The Knitting Theologian

So, I know I left something out: how I started praying to Jesus, and what that did.

It all began when I turned my heart over to Jesus in the chapel at Seattle University on one December Saturday in my first quarter at Seattle University. I sat there in the chapel lonely and sad, full of the recognition of what a wreck my life actually was, all exterior accomplishment and no interior fulfillment, and I asked Jesus to come to me. I had always prayed to God before, who was comfortably abstract and far away. Jesus, I knew, would mess up my life, and I liked it the way it was–until that day in the chapel, looking at Jesus on the crucifix, when I realized that actually I did not like my life the way it was at all.

This was the first time I had ever done such a thing. But I was so lonely. I think it was beginning to dawn on me that nobody could ever love me as I longed to be loved. The only person who could do that was Jesus.

I remember the prayer I said that day:

Oh, Jesus, come to me. Come to me. Be my brother, my father, my lover, my friend. Come to me.

I said it over and over, and I wept. And that’s how it started.

I have read so many times in different spiritual books about how all God needs is for us to turn to Him. He, like the father in the story of the prodigal son, will run to meet us. I know how true this is, because this is what happened to me.

I prayed that prayer in the chapel, looking at the crucifix, and then I began to pray with the Sacred Space book, which was my first introduction to mental prayer. And Jesus began to come to me.

Soon, I was praying daily, and then I was making it most important, praying first thing in the morning. In return, it seemed like my prayer life was deepening and growing almost every day. Soon I couldn’t do without mental prayer. I needed it.

Jesus granted me a lot of consolations through prayer in those days, as if to draw me deeper and closer in. It’s a good thing He did. I still panicked the first time I encountered a dry patch in prayer, but the Holy Spirit directed me to some texts on prayer and I learned enough about dry patches to soldier through, or at least to keep going.

I still pray daily. It is a constant in my life. Sometimes I think of it as my real work. And I have seen my life transformed by it.

In the spirit of the Easter season, and knowing that the possibility of experiencing moments of resurrection exists in our lives here, I offer my conversion story.

Yes. I have been converted–or perhaps more accurately I am still being converted. I’ve heard some people call it a "reversion" instead, meaning that they were born and baptized a Catholic, attended Mass as children, received the sacraments of Eucharist and Confirmation, and then left the church as teens or young adults before coming back to a full practice of the faith. I’ve used that term to refer to myself as well, but really I think that the difference in how I thought of my faith before and after is so significant that the term "conversion" is more accurate.

You see, I really did not know Jesus before. I did not have a personal relationship with Him. Prayer, for me, was a series of words I said directed at God who was comfortably abstract and far away. After I finished saying all those words I checked "pray" off my mental to-do list and went about the rest of my day, never giving God a second thought.

As a child I experienced my faith as a series of rules I was supposed to follow. God was actually pretty scary. I believed in Him, because I was supposed to, but the idea that God loved me was so preposterous to me that I simply dismissed it. The idea that Jesus might have died for me, personally, on the cross was simply not to be believed. I didn’t even believe that Jesus loved me, at least not me personally as an individual. I thought God loved me because He had to according to the way He’d set up the rules. I was along for the ride. And so my faith was entirely exterior.

I apparently had a great longing for a deeper faith, and a natural orientation toward spirituality, because other people saw in me what I did not see in myself. But without that personal connection, without falling in love with Jesus Himself, the church became more and more a series of constraints to me. Just a bunch of stupid rules. I continued practicing my faith, sort of, in a very superficial way but in my heart I continued running farther and farther away from the image of God I knew.

However, I knew, deep down, that I wasn’t really happy, and I knew that God was seeking me. That frightened me. I had even been blessed with a few experiences, in my unbelieving days, which I knew were much more than they seemed. I couldn’t dismiss them as hallucinations or figments of my imagination, but accepting them as encounters with Christ was so ridiculous to me that I simply boxed the experiences up and shoved them away. I shake my head now, knowing that they were experiences when God reached out to me, came so close, revealed Himself to me–and I wasn’t paying attention. I stuck my fingers in my ears, closed my eyes, closed my heart, and waited for the moment to pass. How grateful I am now that God never stopped trying.

This history of mine is why I tell people to start with prayer. I have had people ask me why the church teaches this and that, which seem so backward, so authoritative, so demeaning toward women, so…everything that we modern people are supposed to reject. I have been asked "how can you, an intelligent and liberated woman, possibly be a Catholic?" What I have come to learn, through my own experience, is it all starts with getting to know Jesus as a real person and falling in love with Him. Everything makes way more sense after that. It all starts, goes back to, and remains in Jesus.

The way to get to know Jesus, I am convinced, is through prayer. I don’t mean rattling off Our Fathers and Hail Marys either, although they are a perfectly fine way to pray. I am devoted to the Rosary, for instance, and say at least one daily, so I say my share of Our Fathers and Hail Marys. But what I mean by getting to know Jesus through prayer is something else.

I mean sitting down with a passage from the gospels–they are our best record of who Jesus was and what He did–and taking 20 minutes to reflect on it, asking Jesus to be present during that reflection. I know that He will be, if you keep an open heart and trust that He is there, and if you remember that very often He is subtle. But He will be there and gradually you will begin to know who He is, and then you will begin to hear His voice in your heart.

And He is irresistible. I think as a human He clearly was; you can see in the gospels how great crowds followed Him, asking for healing, asking for food, asking for wisdom. Not very many understood Him, but certainly they were attracted to Him, and I think He must have had an irresistible attractiveness then. He still does. I know this through my own experience of encountering Him in prayer. I have come to know Jesus, and I have come to love Him deeply, and — no surprise here for anyone who has experienced conversion — my life has changed as a result. It hasn’t always been easy — there is no Christianity without the cross — but I wouldn’t trade it for anything, and in fact I am happier now, much happier than I ever was before. It is a deeper and more profound joy that sustains me and gives me life and hope. Those are big gifts, especially in the world we live in today.

My current “theme” Scripture:

Therefore, my beloved, as you have always obeyed, so now, not only as in my presence but much more in my absence, work out your own salvation with fear and trembling; for God is at work in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure. (Philippians 2:12-13)

That’s what I’m doing. Step by step. Bit by bit. Slipping back and gradually moving forward. Continuing on this spiritual journey because, really, it’s too late to turn back and I have no other options. Making a daily act of will to put my trust in God. Trying to accept the fact that I don’t have the big picture of where I’m going to end up; only the daily task list:

1. Love others
2. Worship God
3. Obey His word
4. Practice virtue

I attribute it all to mental prayer. One of these days I’ll get up a post on how mental prayer changed (well, is still changing) my life.

I am losing my secrets on the road to sanctity, and even though I know it is necessary it frightens me. See, I have these secrets that I’ve carried around with me for most of my life. I’ve held onto them like possessions, even though I don’t look at them or use them.

In the past few months, as my life has changed, I have given away many possessions that I just don’t need anymore, and I continue to do so. The other thing I am doing is telling my secrets, which is, of course, much harder than loading a bunch of stuff into the car and taking it to Goodwill.

For there is nothing hidden except to be made visible; nothing is secret except to come to light. (Mark 4:22)

Every time I come across this verse it knocks me flat. This morning was no exception. I sit there in meditation, and I ask God to show me what He wants me to learn from the verse, and He of course does, and then I sit there and struggle with the challenge of being confronted with the ugliness of my own sin and my belief in God’s love and mercy, which is more of an intellectual belief than an emotional certitude.

Losing my secrets for me means sharing my secrets, both to a very few trusted friends and in Confession. How grateful I am that my parish offers Confession just about every day, if I will only bestir myself to go.

And what do I discover when I do? God’s compassion, right there, in the person of the priest to whom I confess. Here’s a thing about secrets. When I don’t tell them, when I only dwell on them in my mind, what I tell myself about them is harsh and condemning. And then I come to believe that God will also say those things to me. But that isn’t what happens.

I was terrified of Confession as a child. I didn’t experience it as an occasion of grace. I got yelled at too many times for forgetting the Act of Contrition. I couldn’t see any value in it; I couldn’t understand why it was a sacrament, and so, of course, I stopped going.

Now I am trying to keep a commitment of going to Confession once a month—or even more often, when I get tripped up by one of my habitual sins—and I am finding that God is much, much bigger than that harsh, condemning voice in my mind. He is infinitely compassionate and merciful, and all I have to do is tell Him my secrets.