by Chris Koellhoffer, IHM, January 29, 2017
This past weekend, in our chapel at the IHM Center in Scranton, those gathered witnessed the incorporation of a Sister from another community into the fullness of life of our IHM congregation. This tender, beautiful ceremony formally welcomed our Sister Elvia to transfer her perpetual vows from the community she had originally entered and into our IHM community, as a Sister, Servant of the Immaculate Heart of Mary (Scranton, PA).
The ceremony was also a celebration of what it means to cultivate a crossroads heart, to pay attention to Holy Mystery, to live in a state of readiness for whatever unfolds in the ordinary and the everyday. I’m still holding close to my heart the emotional impact of witnessing Elvia’s leap of faith and trust. And her incorporation has invited me to reflect on similar journeys in my life, times that called for thoughtful and sometimes challenging discernment. I invite you also to enter into today’s reflection and find the parallels to your own efforts of sorting out and responding to God’s path for you.
One of the most profound graces of my life came about many years ago when I was applying to study to become a spiritual director. As a requirement for acceptance into the program, I was asked to write a spiritual autobiography. There were guidelines and a suggestion of what we might want to include, so it seemed that for a writer like me, this would be an easy assignment. Not so! I struggled with it for days right up until the deadline. When I sat down to read what I had put to paper, I was stunned at the map of my soul’s landscape that spread out in front of me.
That map revealed that very little in my life had moved forward in a straight, unwavering line. There were seeming detours and interruptions, roads taken and not taken. As in any life, times of both heartache and delight, emotional pain and loss, as well as blessings too numerous to count. What stood out in my map reading was the outline of God’s presence in my life, the traces of the Holy that marked each step. There was discernment large and small, the messiness of decision-making, the struggling with ambiguity and the longing for absolute certainty. There were times of paralysis. There were periods of desperately waiting for a burning bush or a blinding light to knock me off my imaginary horse.
Or an eyebrow. Once, when I was companioned by a spiritual director in a long discernment process about a major life change, I kept coming to the edge of a final ch
oice—and then I’d back away, frozen in immobility. The retreating had nothing to do with logic and everything to do with fear. The path I was already on was comfortable and familiar, but not life-giving for me, yet it was the one I knew. The possible path ahead appeared to hold the abundant life God dreams for each of us, but it was unknown. So back and forth I went. Observing this back-and-forth dance over and over, my director finally asked, “Chris, what is it that you really want?” I heard myself say, “I want an eyebrow!” I explained that I wanted to see on my director’s face some indication of the path I should embrace and choose. I wanted her eyebrow to go up or down, revealing what she thought was the better choice for me.
As a now long-time spiritual director, I know it’s not the role of a spiritual guide to provide an eyebrow or a quick and easy answer, but to listen with and companion another with attention and intention. In Discernment, a Path to Spiritual Awakening, Rose Mary Dougherty notes that, “The habit of discernment fine-tunes the ear of the heart so that we hear more clearly the invitations to love intrinsic to every moment of life. In the habit of discernment, our choices are again and again refined by the invitations to love. Gradually we come to know what is consonant with love, what we need to do or need not to do, and, with grace, we are free to respond.”
What is consonant with love: that’s the question Deuteronomy (30:19-20) poses to us:
“I call heaven and earth to witness the choice you make.
Choose life, that you and your descendants may live.”
In discernments large and small, may we choose what is consonant with love. May we
discern wisely and well, gathering the best information and wisdom we can and summoning, with God’s grace, the courage we need to move into the unknown. May we listen with openness to the present moment and so cultivate a heart always ready for the crossroads ahead.
Takeaway
Reflect on a time when you were faced with a significant choice in your life.
What factors were involved?
Who or what helped you to choose?
How did prayer figure into your decision-making?
What were the consequences of your choice?
Spend some quiet time in prayers of gratitude for God’s presence and the accompaniment and support of others at that time of decision-making.
NOTE: Thank you to all of you who held in your prayer the directed retreat weekend at the Jesuit Center in Wernersville. Special thanks to Brother Chris Derby, SJ, Susan Bowers-Baker, all of the Center staff, directors, and retreatants who contributed to making the weekend a graced experience in that holy place.
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legacy of a good and holy man. I was living in New York on July 12, 1986, when Officer McDonald, a young New York City policeman, was shot three times by a teenager whom McDonald had stopped while on patrol. The shooting left the officer paralyzed from the neck down for the remaining thirty years of his life.
Israel–areas of intense conflict and deep-seated, decades-long enmities—witnessing to the healing power of reconciliation. He chose to move forward on a spiritual journey marked by love, compassion, and forgiveness.
considerable time to choosing the perfect name for the child of their hopes and dreams. Naming shows connection: new owners may search for just the right title as they bring an adopted pet into their home. Naming witnesses to the intimacy and closeness of relationship: we tend to name what is significant and meaningful in our lives. And naming sometimes offers us a liberation of sorts when we’re able to voice what we hold in our hearts.
simply acknowledging the truth that God is so much bigger than we can ask or imagine and that we don’t ever want to close ourselves off from fresh revelations of the Divine. When we pay attention to the names of the Holy which most resonate with us, we can come to a revelation about who God is for us at this time in our lives: Dreamer? Lantern of Love? Mother of the Weary? One Who Weeps? The Opener or Beckoner? Sanctuary? Flute Player? Laughing One? Shelter? Friend of the Poor? Disturber? Lord of the Dance? Other? (a sampler from Fragments of Your Ancient Name) 
evening of contemplative dialogue promising a safe, sacred, non-judgmental space for people to gather following the U.S. elections. It was an experience of practicing Isaiah’s admonition to enlarge the space of our tent. In this space, we committed to make room for the other, to listen and share with openness and respect around 3 questions:
These Advent images stand in stark contrast to what many have expressed as their feelings going into this season. In conversations, in faith sharing, in companioning people in spiritual direction, I’ve heard a litany of the same anguished life questions over and over: How can this be? What does this mean for people we love and care for, for people who feel unwanted and unheard? How are we called to be? And especially, where is God? I can resonate with all of these questions. Perhaps you can as well.
dark prison where he’s languishing, John the Baptist asks one of the most poignant questions in all of Scripture: “Are you the One who is to come, or should we look for another?” We can imagine the fragile hope, maybe desperation, behind John’s questions. As if he were really asking, “Tell me, have I been wasting my time? My life? Am I pointing in the right direction? Give me a sign! Show me your face!”
blessing? Go figure. How, we might ask, is that possible? Perhaps in the sense that Henri Nouwen describes, “To be grateful for the good things that happen in our lives is easy, but to be grateful for all of our lives—the good as well as the bad, the moments of joy as well as the moments of sorrow, the successes as well as the failures, the rewards as well as the rejections—that requires hard spiritual work. Still, we are only truly grateful people when we can say thank you to all that has brought us to the present moment.”
suffering exacts–the terrible anguish, the intense physical or emotional pain, the feelings of rejection or loss or bewilderment or failure that sometimes accompany our human condition. But when we live from a grateful heart, we acknowledge that, in spite of appearances in those moments, God is present to us, God accompanies us, God continues to pour out unconditional love for us, and that is cause for profound gratitude. In our darkest hour, notes R. Wayne Willis, we can still use our pain and our loss to bless someone else whose wounds are fresher than ours.
past, even over actions taken in good faith and after careful discernment. This is true especially when the words spoken or the choices made did not result in a positive outcome. There are often expressions of “I should have…” or “If I knew then what I know now.” There is sometimes self-loathing or guilt or hidden shame. So how, then, are we to be when, like Vaughn Allex, our best efforts seem linked to a negative result?
So what might we learn about falling well that we can transfer and apply to the life of the spirit? Perhaps, flawed and limited as we are, it’s accepting the inevitability of falling and losing our balance. And then, with God’s grace, getting up and working and praying our way back to a place of being centered.
year-old husband and father of two small children, was diagnosed with ALS and given, at best, a few years to live. He chose to learn to live richly in the face of loss, the work that he called “learning to fall.” He wrote of falling as a figure of speech: we fall on our faces, we fall for a joke, we fall for someone, we fall in love. We fall away from ego and our carefully constructed identities, our reputations, our ambition. And we fall into compassion, into oneness with forces larger than ourselves, into oneness with others who are likewise falling. “We fall, at last, into the presence of the sacred,” he wrote, “into godliness, into mystery, into our better, diviner natures.”
we reach adulthood, we will be 70% water. And if we live to old age, we will still be at least 50% water. He concluded that throughout our lives, we exist mostly as water. Naturally curious, he began to conduct a series of scientific experiments with water.
words on both water and human consciousness. Water, he believes, teaches us in a very clear way how we must live our lives. It helps us to see ourselves and our universe differently. “The vibration of good words has a positive effect on our world,” Dr. Emoto noted, “whereas the vibration from negative words has the power to destroy.” One has only to enter a room full of strangers in conversation to notice that some people are vibrating in ways that feel joyful or content, whereas others may move through the room carrying and vibrating messages of sadness or anger.
the “Pesame,” the one who stands as a witness to injustice. “Pesame” is used when there is pain that cannot be assuaged. Pesame, I’m sorry for your pain. It’s grieving with the other. It’s standing with the other. It’s used to describe Mary, the widow, the mother of the condemned, the brokenhearted one at the foot of the cross, the one who stands and watches and never ever abandons.
And like Mary, we also say yes. We say yes to remaining, to staying on while others abandon and give up. We say yes to being transformed by the learnings that come to us through the collective ache of our world. We say yes to remaining in the messy, confusing, painful places where something new is struggling to bubble up and break through. We say yes to sharing the fate of God for the life of the world. We say yes to embracing with acceptance the powerlessness we feel in the face of pain, violence, or loss, and meeting it with inner hospitality. We say yes to carrying and loving what God carries and loves.