This Little Light of Mine

Well here we are at Pentecost Weekend. Fifty days after Easter commemorating the coming of the Holy Spirit on the apostles as promised by Jesus. We’ve been talking about what happens when we stir up the Holy Spirit in the last few blogs. Or I should say I have been talking about it, I have no idea what you have been thinking or doing with my passionate ramblings about all things Holy Spirit! I hope you have a new-found acceptance and appreciation for the third person of the Trinity. I’ve always thought the Holy Spirit got a bad rap being described as a dove, a tongue of fire, and a ghost? How can we relate? Who wants to snuggle up to that? As a young child, the Holy Ghost was just plain scary. Everything surrounding the coming of the Holy Spirit in story, was anxiety provoking. The idea of the apostles minding their own business, sitting around when all of a sudden, the wind kicks up and tongues of fire appear above their heads was too much for me. I’m a control freak and things were out of control in that Upper Room! Before they know it, they are speaking in foreign languages and healing people. They found themselves doing things they never dreamed they could do. They found themselves doing things they only saw Jesus do. Their lives took on new meaning and purpose. Their words became powerful. Their actions brought healing. Their passion created the early church. Their positive influence couldn’t be curbed. Wait, that doesn’t sound so scary, that sounds amazing! Sounds like a wonderful life. Sounds like the life Jesus meant for us when he promised, before he left, to send the Advocate, the Counselor, to be with us always. In past blogs I’ve described the indwelling Holy Spirit we’ve been promised as a glob of chocolate syrup that has sunk to the bottom of a glass of milk. It needs to be stirred up. I talked about what it looks like when we stir up the Holy Spirit in our lives. Well I have one more analogy I’d like to leave you to ponder. I once heard the Trinity described in this very technical, yet memorable way. God the Father is the electrical outlet, the Power. Jesus is the plug and cord. We are the lamp. We are connected to the Father through the Son. The Holy Spirit is the...

Surprise, Surprise!

Have you ever bought some gifts, put them in a hiding place and then forgot where you put them? Come on, be honest. I did that last Christmas. I even went so far as to return to Target with the receipt and question if they put all my bags in my cart. Don’t ever try that. They have video at every register and could prove all my bags went into my cart. (Kind of creepy, don’t you think?) My next thought was that that one bag with the items I couldn’t find didn’t make it into my trunk. It was left in the cart so I went to lost and found. No luck. At this point the manager gently and diplomatically suggested I might have put it somewhere at home and forgot. She said that happens often at this busy time of year?. Fast forward to July. I went into a closet in one of the spare bedrooms (A closet that wasn’t full of golf shirts. See previous blog.) to get something and there was a Target bag full of stocking stuffers. The melted chocolate Santas oozing out of the wrappers. I gasped. I had found the hidden gifts. There are gifts of the Holy Spirit that often go unfound. I discovered them 10 years ago and my life has never been the same. It was like finding the hidden bag of Christmas presents I forgot where I put, only it’s July. I was so excited at the discovery and at the same time frustrated that I had been unaware of the gifts for so long. Do you remember when you made your Confirmation and you had to memorize the seven Sanctifying Gifts of the Holy Spirit: wisdom, understanding, counsel, fortitude, knowledge, piety, and fear of the Lord. And maybe later in your faith formation you were introduced to the nine Fruits of the Holy Spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. These gifts are for us and reflected by us as we live a holy life. The third set of gifts, the lesser known, are our charisms. Charisms are gifts given to us at baptism to enable us to carry out our baptismal call to bring Christ to the world. They are gifts given to us to give away. To give to others. Did you know you have been called and gifted to a unique work for God? I bet, if...

Soda Scandal

I need you to weigh in on a long-standing debate my husband and I have had. When you go to a fast food restaurant and you are really thirsty, is it ok to order a small soda and fill it up multiple times with the free refills or should you just order a large? Is it stealing? Time in purgatory? Or just a wise consumer? To preserve the reputations of the parties involved I won’t divulge who orders the large and who orders the small. Every day is full of small and large choices. We are constantly challenged morally and ethically. If we’re honest we need to admit we haven’t always made the right choices. It’s called being human. Often, we rationalize away our poor judgement. We are blinded to our wrongs. One of the first things I noticed when I began to stir up the Holy Spirit in my life was a gentle nagging when I made some of the poor choices I had become accustomed to making. It just didn’t feel good. Like when I gossiped about someone, was late for an appointment and said it was heavy traffic when really it was lazy me, gave my husband the cold shoulder for days, or didn’t answer when I saw it was my mother-in-law on caller ID. (I only did that a couple times.) Little everyday choices to withhold the love and care that God was calling me to share. The Holy Spirit convicts us of those habits in an effort to prune us, to make us better. When faced with our weaknesses we can get discouraged and that discouragement leads us to turn away from God. We might say, “I can never measure up, so what’s the point?” The point is not to make us feel bad about ourselves; the point is to show us that with the conviction comes the knowledge of God’s infinite mercy. When we admit to our sinfulness. Call a spade a spade. Show genuine sadness for our actions or thoughts and ask for forgiveness we find something amazing waiting for us. The tender heart of God waiting to shower us with compassion, forgiveness, kindness, sympathy and grace. In short, Divine Mercy. We’ve seen in the last few week’s blogs how stirring up the Holy Spirit brings us a new awareness of God as personal and near. Opens us to the deep love and care he has for us....

Better Than Botox

The mirror is no longer my friend. I feel like there is a fault line running vertically from the top of my head to the tips of my toes and every day something has shifted. Things aren’t where they used to be. And there are things appearing that didn’t used to be. Like the two deep lines running vertically between my eyebrows. My furrowed brow? I’d say it’s more like a trench. If I put on my anxious, worry face those lines become so deep I could store spare dimes in them. It would come in handy if there were still pay phones. Last week I talked about the peace I found in my powder room when I stirred up the Holy Spirit and cried out to God in prayer. Well, that peace is the cure for a furrowed brow, the ultimate Botox! If we lived in a constant state of that peace, imagine how relaxed, how calm, how serene our lives would be. The peace I experienced after my heartfelt prayer was like nothing I felt before and I wanted more of it. I knew it was from God but didn’t know much else. The Holy Spirit prompted me to seek out people and places that would help me know God. I joined a bible study that “coincidently” was starting up at my church. In that group I found the women who, to this day, are my GFFs, God Friends Forever! We helped each other come to know God. As the Holy Spirit began to reveal things to me, I felt that I began to know God in a different and more personal way. I began to think about God more than I used to. I even began talking to him on a regular basis. That’s where my GFFs came in handy. They assured me I wasn’t going crazy because they found themselves doing the same thing. I started communicating with God like he was a friend, real simple and natural.  I would thank him as I strolled the fairways with my golf buddies on a beautiful, sunny Wednesday morning. I would bargain with him as I lay in bed at midnight and the new driver in the family wasn’t home yet. I would scream at him in the car as I pulled away from my mom’s assisted living facility. I would imagine embracing him, speechless, when I saw the faces of my...

Powder Room Prayers

Last week I said that for the next few weeks leading up to Pentecost I was going to share with you my experience of “stirring up” the Holy Spirit in my own life. Well, the story starts in my powder room in our house in Wauwatosa twenty-seven years ago. I quit working to stay home with our three children. I was a full time at-home mom and didn’t know what that meant exactly. With no job description and no clear purpose anymore (job=purpose in my mind back then) I became very anxious. I won’t go into the details, but one day when I was at the end of my rope I was in the bathroom getting ready to go somewhere and I prayed. “Big deal,” you say? It was a huge deal. I had been ignoring God for a very long time. The faith of my childhood including my Catholic schooling through high school was on the back burner. And the burner was off. Something prompted me to pray at that ordinary moment, on a week day, in my bathroom, blow drying my hair. I cried out to God, that is IF he was really there, and asked for help. Immediately I felt a warmth and a peace and it wasn’t the blow dryer! I met our extraordinary God in a very ordinary place and my life has never been the same.   Unbeknownst to me, I stirred up the Holy Spirit in that moment of despair by the simple act of praying. I know now that really the Holy Spirit stirred me up by prompting me to pray in the first place. As a result, my eyes were opened to a new life changing revelation. God isn’t just in church. And if he’s in my bathroom, he can be anywhere. I began to look for him everywhere and you know what? I found him everywhere.  The Holy Spirit opened my eyes that day. Remember the excitement of a newborn baby? I remember it like it was yesterday. In particular was the excitement of those first couple of hours when the baby would open its eyes. That simple act caused family members to drop everything and come running. I can’t help but think that God feels the same way about us, his children, when we open our eyes to his presence in every moment of every day. What joy that brings him as the scales begin...

Stirring Up the Holy Spirit

I told you last week that Easter was my favorite day of the church year. A close second is Pentecost because I’m a big fan of the Holy Spirit. I feel like the Holy Spirit is the middle child of the Trinity. God the Father and Jesus the Son get all the attention. From the time we are little we learn to pray the Our Father and join our fellow Vacation Bible School buddies in a rousing rendition of “Jesus Loves Me, This I Know.” But what about the Holy Spirit? As a kid I remember being kind of afraid of the Holy Spirit. The images of fire, wind, and doves made me think of Alfred Hitchcock not my Advocate, my Counselor, or the power of the risen Christ that is available to us. Then as a sixth grader I was taught about the Holy Spirit again in preparation for Confirmation but I remember being more concerned about picking a cool Confirmation name than realizing what life transforming power was at my disposal. It wasn’t until I had a spiritual awakening in my thirties that I seriously began my search for a better understanding of the Holy Spirit. And to my surprise and awe the first thing I realized was that you don’t have to search at all. It’s right inside of you. You don’t have to acquire it, you just have to make room for it. You have to stir it up. Think about it this way, we are a glass of white milk. The Holy Spirit is the Hershey’s chocolate. At Baptism and again at Confirmation we are given a squirt of the Holy Spirit. It’s our choice to leave it in a lump at the bottom of our glass or stir it up and become a delicious glass of chocolate milk! So how do we stir up the Holy Spirit that dwells in us? We put our relationship with God on the front burner. We seek out people and places that feed us spiritually. We spend more time in prayer. We discern our spiritual gifts. We intentionally say yes to growing in our faith. We look for the Divine in our everyday experiences. The list goes on and on. It’s not as complicated as you think. So for the next couple of weeks in my blogs I’m going to tell you about my life with and in the Holy Spirit and I hope...

Easter Everyday

The bunny wreath is off the door. The Swiffer discovered the last of the runaway jelly beans under the couch. The Easter bonnets are in the dress up bin. Oh wait, make that the stocking hats. I didn’t see any Easter bonnets in church this year. I did see a few bare legs in anklets and patent leather shoes running into church. Brr...

You Are Loved

Here we go, we’ve arrived at Holy Week. There’s a light at the end of the Lenten tunnel. Pretty soon we can stop feeling guilty that our Lenten resolve dissolved in week two. We can start doing those things we gave up and stop doing those things we started, like sacrificially turning my husband’s t-shirts right side out when he throws them in the laundry inside out. Argh...

Martha’s Fan Club

My blog last week generated a lot of comments. Well three really, but that’s a lot as far as I’m concerned. I wasn’t sure three people even read my blogs! The comments were mostly from Martha supporters, women who relate to Martha and would like to see her appreciated for her focus on doing, preparing, and serving. I agree that the world is a nicer place because of women with the gift of service and hospitality that Martha had. We should commend Martha. She is willing to use her gifts, her charisms, in service to Jesus. We are learning in the Called and Gifted Workshop at Firstfruits that we all have been given gifts or charisms. They are given to us to carry out our mission in life. That mission is to bring Christ to the world. How we are called to bring Christ to the world however is different for each of us. The mission is universal, the method is unique. And the “world” we are called to minister to could be our workplace, our school, across the nation, or across our kitchen table. God has equipped us with exactly the gifts we need to carry out our unique way of bringing Christ to the world. Those gifts are called charisms. For some it’s the gift of Administration, Service, or Teaching. Others it’s Wisdom, Hospitality, or Mercy. Still others Craftsmanship, Music, or Leadership. And no gift is better or more important than another. How many of us realize this? How many of us know what our gifts are and where God is calling us to use them? Martha is to be commended for her willingness to use her gifts for good. She just needed to be reminded of the importance of finding a balance between doing for God and being with God. Prayer and productivity in equal measure. In defense of Martha, someone pointed out to me this week that Jesus appreciated a nice table and good food too. Look at the Last Supper. This is true. There must have been a woman with the charism of hospitality behind that. Otherwise, we’d see Jesus and the apostles sitting on mismatched furniture surrounded by beer and pretzels! Here’s to the Martha’s of the world! God loves you and so do we. Joan...

The Martha Syndrome

Sunday nights I usually sit down and write the Firstfruits blogs. I was on a roll there for weeks. I couldn’t type fast enough. In fact, I had to see my chiropractor and go for a massage on my upper back and neck ,because of the strain I had put on those areas from sitting at my computer so much. Occupational hazard I guess. But for the last few weeks, I have had writer’s block. My shoulders and neck are happy about it, but I’m not. Every time I would sit down to write I had nothing. It was unsettling. So I prayed, hard. I demanded that the Holy Spirit give me a topic, an insight, a story. Nothing. Then I had a visit. Three women who are affiliated with Contemplative Outreach, an international organization whose primary mission is to spread the teachings of Fr. Thomas Keating on Centering Prayer and Contemplation. After talking to these women and hearing their personal stories of the power of silent prayer to bring us into the presence of God, I realized why I hadn’t had anything to say or to write. I had become very busy doing for God and not being with God. I fell victim to the Martha syndrome. Remember Martha and Mary? They were the sisters of Jesus’s friend, Lazarus. Martha was the doer bee. When Jesus came to visit she was all about seeing that he was taken care of and comfortable. Her priority was making sure things were in order which stressed her out and caused her to resent and judge her sister Mary because Mary’s priority was sitting at the feet of Jesus listening to him speak. Just being with Jesus was all she needed. Jesus chastised Martha for this and said “Martha, Martha, you are anxious and worried about many things. There is need of only one thing. Mary has chosen the better part and it will not be taken from her.” How easily we become Martha. We mean well because on any given day there is a lot to do even if we aren’t entertaining Jesus in our home! We can get caught up in the necessary tasks, and the not so necessary self-inflicted stress and work we put on ourselves because of our need for perfection, control, or affirmation from others. I had unconsciously become Martha and no longer was making the time to sit at Jesus’s feet and...