is anybody out there?

Written back in March...
Seems time to shut this down...and I don't know how. Spiritually off now in places I am not yet prepared to describe. I've been feeling a lot of discontent inside the people I've encountered...and I don't know what to do with it. I understand that we each must walk our own path, and I am so grateful for people who did not try to push me along the way, but I'm not sure I am helpful to some people. I just realized someone new called me about spiritual direction...and I have not yet returned the call. That is not like me.
I am lost inside my own thoughts...and I'm not certain I am thinking at all. There is this conversation with God that seems to be unceasing, and yet really has no words in it anymore...and I'm not really comfortable with that.
I have always asked God to make me a healer.  Since I was a little girl. In the last 20 years, I have asked for wisdom. I think God has given me a bit of both. I asked God for a teacher, and I was given several wonderful ones. Everything I have asked for, God has given me. I have not always asked for good things, so I am much more careful with my asking. I recognize I need to pray more, so to know what things are best for me to ask for.
I write in this way here because it is just too scary to presume to write differently right now.
I am praying for the courage to go deeper into this life I am just beginning to find. I may have to find a different way to communicate...but I recognize it is essential for catalogue this spiritual journey with the hope that however far I might get, someone will go further. Be braver, be younger when they begin, have greater insight...and write more clearly.
I step out into the night and risk everything
asking God
to just not walk away
to not let me walk away
to heal more
so that I can draw close
and He can draw close
and I can be more
helpful
to the lost
even while I am lost...
*******************************
Now it is September. NPR is reporting about Catalonia wanting independence from Spain, on the heels of a failed election in Scotland calling for the same thing. Previously, there was a story about how Democracy doesn't necessarily improve the lives of the poor. And a story about a United States IPO of AliBaba...however it might be spelled.

I have thoughts on all of that...but the safer response is to connect to the basic human condition and the unceasing struggle between dependence, independence and interdependence. I have been more than a bit annoyed with the current priest I have been working with, and not surprisingly, he has probably helped me the most. I do better when there's a war...or a battle. You know what you want during a war. Peace time, is more fuzzy. Perhaps that is why men consistently choose to wage war. At least you feel...in control...with your personal heart. When lines are drawn, we kind of look good.  When we are calmer...we maybe don't know what to do with ourselves.

It is really hard...at least for me...to do "nothing."

I've spent the year saying no to almost everything. As a result, I've gone shopping a lot...and I have so much crap in my house now that I just look at it and cry. I replaced the addiction of doing with the addiction of buying. This is a much bigger mess than working. I'm not sure the priest's advice was the best. Suffice to say, as I read about the mystics, I know that well-meaning priests have done the same to really great women...so it doesn't bother me too much. It's part of the trial, I think, to learn to discern what is good advice and what is not...and perhaps what needs to be learned or refined is much subtler than I can imagine before learning the lesson.

Kind of like the time I had a priest, red-faced, scream at me (like a nun did once when I was in 4th grade)...and while I gave in to his tantrum in the beginning minutes and let him hurt me, I did find my way to recognize that he was in trouble and what was immediately happening was not about me. It's hard to figure that out when you really care about someone.

I am toying with the idea of writing a book about all my encounters with priests, and what I learned from them. I am praying about whether or not it would be helpful to others. I would not do it just to do it.

But it has been made clearer to me about how to put together the next thing, and it is connected to ideas I began forming 30 years ago...and to which my biological mother spoke about with me before she died.

I kind of think about Zwingli...and his attempts to "wipe out" the Catholic stain from his country by white-washing the church walls.  I argued in a paper for my Church History class that you could take away the visual stimulations of the story of God in the Churches (which is how I understood the paintings of the Saints...I never connected them to some kind of papal control of the Church), take away the beautiful art...and man will pray in his pew and create his own art in his head. You cannot take away God...the real ideas of God.

Take away a child's toys and he will create play with boxes and dirt. Take away the boxes and dirt and he will create play with his fingers.

So that's how I have begun to see my assignment to "do nothing."  There have been moments of real stillness. And I have learned much from them. But I am a busy person by nature...I simply don't want to do what other people tell me, most often because they have told me to do it.

And there is the revelation. In conversation yesterday, I feel I can most identify with Paul, rather than Peter, these days. And it is here where I meditate.

I must close now. More of a report, than an clean offer of insight here. But I thought I'd add a few words as I move into the next place.