First of all, I should say I didn’t want to “become Catholic”. I wasn’t in search of an identity of belonging or to become a member of an exclusive club. I had read and prayed and meditated and dreamt my way to faith, including some interior experiences that I will never share with anyone again, given the profound spiritual abuse I experienced in ever deepening levels of social and spiritual hell.
Let me spell that out before I go further: 1 – First was waiting to be baptized 2015 to December 8, 2017. 2 – Then I was baptised but told to get lost and it was made clear to me I wasn’t welcome. That started the week after I was baptised when I didn’t know whether to go back to Mass where I was baptised or back to the parish that had rejected me. That was December 15, 2017 through 2018. 3 – Then a Trespass to Property Notice cut me off from Eucharistic Adoration and the small group of prayerful people I had gotten to know. That was March 2019. I don’t even want to talk about what happened after I had the italki team delete my profile in August, 2019.
Conversion was about: -an experience of saying yes in a dream with religious imagery I had never had before -a book called Path to Salvation by Theophan the Recluse. I did some of things in this book and it lead to an opening, a relationship, a settling into almost a marriage or a ‘home’ that just always is. -doing a life review after discovering a website with an Ignatian Review, especially relationships that had gone wrong – at work, personal life. I really thought about myself with a brutal honesty. The fact that I did this, and was never allowed to speak it, and then mobbed and humiliated on purpose by the priest whose job it was to hear me … as Bishop Bourgon said it was a sacrilege. Playing games with Sacraments where people are at their most open, most trusting, most child-like, most exposed, most vulnerable is … evil. Despite all the shortcomings, I still had that new connecting with God, whose voice I heard inside me a few times. I’ve being exploring the metaphors and images and parables ever since then. -finding a Psalm on Youtube – both the music and the words worked together, for me. I realised how old the Psalms were and it hit me that the people who wrote those words so far back in history, and from another part of the world I had never felt connection to … we were more similar than different. That was a big realization.
After conversion: -Sobornost, Catherine Doherty, Madonna House, I am third, Mass in their forest chapel -the Imago Deo -the Trinity (from Canonical Orthodox groups)
“You talked to the priests? Why’d you do that? Priests are men!” -MT, a lady in Toronto from their local Catholic Women’s League
“They get those jobs because they can smooth things over.” -HB, a religious sister explaining the types of priests who become Vicars
“I lived as though I wasn’t aware I was a daughter of God.” -CG, a cradle Catholic who left the practice of Catholic-Christianity after high school but came back many years later
From speaking to Catholic women after my disastrous Rites of Initiation, I have realised a few things:
1 On spiritual and moral questions, women need to talk to other women.
2 Women should interact with priests as little as possible. This is just better for both.
3 The step where an inquirer formally and publicly becomes a catechumen is important because it tells practicing Catholics that this new person has a mustard seed of faith, and that they may and should participate in this person’s journey, through Catholic mentorship. Converts are hardly coming to the table empty-handed; we can be ‘mustard seeds of faith’ to established communities, too.
4 The process of healing wounded conscience or consciousness (for the glory of God and more peaceful families, workplaces, organizations) needs time. After acquiring new information and the awareness of having made choices out-of-step with your best life, sometimes it takes years before someone with the right experience appears in your path with the right words. For me, when it comes to personal topics like dating, mating, procreating, I just needed the phrase, “I hadn’t lived like I was aware I was daughter of God” which expressed everything I felt. Converts who know how to succinctly encapsulate all the elements of ‘a good confession’ in under a minute would save the sense doors (eyes, ears) of the priest from images they’d rather not allow into their mind.
This is an article I found after visiting Madonna House in 2015. I believe I found it and printed it in 2018. I think this is a good attitude to have for these times of lifelong learning. I am copying the whole thing; hope this is okay. This analogy about having to unwind a ball of yarn after making mistakes for a long time is worth sharing widely.
As per my endorsement of Alex Havard’s conclusion that Catholicism can be timid and pusillanimous, I’ve translated a few Christian-Catholic words from the original into my own new New Age (=psycho-spiritual)equivalents. There are stages of the spiritual journey where timidity and awe and regret are the right sentiments, but I think my New Age vocabulary suit our times, and a spirituality for the second half of life.
I made the mistake of trying to speak Christian as a foreign language, and incorporated all these words (forgive, repent, convert, conversion, metanoia) in what I said to Catholics, with the result that they thought I was either nuts, a religious fanatic. However, I thought this was the insider terminology Catholics used to talk to each other, and I wanted them to know I had started to learn their language. In the monocultural small community of Catholics in Peterborough, this was an epic fail.
Wrong For So Long by Fr. Bob Wild
There are many obstacles to conversion (=growing, changing). One of them is the difficulty of admitting even to ourselves that we may have been sinning (=not up to our own or external standards)or doing something stupid for a long, long time. Since this is a hard pill to swallow, we put up tremendous defenses.
One day I was spinning wool in the poustinia. After you have spun two balls of single yarn, you ply them together to make the two-ply yarn. Well, I was happily plying away but things weren’t going too smoothly. No matter. Perhaps the wheel needed oil or something. I barged ahead.
But the spinning kept getting harder and harder to do. When I had almost completed the whole ball, I suddenly realized what was wrong. I had plied the yarn in reverse!
That was my sudden moment of “enlightenment,” the moment when I realized that I’d been doing it all wrong! Not only that but now to “get it right” I would have to go through a long, messy process. I would have to unravel the yarn and start all over again.
This initial realization was very painful; I could hardly get up the energy to begin again. And as I did, the wool went all over the poustinia—on the rafters and the floor; it looked like a huge spider web.
But once I accepted the truth that I had done something stupid, it got easier and easier. Then at last, as I approached the final rewinding, I had a great sense of joy and gratitude.
It takes a great deal of humility (=clear-eyed self-awareness) to face the truth of what we see. Perhaps the older we get, the harder it is.
And our long-standing defects are the hardest to uncover and repent of (=get over). We need to fight the tendency to deny what we see, to make believe it’s not as bad as we think. It probably is as bad as we think!
At this point, temptations can rear their heads. Discouragement: “If I’ve been wrong in this area, maybe my whole life is one big mistake.” Sadness: “All my efforts have been wasted. There’s no sense in trying any more.” Self-pity: “I’ll never be able to live right.” These are lies and we need to renounce (=observe, look at but then let go of) them.
And this is an important moment of decision. We’re either going to admit our blindness and seek change, or we’re going to cover up what we see and continue on as if nothing had been revealed to us.
It was very difficult for me to start unravelling that dumb yarn. “All that time wasted!” But as I proceeded, joy was restored.
For there is joy, though usually not at first, in facing reality and doing something about it. If we break something, we can pick up the pieces. If we make a mistake, we can admit it and ask forgiveness (=acknowledge a mistake out loud in words to the person affected so as to not gaslight them, deepening rather than shattering your shared reality with that person, and then letting it go).
And, if we discover that we’ve been sinful (=made a mistake, which is an essential part of becoming / learning)or immature or childish in some area of our life for a long, long time, the really mature and realistic and life-giving thing to do is admit it and unravel the results as best we can.
That’s what repentance(=change, growth) is—admitting that we have been travelling down the wrong road—like when we’re out driving and we discover that we’ve gone 200 miles in the wrong direction.
Facing long-standing faults is very hard, and it takes a great grace (=movement of the Spirit, serendipity, synchronicity) and a big heart to repent (=change, grow). If you do, you will know both the pain of having wasted many years and the joy of finally living in the light.
“Sisters is a one-hour documentary film that takes us into the lives of five American Catholic Sisters.
It is a film about faith and hope, love and death, seen through the eyes of five women who have committed their lives to the service of others in the deepest way. Without narration, their stories are told in the honest words and actions of the women themselves. To purchase a DVD for group screenings contact Char Gardner at: char@gardnerfilms.com”
Source: from the Vimeo page for this documentary
Buddhist Techniques for Silence & the Catholic Imagination as Archetypal Portal
I think that Buddhist meditation, Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction, Tonglen (for a world that is falling apart), Metta Bhavana, Vippassana, the 32 Parts of Body, the Body Scan and various other Buddhist practices combined with the Catholic imagination, writings of the saints, contemplation on the events of Salvation History can create fertile space for *Annunciation, Acts of Perfect Contrition, Illumination of Conscience, ‘God breaks through’ or the development of an interior voice. I guess one just has to find a practice that leads to silence, and then ASK (I didn’t know you had to ASK until I found Theophan the Recluse) and then just wait and listen.
Listen to Sister Karen (above) from about the 39:55 min mark.
I waited years to have an opportunity to tell the Catholics about this experience. They wouldn’t listen. I guess it isn’t in the interests of a corporation that says the Holy Spirit only comes through infant baptism they provide to hear the story of a convert. The Catholic Church still behaves as a hegemon though it’s not. The People of God are central to the Mystical Body of Christ, and ordination is a call to service, not domination. I want to look further into the dysfunctional co-dependency that is clericalism. Would the chosen co-operation of human beings who are awake not be a more powerful force for good? In this talk from Thomas Doyle in early 2020 at Emory University on the topic of lay involvement in the institutional Church, he says that there is nothing a Catholic cleric loathes more than an adult Catholic. This seems very true in Canada. Then again, we are still learning how to discuss and disagree well; until recently, superficial harmony and ‘niceness’ was enough.
*I still speak Christian as a Second Language (CSL) and might be using these vocabulary items incorrectly. I apologize to native Christian speakers for any misuse. It is not ‘intentional’. Experimentation, opportunities for practice, regular good quality interaction with native speakers, gentle corrective feedback, explicit instruction are all essential to successful adoption of a new social identity and fluency in a new language / worldview.
I recall reading that John Paul II was an advocate of Eucharistic Adoration, and included it in his daily practice. I think this is the ultimate self-awareness exercise. The Rosary is a useful tool for laying the ground work of the theological imagination, and it develops good habits of daily recollection and disciplined focusing of the mind for 15 to 20 minutes.
Adoration, on the other hand, is a good percolation and infusion space for the psychic seeds planted by the Rosary, and homilies, and parables in Scripture. The experience of the Divine Love needs a place to go, and Adoration is that place in the Catholic Tradition. That awe and reverence and devotional energy needs to go somewhere. The body needs to express what it knows and feels.
Why do Koreans want to be Christians and why do Canadians want to be Buddhist? Or Indigenous? I think that the exotic (rituals, mantras, symbols) appeals to meaning-starved WEIRD people as long as the ‘Self’ remains unintegrated, and the shadow is in the driver’s seat. Our own traditions seem hokey and ridiculous and banal and uninteresting as long as we find parts of ourselves to be hokey, ridiculous, banal and uninteresting.
This is why wise teachers insist western Buddhists do their the Metta Sutta chanting in their mother tongue rather than Pali, and the Catholic Latin Mass is okay as long as people know what they are saying and aren’t permitted to derive a sense of superiority or ego gratification or exclusiveness from partaking in exotic rituals. As long as people understand what is being said and done, the traditional Catholic liturgy is a real treasure of the Church that feeds participants in a way that newer Masses don’t. At least, that is how this convert sees things.
The Karaniya Metta Sutta: The Buddha’s Words on Loving-Kindness aka ‘Charity’. Is charity as patronizing handout to ‘the poor’ gone? Is charity as empathy and compassion a new normal?
What if ordained Ministers taught the mystical significance of the Sacraments, starting with the Sacrament of Reconciliation. The minister is actually a mirror to the Self (like the Eucharist) rather than judge, jury and executioner.
Then again, perhaps what comes next are religious sisters who are trained in social work, psychotherapy, mental health, nutrition, sciences and who go out and bring God to the public who can’t afford therapists or elite Catholic priest-confessors; sisters who just get on with modelling the Gospel through their lives, through vows of simplicity, charity, service and growth in holiness, happiness and wholeness.
The Sisters of Creation… The Sisters of Renewal… The Sisters of Christ Consciousness… The Sisters of Compassion… The Sisters of Communion…
This talk by Rabbi Friedman is the best explanation of the spirit vs the soul, or the Source or, where we come from and where we’re going back. Do you think ‘afterlife’ is the best term? Or, are we just ‘Incarnated’ for a short time?
“God loves you.” This is what everyone who walks into a church should hear first, and hear often.
It might something other businesses and organizations could adopt, too. Why not?
To mirror Christ consciousness back to someone new to Church, I’d say remove the “I” and the “You” and the “Everyone” and make it about the Divine Love that doesn’t depend on personal opinion or situational factors.
“You’re doing okay.” This was good, too. I knew what this meant. The two times I heard this, from different Catholics, I felt the friendliness and camaraderie in it.
“Jesus loves you.” Now I know what this means. Does it still resonate with people who don’t speak Christian as their native tongue? Not sure.
Beloved, you are welcome here. God loves you.
Let yourself be loved. Let yourself be seen. There is nothing ‘God’ doesn’t know.
to forget — to aver from memory, to refuse to dwell
to forgive — to abandon the debt
How does one know if she has forgiven? You tend to feel sorrow over the circumstances instead of rage, you tend to feel sorry for the people rather than angry. You have nothing left to say about it. You understand the suffering that drove the offense to begin with. You prefer to remain outside the milieu. No longer waiting for something. There is no lariat snare around your ankle stretching from way back there to here. Most certainly there is now a fresh Once Upon a Time waiting for you from this day forward.”
Paraphrased from the chapter Marking Territory:The Boundaries of Rage and Forgiveness by Pinkola-Estes
Also:
“Women who are tortured often develop a dazzling kind of perception that has uncanny breadth and depth. Although I would never wish anyone be tortured in order to learn the secret ins and outs of the unconscious, the fact is, having lived through a gross regression causes gifts to arise that compensate.
If a woman will return to instinctual nature instead of sinking into bitterness, she will be revivified.”
“[R]ecalling the ‘dangerous memory of Mary’ challenges depictions of Mary’s life that attempt to neutralize its radical implications for pushing against injustice and its call to stand in compassionate solidarity with all who suffer….It is this dangerous memory of La Virgen of Guadalupe that empowers nos/otrx to push against all that keeps us from recognizing the presence of God in ourselves, and each other.”
First, I compare this to what I was told in my small, rural Diocese about how women should communicate in a male-lead organization: “Use silence.” and “Be brief.”
Second, I envy the ease with which Dr. Barros talks about Mary as a presence in the life of her family, growing up. I didn’t learn to speak about elements of my theological imagination as actual people, and I see that this is taken by some Catholics as a sign of ‘real faith’. I didn’t grow up speaking Christian as my mother tongue, though, and so I have a hard time talking about saints, Mary, Jesus, Joseph as actual persons in the way that I am an actual person. This manner of speaking would have developed in childhood, and then cradle Catholics carry it forward into adulthood, and it becomes ‘insider lingo’ or code through which the natives identify themselves. When I hear Dr. Barros talk about Mary as she does here, it is so jarring and feels like deliberate deception on her part.
SPEAKING CATHOLIC AS A SECOND LANGUAGE
I was told, “We’ve never had anyone like you” and indeed, my Diocese didn’t know (and wouldn’t listen) to how important it is for a new Christian to be able to speak about ‘Christ’. I tried to explain several times — for the benefit of myself but also other future converts — but monolingual people couldn’t understand. Like many people who’ve inhabited only one language from birth, they laughed at someone trying to speak a new language, never having gone through that difficult, humbling experience themselves.
Is it mandatory though for adult converts to have to pick up this way of speaking about the Mother of God or Christ the Redeemer or Source, as an actual friend in this world? I actually had so much frustration with cradle Catholics who talked to me like this, as though the doorway to Christ consciousness and intuiting the meaning of ‘Mary’ could only be conveyed in this way.
MYERS-BRIGGS
This insistence on concretizing one’s experience in a particular way is what Myer’s Briggs ‘sensors’ do. They need to hear, feel, see, taste and touch something for it to be real. They distrust anything that can’t be measured or clearly categorized. They are bottom up people.
I am an intuitive person and I need time to get the Big Picture and then use points 25, 37, 45 and 61 to make leaps of insight into what points 22, 39, 41 and 59 might look like, and then what the Big Picture might be. I am top down; a global thinker. For me, connecting the dots brings pleasure and joy and satisfaction. Rather than receive knowledge from my senses, I construct my own theological imagination. To do this, I need to read and then discuss things with others. This is why I value good homilies and like to read. The Eucharist and Reconciliation — those Sacramental rituals — appeal to sensors, but aren’t necessary for intuitive people. Upwards of seventy-five percent of people are sensors. Does 75% of humanity feel these tangible, touchable connections to God are useful, or even necessary? When it comes to the Eucharist, what matters to me is the visualization in my head as I approach, and having put myself ‘in the presence of God’ during the preceding prayers. I also have enjoyed learning the history and significance of each part of the Mass. A lot of the older church buildings were designed to be sacred spaces, after all. The Mass is performed everyday all over the world. That’s communion.
WHO REALLY BELONGS?
Abortion, and how people are having sex, and with who, is just not something I give a lot mental space to. I will post soon about my humble and semi-formed understanding of the metaphysics of life and why Canadian society should have a conversation about how easy abortion is, and the impact that has on society. Some Catholics have a political vocation and that’s part of the diversity of Creation; but it’s not me. My politics is my politics but my Catholicism is interior, spiritual, metaphysical. As for morality, after five years of observing, I think the Church should teach better and judge less. Am I a real Catholic? Who decides?
Back to Sacramentals, and what that means for intuitive Catholics. I don’t claim to “believe”; I enjoy trying to understand. The process of deepening my intuitive sense of how Scripture and Tradition and the saints and the CCC and what the visible Church is doing in the culture ‘feeds’ me. Am I Catholic? What I learn influences my activities in the public sphere, as well. Do Catholics have freedom of conscience? Who decides what I do with the fruits of my Catholic-Christian theological imagination? Is spirituality the same as the moral life? I appreciate Catechism of the Catholic Church for its exposition of the / a Moral Life, although it’s grating when those charged with guarding the deposit of Christian faith lapse into partisanship. That one-sidedness from ordained institutional men is what might cause ‘secular people’ to say, “I’m spiritual, and a good person but not certainly not religious.”
TYPE KNOWLEDGE AS A SET OF GLASSES TO ACCURATELY VIEW OTHERS
About ‘type’, I’ve noticed in my time as a tutor of IELTS that I am a much more useful teacher for learners who share my intuitive way of understanding. I know which dot they are missing in their understanding; we don’t have to be like sensors and start from “the beginning”. With students who are sensors, I’ve learned to be more systematic and explicit. Similarly, in Church environments, I’ve noticed that those with a sensing style feel that I’m “not Catholic”, or “don’t believe what the Church teaches”. They need to see me doing certain things or hearing me speaking in a particular way in order to “judge” me. I’ll have to leave the Myers-Briggs ‘judging vs perceiving’ for another post. There is nothing so toxic to a Catholic intuitive-perceiver as a sensing judger; and bureaucracies are where sensing-judgers do well. Lord have mercy on us intuitive-perceiving types, especially if we are female.
INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES
I hope that as the Canadian Church reconsiders what RCIA looks like, they take into consideration individual differences in temperament, moral matrix, and more. I think the movement to write the Canadian RCIA should be lay-driven, by a mix of cradle Catholics and converts and include representatives of all the types of people they hope to teach. I hope they allow converts some time to learn to ‘speak Christian’ because we have a lot to add to the collective theological imagination.
Back to that first point about women and communication in the Catholic Church, I never seriously considered myself a feminist until I became Catholic in a rural, conservative Diocese. I took my freedom and human dignity for granted until my baptism, and I am still in recovery. The Church teaches that ‘all is grace’, and I guess when some autocratic Father wants to take away your everything, on a whim, based on his personal imaginary Jesus, that is what he (He?) will do. As I said, I am still in recovery.
DEVELOPMENTAL STAGES OF CONSCIOUSNESS
I will write more about what a feminist therapist put in front of me when I decided take up the churlishly-delivered suggestion by a Luddite priest that I “get some counselling”, in 2019. Check out Ken Wilbur’s meta-theory of all the major theories of emotional, spiritual and human development. It is important to understand how pervasive medieval consciousness still is in the Church, and everywhere. With Big Tech and God-like technology hacking our still-Reptilian brains and souls, institutions clinging to medieval consciousness leave humans open to be downgraded.
The Spirit laid out decades ago a clear (collective) path to conscious-raising in the Mystical Body of Christ, that is — as Dr. Pearl Maria Barros says above, ‘learning to recognize Christ in each other, and in ourselves’.
My Lenten project in 2021 is to begin again; to revisit the Ignatian Exercises I discovered in 2014 and to mediate on where I’ve fallen short in empathy over the last few years. Rather than the dreary Catholic preoccupation with ‘missing the mark’, I prefer to just work on reminding myself what the mark looks like – in detail. Sometimes missing the mark is about having forgotten what the ideal is.
When I first found the Ignatian Exercises at mid-life, I mindfully went through some events and relationships from the past, and consciously and deliberately put myself in the shoes of the other person.
I spent a long time visualizing multiple encounters and conversations — in my theological imagination – and applied my reason to developing empathy. I imagined how that person would feel, think and reason in every problematic situation we had. This is what ENTPs have to do; we have to THINK our way to understanding ‘feeling’.
These Exercises were very effective for me and led to a lot of what I would call Vipassana insights, because I was paying attention to involuntary reactions; when I felt my face flush, a grimace, a knot in my stomach, tears, a laugh as I mentally walked through each memory. I combined this awareness of what was going in my body, having already understood how sensations relate to memories and thoughts, with the Christian-Catholic moral, evaluative perspective.
I was pretty impressed with myself for combining Buddhist methods concentration, silence with this Christian exercise. I waited YEARS to find a Catholic priest who would give me 30 minutes to let me explain. I thought the deluge of Christian imagery in my dreams and as meditation material meant something; now I understand archetypes better. Most of the cradle Catholics I met in my first years dismissed Buddhism as ‘pagan’, although – upon being questioned, I felt they misunderstood what it was about. This got me curious about which personality types gravitate to regular church attendance, and what it meant to them.
So, to recap, the Ignatian Exercises, plus a commitment to daily, extended periods of mindfulness and focused attention e.g. 40 minutes and attention to what empathy is will be my Lenten practice.
Also mediating on whether Christian ‘charity’, which has always felt a little patronizing to me, is the same thing as ‘compassion’?
Is that famous St Augustine saying, “My heart is restless ’til it rests in Thee” about empathy? That is, if we engage in metta bhavana or a conscious practice of empathy with a Catholic Christian moral lenses, can this lead us to that ‘peace that exceeds all understanding’? If I can manifest subtle compassion for myself, my teachers, my friends, the neutral ones and then my ‘enemies’, the classic metta sequence, is this the face of God? Is my face the face of God? Is this not Suchness (Tathagata) or the Ground of Being, or God?
I am not sure another Rosary recited vocally is as efficacious as intensified Ignatian Exercises. I am also exploring if and how Mysteries of the Rosary can lead to contemplative insight, or if it is mostly initial rote prayer, which (just?) establishes meditative concentration.
