It was Thursday of the fifteenth week in Ordinary time in 1997. I was on retreat for the first time in years. I remember the readings for today, because that day God spoke to me as clearly as he spoke to Moses in the burning bush. I heard no voice. God did not tell me his name. He did not send me to “let my people go.” But the results of prayer that day have the unmistakable mark of God calling: it was a moment that changed me forever.
My husband had died in 1995. I was a widow with two teenage sons. We had moved from the farm to town the winter after Alan’s death. Life went on. Life wasn’t bad—but spiritually it wasn’t good. The six years before my husband’s death had been very hard ones for all our family. Worse than the physical circumstances, was a sense of the absence of God. “Where are you, Lord, when I need you?” I had cried again and again.
God Calling: He sets the stage.
A friend from work was giving a retreat at our diocesan retreat center. It sounded interesting. I went. I have no idea who the priest was who said mass that Thursday morning, but I remember one sentence of his homily. He said, “For the Christian, every bush must be burning.” The message I got was: God is here. He is around you. Look for him. I remember then hearing the Gospel and being angry: “Come to me, all you who labor and are burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am meek and humble of heart; and you will find rest for yourselves. For my yoke is easy, and my burden light.”
“Come, Lord, come where? Come how? I try to come to you, but you do not answer me. You do not show me. I cannot find you! I have not found you for so long that I no longer am even sure you are really there!”
God Calling: The Walk
I took a walk. As I walked, I must have prayed the prayer of emptiness, poverty, and yearning that God had been waiting for. I went through a field, over close to the lake. There was a bench under the trees. I laid down on the bench and looked up. For some strange reason, I took a picture of the light through the trees with a butterfly in it. That picture hangs over my bed today. Though I didn’t yet know it, it was in that moment that the bush burned for me.
I walked back to the retreat center and met with my friend, the retreat director, later in the day. I told her how angry the readings and homily had made me. She knew me well. She knew the therapy method I used for troubled families. So she gave me an assignment. She told me to go to my room and tell God everything in my heart—but do it using the structured conversation I make families have in therapy.
So I did.
Now that method requires that the person listening give an empathic response to what is heard—that they name back the core thoughts, feelings, concerns, and desires of what has been said. To make that work in a conversation with God, I had to both speak for myself and give the empathic response from God’s perspective. That process led me very deep into my own pain, especially the pain of God’s long absence. It came out in torrents.
God Calling: The Gift
In the middle of the intensity of that I looked down. Out of my blouse crawled a wood tick. I must have picked it up when I had laid down under the trees. In that wood tick crawling, God spoke. I heard. I understood. “I was with you. I was with you, right over your heart. I did not hurt you. I just waited. I was silent, but I was there.”
I picked up the tick and tenderly carried him back out to a tree.
For seven years prior to that day I had been in desolation.
In the moment of the wood tick all desolation vanished.
I have never been in desolation for more than a short time since. Even when I am, I remember the wood tick who came to me without my knowing, who taught me about God when he seems absent.
God Calling: There Was More to the Story
In the intervening years I have recognized that God’s perceived absence in those seven years was much more my doing than I saw at the time. There had been serious sin that I saw as sin, but had not seen as serious sin, so I had not given it up. There had been pride. There had been failure to be honest and failure at times to love. There had been ineffective spiritual direction. I hadn’t even understood what fidelity to God meant. I had been like plot of ground in Sunday’s Gospel which was crowded with the thorns of the burdens of a hard family time.
Even so, God stayed with me—hidden. He did me no harm. AND he didn’t leave me. He came out of hiding when I came sufficiently empty to him.
He came to me, but God is God. God does not violate human freedom, for that would not be truly loving . As we heard in the Gospel on Sunday, God lets us be the soil we choose to be. God waited for just that Ordinary Time day.
When I was a patch of thorns, God’s seeds could not find room to grow. So they hid over my heart in silence.
Helping God Come
God comes and sows his Word and his Love—whether we are hard-pressed paths, stony ground, a patch of thorns, or good soil.
God invites us, “COME to me, all you who labor and are burdened….”
We have to take a walk, look at the burning bush, and COME to Jesus.
In yesterday’s A Catholic Moment reflection, Steven Marsh listed a number of ways to find your burning bush, to come closer to God. I came in this instance through a retreat, a homily, and the invitation of a friend.
Some weeks later, I painted a pottery coffee mug to look like it was on fire. I still have it, too, with MO, 7-97 painted on the bottom. It continues to remind me that God is present in the ordinary and every day, whether I see him or not. Every bush IS burning. Every bush IS God calling. Every bush says, “Here I am. See me. Come. Let’s talk. I’ll listen. Come, and I will give you rest.”
Prayer:
Lord, help me to see God calling in burning bushes and wood ticks or any other circumstance of my life, in prayer that is honest and humble, in words of homilies, and the guidance of friends. Wherever you are, however you are for me today, Lord, let me listen to you. If there is sin, pride, fear, anger, desolation, or discouragement in me today that blocks you from my view, I here give you full and total permission to show me those blocks and remove them. If you are telling me to do some arduous task, as you told Moses, give me courage to say “yes, Lord.” Help me trust you. Help me rest in you, put on your yoke, and learn of you, for your meek and humble heart waits for me to come. Amen.
