Tag: ImpatienceI am stuck in my spiritual growth… how do I get unstuck? This is frustrating! Part I of IIQ: Dear Sister Carmen, I feel like I am stuck in mansion somewhere in mansion one or two. Is this normal? Where do most people get stuck in the journey through the mansions and is there any common way you can suggest that we get unstuck? Maybe I am just impatient. I feel like A: Teresa posits conformity to God’s will as the first principle of spiritual growth In her Way of Perfection: Chapter 16. She reminds us of the necessity of “keeping our eyes fixed on You; if we were to look at nothing else but the way, we would soon arrive.” Teresa herself had sufficient experience in her own life of a lack of focus due to the many preoccupations which diverted her eyes from the Lord, thus drawing her out of herself and out of her interior center back into the world around her. Because of this struggle she gave up prayer for many years. So too our attention can be drawn away from the Lord and dissipated in many directions so that we are no longer in our own center. The Lord continued to call Teresa from His Presence in the Center of the Castle of her soul; this entry back into the castle was prayer – that intimate voice – leading her through the gate into the Mystery of divine intimacy. It is only when we assume a posture of loving attentiveness where the Lord’s voice becomes the First Voice that the rest of the pieces of our life fall into place. As children we often delighted in looking through a kaleidoscope to view broken pieces of colored glass falling into new patterns of color. The possibilities seemed endless. The more conformed our lives are to Our Lord’s the more the broken pieces of our lives catch the reflection of Christ thus producing a kaleidoscope of endless arrangements of stunning beauty. There is a “getting stuck” when we are not serious about our prayer life or intimate relationship with the Lord and thus make little or no effort to climb out of our comfort zone and therefore move forward. This may even result in our slipping backward. But what we term “getting stuck” may also be due to our impatience to move into the next rooms before we are ready. When a butterfly has rested after coming out of the chrysalis, it will pump blood into its wings in order to get them working and flapping – so that it can fly. This time is crucial to the flying phase. If in our impatience we were to “help” the butterfly open its wings, the butterfly’s wings would become useless and the butterfly would die. These first three mansions are the soil where we grow in the virtues and in order to do that we must, as mentioned above, become more and more conformed to God’s will. It takes our fidelity and determination, with the help of God’s grace, to continue to draw spiritual nourishment from the present set of circumstances in which we find ourselves. Jesus is present in the midst of the joys and sorrows, confusion, trials, successes, failed plans and messiness of our daily lives. This is where we work out our salvation and sanctification. The temptation is to become distracted through either past situations, present preoccupations, or imagined future ones. This pulls us away from the Present Moment in which we find all the graces needed for our interior growth. We know that growth is necessarily often slow. Teresa tells us that most of us will probably spend a long time in the first three mansions. In this sense she takes the first three mansions as a group for this is where we ourselves are most active in our own growth process. This is where we learn humility, advance in the virtues and grow in generosity. Jesus is the Beloved – how much are we willing to give? Can we ever measure our gift against His? Anything worth doing or worth having requires arduous preparation. We can only receive what we are prepared to receive. God is patient and takes us where we are. He gives accordingly the growth we are ready to embrace. Just as Teresa abandoned prayer for many years before she was willing to detach herself from what was hindering her growth and open herself in abandonment to the Lord, so too we need to take a good look at our “attachments”. God can give much growth in a short time according to the person’s readiness to receive. In our next post we will provide you with a brief examination of conscience that will help you understand where you might be stuck and a little more about what you can do about it.
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Struggling with impatience, what can I do?
A: You will not like the answer to this question, but I will try to answer it anyway. There are two things you may be doing wrong – or you may be doing both of them. Going to the Root First, you may be chopping off the visible stems of this weed in the garden of your soul, without digging up the roots. We all have a unique combination of selfish tendencies, and they express themselves in a unique combination of manifestations. Just like a big weed with a lot of stems and branches. We have all had the experience of pulling up weeds. We know that if you don’t get the root out, the weed will just grow right up again. From your question, it seems that you tend to consider impatience to be the root of your selfishness. Chances are, that is not the case. Impatience is one of the many offspring of the capital sin of pride, which is a disordered attachment to one’s own excellence. You get impatient because deep down you have a strong tendency to think you are so smart, sharp, and gifted that you should be able to manage yourself and all the circumstances around you with perfect elegance. (I told you that you weren’t going to like this answer.) Therefore, you will never be able to overcome your impatient patterns of behavior simply by ordering yourself to become more patient. You will have tiny flashes of patience if you follow that strategy, but that’s it. What you really need to do is work positively on growing in the virtue of humility. Humility will strike at your impatience where it is rooted. How do you grow in humility? Ask for the grace, first of all, every day. Secondly, continue your determined commitment to mental prayer, meditating on the life and words of Jesus, who is the perfect model of humility. Thirdly, increase your conscientious use of the sacraments of confession and Communion. Finally, never let a day go by without making AT LEAST one small, HIDDEN act of self-denial, e.g. purposely eating another helping of something you don’t like, purposely not turning on the radio for the first five minutes of your commute, purposely not responding to someone who unfairly criticizes you… Great Expectations In the second place, your expectations may be wrong. Growth in any virtue does not follow a Hollywoodian schedule. In Hollywood, you can go from chump to champion in just two hours, like Peter Parker or Rocky Balboa. In real life, growth in holiness and virtue takes a long time and happens gradually. This is why Jesus always used parables of seeds and growing things. If we sit and watch a seed grow, nothing seems to happen. But in fact, a lot is happening, if the parameters for growth (soil, water, sunlight) are present. In our spiritual lives, we too often want to see the fully matured fruit right now. Well, the fully matured fruit will not be seen this side of eternity. Sorry, that’s just the way it is! As the Book of Job puts it, in the first verse of Chapter 7: “Does not man have hard service on earth? Are not his days like those of a hired man?” Frustration is almost always a function of expectations. If you have been working seriously on becoming a more patient person, following the example of Christ more closely, I can guarantee that you are more patient today than you were five years ago. Guaranteed. I would bet my life on it. So don’t let the devil trick you into being frustrated with gradually becoming more and more patient, just because you aren’t perfect yet. Instead, every time you fall, just brush yourself off, look up to heaven, and say, “You see what a pile of dust and ashes I am, Lord? Thanks for putting up with me. I know you’ll never give up on me; help me never to give up on you.” Yours in Christ, Father John Bartunek, LC How do I get rid of my “inner ugliness?”
A: OK, brace yourself for this really blunt answer: You still feel “inner ugly” because you still are “inner ugly” – at least partially. Let’s be blunt again: It’s obvious from your question that you feel frustration at the stubborn persistence of some of your faults, in spite of your efforts to extricate them. Where does that frustration come from? Does it come from God? Is God frustrated with you because you aren’t perfect yet? Is he up in heaven tapping his watch and raising his eyebrows? Not a chance. Let me tell you, as a Catholic priest, that he is OVERJOYED with the fact that you have followed his nudges and made your way through the wilderness of our secular society onto the one path of holiness. Yes, you are on the path of holiness; you are on the “steep road” and passing through the “narrow gate” (Matthew 7:13) that lead to salvation, wisdom, Christian joy, everlasting fruitfulness, and eternal beauty. He has been trying to convince you to get onto that path for a while, most likely. Now you are there, and you are traveling it, and you are following the road signs (prayer, confession, spiritual direction… Heck, you’re in the fast lane!), and he is delighted! So, if your frustration doesn’t come from God, where does it come from? I am sure you have already guessed it: your pride. You want God to go at your pace, but God is not always going to go at your pace. He knows better; he is going to go at his pace, and we (all of us) need to learn to follow that pace. If not, we will never grow in humility, the bedrock of all holiness and true happiness. Baking School Imagine: You are teaching your teenage daughter how to make an angel-food cake. First you make one together, and she really just watches and assists you a tiny bit. So then she gets really excited about it, and she wants to do one all by herself. She is so excited that she tells you, “Mom, you go running or something; I want to do this myself.” So you go running. And you come back to find her huddled over a rather floppy, lopsided, misshapen, and gooey culinary mutant. She is either crying or fuming. She is an impatient girl and wants to do everything perfectly right away, but the reality is that some things can’t be rushed. If she were a bit humbler and more patient, she either wouldn’t have tried to do it all on her own so soon, or she would have had more of a sense of humor over her delicious dessert disaster. Transitioning the Garden Here’s another analogy. Think of your soul as a large garden. You haven’t always been attentive to taking care of the whole garden. In fact, there were parts you didn’t even know you had, sections with amazing potential. So now the Lord has shown you the potential of your garden, and together with him you have rolled up your sleeves and gotten to work to make your garden into what it should be. There are various phases to this work. First, you have to repair the broken fences, cracked fountains, and disheveled walkways. Then you have to extract the weeds that have been growing freely for a while (maybe for a long while), so that the good plants (the ones already there and the ones you want to plant) have room to grow. Then you have to dig up the soil, aerate it, water it, fertilize it. Then you have to keep tending the good plants (protecting them from rabbits, deer, birds, etc.), repair things that get broken during storms, keep weeding, etc. That’s the process. It’s long and hard, but it’s what matters most, because the flowers and fruits that come from our spiritual gardening are the ones that matter most: “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, faithfulness, self-control” (Galatians 5:22). That’s the opposite of the “inner ugly” that you are striving for. Right now, you are working hard, sweating, and doing all the right things. But you are discovering that the weeds had deeper roots than you thought. You are discovering that the broken fences are taking much longer to mend that you anticipated. You are finding out that the soil is extremely dry and alkaline in certain areas and needs a lot of deep digging. You like the look of the new plants, but they are still so little, while some of the older, ugly weeds are still big. So you see the fresh inner beauty, but you also see the stubborn inner ugly, maybe even more clearly (more realistically) than before. Letting God Be God God can speed up the process whenever he wants (and in some aspects, he probably already has, whether or not you realize it). But when he doesn’t, he has his reasons. We can only make a decent effort to do our part (what more could he expect from us?). God’s part is up to him. If he is going at a pace that makes us uncomfortable, we need to trust his wisdom. The worst thing to do would be to let your frustration get the better of you and give up. The best thing to do, being the little and beloved daughter of God that you are, is to wipe the sweat from your brow, smile, and keeping following his lead: “But as for the seed that fell on rich soil, they are the ones who, when they have heard the word, embrace it with a generous and good heart, and bear fruit through perseverance” (Luke 8:15). He has guided you faithfully so far, and he won’t lead you astray now. And remember, the frustration doesn’t come from him – he is DELIGHTED with you! Yours in Christ, Father John Bartunek, LC |
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Q: Dear Father John, I have been struggling with some interior trials with forgiveness, resentment and jealousy. I call this “inner ugliness.” I have been praying fervently, going to confession, and receiving excellent spiritual direction. I have been willing myself to be charitable even when I am not feeling it. So here is my question. What am I missing, why do I still feel “inner ugly”? How do I let go of all of this?
