Why I Love My Husband- Part II

I spend the first forty-five minutes of every morning praying side by side with my husband. We are Carmelites. Our intense prayer life is our service to the Church. We're not the Dominicans. We're not the Jesuits. We're not the "pin-heads" as we affectionately call these orders. Instead, a Carmelite's humble service to the the whole world is to pray.

It is absolutely unbelievable to have your spouse and your best friend act as your prayer partner.

A dear friend, the one who actually JOGS each night, asked me recently how I managed to stick to my 5:30 AM prayer routine. "It's my husband," I answered. Every morning Jon rolls out of bed and heads to our living room for prayer time at the first beep of the alarm.

Some mornings I keep my sore, pregnant body in bed. Then Jon's empty spot in our double bed starts to taunt me. I start to feel like a lazy bum for missing Morning Prayer while my equally tired husband is off doing our hard Carmel work. If desire to talk to God doesn't get me up in the morning, than the silent witness of my steady husband does.

My husband is the one who prays our Prayer of the Quiet beside me each morning. He's the first person I talk to about the insights I've gained from reading the Divine Office. By speaking our prayer intentions out loud, I come to know the inner map of my husband's heart. I know who has hurt him at work and who he is struggling to forgive. I know when he's feeling remorse over a bad day with our son. I know how much he loves our unborn daughter. I know how much he hopes for his Mom and his Sisters to convert.

You can talk about all of these issues calmly over dinner, of course. (Then again, who has leisurely conversations at meals where multiple young children are present?) Yet a joint conversation with God is something different. Something Holy. Something Intimate.

If you have a Catholic husband, please use your built in "prayer partner" on a daily basis. You don't need to pray as long as we do. (We're the weird Carmelites who pray for the whole world, remember). However modest, a strong, steady prayer life with your husband will make a huge difference.

Try to pray a single decade of the Rosary together. Do your Daily Act of Consecration together at the doorway before your husband lives for work or say your Act of Contrition next to him at night. Small, simple prayer rituals that are REGULAR will kick-start both your faith and your marriage to a whole new level.

Prayer Help: Acts of Spiritual Communion

No one can get to Daily Mass everyday (and the mothers of young, squirmy children can get their brood to Daily Mass almost never!) There's an easy way to make sure that we never miss out on the spiritual benefits of attending Daily Mass, however. On days that you're homebound, simply read the Scripture readings of the day and reflect on them in your heart. (I like to look up the Daily Mass Readings on EWTN.com). Then say a simple Spiritual Communion Prayer like the one listed below.

Spiritual Communion Prayer

My Jesus, I believe that You are present in the Most Holy Sacrament.
I love You above all things, and I desire to receive You into my soul.
Since I cannot at this moment receive You sacramentally,
come at least spiritually into my heart.
I embrace You as if You were already there and unite myself wholly to You.
Never permit me to be separated from You.

These acts of Spiritual Communion really work! You'll receive all the graces that Jesus was going to give you at Daily Mass. (One of the ladies in my Carmel group actually sticks out her tongue to receive Jesus during her Acts of Spiritual Communion. She says it helps her visualize receiving the Eucharist if she acts the same at home as she does in Church.) Invite your husband to join in this prayer session and make Acts of Spiritual Communion a part of your family's early morning routine.

Prayer Help: Fasting

Easter Season is coming to an end and that means it's time to start up fasting again.

(Did you know we Catholics a six week excused break from doing ANY fasting or penance during the Easter Season? We can't fast while the Easter Bridegroom is with us! I've made sure to cook a meat dish for my family each and every Easter Friday.)

Fasting and Prayer go together, hand in hand. When you find yourself having trouble praying for a difficult family member or co-worker, try fasting once a week for them. You'll be totally shocked at how quickly your love will increase for "the difficult to love" people in your life.

I can't remember which Saint said this, but someone said "The penance that the Devil hates the most aren't all night prayer vigils or frequent whips of the St. Catherine Wheel. What angers the Devil most are fasts from food, water, and sleep."

Food. Water. Sleep.

Every single parent knows what it means to "fast from sleep." My husband and I joke that our beloved St. Martin of Porres (the man who could fly!) had an elaborate system of penance where he'd sleep on a board and wake himself up at 2 AM to whip himself on the back.

Here's my elaborate system of "sleep fasting": be pregnant, wake up with vomiting at 2 AM, have a five year old have a bad dream at 3:00 AM, have a toddler who wishes to share your small bed at 4:30 AM.

St. Martin de Porres and Me, on a similar sleep penance schedule. Mine even counts a little"more" because my sleep fasts aren't self-imposed, they are imposed upon me.

My Carmel teacher also reminds us constantly to fast from the little things. She says "if you're waiting for the bread in the toaster and think, I can skip buttering my bread this morning in order to help sinners: DO IT!"

As members of the universal priesthood every little fast of ours helps others. So skip the milk in your coffee. Give up using ice-cubes on a summer day. Pick up litter that you didn't lose. Every little bit helps!

For me, fasting helps me grow in the virtues of patience and gentleness. If I'm cranky because I haven't eaten lunch during a fast, it's easier to remind myself not to lose patience when my 7 year old has an extremely slow home-school session. Since I'm fasting for Christ, it's easier to remind myself mentally "don't take this out on Hannah".

All of that past fasting work has really helped now that I'm in the "involuntary" fasting part of pregnancy. My patience during bad morning sickness days and bad back-pain days is so much better because I've had practice!

I think of fasting now as purposely using my heavy cross-trainer shoes. Back when I ran track in high school, we used to use our heavy running shoes for our regular training sessions. We saved our slick, light-weight running cleats for the actual track meets. Whenever I suited up in my shiny cleats, after hours of running in dirty cross-trainers, the first 800 meters felt soft and easy.

If you want more patience during long car trips or major crying sessions in Target, use fasting to train your body to stay calm, holy and cheerful even when you're physically stressed. Purposeful fasts are the "cross-trainer" shoes of motherhood.

If you find yourself needing extra patience on the hard days of motherhood (and who doesn't) try to add a little fasting to your prayer routine: wait 15 extra minutes before taking a drink when your thirsty, eat unbuttered toast, skip dessert, fast until 5 PM on a normal Friday or (for us pregnant gals) try to cheerfully offer up our suffering during morning sickness. Every little fast helps!

The Importance of Keeping Your Memory Clear

When you pray, you engage the three faculties of your soul; the intellect, the memory and the will.

The most important part for us is our "will." God greatly rewards our desire for prayer and holiness. Before each prayer session try a simple prayer for purity of intention. "God I want to pray right now. Help me to pray better."

The intellect is that "thinking" part of our soul that is easy distracted during prayer. It's the part that mentally composes a grocery list during our set-aside prayer time. St. Theresa of Avila describes the intellect as "the mad woman in the house!" While calming the intellect gets easier with practice, God has assured St. Theresa that we will all struggle with a distracted intellect until we die.

That leaves "memory." Memory is the "gunk" in our brains, the residue from everything that we've seen, heard and or tasted in the past. Everything from our senses gets imprinted into our memory. Often times this gunk can distract us during prayer.

If we're trying to pray better, one of the most important things we can do is strive to keep our memory 'clean'. We can avoid negative images that distract us from God and instead court holy, positive images that lift our minds and hearts to heaven.

The good news is that to strive to keep a clean memory, doesn't require a massive effort to shut off every TV channel except for EWTN. If we spend regular time in prayer, God will take care of the rest.

For example, a couple in my Carmel community loved to watch comedy routines together. This was a major part of each evenings entertainment for them. The wife told my husband that after four months in Carmel, she and her husband could no longer watch some of their favorite comedians. They had to turn off the TV in the middle of a formerly beloved comedy hours because the jokes had become too painful to listen to anymore.

My husband told her that this was a healthy sign of a growing prayer life. Formerly, mean spirited jokes and the constant misuse use of Lord's name didn't bother this couple. Now that this couple prayed more, they became more "sensitive" and could easily decide to tune out things that negatively impacted their memory.

St. James tells us to keep our thoughts on heaven and not on earth.

Happy Praying this Easter Season!

How to Pray with Small Children

In honor of Lent this coming week, I wanted to share my small observations on this topic. Here are some helpful tips that might work for no one's home but my own.

1) Pray In the Midst of Calcutta

In my house, our prayer corner is a small table next to a picture of the Blessed Virgin Mary in my dining area. (Our apartment is laid out as one giant square box with living room, dining room and kitchen all open and inter-connected.) My husband and I pray the Daily Office first thing in the morning next to the dining room table, rather than cloistered off into our bedroom. Our kids get up, turn on the TV, play with legos, talk loudly with each other and generally ignore their parents.

I found that when my kids can see me praying, they are generally content to leave me alone for twenty minutes. If I tried to hide in a closet to pray in great silence, my kids will freak out and come find me, convinced I'm doing something super fun in my secret space.

2)Deal Patiently with Interruptions

When you're chatting with anyone, including the Creator of the Universe, your kids will interrupt you. My model is St. France of Rome who got interrupted from her prayers 12 times in a row, calmly went back to praying each time. On the last time her prayer was written in solid gold.

I try to remind myself that God understands my situation! He gave me these babies. My job is to patiently deal with whatever need is critical, and kindly remind my kids that all non-urgent requests can wait until "Mama is done talking to God." I prove my dedication not by having some amazing transcendental mountain top experience every morning, but by persistently returning to my prayer time after each distraction.

3) Pray Immediately After the Kids Bedtime

We have three young kids who share the same room. Bed time can be exhausting, some nights. Even though all I want after the bedtime routine is finished is to grab some tea (or a stiff drink) and relax on the couch with my husband, I found that if we both IMMEDIATELY start out evening prayer ritual the night goes so much smoother. Even if bed time turns into one of those awful, bleeding into the late night times, I'm so much calmer after a simple 30 second recharge with God.

So each night at 8:00 PM, my husband and I stumble exhausted into our prayer corner and start praying the Evening Prayer of the Divine Office. Some nights the frequent "I need you..." mean that we don't finish praying until 9:15 PM. It's such a great use of our time. Praying keeps us from fighting with our kids or each other. Praying first helps us to clean the house faster later. I've had so many sweet, sweet evenings with my husband since we started to pray first and talk later. Even if we have only an hour together before bed, it's a happy time when we're both recharged and refreshed after a tough day.

4) Enjoy Life with Babies

In heaven, all of us will be contemplatives. That will be our job for the rest of eternity. Whatever small piece of this crazy, short life that we hand over to God will help us get to our end goal.

Prayer is everything. All the concrete actions that we do each day, are all outreaches of our inner relationship with God.

And because Prayer is so important, there are going to always be tons of distractions. St. Anthony in the Desert, had distractions from his prayer life. So that being said, there is something for learning how to pray in the midst of lots of young kids.

The truth is that as mothers, we're not living fabulous lives of luxury and comfort. I never have to say "Sorry girls, I've got to leave our fascinating mah jong game to go pray my half an hour prayer of the quiet." Instead, I simply decide to forgo picking up legos off the couch to go pray with my husband.

In that sense, because our life as mothers is so simple, because our life is hard, because we're exhausted at the close of each day, it's far easier to appreciate our intense dependence upon God.

One of my Carmelite friends is the mother of 10 children and someone in our class questioned how she could possibly pray each day with that many children. My friend simply answered "I get up before anyone else in my family wakes up to get in my half-an-hour because I need to pray everyday." That answer mystified my classmate. Yet it made perfect sense to me. If you've got 10 kids from ages 2 to 20, you need to pray everyday. I need to pray everyday and I've only got four!

Anyway, hope these brief notes encourage you to carve out some prayer time this Lent.

Tips on Attending Daily Mass

In 2008, my humble little convert family started attending Daily Mass together at 6:30 AM each morning. Our Holy Father gets all credit for this new habit. (We started attending Daily Mass in April to prepare our tiny kids to sit through the Papal Mass.) Since we have 3 kids under age 6, we're the only noisy ones in the pews at that early hour. A friend asked me to share some advice gleaned on this subject. Here's a recap of my email to her.

Reasons to go to Daily Mass:

1) You have a front seat to your priest's best homilies.

2) You effortlessly learn Scripture & observe cool, formerly unknown Saint's Days.

3) You get to form close friendships with other highly motivated and extremely kind parishioners. The "Daily Mass" folks tend to be a regular, stable group who you'll meet over and over again at church events. We've formed close friendships with people of all different ages, and in our immigrant Catholic church, from all different countries.

4) You get to know your priests well and they get to know your family.

5) Your kids get exposed to Mass as a regular part of Daily Life.

Those are just the quick tangible things that keep us former night owls going to bed early so that we can wake up at 5:30 AM, dress extremely sleepy children into nice clothes and bundle them into a freezing car in the dark.

Here's the mystical part that I can't put easily into words. "It's the Eucharist." Its the summit of Catholic life. It's the world's greatest miracle that gets enacted at your local parish church each and every morning and several times on Sunday. When you show up to the "optional" Mass, you receive grace. You get told explicitly in a homily or in a Sacred Scripture quote exactly how you are supposed to change your life to better conform yourself to Christ. And like the helpless humans that we are, Christ gives you himself to help you reach up to God.

If I'm asked why I drag a pack of restless young children to Mass each day, my simple answer is "because I need it." I need Mass. I need the Eucharist. I need that daily dose to get myself through the laundry washing, and the naughty chair enforcement, and the finding of the missing buckle shoes.

I go to Mass nearly day because I need Christ.

I go to Mass nearly every day because Christ needs me. He needs me there to receive his daily outpouring of love.

When I'm at Daily Mass, I get to pray for the needs of our whole Church and our whole world. My kids get to notice that the three Wisemen moved a little bit closer to the Nativity set and that someone kindly glued back the donkey's ears which got broken off last Sunday. By going to Daily Mass, I get to pray, to go to confession and to be blessed on every trip home to see my parents, every big meeting for my husband and every scary homeschooling meeting for myself.

When I go to Daily Mass, I'm already in a holy routine. When my father-in-law had his scary helicopter flight to the regional ICU, we didn't have to look up the next Daily Mass times. We already knew it by heart. On that scary day when we didn't know if Jon's Dad would be okay, we got up at our regular time and prayed our "regular" Mass with with our beloved parish priest and a beloved group of devout friends.

Not every day is an "emergency", of course. But every day, especially these hectic days with lots of young bodies in my house, is Holy. The single greatest help to living a more holy life is to "eat Jesus" more often!

If you feel any pull of your heart to go to Mass more often, just start. Don't make a big plan or big announcement. Start where you can. Drag the kids out to Mass at Candle Mass on Feb 2. Or start going by yourself on Saturdays in honor of Our Blessed Mother.
Start where you can start and let yourself be surprised by all the heavenly help that will race forward to embrace you!

Anyone else going to extra "optional" Masses either alone or with young children in tow?

Prayer 101

Okay, so nothing has intimidated me more than discovering that my primary job as a secular Carmelite is prayer. “Prayer for priests and prayer for sinners.” Just writing that line makes my heart light. It’s such a lovely, inviting task. Much like, “please invite your dearest friends to share coffee at the National Gallery cafe on your birthday and then visit your favorite artwork of your Blessed Mother together.”

‘Plan a birthday party tea at the National Gallery,” that’s the insight I received at Adoration recently. A happy enjoyable task, I couldn’t wait to do. That is for all of the ninety sections it took to open up an Evite folder.

Suddenly a birthday tea at the Smithsonian seemed intimidating. Who would I invite? Do my Protestant, non-Mary ‘worshiping” Mom & Sister get placed on the invite list? What about the logistics? What should I write about directions and parking situation? And most importantly, is everyone going to think that I’m crazy for wanting to stand around “lonely’ former alter paintings with my rosary?

(That “people will think I’m crazy” pride thing trips me up a lot).

That ability I have to take a perfect, easy, holy task and muck it up in my brain with endless anxious “am I doing this wrong?” questions also happens a lot.

I had a breakthrough on the prayer thing which I’m writing down so that I’ll remember the next time I start suffering from social anxiety with Jesus again.

A few weeks ago, I had a broken conversation with my sister. I had a long car ride home on the George Washington Parkway. I was all alone in the car (a great rarity in my current life). I needed to talk to someone. We don’t own a cell phone and for the thousand time I thought “this is one of those moments when it would be really nice to be able to call Jon.”

I couldn’t call my husband, but a little voice inside said “you can always call Jesus on the cell phone!”

I quickly bent my three fingers and place my pinky to my mouth and my thumb to my ear. (Making an inverted Hawaiian sign is how my 18 month old daughter & I pretend to talk on the phone in my house.) The motion was super quick. I think I even forgot make the sign of the cross.

With my pretend cell phone on my right ear, I started talking to Jesus. It was so easy. I could find the words to talk to him “on a cell phone”-- those easy, non scripted things on my heart—that had eluded me when I tried to pray “the right way” with my hands clasped and my head in serious prayer mode.

I told Jesus about the things in my heart. I told him about all the brokenness with my sister and my hurt that my Catholic faith seems to be the wedge that drives us further away from understanding each other. All these feelings which I thought were snarled in a endless knot came flowing all out in these relaxed, easy words.

I told my husband last night I started to imagine that my prayer to Jesus were a simple cell phone call. I showed him my silly hand motion that helps me to pray.

Jon got so excited about the metaphor. “You’ve got to collect yourself and dial the right number. That’s the recollecting your soul to God and making the sign of the cross” he said.

The he told me something really sweet. “You know that prayer of the quiet that you always struggle with?”

I nodded.

“That’s not anything grand or mysterious. That’s waiting on the cell phone connection until Jesus answers back.”

Remembering to pause in my stream of consciousness so that Jesus gets a chance to answer back?

Wow. A simple lack of social etiquette that I struggle with in real life.

I’m always excitedly talking OVER my friends’ words and missing half of their tender advice.

The prayer of the quiet is holding my tongue and letting Jesus have a turn to talk.

“I can work on prayer of the quiet!” I said. “That’s a skill that would be nice to have in my “real” life too.

Prayer 101. Simple. Easy. And endlessly useful.