Embracing Disorder

Day 4: Talk 1: ACCEPTING REALITY / EMBRACING DISORDER

(EVERYTHING BELONGS). Retreat to the FMAs, Bellefonte Outreach, Shillong.

There are stories that change your life… Here is a story that changed mine.

Letter of a pregnant nun

Here is an extraordinary letter written by a young nun, Sister Lucy Vertrusc, to her mother superior. Sister Vertrusc became pregnant after she was raped in 1995 during the war in the former Yugoslavia. The letter appeared in an Italian newspaper at the behest of her Mother Superior.

I am Lucy, one of the young nuns raped by the Serbian soldiers. I am writing to you, Mother, after what happened to my sisters Tatiana, Sandria, and me.

Allow me not to go into the details of the act. There are some experiences in life so atrocious that you cannot tell them to anyone but God, in whose service I had consecrated my life nearly a year ago.

My drama is not so much the humiliation that I suffered as a woman, not the incurable offense committed against my vocation as a religious, but the difficulty of having to incorporate into my faith an event that certainly forms part of the mysterious will of Him whom I have always considered my Divine Spouse.

Only a few days before, I had read “Dialogues of Carmelites” and spontaneously I asked our Lord to grant me the grace of joining the ranks of those who died a martyr of Him. God took me at my word, but in such a horrid way! Now I find myself lost in the anguish of internal darkness. He has destroyed the plans of my life, which I considered definitive and uplifting for me, and He has set me all of a sudden in this design of His that I feel incapable of grasping.

When I was a teenager, I wrote in my Diary: Nothing is mine, I belong to no one, and no one belongs to me. Someone, instead grabbed me one night, a night I wish never to remember, tore me off from myself, and tried to make me his own . . .

It was already daytime when I awoke and my first thought was the agony of Christ in the Garden. Inside of me a terrible battle unleashed. I asked myself why God had permitted me to be rent, destroyed precisely in what had been the meaning of my life, but also I asked to what new vocation He was calling me.

I strained to get up, and helped by Sister Josefina, I managed to straighten myself out. Then the sound of the bell of the Augustinian convent, which was right next to ours, reached my ears. It was time for nine o’clock matins.

I made the sign of the cross and began reciting in my head the liturgical hymn. At this hour upon Golgotha’s heights,/ Christ, the true Paschal Lamb,/ paid the price of our salvation.

What is my suffering, Mother, and the offense I received compared to the suffering and the offense of the One for whom I had a thousand times sworn to give my life. I spoke these words slowly, very slowly: May your will be done, above all now that I have nowhere to go and that I can only be sure of one thing: You are with me.

Mother, I am writing not in search of consolation, but so that you can help me give thanks to God for having associated me with the thousands of my fellow compatriots whose honour has been violated, and who are compelled to accept a maternity not wanted. My humiliation is added to theirs, and since I have nothing else to offer in expiation for the sin committed by those unnamed violators and for the reconciliation of the two embittered peoples, I accept this dishonour that I suffered and I entrust it to the mercy of God.

Do not be surprised, Mother, when I ask you to share with me my “thank you” that can seem absurd.

In these last months I have been crying a sea of tears for my two brothers who were assassinated by the same aggressors who go around terrorizing our towns, and I was thinking that it was not possible for me to suffer anything worse, so far from my imagination had been what was about to take place.

Every day hundreds of hungering creatures used to knock at the doors of our convent, shivering from the cold, with despair in their eyes. Some weeks ago, a young boy about eighteen years old said to me: How lucky you are to have chosen a refuge where no evil can reach you. The boy carried in his hands a rosary of praises for the Prophet. Then he added: You will never know what it means to be dishonoured.

I pondered his words at length and convinced myself that there had been a hidden element to the sufferings of my people that had escaped me as I was almost ashamed to be so excluded. Now I am one of them, one of the many unknown women of my people, whose bodies have been devastated and hearts seared. The Lord had admitted me into his mystery of shame. What is more, for me, a religious, He has accorded me the privilege of being acquainted with evil in the depths of its diabolical force.

I know that from now on the words of encouragement and consolation that I can offer from my poor heart will be all the more credible, because my story is their story, and my resignation, sustained in faith, at least a reference, if not example for their moral and emotional responses.

All it takes is a sign, a little voice, a fraternal gesture to set in motion the hopes of so many undiscovered creatures.

God has chosen me—may He forgive my presumption—to guide the most humble of my people towards the dawn of redemption and freedom. They can no longer doubt the sincerity of my words, because I come, as they do, from the outskirts of revilement and profanation.

I remember the time when I used to attend the university at Rome in order to get my masters in Literature, an ancient Slavic woman, the professor of Literature, used to recite to me these verses from the poet Alexej Mislovic: You must not die/ because you have been chosen/ to be a part of the day.

That night, in which I was terrorized by the Serbs for hours and hours, I repeated to myself these verses, which I felt as balm for my soul, nearly mad with despair.

And now, with everything having passed and looking back, I get the impression of having been made to swallow a terrible pill.

Everything has passed, Mother, but everything begins. In your telephone call, after your words of encouragement, for which I am grateful with all my life, you posed me a very direct question: What will you do with the life that has been forced into your womb? I heard your voice tremble as you asked me the question, a question I felt needed no immediate response; not because I had not yet considered the road I would have to follow, but so as not to disturb the plans you would eventually have to unveil before me. I had already decided. I will be a mother. The child will be mine and no one else’s. I know that I could entrust him to other people, but he—though I neither asked for him nor expected him—he has a right to my love as his mother. A plant should never be torn from its roots. The grain of wheat fallen in the furrow has to grow there, where the mysterious, though iniquitous sower threw it.

I will fulfill my religious vocation in another way. I will ask nothing of my congregation, which has already given me everything. I am very grateful for the fraternal solidarity of the Sisters, who in these times have treated me with the utmost delicacy and kindness, especially for never having asked any uncareful questions.

I will go with my child. I do not know where, but God, who broke all of a sudden my greatest joy, will indicate the path I must tread in order to do His will.

I will be poor again, I will return to the old aprons and the wooden shoes that the women in the country use for working, and I will accompany my mother into the forest to collect the resin from the slits in the trees.

Someone has to begin to break the chain of hatred that has always destroyed our countries. And so, I will teach my child only one thing: love. This child, born of violence, will be a witness along with me that the only greatness that gives honour to a human being is forgiveness.

Through the Kingdom of Christ for the Glory of God.

* * * * * * *

Embracing Disorder

How to approach problems? Reality is full of inconsistencies, problems. What should I do? The question I should answer is: Am I interiorly at peace? The first questions are not: to How to help? How to serve? How to solve the problem? But am I spiritually okay to deal with this situation? Do I see God in this situation?

Do you know what faith is? Faith is simply to trust the real, and to trust that God is found within it—even before we change it.

The strongest tool for helping others is a “compassionate presence.” Our presence itself must have a message.

Do not be afraid. 365 times.

Know that the world is okay as it is. Know that things are okay as they are. This moment is as perfect as it can be. The saints called this the “sacrament of the present moment.”

It’s enough to know you really are okay and the world is okay, too.

From your point of view, there is confusion. But from God’s point of view? Contemplative discipline is to allow this view in your life.

Quantum theology. Spirituality is about true seeing; it is about perception. An experience that imprints in your memory, or changes you at any depth, is not so much based in what you experienced (its content) as it is how—at what level of significance did you take it in? Three people can be exposed to the same stimuli and come away with three different “experiences.”

Quantum physics and biology now insist that the observer necessarily changes the content and results of an experiment. Contemplation is training you to see the overlooked wholeness in things.

Jesus states the same principle in reverse in the parable of the rich man and Lazarus: They will not be convinced even if someone should rise from the dead. People who do not believe in miracles never experience miracles. If you are not open to the Beyond of things, you will not allow yourself to experience a miraculous event happening right in front of you.

It’s only God in us that understands the things of God. We must take this very seriously and know how it operates in us, with us, for us, and as us. You need to see as God. This is not blasphemous: you need to allow God to use your eyes. The God in you meets the God in the world.

“The Lord looks on his servants with pity and not with blame. In God’s sight we do not fall: in our sight, we do not stand. Both of these are true; but the deeper insight belongs to God.” - Lady Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love, chapter 82. [Everything Belongs, 66.] The other name for God is mercy (Pope Francis).

“First there is the fall, and then we recover from the fall. Both are the mercy of God!” (Julian of Norwich).

“Sin shall not be a shame to humans, but a glory. The mark of sin shall be turned to honour” (Julian of Norwich). If that’s not the “good news,” what else could it be? What else could be good except that kind of freedom, that kind of spaciousness, that kind of embrace from God that says your life matters? Your journey matters, and God’s covenanted love towards you is always unconditional and usually unilateral. If you accept this good news, the universe suddenly seems to be a very safe place.

It is about accepting reality = forgiving reality for what it is. What is is.

God comes to you disguised as your life. Life is characterized much more by exception and disorder than by total or perfect order.

We must stumble and fall. Falling, losing, failing, transgression, and sin are the pattern. Yet they all lead towards home.

Failure, sin, humiliation, and shadow work are very good teachers if we allow them to be. “Sin is behovely” Julian of Norwich. We grow spiritually much more by doing it wrong than by doing it right. Ironically, we flourish more by learning from our mistakes and changing than by a straight course that teaches us nothing. Till you learn something good from your sin, don’t give it up.

God will even use these deaths in your favour, if you will allow it, leading to “negative capability.” Like a slingshot or drawn bowstring that actually creates forward momentum, negative capability describes those failures, that emptiness, those acts of resistance that end up being the very force and motivation that catapults us ahead.

God’s mercy is so infinite and resourceful that God uses even our sin for our own redemption. He recycles it. Nothing is wasted. Nothing is lost; it is only transformed. Everything belongs.