Seeing God Now

I went to confession today. The sacrament of confession has been a blessing in my life that I cannot even begin to describe, so I will not try. I try to go regularly, but sometimes it isn't easy, even in the Philippines. The parish on my post, for whatever reason, does not have regularly scheduled confessions. In other parishes they have confessions scheduled five days a week, but I cannot always get there. Today, however, I was able to get out for confession.

Now, on the schedule it said that confessions started at 2:00 PM. I was planning on seeing a movie with the guys, which I remembered from seeing on the billboard the day prior, started at 3:00. Accordingly I arrived early, so as to be the first in line. I was early enough to make a short visit in the Blessed Sacrament Chapel before getting into where I assumed the line would form. I was 15 minutes early, a respectable time.

The priest was not 15 minutes early. He was not early at all. He was, in fact, on what Americans lovingly refer to as "Island Time," which means that you show up, you know, meh... whenever. As time ticked by I said a rosary, and still no priest showed up. Other people came and got in a sort of line behind me, and still no priest showed up. I, being the only white guy in church, also appeared to be the only one at all perturbed by this.

While I was waiting in line I was reading "The Jesuit Guide to (Almost) Everything," by James Martin, SJ. The chapter I was reading was called, "Surrendering to the Future," in which he talks about the Jesuit vow of obedience and what it means to be obedient to God's will in day-to-day life. He quoted from a Jesuit named Walter Ciszek:

"The plain and simple truth is that His will is what He actually wills to send us each day, in the way of circumstances, places, people and problems. The trick is to learn to see that... Each of us has no need to wonder about what God's will must be for us; His will for us is clearly revealed in every situation of every day, if only we could learn to view all things as he sees them and sends them to us."

Of course! God's will in the moment! I get it, so this late confession thing is like a test? Right. I got this. I immediately set myself to surrendering my impatience. Cool beans! I surrendered the heck out of it!

Then when my buddy M texted to ask about the movie, I told him it was at 3:00 (he had thought it was 3:30) and I replied I probably wouldn't be able to make it to the movie. I was stuck in confession line. So I wouldn't get to hang out with the guys? I wasn't looking forward to being stuck in the hotel room by myself, or going to see a movie by myself later if I still even wanted to see it, but God's will. Surrender. Got it.

Finally the priest arrived at 2:38. I was out of the church at 2:48 thinking I might just have time to

catch a trike cab to the theater by 3:00. (Trike cabs are the primary transport around here. The small ones are basically a small motorcycle with a covered side car. The large ones are a medium motorcycle with a frame welded around them with a passenger compartment to the right and behind the motorcycle.)

Unfortunately, all the trikes waiting outside the church were the little kind. When I told them I wanted to go to the mall they shook their head and replied in Cebuano, which I do not speak. Something about too small, which I thought was a reference to my size, but I saw an identical trike carrying three Filipinos. No matter how small they are, three of them are bigger than one of me.

Eventually I figured it must be illegal for them to drive on the highway, since I only ever see the big ones on the highway outside our hotel. These guys were little trike drivers, but they cheerfully spent ten minutes trying to flag me down a big trike. When that was to no avail, they suggested I walk back to the corner and try to get one from the other road.

So I headed back to the corner, and then when no trikes would stop there I kept walking. No point in bothering about the movie now. It looked like God wanted me to have some alone time. Maybe I would do some more reading? Maybe journal for a bit? Spend some time in prayer?

Eventually I got picked up an made it back to the hotel so I didn't have to walk the two miles. Which, two miles is nothing, but I was still glad to get a ride. I walked into the library, still trying to accept God's will being me spending the rest of the afternoon by myself. In the elevator I accidentally pressed the 3rd floor button instead of the fifth floor button. That was a slight irritation, because it's an old fashioned elevator and you cannot cancel a floor by pressing the button again, and it takes a long time to slow down and start back up again.

Then the door opened at the third floor and my buddy H was standing there. He stepped into the elevator, and then looked at the number 5 and then at me. "Wait, are you going up?"

"Yep. Are you going down?"

"Yeah. Are you going to the movie?"

"I am pretty sure it started at 3:00."

"M is pretty sure it's at 3:30. That's where I am going now, down to his room. Are you going to come."

"Sure, let me drop off my book and I will meet you down there."

And so it was that all of the delays and frustrations and accidentally pressed wrong buttons served to put me in the exact right place at the right time to meet up with H in the elevator. And it turned out the movie was at 3:40.

God is sometimes obscure, or maybe I am obtuse. I can sometimes see Him in hindsight, but only rarely in the moment. But that was so obvious even I couldn't miss it. He was saying, "I care about everything, even the smallest details. You can trust me with your life."

Totality

"I am the Lord's poor servant; to Him alone, the living God, I have offered all in sacrifice; I have

St. Lucy, after her eyes got gouged out during her martyrdom.

nothing else to give; I offer Him myself." Antiphon for the Canticle of Zechariah from the Divine Office for the feast of St. Lucy.

This morning during my Holy Hour the antiphon above really stuck in my mind. It is fitting for Saint Lucy, since she is both virgin and martyr. She truly did give everything to God, both during her life and at the end of her life. By including this antiphon in Morning Prayer, the Church obviously means me to pray it, but the truth is I cannot honestly apply it to myself. In truth, I doubt anyone ever could strictly apply it to themselves, except for Jesus and the Blessed Mother. No one else can claim truly to have given everything to God. Even the greatest saints have held something back at one time or another. All are conscious of their sinfulness.

If this is true even of the greatest saints, how much more so of myself? I cannot even give him a full hour totally. Even thinking about this during my Holy Hour I noted the trend I have to be extremely distracted for about the first 50 minutes. It is generally only the last ten minutes or so that I really feel like I engage in on any affective level. The first 45-50 minutes are just me trying not to be distracted as I work through the Liturgy of the Hours. I cannot even claim ever to have given Him an undivided hour. Can I really claim to have "offered all in sacrifice?"

In thinking about this another similar experience came to mind. I have been doing a lot of kickboxing lately, working the heavy bag a couple of hours every week. I am right handed but I box left handed because I got into that habit when I first started out. My left hand would not learn to jab very well, so I just jabbed with my right and used my left for power punches. I also liked having that surprise power shot with the right, and I liked messing with right handed sparring partners who aren't used to fighting a southpaw.

In my sessions on the heavy bag I have been having trouble getting my left cross up to scratch. It doesn't have the speed or power that I want at first, it is slow and stiff. It takes about four or five rounds on the bag to get it snapping the way I want it to, and only then does the real practice begin.

I sometimes wonder if my distracted prayer isn't a bit like that. I only really get into the last bit because it takes me the first 45 minutes just to get warmed up. With the boxing the cause is fairly straightforward. A punch flies properly when it is loose. It starts from the feet, legs and hips and translates out from there to the end of the fist, but in order to do that the power must be generated in the large muscles of the lower body and transferred smoothly through the muscles and joints of the lower body. It isn't hard to teach those muscles all to fire. That takes about five minutes to learn. What takes much longer, years and years in fact, is teaching the other muscles not to fire. When I throw that punch, my body wants to tense up and push harder, thinking that will make my strike more powerful; but that simply does not work. Instead, muscles end up fighting each other, competing instead of cooperating. Instead of transferring smoothly back and forth between different groups at different points in the movement, all groups want to be controlling all parts of the punch. I have the strength. I can deadlift 400Lbs quite easily and do multiple sets with it. That is more than enough power to hit as hard as I want, if only I would stop getting in my own way.

This, ironically, is why small, lean fighters often hit with more force than large, muscular ones. They have less muscle to get tangled up with itself, and it is easier to train them to work in cooperation. This is the secret behind Bruce Lee's incredible"one-inch" punch that was reported to be able to knock a sumo-wrestler off his feet (note the guy in the picture is not a sumo-wrestler.)

To apply this to my prayer life, what the antiphon is talking about is a similar kind of totality, where every single part of me, body, mind, emotions, will are all engaged in just one thing. As with boxing, I am beginning to think that perhaps it is less a matter of training myself to do and more a matter of learning not to interfere. The simple decision of the will is there. I get up in the morning. I go to the chapel. I kneel down. I make the decision to pray, which is a response to the call of God to pray. That call is the power. That generates all the power needed to crash through any barrier or overcome any enemy, if only I wouldn't get in the way. But my mind refuses to be still. It wants to think, because when you are a mind that is all you know how to do. My body wants to move, because that is what a body does. My emotions want to feel things, because that is their only experience of life. My will wants to choose things, without knowing that all that is required is not to un-choose.

The truth is that the prayer is not any of these things. All of these things may enter into the prayer at any point, for a specific purpose and then they must be prepared to give their all in that moment, but they are not the prayer. The prayer is that single, downward rushing desire of God to come to me and dwell in me and make His home with me.

The rest is just me learning not to get in the way.

Getting Old

When I am deployed I always have time to work out. Whereas in the states I always have more important things to do, and physical fitness is relegated to whenever I can make the time, on deployment there are long periods of time where there is literally nothing to do except work out. Then of course there are the deployments where there is no time at all, but that is a different story.

So thursday morning I did a solid sprint workout, trying to get my run time back down to the sub 6:30 mile range. I was feeling pretty good, but I had deadlifted the night before. Not necessarily the wisest thing ever, to jump straight into two-a-days and to sprint the morning after a deadlift routine. Sure enough, I pulled a muscle.

Not a large muscle, like a hamstring or a quad or anything like that. No, I pulled a very small, almost inconsequential muscle in my lower abdomen, right in the flex of my hip. It doesn't hurt very bad except when I do one very specific movement, which is try to bring my left leg from behind me underneath my body to in front of me. Given that I am a biped who gets around by walking, however, I do this with an astonishing degree of regularity, i.e. every step. As long as I am just walking it is fine, because I don't let my leg go that far behind me, but even a single step of running hurts like the proverbial Dickens.

So there you have it, just one tiny little pulled muscle. No big deal, right? When I was 19 I would have taken a weekend off, come at it hard on monday and been fine. Now, at a few months shy of 29, I am having to be wise, unfortunately. I have to cut back not just the intensity of my workouts, but even the style. It is only a small muscle, a small injury, but you use that muscle for virtually every exercise that involves tensing up your core (which is pretty much every exercise worth doing). More importantly, a weakening of that muscle leads to an increased risk of hernia, which I do not need right now.

So there I was tonight, in the gym, spending an hour working just biceps, triceps and forearms. I have not done an arm workout in years. I despise isolation exercises, ones that only use a single joint, or pair of joints. I eschew the body building notion that every muscle needs to be trained independently and sculpted to the max. That is vanity and a waste of time. I don't have time for that. When I go to work out I am focused on one thing, and one thing only, and that is increasing my work capacity. Sometimes that means I practice martial arts, sometimes I practice moving my own body, sometimes I practice moving other heavy things, but I despise workouts that are focused on cosmetics. My goal is function, healthy body mechanics, and the ability to do useful things.

Unfortunately, all of those heavy, multi joint lifts or dynamic body movements or martial arts techniques involve the core, which means they stress that particular muscle, which means they retard healing, so there I was, curling.

Then, to make matters worse a buddy that I sometimes lift with came in. He is a big guy. Huge. He proceeds to start a leg series, squatting and leg pressing. I really wanted to get rid of the curl bar and the cables and all that girly stuff and throw a bar across my back, but I refrained. I did not jump into the squat workout.

It seems I have invested my pride in the kind of workout I do. Every bit as foolish as the "beach muscle" lifters that I presume to despise, I have taken pride in not being a "beach muscle" lifter. So when beach muscle lifts are all I can safely do, it irks me. It stings my pride. Therefore, it is probably good for me. I need the humility of realizing that even functional fitness is not my goal, and therefore needs to be surrendered. God had other plans, and therefore I must cease my grumbling, my superiority complexing and my feeling sorry for myself. It is an opportunity to remind myself that I am mortal, strength is fleeting, and I will grow weak and die someday. This is my first acute sports injury, at 28 years old. I am doing really well so far, but it is all down hill from here, and I need to be detached from my physical abilities, because God is going to take all of them away eventually, once they have served their purpose. Let them go. He is the only strength that matters.



His pleasure is not in the strength of the horse,
    nor his delight in the legs of the warrior;
the Lord delights in those who fear him,
    who put their hope in his unfailing love. Psalm 147:10-11

The Widow's Mite

They asked me once… No, come to think

It was more than once; Actually when have they not

Asked me? But for the sake of the poem, once,

“Why? Why throw it all away? Why sink

Into oblivion? I mean, you know, you’ve got

It all! Brains, muscle, health. You dunce.

Why let it go?”

                        And I must say…

                                                       I don’t know.

I don’t know what it is that I am letting go

Of, I have let go of quite a bit in my time

Sacrificed time with family,

Time with friends,

Time with books

Time in Church

In my search

With vague frenzied looks

For insufficient ends.

Time in college,

Time at the park,

Around the campfire in dark

And much knowledge

Gained from teachers

And preachers.

Sacrificed time at the end of my life

With my aging wife

Time borrowed against my latter years

In health used up now

And wealth spent on things

I do not even remember. Silver wings

For a meniscal tear

A green hat

For an arthritic back

And a bursa spent upon

Who knows what? Need I go on?

And yet I have been the gainer, through it all,

A certain mental toughness, a confidence

I never had before; a physicality

Beyond the reach of most. My personality

Needed the reality, banality, inanity and all out insanity

Of such a life, to break at length through the dense

Obtuse mind’s self centered wall,

To see what truly matters.

And now, having seen much of places and climes,

Governments and men, through various times

And traded gold for success,

And achieved success and filled my mouth with the whole dusty mess

And chewed and swallowed and soliloquized

On the dry, tasteless, much prized

Dust, and how delicious it would be if only

I could season it with a little more dust…

In short, having become lonely…

At length I can hear

The silent voice in my ear

Deafening me with His love.

“If dust is all you have, then give it to me

Every speck.

Keep not one fleck

For yourself. Then you shall see

How I make much of nought.”

And so, I thought, why not?

Having made a hell of a try

Of this and found it dry,

If He offers me living water for the dust of earth

That forms my frame,

And shapes what fame

I might yet have achieved,

So what? He is to be believed.

And in the end all I have from birth

Is His, to give, to whom he will.

So it is willed,

Where what is willed must stay.

And so you can keep this whole mess

The fame, and fury, and utter pointlessness.

I will give it all for love and fade away,

And thus be filled.