (Luke 19:10). I wrote last time about the great dignity of our human nature, even after the fall. We all have deep and dark places in our hearts in which we feel broken and shattered, marred and disfigured, unlovely and unlovable. Jesus reveals to us that there is no place too deep or too dark for him to enter. His desire to descend is unlimited – or rather, limited only by our resistance to receiving him.

There is so much that is comforting in this message. Jesus is not deterred by how seriously and how often each of us has turned our backs on him. He prays for his persecutors. He does not flinch when his closest companions misunderstand him, abandon him, deny him, or betray him. At Peter’s third denial, Jesus turns toward him with a gaze of kindness that incites Peter to rush outside and shed bitter tears.

The deeper truth of Holy Week is that Jesus desires to descend fully and deeply into the worst of our human experiences in order to rescue us, heal us, transform us, and exalt us. Hebrews 5 tells us that Jesus not only offered prayers and supplications for us, but did so with louds sobs and tears. It was not simply a matter of paying a price. Rather, he freely and willingly united himself with every human experience of misery and suffering – every loss, every betrayal, every rejection, every abandonment, every single moment of darkness. Jesus descended.

Philippians 2 describes the dynamics. Jesus, though truly divine, freely chooses to descend, to empty himself completely and totally for our sake. He is therefore exalted and raised above every other creature. He does this, not for his own glory and exaltation (he had no need of it!), but “for our sake” – in order that where he is, we also may be (John 14:3).

Nor does Jesus descend in order to rescue and exalt the “good” people or the “good enough” people. We are all the lost sheep, the lost coin, his lost sons and daughters. Remember whom he chose to hang around with the most – the poor, the lame, the crippled, and the outcasts – including those considered to be the worst of sinners.

I know in my own life I have often vacillated back and forth between a puffed-up confidence (as though I “have it all together”) and a deep discouragement. In both cases, I am somehow trying to be my own savior. Meanwhile, I need only allow Christ to complete his descent into the places of my heart in which I feel the most desperate and discouraged, and his love begins to transform all.

True Christian humility always brings with it a twofold conviction: (1) My own radical poverty; and (2) unshakable confidence in God’s eternal mercy. This is the humility we see in the Virgin Mary and her Magnificat – her song of praise to God in the presence of Elizabeth (Luke 1:46-55). She deeply understands that all is gift, proclaiming God as her savior – AND she eagerly praises the amazing things he is doing in her and through her, so great that all generations henceforth will call her blessed.

At the Cross, Mary freely shares in the sufferings of her Son, having compassion not only on him, but on every lost child of God who stands in need of mercy. Her Son loves us, and therefore so does she. The fact that many of us keep messing things up does not for a moment cause him to falter in his descent, nor her to falter in her deep motherly compassion on those who suffer with her Son.

How many of us attempt (in our prayers or piety) to try to “go up” to God? How willing are we to be truly vulnerable, to let him see us fully, and to love us where we most need his love? Do we not sometimes take the lead of Adam and Eve in the fall, hiding ourselves from God and covering our nakedness?  Toxic shame is one of the devil’s favorite tools to convince us that no one would ever love us as we are.

The descent of Jesus says otherwise. He desires every piece and fragment of our broken hearts. There is no limit to his desire to descend.

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Prayer as Desire

Lent is a sacred time in which many of us resolve to be deepened in prayer. Joining Jesus in the wilderness, we are invited to allow our heart to be captivated by God the Father, growing in our identity as beloved children of God, and claiming as our own Jesus’ victory over the evil one.

The prophet Hosea describes God’s invitation beautifully: “Therefore I am now going to allure Israel; I will lead her into the wilderness and speak tenderly to her” (Hosea 2:14).

God the Father awakens desire in our hearts. Deep and authentic prayer happens to the extent that we allow ourselves to experience and grow in that desire.

Have you ever considered prayer as an experience of desire?

I would say it took me a long journey with many detours before I really began appreciating the invitation to experience prayer as desire – and this was not for lack of pursuit on God’s part! If I take the time to reflect on my life, I can recall with gratitude many moments in which God sought to woo my heart in prayer – in childhood, in adolescence, and throughout my adult years. Sometimes the experiences were profound, intense, or astounding; other times simple or subtle or sweet. There were often obstacles impeding my response.

It turns out that deeply allowing the experience of desire is not so easy as it might sound! Feeling an ache that only God can satisfy can actually be painful – not unlike the experience of intense hunger or thirst. I used to laugh at the line in Matthew’s Gospel about Jesus fasting and being tempted in the desert: “And after fasting forty days and forty nights, he was hungry.” I always used to think to myself as I read those words, “Well, duh!” But the spiritual combat of the desert – whether in Jesus or in me – is not mainly about physical hunger or bread – it is about the deep desire of the human heart that can be satisfied by God alone. We are created with an insatiable longing for him – one so intense that we rarely let ourselves experience it in full depth.

Augustine of Hippo perhaps put it the best when he prayed, “You have made us for yourself, O God, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.” We spend much of our lives, as he did, plunging ourselves in unlovely ways into the lovely things God has created – good things which would not even exist had God not created them. But they hold us back if they diminish our thirst for God.

Jesus allowed himself to go into the depths of human hunger and thirst – both physically and spiritually. He invites us to share in his experience: “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness; for they will be satisfied.”

Have you ever felt a thirst for God, and allowed yourself to abide in that longing? Or to seek and receive a taste of him, only to long for him even more? This is the invitation prayer offers us.

Even now, at a season in my life in which I understand the invitation at a much deeper level, I still notice myself avoiding it. Sometimes I numb out or keep myself distracted with lesser pleasures and lesser desires. Other times I stay plunged into busyness or activity; if I don’t let myself slow down, I won’t feel the ache. Still other times I try to make things happen my own way – as though “getting it right” will somehow bend the will of the living God.

Thankfully God has substantially eased my frantic urge to “get it right” – whether with daily prayer or on retreats. I can think of a few retreats in my young adult years in which I felt much anxiety over whether I was spending the time rightly – as though God is stingy or particular about awakening love or showering his blessings! Thankfully he often surprised me and – at least some of the time – I let myself be surprised.

One of the benefits of being Catholic is also one of our greatest pitfalls – we have thousands of prayers and devotions we can turn to. Often, instead of slowing down and just being with God, we can easily pile on more prayers. We can begin to think of holiness as a matter of being strong enough, disciplined enough, or doing all the right things. In this posture, prayer becomes something we “do,” rather than time spent receiving, and the more we receive, allowing the desire of our heart to be expanded even more.

Experiencing prayer as desire includes an invitation to engage with all our human faculties – our thoughts, our imagination, our emotions, our memories, and even the very sensations in our bodies. Again, Augustine captures what the experience is like, describing how all five of his human senses were transformed by his desire for and encounter with the living God:

You called and shouted and shattered my deafness. You were radiant and resplendent, you put to flight my blindness. You were fragrant, and I drew in my breath and now pant after you. I tasted you, and I ache with hunger and thirst for you. You touched me, and I burn with desire to attain the peace which is yours.

There are moments in which we have no doubt we have tasted and seen the goodness of the Lord. Yet we resist! I know that I sometimes do. Sometimes it feels safer to put surrogates in God’s place, predictable comforts that don’t involve waiting or trust or surrender.

I find it helpful at times to pray slowly the opening words of Psalm 63, words deeply familiar to anyone who prays the Liturgy of the Hours. I like to emphasize the words “you” and “your” in each line to remember Him whom I truly desire:

O God, you are my God, for you I long;
for you my soul is thirsting.
My body pines for you
like a dry, weary land without water.
So I gaze on you in the sanctuary
to see your strength and your glory.

I am grateful for the experience of God awakening desire in my heart, even though it can sometimes be intense. It is good to long for the living God. Nor is it necessarily a bad thing that it took me a long time to experience a thawing of the desire he had placed in my heart. Scripture suggests that God waits until we are ready: “I adjure you, Daughters of Jerusalem, do not awaken or stir up love until it is ready!” (Song of Songs 8:4).

Hopefully, this Lent will be a season in which you and I can join with the Psalmist in praying, “My heart is ready, O God, my heart is ready!” (Psalm 57:7).

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God Will Be Enough

“The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.”

These opening words of Psalm 23 are familiar to most. But each of us can ask ourselves honestly: Do I really believe that?

Speaking for myself, the truthful answer is both “yes” and “no.” It is one thing to know at an intellectual level that God is all-good, all-powerful, and all-loving; or to state that I believe that he will provide for all my needs. And truly, I believe these things! But I also know the bind I sometimes feel. There can be that clutch of dread or panic about impending conflict, the crushing weight of responsibility (even if self-inflicted), or the suffocating feeling that those I thought I could trust are now pulling back and leaving me unprotected. In those moments, there are parts of me that urge me to hide and isolate rather than surrender unconditionally into God’s hands. It can feel so much safer to take matters into my own hands and to feel some measure of control rather than surrendering to God – what if his love won’t be enough??

In my own case, this inner resistance I sometimes experience isn’t so much in the form of words or thoughts as bodily sensations or deeply felt feelings. One way or another, I am quite familiar with the inner cry that screams out: It won’t be enough!!

I know I am not the only one.

There is a reason why Psalm 23 is so appealing. It speaks soothing and reassuring truths to so many of us who need to hear them again and again as we internalize them. We all need to know that God is abundantly good to us. We need to know that our hunger and thirst will find deep satisfaction in him. We need to know that we will be mightily protected by his rod and always guided by his staff – never abandoned in a place of powerlessness or stuck alone in a valley of death. We need to taste and see his goodness – even in this life.

Psalm 145 offers similar strong reassurance that the Lord’s love and care will always be enough for us, and that our deepest desires and needs will be met by him:

The Lord supports all who are falling
and raises up all who are bowed down.
The eyes of all look hopefully to you;
You give them their food in due season.
You open wide your hand
and satisfy the desire of every living thing.

If you are anything like me, you may find that you strongly believe the truth of these words, and desire to live by them – AND experience inner resistance. So… What do we do when part of us screams out, “It won’t be enough!!”?

I can rattle off the things so many of us tend to do in those moments – pull out our phones, scroll through social media, eat comfort food, binge on sugar or caffeine, fantasize about ways of getting away from it all, bury ourselves in busy work, fixate on the faults of those around us, and so many more. These days, there are no shortage of surrogates we can turn to in an attempt to replace real relationships. Then we reach a point of disillusionment and realize that these things we pursued to make sure it would be enough not only were not enough, but actually depleted us. We feel frustrated with ourselves and tend to trust God even less and to want to hide ourselves even more. A vicious cycle.

Alternatively, we can open ourselves to the kindness of God and other trusted companions, and become genuinely curious about the inner conflict. Rather than fleeing the images or feelings or bodily sensations that can be so unpleasant, we can follow where they lead us. In many cases, the reason why I am having trouble trusting and surrendering to God now is because my body is remembering what I felt like way back when. If I have past experiences in which I felt deeply deprived, neglected, abandoned, unprotected, or powerless, then it makes a great deal of sense that my body would warn me in the present moment that the same danger is immanent. The situation now is radically different – but my implicit memory doesn’t know any better; it’s doing it’s just doing its job by warning me.

The ultimate answer is to be found in an experience of genuine relationships, connection and communion, abiding in love and truth, staying present to others and God – and even to those parts of myself that try to tell me that it won’t be enough.

Ironically, I think many Christians have learned how to pray in a way that keeps God at a distance – especially from the ways in which we most need his loving presence. There have been seasons in my life in which I have looked at prayer much more as a “should” or a matter of being disciplined enough or getting it right. Rather than a close connection with God, many of us either avoid the vulnerability of prayer (and shame ourselves for being “lazy”), or we stay “busy” in prayer in a way that allows us to feel safe and in control, but hinders receptivity.

God invites us to come to him as we are and receive his blessings. I have written before about the prayer of lament, in which we open up our grieving hearts to God and seek connection with him in our pain and brokenness. Whether grief, anger, lustful fantasies, overeating, bitter resentments, panic, anxiety, or deep feelings of powerlessness – what would it look like to experience these things with God? If my body is a temple of the Holy Spirit, why not tell the Holy Spirit he is welcome in my body (including where I happen to be feeling dread or shame or grief or loneliness)? Why not consecrate it all to God – giving him all the pieces? If we do not, how can we say we are loving him with our whole heart?

Similarly, what would it look like to cultivate relationships with trustworthy people in which I allow them to see and know the real me – including all the parts I’d rather hide away? Many of us were wearing masks long before this pandemic began! To be fair, we may have needed to do that for a long time. The pain of deprivation, powerlessness, or abandonment is simply too much to bear until we are in a position in life in which deep prayer and meaningful relationships are genuinely possible. When we allow ourselves to experience these relationships consistently in our lives and in our prayer, real change begins to happen.

Do you, like me, sometimes fear that God’s love or the love of others won’t be enough? Are you willing to let go of your surrogates and experience real relationships? I cannot encourage you enough to step out in faith, to renounce the lie that his love won’t be enough, and to permit yourself opportunities to receive.

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Radiating Christ

“One can only give God through radiating him.”

Apparently this was a mantra often repeated by the French mystic Marthe Robin. It is so true! No amount of doing or striving or “getting life right” on my part will ever be able to connect others with Jesus. But if they see him shining through me, it is an entirely different experience!

Some of you may be familiar with a beautiful prayer that is recited every day after Mass by the Missionaries of Charity – the congregation of religious sisters founded by Mother Teresa of Kolkata, now serving the poorest of the poor in 139 countries of the world. The prayer is often attributed to John Henry Newman:

Dear Jesus, help me to spread Your fragrance wherever I go.
Flood my soul with Your spirit and life.
Penetrate and possess my whole being so utterly,
that my life may only be a radiance of Yours.
Shine through me, and be so in me
that every soul I come in contact with may feel Your presence in my soul.
Let them look up and see no longer me, but only Jesus!
Stay with me and then I shall begin to shine as You shine,
so to shine as to be a light to others.
The light, O Jesus, will be all from You; none of it will be mine.
It will be you, shining on others through me.
Let me thus praise You the way You love best, by shining on those around me.
Let me preach You without preaching,
not by words but by my example,
by the catching force of the sympathetic influence of what I do,
the evident fullness of the love my heart bears to You.
Amen.

I had many Masses with those sisters early on Wednesday mornings during my years in Rome, as I worked on my doctorate. I remember this prayer speaking deeply to my heart, awakening a yearning deep within me to radiate Christ – even if I was blind at the time to some of the obstacles that I was putting in the way.

What does it mean to “radiate” Christ?

Radiating requires a relationship with Christ. It is a way of being rather than a matter of doing. That is so hard for us busy and wounded westerners, who tend to be so focused on doing or achieving or insecurely putting forward a positive image of ourselves.

If we can learn anything from the apostle Paul, we can learn that to be a Christian is to abide “in Christ.” During my doctoral studies, I learned that Paul’s letters use that phrase “in Christ,” or something very similar, 165 times! If I allow myself to be crucified with Christ, to die and come to new life in him, then it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me. Paul learned on the road to Damascus that Christ is not just a historical man, but one mystical person, a unity of head and members. Jesus asked him, “Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?” Not “Why are you persecuting my followers?” but me. Christ and his body are one. Through faith and baptism all our own efforts are put to death and we enter a new, highly vulnerable, highly childlike existence as a co-member of the Body of Christ, together with all the other members of all times and places who likewise humbly depend upon him for everything.

Jesus invites us to abide in him like branches on a vine. It is such an appealing image of what it means to exist “in Christ.” There is a profound unity of the entire organism, and a sense in which we all thrive or suffer together, grow together, and bear fruit together. But there is no question about the order of causality. It is the vine that gives life to the branches, and not the other way around! Our heavenly Father, the true vinedresser, never ceases to graft new shoots into his Son.

Radiating means receiving. Think of a stained glass window. There are so many pieces of broken glass. An isolated pane is nothing to marvel at – particularly if all is darkness! But when assembled by a master artist, and when flooded with the gift of light, what beauty and radiance!

And so it is with Christ and Christians. We are invited to be vulnerable and receptive. That can feel so scary sometimes! It feels so much easier to carve out a familiar way of doing things, in which I can maintain the illusion of being in control. Even though I pray seriously every day, I have often prayed in a way that lacks vulnerability and receptivity, approaching prayer as a “should” rather than opening up my deep desire for God and letting myself ache for him and receive from him.

Even when we let ourselves beg God like a little child, what is our begging like? Do we not sometimes beg him to help us be strong enough so that we no longer need him? It is challenging to abide like little children who depend on him for our daily bread (and keep coming back the next day and the next day). Like those Israelites in the desert, I sure am tempted to store up a bunch of that manna in a jar so that I don’t have to keep feeling so vulnerable and so dependent upon God. Control feels like safety, even though it leaves me alone and miserable.

Little by little, God is assuring and reassuring me that his love is enough and always will be enough. I can open up the rusty gates of my multi-layered fortress and let the King of Glory enter. It doesn’t matter that I still struggle with my insecurities and sins. He will shine, and there will be no doubt whose glory it is that is shining. To be holy is not to be perfect, but to radiate Christ.

We can close with wise words from the Gregory Nazianzen, an early Church Father:

He wants you to become a living force for all mankind, lights shining in the world. You are to be radiant lights as you stand beside Christ, the great light, bathed in the glory of him who is the light of heaven.

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Healing and the Holy Spirit

Have you ever heard testimonies from fellow Christians about powerful healing experiences and secretly doubted or judged them? Or have you perhaps felt threatened by or resentful of the joy and freedom they seem to possess? I admit that I have!

For every person who has a powerful healing story there are dozens of others who have been reaching out for years and (it seems) experiencing no answer. Whether we have a physical ailment, anxiety and depression, a repeated sinful habit, an addiction, or relationship struggles, we can find ourselves suffering painfully for many years.

Reaching out and not being attuned to, not being heard, or not being cared for is one of the most painful human experiences. It can feel far safer to close ourselves off, to believe that healing doesn’t really happen, or to claim that it happened “back then” with Jesus but no longer happens today.

It doesn’t help that plenty of us Christians are prone to exaggerate or embellish, to draw attention to ourselves, or to avoid facing our brokenness by hiding behind a healing story. Even when real healing has happened, it can be tempting to tell a glamorous healing story that turns a blind eye to our ongoing struggles and avoids facing the toilsome work still ahead.

Isn’t it fascinating that sometimes God works powerful graces so swiftly and suddenly, and other times he seems to keep us waiting for SO long?

Lurking in the background here is perhaps the greatest theological mystery, namely, the interplay between God’s omnipotence and our human freedom. He is the all-powerful God AND he always honors the freedom he has given us. This means that the Holy Spirit works with amazing swiftness, but always in a way that respects and honors our human dignity, our desires, our receptivity, our readiness, and our freedom to choose.

Ambrose of Milan comments on this swiftness of the Holy Spirit, reflecting on Luke’s Gospel account of the birth of Jesus. The angel Gabriel comes to Mary and declares her to be full of grace. He invites her to say “yes” and become the mother of Jesus. She freely and wholeheartedly surrenders. Immediately God’s eternal Word becomes flesh in her womb, as the Holy Spirit rushes upon her in a new and special way. The result? She sets out in haste to the hill country. In the words of Ambrose, “Filled with God, where would she hasten but to the heights? The Holy Spirit does not proceed by slow, laborious efforts.”

The Holy Spirit acts with utmost swiftness. Whether impregnating the Virgin Mary, forgiving the sins of the Apostles on Easter Sunday, exorcising demons, healing the sick, or raising the dead, the Holy Spirit needs no time.

It is we who often need time. And God honors us in that need!

I know for myself that my “yes” to God’s invitation, my surrender to him, seems to come with strings attached. I have experienced many grace-filled moments in which I have given everything to him. Yet I keep discovering that I have secretly crossed my fingers behind my back. Somehow I have maintained a contingency plan, withholding some small parcel for myself just in case he doesn’t come through for me. It reminds me so much of the scene in Lord of the Rings in which Bilbo Baggins is called upon to surrender the highly corrupting Ring of Power, passing it to his nephew Frodo. Bilbo agrees and then gets up to leave the house – only to be confronted by the wizard Gandalf with the words, “You have still got the ring in your pocket.”

Like Bilbo, I can so often respond, “Well, so I have.”

And God waits – not with disdain or disappointment, but with eternal kindness and patience. He desires me to desire him. As a loving Father, he patiently watches me grow, without jumping in or coercing.

Receptivity in freedom is not a “one and done.” Even for Jesus and Mary, who were so utterly receptive to the Father’s will, so totally open to being led by the Holy Spirit, receiving was an ongoing reality. Mary was already “full of grace” (Luke 1:28) when she said yes to God – receiving ever greater blessings. She pondered God’s mysteries in her heart as she kept growing in her wisdom and understanding (Luke 2:19, 51). Luke twice tells us that Jesus himself grew in wisdom and in grace (Luke 2:40, 52).

To be truly human is to grow our whole life long. Our human existence is dynamic, not static. We are freely invited by God to become who we are. We are created in God’s own image and likeness, and called to receive love freely and give love freely as we grow in communion with God and each other. We are intended to love and be loved with ever greater depth and fullness and fruitfulness.

Desire and receptivity are key concepts here. We all have holy desires, sown in us by God the Father, who is always drawing us to himself (John 6:44) – often in undetected ways, but always in a manner that honors our freedom to say yes or no.

As we well know, our good and holy desires often get twisted and tangled up. Augustine of Hippo beautifully described the experience in his Confessions. In our unloveliness we plunge ourselves into the lovely things God has created – things which cannot even exist without him. We run far from him even though he is never far from us. And ever he pursues us, ever he invites us to open up and receive.

Desire stretches our hearts. The more we receive and truly experience the living God, the more we thirst for him. Thirst for God is quite possibly the most painful human experience of all – and the one that keeps enticing us to stretch out our hearts in receptivity. The more we willingly thirst, the more we can receive him, and the more the Holy Spirit is then unleashed to rush upon us, to flood us, to possess us, and to lead us in haste to give freely and sacrificially to others.

God alone knows all the reasons why healing does or doesn’t happen in any particular case. In some cases, we may never know in this lifetime. Often, however, what feels like a delay to us is actually a deep honoring of our desires, our receptivity, and our freedom. I believe that the single hardest human thing for many of us is to open up and receive. It is so hard to do what the Virgin Mary did in her fiat – to receive love vulnerably, freely, and wholeheartedly, setting down all our well-crafted defenses, permitting God and others to be and to stay intimately close.

Quite often, we find ourselves in a bind. One part of us deeply aches for connectedness and communion. We ache more than anything else for someone to draw near, to see us, to hear us, to be intimately close to us. And then when a good and trustworthy person actually does that, we freak out and sabotage! I am astounded at the lightning speed with which my defenses engage in situations like this.

The great spiritual question is the question Jesus asked at the pool of Bethesda to the man who had been crippled for 38 years: “Do you desire to be well?” Of course we do! All of us desire to be well, to love and to be loved. God created us for these things and planted these desires in us. But many of us are also chained by our pride and self-reliance, our hiding and self-protection. We need Jesus to break those chains by the power of the Holy Spirit. He will eagerly do so, and with even greater swiftness that our defensive reactions – if and when we deeply desire it. Some of us need many years to grow in those desires and reach a point where the strength of our desire is greater than the strength of our defenses. The Holy Spirit will never force himself – but thankfully he only needs a tiny crack to enter. Faith the size of a mustard seed is enough.

Many of us may need a long time and much breaking up of the hard soil before we are receptively willing to permit the Holy Spirit to act upon us and possess us. Likewise, after powerful moments of healing, the real work is only just beginning. Whether the healing received is physical, emotional, or spiritual (with spiritual healing always being the most important and most amazing), we are then invited in freedom to grow and mature and bear fruit. Only Jesus, through the anointing of the Holy Spirit, can liberate us. He breaks our chains, rolls away the stone that is blocking our self-created tomb, calls out forth, unbinds us and pulls off the masks that have obscured our vision. Once these obstacles are removed, his desire is for us to keep growing in our desires, to keep receiving and giving, and to bear fruit. He wants us to be true sharers in his love, his freedom, and his dignity. We are not robots of puppets. We are no longer slaves but are led by the Holy Spirit to live in the glorious freedom of the sons and daughters of God.

Conversations about faith and good works so easily get sidetracked if we don’t look at them in terms of Love. From start to finish, it is all God’s work – starting with the very desires themselves that he sows in us, continuing with the period of preparation (as long as it takes) for receiving the gift, rushing ahead in powerful moments of healing and grace, sprouting forth with new life, proceeding with everyday moments of patient and laborious growth, and culiminating with superabundant fruitfulness. From start to finish, God honors our dignity and freedom, inviting us freely to grow and mature and bear fruit in love, as we become who we are.