Free-Writing September 23, 2011

JMJ

My Jesus. Right now I am full to bursting with intellectualism. With thoughts, with conflictedness, with plans. But more than all of that I find myself drawn and pulled to You. There have been so many times that all my busyness, all my activity, and all of my plans have drowned out that still quiet voice that I heard so loudly today in mass.

Again I had so many thoughts that I couldn't just shut them down and see what was happening at the altar. So I remembered the model. Child, daughter, spouse. And I focused on child, because I knew I was comfortable there, and I knew that I could at least stop my incessant mental exertion with that.

And so I saw what happened on the altar with eyes unclouded, with heart wide open. I saw it in a way I had never seen it before.

Will you be mine?

That was the question I saw, arrayed by most glorious love and sacrifice. The beauty of it was astounding, that this God, God of the universe, was asking this question.

Will you be mine?

I said yes, in my heart and mind, because really how can you look at that and not say yes. But later, all the thoughts came back to distract me. Each thought like a door leading away from the room of my heart where Jesus was, each thought a door that I closed behind me, each part of my life a different compartment.

I'm frightened. Not of Him, and not necessarily of the act of opening all these doors at once. I'm frightened to change. It may not be perfect, this set-up, but it is familiar. But that's the language of sin. “I sometimes think that the only thing we have control over is whether or not sin.” J said that. There can be an extreme apathy about sin—oh, it doesn't matter anyway. I'm weak, or lazy, or I just don't care, so I'm going to do it. “It;” sin.

I'm frightened even having all these doors open, instead of carefully leading Jesus into them, one by one, and quickly locking the doors behind us. I'm frightened that He wants me to give up my crutches. These are people that I lean on when I forget I'm supposed to be leaning on Him.

And after I spent so much time searching! So much time convinced I'd never find people who would love the identity that I so carefully constructed around the tiny, naked baby inside of me. Who loves baby M? Mama Mary, daddy Joseph, baby J. They are the family who can raise this soul child that I am into a daughter and a spouse.

But, I'm afraid. And I'll go in a circle again and say, I'm frightened, and what about those people, anyway?

I can hear an answer: they only love a shadow M. They shy away from unexpected light. They keep to the dark. Why allow them to keep you there, as well?

“A woman's heart should be so close to God that a man should have to seek Him in order to find her.”

If they can't love the light, then they should not be able to find me, because Christ is the light and I must be with Him.