Months! Months it’s been, since I last wrote to you! There is a sweet baby girl growing in my tummy, making it hard in more ways than one for me to reach my computer like I used to be able to. :) The first few months of pregnancy I was simply not myself, and now the third trimester is coming on and thoughts of baby, birth, and all the ways life is changing seem to crowd out most everything else.
I’ve felt myself dormant in soul for so long— but something about Jesus marking my forehead with ashes and something about the nigh reality of holding our baby girl in our arms has caused light to flicker over my eyelids, making me dream of dawn, and dream of waking. I want to be near my Lord again, awake to his breaths and his movements— dare I say, even more awake than I am to the movements of this little one inside of me! And here it is Lent, a time for us to be keeping watch, trimming our lamps for the coming of the Bridegroom, and sweeping the rooms of our soul.
Pregnancy is so hard. My body is being broken for the life of this little one, and most days I give in to self-pity. What is it for you these days? Sickness? Exhaustion? Overworked and harried noisy days? Or maybe it’s the suffering of fasting and abstinence as you travel through the desert with your Lord this season?
I’ve felt him prodding me to wonder—What does it mean to suffer for Christ? I know the Sunday School answer, but it has been a long time since I knew with the deep-down knowledge of experience. Perhaps I have never truly known what it is to suffer for my Lord. I yearn to know. For suffering is a deep, dark place without him.
He’s brought two places of study to my mind for this journey— the epistles and St. Teresa of Avila’s “Interior Castle,” which I read some years ago. My plan is to journey through these, punctuating my study with writing to you. If you find yourself with a bit of truth or wisdom on what it means to suffer for Jesus, please do leave a comment or send me a message— I’d love to hear about your own journey in this!
I pray that wherever you find yourself, you would find Jesus in your suffering this Lent. I pray that your vision of your own suffering would so blend with his cross that they become one for you and that your every trial draws you closer to his pierced feet.
Week One: The Outer Courts
I have thought often lately of my unexpected meeting with Jesus in the Boston Public Library that I wrote about some time back. Tucked away on a higher level of the Library, is a mural, which, when you walk up the stairs, is so strikingly real you’d think you’d stepped back to Golgotha 2,000 years ago. There is Jesus, hanging, pierced and broken, on the cross. And Adam and Eve are literally tied to the base of it, their desperate arms holding golden chalices up to him, catching his precious blood. I feel these days like I’ve been wandering around, untethered, here and there glancing down into my cup, growing upset and discontented with how empty it is, and then filling it with the tears of my own self-pity. Part of me wants to laugh out loud at this image of myself, but how true it is! I have lingered outside of my Lord’s castle for much too long.
In her first chapter, St. Teresa of Avila writes about the soul as a “castle made of a single diamond or of very clear crystal, in which there are many rooms.” Some linger their whole lives in the outer courts, “and although by nature they are so richly endowed as to have the power of holding converse with none other than God Himself, there is nothing that can be done for them.” The door, she says, is prayer. There are also some who linger without the castle, but eventually make their way into the first rooms. “These are very much absorbed in worldly affairs; but their desires are good […]. Full of a thousand preoccupations as they are, they pray only a few times a month, and as a rule, they are thinking all the time of their preoccupations, for they are very much attached to them, and where their treasure is, there is their heart also.” Preoccupations, preoccupations! How many thousands there are that run through my mind each day. When my prayer is finally in earnest, what else do I think upon?
“All our interest is centered in the rough setting of the diamond, and in the outer wall of the castle— that is to say, in these bodies of ours.” If that doesn’t sum up my life lately, I don’t know what does. St. Teresa writes that “we do not understand ourselves, or know who we are.” I have felt as though I’ve been sleeping for months—to feel asleep in soul, asleep to our Lord and his kingdom is, I believe, bound up with not truly knowing ourselves— “as to what good qualities here may be in our souls, or Who dwells within them, or how precious they are— those are things which we seldom consider and so we trouble little about carefully preserving the soul’s beauty.” To truly keep watch for our Lord, to be awake to him, we must be awake to our true selves— for could it be that our true selves are so bound up in him that there is no way we can know our Lord without also knowing ourselves? Our soul is our Lord’s castle– they are one and the same! I will never be able to comprehend this.
Oh Lord Jesus, by the time your precious altar is stripped on Good Friday this year, may we find ourselves deep within the heart of your castle, our souls. May we find ourselves like Adam, like Eve, so tethered to you that our suffering is yours.
