Daily Excerpt: A Believer-in-Waiting's First Encounters with God (Mahlou): Silent Running

 

Today's excerpt comes from A Believer-in-Waiting's Encounters with God by Elizabeth Mahlou

Silent Running

Just when I begin to think that I understand perhaps a small slice of God’s grace, I find myself back at the beginning. Physical things happen to me that I do not understand. Mystical things happen to me that I do not understand. Where are these experiences supposed to lead me? Or, am I supposed to sit tight and let their transforming power alone affect me? I just don’t know. So, confusion reigns.

While I am grateful to God for the unexpected and unexplainable healings, I have received, they, too, have left me in a state of confusion. Why would God intervene in my fate in this way? Am I supposed to be doing something in response?

When it comes to mystical experiences, I find myself even more confused. Are these personal, intimate gifts for maintaining in a private relationship or are they joy and knowledge to be shared with others? If the latter, then I do such a poor job that I have to think that any other person would be a better choice as recipient of such gifts. When I speak of such things, with rare exception, I meet with incredulity. So, again, I am back in the state of confusion.

Perhaps I should simply accept such grace—unearned and unconditional—as a gift of love from God, given to sinners and righteous alike because, in reality, there is nothing else I can do. Perhaps I should also accept my state of confusion as a gift and stop searching for clarity. Perhaps I should not worry whether people consider me sane. My state of confusion brings me closer to God. Should that not be enough? I try to value and love my state of confusion for it has been given to me by God.

More difficult to value and love are times when I am on silent running along this path that I do not see clearly and past rocks over which I stumble. Some of those times resemble dark nights, as described by St. John of the Cross (Ascent of Mount Carmel). Such things seemed buried in centuries-old mysticism—until I turned a bend in the path and walked out of the fields of sunshine into a deep, dark wood.

Dark Nights

I had taken no more than a few faltering steps with God before I learned about the dark nights of the senses and spirit. First, Jean experienced this phenomenon. Then I experienced it. In that Divinely inimitable way that I have grown to appreciate, God prepared me for my experience by allowing me to participate in Jean’s.

Jean’s Dark Night

One evening, as I was working late, Jean burst into my office, eyes large and frightened. “Beth,” she exclaimed. “I think the Evil One is after me!”

I had never heard Jean or anyone else speak in those terms before, so I was taken aback. “What do you mean?” I asked.

“I suddenly feel estranged from God,” she replied.

Jean came by nearly every evening after that, and we prayed. Always for the same thing: to bring Jean back to where she had been spiritually, not realizing that going through the dark night was necessary if Jean were to meet a new dawn and develop a closer relationship with God. As soon as her faith reared its head, it was stomped into the dust again. I began praying for her every day for hours.

Weeks later, having indeed emerged into daylight, Jean told me that 18 years earlier she had met someone she thought was her guardian angel. He had said to her,  “One day you may experience spiritual trial. Should that ever happen to you, I hope that you will have someone at your side to help you.”

She did. Ironically, Jean, who had served as God’s instrument to shepherd me back to the flock, had me at her side. Even though I did not know what to do, I had God to guide me. So, Jean, though unaware of  it, had God at her side throughout her ordeal. I was clearly only a conduit, through which God guided Jean through the dark night and deposited her once again in the light.

Similarly, Jean had been simply a conduit for God to convert me. Through observations, I came to know that Jean is no paragon of perfection as I originally thought. I caught her in a number of lies about minor things in which the truth would have served her better. She often walked by the law, thinking that if she followed all the rules, she would “earn salvation” and “make up for her sin” rather than by the spirit, growing closer to God through repentance, confession, and contemplation. At one point, I wondered why God would use her to reach me—until I realized how often God uses imperfection, including me, for divine purposes. Upon reflection, it seems perfectly natural that God would use Jean. After all, she was going to need me for her dark night. Moreover, it seems arrogant to assume that I deserved an angel or a saint. Praise God for Divine use of imperfect people! Otherwise, I would not have had the opportunity to help Jean or anyone else—and had I not shared Jean’s dark night, mine would have been frightening, rather than illuminating.

My Dark Night

To understand my difficulties with silent running, one needs to realize that God really does spoil me. That is not only my perception; that is the perception of many who know me. I do not have to wait for answers to prayers—sometimes they come before I even ask or in lieu of my asking. Nearly any time I have tried to help someone else, divine intervention and the people who come with it carry the action forward faster and better than I ever could alone.

So, for more than four years after my conversion, I tripped merrily along, secure in the presence of God. Even if I were sleeping, I knew God would keep away nightmares, and I had none. Throughout the day, at work or home, I could feel the presence of God. God’s presence had become the core of my life.

Then the wham! day came—and the next day and the next and so on for more than three weeks. I had no sense of God’s presence for day after day. It would have been easy to think that all my previous experience with the Presence of God had been imagined. That’s the way our human minds work. The past is gone; the present is where we live; the future we look forward to if we don’t like the present. I realized during the early days of this experience that I had a choice. I could choose to believe in spite of the absence of any spiritual connectiveness. I guess that is what faith is: choosing to believe.

What kept me going was knowing that Mother Theresa had gone through a dark night for years. Why? That is a question that only God can answer, but Thomas à Kempis in The Imitation of Christ suggests a way of viewing the experience—a more humble one than my initial response of wailing and begging for the lifting of the dark night—that I find helpful:

Do you think that you will always have spiritual consolations as you desire? My saints did not always have them. Instead, they had many afflictions, temptations of various kinds, and great desolation. Yet they bore them all patiently. They placed their confidence in God rather than in themselves, knowing that the sufferings of this life are not worthy to be compared with the glory that is to come. And you—do you wish to have at once that which others have scarcely obtained after many tears and great labors? Wait for the Lord, act bravely, and have courage. Do not lose trust.

I began to understand much better what St. John of the Cross meant when he said that the dark night is a positive thing, an opportunity to grow spiritually, a cleansing and purification.  It is yet another metanoia. Barbara Yoder, in discussing the dark night of the soul in The Overcomer’s Annointing, asks, “Could it be that God is beginning to get your attention in a way that He has not had it before?” After all, God transformed the darkness at the very beginning of time and throughout history and even until today continues to transform darkness. Is metanoia anything more than the transformation of our internal darkness into something else? Can we be transformed at all if we avoid the darkness?

Likewise, Thomas Merton in Contemplative Prayer describes the dark night as a time that “marks the transfer of the full, free control of our inner life into the hands of a superior power.” I suppose my fear and frustration came from no longer being able to feel that superior power after months of habituation.

Recently I heard a homily in which the priest talked about the Word, as in that which was in the beginning, is now, and always will be. “Wherever there is darkness,” the priest said, “the Word is there to bring light. We may not see the Light, but the Light is there.”  I guess it is like when the sun goes down but is still there.

I did not want to go into that dark night because, like people in a bygone era frightened by solar eclipses, I worried that the sun might never return. I was afraid of what I would lose. I did not understand one iota of what powerful transformation I would gain by trusting my inner life to the unfelt Divine.

Now that the Presence is palpably back in my life, I don’t think I will ever again take it for granted. More than that, though, I know that I do have faith. If it seems weak, I can choose to believe and to ask God to increase my faith. God will do it.

As much as I did not want to go through a dark night myself, I am now grateful that God gifted me with this experience. Now, too, I will not fear another dark night should God want to so gift me again. I will know that even if I cannot feel God’s presence, God is with me always. I know that I can believe by volition. Simply choosing to believe must be even more gratifying to God than believing because the jaws of the “Hound of Heaven” have rested around one’s ankle. At the same time, I no longer fear transformation. I welcome it.

Trust

Living in a silent running mode is all about trust. There can be no real faith without trust. Trust, though, can be elusive and difficult to maintain, as much as we may protest that we do trust.

“Pray, hope and don’t worry,” St. Pio once said. “Worry is useless. God is merciful and will hear your prayers. Prayer is the best weapon we have. It is the key to God’s heart.”

If we hand a problem over to God and then worry about it, is that trust? By worrying about it, we have taken the problem back. I have had two vivid reminders that a problem handed over is a problem resolved, regardless of how things may seem.

The Foolishness of Taking Things Back

Usually, after asking God for help, I go on to other things, finding that God has a way of taking care of things better than we can imagine. Sometimes, though. I have been foolish enough not to put all worry aside after prayer, resulting in an unnecessary waste of energy and emotion.

A couple of years ago, for example, I had made a mistake that could have had extremely serious repercussions by signing a document without reading it thoroughly. By doing so, I had committed my organization to pay thousands of dollars for a contract I had no authorization to make, yet the work had already been done. Media attention was threatened on Friday by the party not getting paid for that work. I left the office not knowing what the situation would be on Monday, but the next-higher office was clearly frightened by the whole situation. And then the day ended.

Needless to say, I fretted all weekend. Of course, I asked God for help right in the beginning, and then I embarked on a fretting spree. On Sunday, as I fretted when I should have been praying, I suddenly saw the image of a tug-of-war, and I immediately understood that the rope symbolized my work problem. At the same time, I heard the words very clearly, “Let Me have it!”

Startled, I immediately dropped my end of the rope, which went slack, and then the image disappeared. My worry had disappeared, too. No more fretting. I could pay attention to prayer.

Truly, I had left the problem behind. In fact, I completely forgot about it and went on peacefully with the rest of Sunday since now God really did have the problem. On Monday, I went to work, still in a peaceful mood.

I had nearly completely forgotten about the whole issue when I got a call from a specialist who said he had been asked to come in early and work on “my” problem. In so doing, he found that what had happened to me represented a serious glitch in the system that could cause all kinds of unauthorized spending. It was being fixed, and the party expecting payment was actually going to get paid, along with several other parties who were discovered to have performed services for other divisions and not been paid! Not only that, I was being lauded because my mistake uncovered a serious problem with the system.

I was a hero! More important, I had another example of God knowing best, of God turning bad into good, and of the fact that we can, and should, trust God with anything and everything and not fret! As they say, just “let go, and let God...”

The lesson I learned that weekend is one that Max Lucado explicates in When God Whispers Your Name. When we don’t know what to do we should just sit tight until God does God’s thing, i.e. we should get out of God’s way. I was told to “let Me have it” because I was in God’s way. In cases like this, according to Lucado, “our job is to pray and wait. Nothing more is necessary.”

Ruthless Trust

That experience, you would think, should have taught me always to trust God. Yet, I once again had some moments of fretting only a year later.

I was on a business trip in Maryland. With me was a colleague who had moved to the US from the Middle East, and quite coincidentally another colleague living in the Middle East had come to the US on a business trip. Both were Muslim; both were devout. We met several times for dinner, and at one point, we decided to do some shopping, mainly to help our visiting colleague buy souvenirs for his family. At a Sears store, where our colleague wanted to check out luggage, I, too, decided to make a small purchase. Somewhat later, after the rounds of several stores, I decided to make another small purchase. I pulled out my credit cards. My bank card was missing! I figured I had probably dropped it at the Sears store when I pulled out my Sears card. Just in case, though, my two colleagues and I retraced all our steps throughout the mall, carefully inspecting the floor for any sign of my card. No sign. Then, we talked to the clerk who had waited on us at the Sears store. No, she had not seen any of my credit cards drop, and no one had turned my card in.

Now I was seriously concerned. My colleagues thought that the card was probably in my hotel room, but I could not imagine where. Canceling the card if I really had it would complicate my trip since I would then be without access to my bank account. Of course, if it were lost, I needed to cancel it to prevent unauthorized use. I called my bank and was told to check my room first, then let them know. There was a 6:00 deadline, after which the card could not be canceled until the following day.

It was already 4:30, and my colleagues were dallying. “Just one more store,” one of them said. “We’re not going to get another chance to shop. Don’t worry. The card will be in your room. Allah always takes care of you.”

It was after 6:00 when we finally reached the hotel. We went to my room and looked around, but we found nothing. It being too late to call the bank that day, I opened a bottle of something to drink—I don’t recall what it was now—and poured out drinks for all three of us.

While I was doing that, one of my colleagues sat down at my desk. Seeing a book there, he opened it to see what I was reading.

“You have time to read while here?” he asked.

“Oh, I was reading it on the plane. I have not had a minute here to read anything.”

He flipped through the book, and out fell my bank card. I forgot that I had used it to buy food on the plane and, not being able to reach my purse, had placed the card in the book as a bookmark, planning to put it in my purse later but then forgetting.

“I told you Allah always takes care of you,” my colleague said, handing me the card. “You should trust Allah, you know.” He laughed and handed me the book: Ruthless Trust: The Ragamuffin’s Path to God (Brendan Manning).

I have subsequently wondered whether this was coincidence or a divine lesson on trust. No matter how great our faith, we all need that lesson occasionally. The wonderful thing is that when we lack trust in God, we can always ask God to help us trust more. I believe that God delights in answering such prayers.

When God Comes

God comes to me most frequently in the humble moments of my life. In the early morning and late evening when I take some moments for contemplation. In the early evening, when I take a walk around my beloved San Ignatio or on Old Mission grounds. Sometimes when I am driving, often when I am thinking about God but just as often when I am not, when I am simply trying to drive within the lines, a skill that does not come naturally to someone who learned first to drive a tractor in the wide open farm fields.

God comes to me at meetings when I let my mind focus on God’s presence. I have been blessed with the ability to multi-task although once when I was called upon by my boss’s boss to explain something at a high-level meeting, I had to admit to not being present in the boss’s moment. I probably could have admitted that I was present, instead, in the Boss’s (God’s) moment because that individual had strong faith. However, being a coward in the midst of such an august secular group, I simply said that I had been “distant” for a moment. My generally irritable boss’s boss could have become angry, but instead he laughed and said, “clearly, very distant.”

At the proud moments, though, I find God missing. Actually, I don’t find God at all in them because I am not looking for God. I am looking at myself. Those are empty moments. The fulfilling ones are where I look for—and find—God with me.

God comes, too, to the humble places in my life. I meet God in the open fields, on the mountaintops, and in our sparse woods.

The Old Mission in San Ignatio is one of those humble places. Built by Indians with uneven floor tiles preserving paw prints of animals that ran across the tiles as they were baking in the sun, the Old Mission promotes a deep awareness of God’s presence that is especially strong in early mornings at the end of December when light from the rising sun enters an upper window, bounces against the statues behind the altar, and then splays all the way down the middle aisle.

People ask me why I would live in a poor, small, farming area in a narrow valley with a town center that is more Mexican than American when I hold a high-powered position, involving much international work and travel. I tell them that the fields are why. The mountains are why. The simplicity is why. The humility of the population is why. God is why.

Likewise, ten years ago I walked up a hill on the outskirts of Tbilisi, Georgia in an impoverished, Muslim neighborhood. Two other members of the international consulting team formed to help the Ministry of Education develop national exams accompanied me on the trek of religious buildings in the city. We first visited an Orthodox Cathedral, where the new archbishop happened to be in the process of being welcomed when we entered. Then, about a half-mile away, we walked up to a synagogue that, not knowing what to do with foreign women, let the Russian team member (a woman) and me sit where synagogues do not usually allow women so that we could be with our Jewish team member (a man) from Holland. Finally, as the day was nearing its end, we trudged up the hill, at the top of which stood the simple mosque. We were surprised that the door was open. Soon after we entered, the imam showed up. Before him stood a Russian Orthodox believer from Moscow, a Jew from Amsterdam, and an atheist from the United States. The Russian and I covering our hair appropriately, we entered a small room with old, worn rugs on the floor. An ancient page from the Qu’ran was encased in a stand along one wall. The imam patiently and proudly pointed out religiously important aspects of the mosque. Standing there, I felt something special, special enough that I wanted to linger. I did not recognize it at the time. Now I know that I was sensing the presence of God.

Sacraments

The sacraments kept me going when in silent running. I believe that we have been given the sacraments for many reasons, but one very good reason is to guide us through the dark moments in our lives and bring us back out into the light. Even when we feel no Presence at all, the sacraments force us to pray. Perhaps the prayer feels dry or empty, but it is prayer nonetheless. As with any prayer, dry or electrified by God’s presence, there is a maker of the prayer and a receiver of the prayer. Whether or not God’s presence is felt, God remains an integral part of the praying. Even if the action does not take the shape of an interaction, God is present always.

Confession

Recently, a retreat I had been attending included the opportunity for confession. There were four priests, one of whom had been ordained 45 days earlier.  It was into the hands of this latter priest that I fell.

The confession I brought to him was weighty, involved circumstances well beyond my control, and had serious implications for the future, including my own physical safety. This, I thought, would be a challenge for a new priest, and, as I spoke, I could see in his eyes a reflection of the overwhelming nature of what I was bringing to him. I began to feel sorry for bringing it when suddenly his demeanor changed. So did mine. We were not alone.

We were so not alone that I felt like I was talking with God Himself. If I had had any lingering doubt about God being present through the priest in the sacrament of confession, this experience would have extirpated any root of disbelief.

The priest did not give me a penance. He gave me a task. Now, that’s exactly what God would do! The task pulled me back onto the path I needed to be on. I guess deep down, no matter how I try to become a Mary, I remain a Martha. The priest did not know that, but God did.

Eucharist

Of all the sacraments, the Eucharist is my favorite. It is in the Eucharist we know, no matter what else may be going on in our lives at the time, that God is present. God must be present, or there is no Eucharist. Of all the parts of the Eucharist, my favorite is the silent time for prayer after receiving the host. With God within and God without, the universe is complete, and I find it easy to rest in contemplation of the perfection of it all (if in the silent running mode) and in the ambient love (if in the Presence mode). Either way the Eucharist opens the door to transformation and ever-continuing conversion.

Years before I converted to Catholicism, I studied Greek. I remember only a few words, mostly medical terms or greetings, from those days, but one very common word I do recall: efkharisto, meaning thank you. The root of that word is also the root of efkharist, eucharist. It would seem appropriate, then, to leave each Eucharist with one last word to God: efkharisto. I like to do that!

The End, for Now

With this attention to how important the sacraments have become in my life, I close this book of my walk with God so far. There are times that I wish I could go through this life again, even with all of its trials, but this time secure in my knowledge of the love of God and with an attitude of gratitude and humility—to remove the imperfections with which I have greeted this life. Then I realize that we have not been given this life in order to enjoy being perfect but have inherited a sinful condition and been given an opportunity in this life to learn, to experience God’s grace, and to become “perfect, even as [our] Father is perfect” (Matthew 5:48).

The final chapter of this book ends as the first chapter began—with prayer. I know that whatever the first chapter of the next book in my life will bring, it will begin with prayer. My life these days is becoming an unending prayer. This life prayer is not characterized by memorized verses and long recitations of praise and pleas although those did help in the dark period. Rather, my life prayer is characterized by fluid movement within a limbic, pre-cognitive state, alternating between profane action and sacred stillness. I find myself drawn to places where I can be alone even though I am an extrovert by nature. I have not turned on a television set in the many hotel rooms I have occupied over the past three years during my constant travels because I crave the silence where I find God.

That is not to say that the profane does not inappropriately intrude into the sacred or that I don’t occasionally march off in quite the opposite direction from the one in which God would have me go. Nor does it mean that I never question my sanity or want to check to see if my sensory array has gone awry when it comes to manifestations. At the same time, I do not forget about Occam’s razor (lex parsimoniae), a heuristic originating from Newton in which one admits no more natural causes than necessary for a hypothesis, spawning the related notion that the simplest explanation, however implausible, is likely the truth. Things such as I have experienced do happen, and yet there are times I don’t want to accept that they do, times that I try to run from them. These are indeed moments that make me feel the need for repentant confession either through the intercession of a priest or, if one is not available, directly to God in prayer that remains fixed at the deepest levels of unconscious expression without bubbling to the surface as a formed linguistic utterance. 

What is that prayer? Well, if it were somehow to break through to the surface and take the form of conscious words, it would go something like the following:

“Lord, please keep Your promise to be with me always. Teach me. I have much to learn. Know that I want to do whatever You ask of me. If I stray in doing Your will, it is from human weakness, and I fully regret each step gone awry. I implicitly trust You in everything but especially to develop in me the strength and humility I require to carry out Your every task. I sense within every fiber of my being that You will help me with nary a plea, but, my being human, You and I both know that I am going to streak to You for help at times. When all is said and done, in this life, I need only Your love and guidance. Thank you for everything you have given to me, taken from me, or made me work through. Thank you for every moment of glory and even more for every moment of humiliation. Most especially thank You for loving me and letting me love You, for letting me be part of Your love story.”

I know now why Jesus, St. Francis, and many others spent so much time in the wilderness—deserts, mountains, or caves—being alone with God. They were listening, receiving, growing, uniting, loving, and being loved. They were being still and encountering God.

To read posts about Elizabeth Mahlou and her books, click HERE.

Elizabeth no longer maintains her blogs, but you can find interesting insights into her, her family, and her books from the cached blog posts HERE.

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