A huge case of nerves

So I am going to visit one of the monasteries this weekend.  I will be there in less than a week.  I am so very scared.  I am having a horrible case of the 'what ifs'.  It has suddenly occurred to me that these visits, the visit to the monastery down south and the one in yankee land, are actually a big deal.  I will be going and sharing in the spirituality of the women that could one day be my sisters; women that I could spend my entire life enclosed with.  Women that I will watch grow old and one day die, women that I will share everything with.  I will share the most intimate part of my life with them and they with me: we will share our spirituality.  I am so nervous and so worried about all this.  What if they do not like me?  What if I do not like them?  What if I was wrong all this time?  What if I only followed my will and not God's?  What if I have done this for all the wrong reasons?  What if... What if... What if... So many what ifs and they are all plaguing me.  I cannot get rid of them.  They fly through my mind and my heart stabbing me, attacking me,  torturing me.  To add to this I have been reminded that although I am surrounded by people who call themselves my friend I do not actually have any real friends.  My one friend that really supported me in my discernment has gone.  He has decided I have no real place in his life.  I am to only be there when he needs me.  I do not actually matter to him anymore.  In this world I am alone, all I have is God.  While I love God and His Son, I am human and am in need of human companionship.  God made Adam and then He made Eve because He knew that we need each other.  We need to feel connected to each other.  I have no one to connect to anymore.  People connect to me and, I guess the connection scares them, and so they leave.  What will happen with my sisters?

Pax,

Thomas Catherine

Failings...

As I work at balance and at prayer and therefore as I come closer to God I find the evil one attacking me.  Last night I had obscene dreams and today I have been fighting obscene thoughts and urges.  I failed at the fight at one point today when I was somewhere between sleep and awake.  I feel so guilty for giving in, for not fighting harder.  I truly need to find time to go to confession so that I may confess my sins.  I also need to see my spiritual director and speak to him about all of this.  Santa Teresa de Jesus warns us of these attacks.  She tells us that as we grow closer to God that the Devil will attack more frequently and with greater force so that he may claim what is not his and was never his to begin with.  This too will pass though.  I must fight harder and spend more time with God and pray for strength.  He will give me the grace to overcome these trials of the flesh.  I have overcome much harder trials with His help and grace.  I have overcome so much thanks to His love, His grace and His strength.  I shall overcome this too.  In less than a week I will be off to visit a Dominican monastery.  I will be there for three glorious days.  Pray that I am able to listen to God and to do His will while I am there.  I will be in Holy peace and quietude.  I will be praying and eating and going to mass with the nuns.  Then at the beginning of September I will be with the nuns that I hope to find my earthly home with.  If all goes well at both of these monasteries I will be invited back to stay in the cloister for a week or two.  Then back again for a month and then entrance.  Pray for me as I pray for you all.

Pax,

Thomas Catherine

Balance

I have got to work on this balance thing.  I have got to get the hang of it.  I need mass, confession, adoration, and prayer like I need air.  Air is more important than food or water or shelter for without air we cannot breathe and if we cannot breathe nothing else matters.  If I do not have prayer, adoration, confession and mass I cannot breathe, I cannot live.  I need to find a balance between the real world and between the world that I long to live in, that I lived in almost all summer.  Oh, my Jesus, forgive me for neglecting you for not spending all the time I should with you.  Forgive me, My Lord, my love...forgive for not being the faithful servant that I should be, that I can be.  Oh Lord forgive me my sins and my inadequacies.  Forgive me for all that I have done.  I need you Lord, I need you to be in my life, in my heart, in my soul.  I need to reach the place where you reside inside my soul so that I may dwell there with you for all eternity.  I need to find that balance that allows me to be in the world and spend any spare second I have in my interior cell. Oh My Lord how I need you!  This love for you is greater than any love that I have ever known.  My love for you is all consuming.  This lack of balance, this lack of time with you has left me with a dryness, with a hole that I cannot fill.  Without you I am nothing and I can do no good.  I must find balance so that I can be rid of this dryness and this hole.  I miss you and I long for you and I cannot wait until the day I can be with you for eternity.  I need to find a balance between the outside world and my prayer world.  I need Him too much.  Oh my Lord help me to stay with you, to be balanced, to spend every spare second with you.  Hear my prayers and the deepest desires of my heart.  Hear me Lord, hear my cries, hear me begging, hear my pleas.  Oh Lord help me.

Pax,

Thomas Catherine

Reading...

Last night I finished Teresa of Avila: The Progress of a Soul by Cathleen Medwick.  St. Teresa's life was filled with suffering and illness and doubt.  Of all the saints I have read about I identify most with St. Teresa and St. Catherine of Sienna.  Both of these women initially and throughout there lives resisted God's call.  St. Teresa had the wicked life before answering God and St. Catherine's parents tried to force her to marry and tried to take her faith away from her.  I feel drawn and called to these saints.  I know what it is to have led a wicked life and to have my parents try and strip me of my faith.  They inspire me to keep moving forward with my vocation.  If St. Teresa can be not only a nun but a saint then so can I.  In her time what she did was wicked and shameful and in my time the things I have done have been wicked and shameful, though many would say what I have done is worse than what she ever did, but given the time periods I would say we are about equal.  I, like St. Catherine, have no obeyed my parents wishes for me, instead choosing my own path.  I have chosen God over my family.  Right now I am reading St. Teresa's Vida.  I have not gotten far, but I look forward to reading what her confessors forced her to write in defense of her spirituality.  I wish that I had more today, but today has been fairly normal for me.  I was offered, by my father, a new car, new clothes and money, but, as usual, these are not the things I want or desire.  I have a car and clothes and money.  My needs are met and I am happy and content.

Pax,

Thomas Catherine

Prayers do get answered...

So I've been begging for God to allow me to share in His suffering and to know His pain and to share in the pain and suffering of my brothers and sisters.  God has seen fit to grant me this favor.  Today has been so long and so hard.  When I look at someone I can see their pain and I can see their suffering.  I can feel it; as though it flows from them to me.  I am filled with a compassion and an empathy that I did not know I had.  I have always cared for others and I have always had a great sympathy and compassion for others who are suffering, but I have never had this much.  When someone touches me their pain and suffering threatens to overwhelm me and over take me.  I have spent so much time crying today and praying for the souls of my brothers and sisters who's sin causes them such pain and suffering.  I have always know that sin, great or small, causes suffering in the soul, but now I know how much pain, anguish, suffering that accumulated sin and hidden sin can cause.  If only everyone knew the beauty of confession, how being granted absolution can heal the soul.  I need to go to confession more often and adoration and mass.  The saving grace of confession and the Eucharist are amazing.

Pax,

Thomas Catherine

Suffering

Since my dream I have been begging Christ to allow me to suffer as He did, to allow me to be nailed to the cross with Him, to have the privilege of having His wounds.  I know that many will not understand wanting to suffer, much less begging for the privilege of suffering, especially suffering as Christ did, but suffering is an amazing gift.  To suffer for others, to suffer for God and for Christ is truly a privilege.  Suffering opens our eyes to the pain of others, to the suffering of others because we look for someone to suffer with us.  What we do not realize is that there is always someone suffering with us, we never suffer alone.  Christ is always with us suffering for us and with us.  He walks with us knowing our pain, our heartache.  No one knows our suffering like Christ does.  Suffering is the one thing we all have in common, we have all suffered, we all know pain.  To recognize that pain in others and to suffer with them is an opportunity to help another Child of God and to witness to the power of Christ's love.  Yet, we turn down that opportunity all the time because we refuse to see that someone, who is different from us, is in pain or, if we do see it, we believe they deserve it because they are homosexual or Muslim or are simply just different from us.  People who do not know Christ's love and forgiveness are the ones who most need our help and our compassion and who most need someone to suffer with them.  Oh to suffer as Christ did and to suffer with others and for others is the most beautiful thing and is, in part, what it is to love God's children.  How I long to suffer as Christ did and to suffer for and with other children of God.  Every time I go to adoration or pray the rosary I find myself praying for the sins of others and asking God that He may help those who sin and do not know His love, His mercy and His forgiveness know His love and mercy and forgiveness.  I ask, I beg to be allowed to suffer for those people.  Christ so loved His brothers and sisters that He committed the ultimate act of obedience and under went tremendous suffering so that we all might know His father's love, mercy and forgiveness.  I can only hope and pray that He will allow me to take on some of that suffering and bless me with the gift of suffering for the sins of others.  I have known His love and forgiveness and I will do anything so that others may also know it.  Oh to have His wounds and be on the cross with Him.  To be that obedient, to love my brothers and sisters and my Heavenly father so much that I would die for their sins.  I am deeply in love with Christ crucified and for me there is nothing more that I want than to be on that cross with my love.

Today I went to mass and I get the privilege of going again tomorrow.  My need for the Eucharist and confession and mass are the same as my need for air; I cannot survive without them.  To have Christ fill me is an amazing feeling.  When I am with Him nothing else matters.  I long to fall down in front of Him and profess my love openly.  I long for the day when we are wed and I am free for Him alone.  My love, my God how I long for you when I cannot be with you.  There is no other for me, there is no other that could love me as you do and I could love no other with the passion, the calmness, the intensity that I do you.  I would give my life for you if you asked it of me.  Oh my Lord how I love you.  Give me strength, give me the ability to suffer as you did for us, give me your wounds, allow me to be on the cross with you.  Allow me to suffer for my brothers and sisters in Christ so that they may know your love and forgiveness, so they may know what it is to be filled by your love and healed by your mercy and forgiveness.  Oh Lord that is my greatest wish and desire; that everyone will know your love, mercy and forgiveness so that they may know your Father and be with you in His kingdom.

Also, today was the Feast of the Assumption.  In the homily at mass today Father talked about how selfless Mary was.  She gave no heed to the things that were bothering her, but instead was always caring for others.  The gospel reading was about when Mary had just found out that she would be the mother of God.  Can you imagine getting that news?!  The questions, the worries, the concerns.  Most of us would lock ourselves in our room and have a total nervous breakdown.  Not Mary though, she went to her cousin Elizabeth and cared for her.  Mary gave no thought to her concerns or fears; she ignored them and went to the one who needed her.  I long to lead a life like that.  To lead a life devoted to others, completely devoid of self.  This is one reason I fell in love with the religious life and why it "fits" me.  I want to devote myself to being of service to others.  By being of service I realize that my life isn't bad, my concerns are not a huge deal, neither are my problems when compared to the homeless addicts and alcoholics I worked with or the abused and neglected children I worked with.  I have everything I need; a place to live, food, clothing.  I am not lacking anything.  So I give my money that I do not need to feed others or house them.  I try to live my life as selflessly as I can, because while I sincerely doubt I will change the world, someone I help, someone that I believed in might.

Pax,

Thomas Catherine

Dreams and other things

Since I moved into my new apartment with my roommate I have been learning how to balance my spiritual life with real life.  This summer I lived alone and was able to focus solely on my spiritual life.  I would go to work and then come home and do spiritual reading, prayer, mass.  Now that I am living with someone who wants my attention and wants to talk I am having trouble spending time alone and therefore having time to pray and meditate and pray.  However the past week I have been spending time reading and praying and being alone.  I feel much better now that I am working on my relationship with God, writing and going to adoration.  I feel so much more relaxed and calm and serene.  Now if I can only meet with my spiritual director I will be back in balance.  Since restarting all this my prayer life has come back to where it was.  With all the favors that I do not begin to deserve and all the intensity.  I had miss that closeness, that intimate relationship.  I cannot truly live without it.  I am ready to die to the world and go to my halfway house, my earthly home.  I am ready to be with my beloved.  To die to the world so that I may rise again and live in Christ.  How I long for my lover.  I long to be with Him day and night, to never leave Him, to always be with Him.  Oh how I hope that I am not long for the secular world.  I feel more and more distant from it every day.  The things that matter to my friends and family do not matter to me.  I do not care about material things.  I care about the state of people's souls, not the outsides.

Today I came home from work and I read and then I prayed and I fell asleep praying.  I had a dream.  I woke up calm and relaxed from it.  I dreamed that I was at the Dominican priory for mass with a friend of mine.  After mass I was praying the rosary and he was waiting for me.  The next thing I knew I was collapsed on the floor and there was blood.  Then he was carrying me to a room in the priory and two of the Dominican priests I know were leading us.  I was begging to go back to the chapel because all I wanted was to be with Christ and see Him on the cross.  He laid me in the bed and I looked at my hands and there were the wounds of Christ.  I begged and pleaded to be taken back to the chapel so I could be with Christ.  The wounds burned and there was this wonderful smell.  I tried to get up but I was too weak.  Then I woke up.  My hands were red and burning where the wounds would have been and in the same shape as the wounds.  I vaguely remember work and everything seems a blur and I cannot care about anything but being with Christ.

Pax,

Thomas Catherine