Kitty Crenshaw's Blog, page 14

God’s Hideous Vulnerability

Jean Baptiste Carpeaux. Pietà. Metropolitan Museum of Art

To grow, to be reborn, one must remain vulnerable–open to love but also hideously open to the possibility of more suffering.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh

If we are to come face to face with God, we must first come face to face with the hideous vulnerability of Christ’s passion—a suffering love made manifest outside the city gate—Golgotha. Here, Jesus manifested Himself not as a god who is controlling, closed and secure, but rather as the God Who is open, vulnerable and real; the God Who yearns for us to the point of dying, but Who will never impose Himself.

Our wounds are healed and our hearts are softened only in the silent darkness of His divine vulnerability. To be renewed by such refreshing waters, we are asked to offer everything: a willingness to sink deep down into the muck and horror of that imageless nudity which is the Crucifix. To embrace the breathlessness of His agonizing affliction is to embrace a vulnerability so radical, so profound, as to silently absorb God’s pain, our own pain, and the pain of others. God meets us in the ruins of our broken hearts and gently rebuilds, recreates, and prepares a sanctuary of spacious vulnerability for others.

This vulnerability requires the strength to risk enormous pain, to bear the weight of our darkest times without defending ourselves or trying to escape, and to open ourselves enough to allow God to touch us in our deeply wounded places. It asks that we lose ourselves in the hope of finally finding ourselves. Again and again we are asked to change our thoughts from fear to deep acceptance and positive trust, remembering always the redemptive power of suffering Love that only the Spirit of Love enables us to embrace.

Accepting and loving ourselves is critical if we are to walk the vulnerable way with Jesus. Self-acceptance moves us to a deep conviction that God loves us as we are, that we can accept and even be grateful for our brokenness and offer it to others. God created us in love, meets us where we are in love, accepts us as we are in love, then calls us to be more vulnerable and accepting of others.

It is well to remember that our inner journey is not a journey into greater control and security. It is a journey into the powerlessness of the Lamb Who was led to the slaughter, the Lamb Whose vulnerability birthed new life; a totally new creation.

Might we enter together into this holy darkness of God’s divine vulnerability and meet the fiercest misery around us with His passionate vulnerability—a willingness to die so that others might live.

April 2

Our work is to come to prayer to receive the Love and then offer it to the hungry hearts of others. ~Betty

From Action to Passion

Antonio Ciseri. Ecce Homo. Museo Cantonale d’Arte

The moment
when Jesus was handed over by one of His best friends to those who would do
with Him as they pleased, was the turning point in Jesus’ ministry. It was a
turning from action to passion. Things were no longer done by Him, but to Him.
Jesus fulfilled His mission not by what He did, but by what was done to Him.

Only John the beloved disciple and the three Marys were with Him when He was nailed to the cross. Fear had scattered the rest. Jesus accepted the horror of the cross in loving obedience to His Father. It was this love that made the atonement adequate and His agony bearable. In this fearsome hour God’s plan of salvation was being fulfilled. The glory of God burst through in Jesus’ passion precisely when He was most victimized. New life becomes visible, not only in the resurrection on the third day, but already in the passion, in the being handed over. It is in the passion that the fullness of God’s love shines through.

The truth is most of our lives are determined by what is done to us or happens to us—our passion. We must embrace our own passion with loving trust as Jesus did. We are asked to hold our suffering until we break through to resurrection in this life. Our cross is the gateway to oneness with Infinity itself.

the transforming power of suffering,
distress, despair, degradation
all at the same time.
Affliction also –
the point of the nail piercing,
entering the Holy of Holies.
BWS
 

Over the infinity of space and time, the infinite Love of God comes to possess us. Surprisingly, this Love comes in the image of the nail. Our finite vision sees no purpose in suffering, but can we trust that when we embrace our passion, we are being prepared for a far deeper love? It is a love that is underneath the pain, not yet fully tasted. Can we see that in the midst of our suffering, in the midst of our waiting, we can already experience new life? That all of suffering humanity is understood and cradled in deepest Love? That our most grievous sorrows are known and held by the Highest Good?  

From The Hidden Life Awakened page 214

Jesus leads us to the foot of the cross, and then we are drawn into the cross. There we die to all that is false in us and become one with Him. It is when we pass through the cross that our hearts are softened by a holy compassion that embraces the whole world. We have finally passed through ourselves and transcended the things of the world that would keep us in bondage.

https://www.thehiddenlifeawakened.com/blog/

March 19

Everything, even our darkest pain, is held in Divine Love. ~Betty

The Mystics Among Us

Perle Fine. Cool Series No.26 First Love

Our loving God reaches out to us one by one through many different means, but most often through the testimony of those who have experienced His love. In every generation there have been great preachers, writers, and teachers to help us find our way to the Beloved. In every generation too, there have been a few very ordinary people who have been awakened and transformed to an extraordinary degree by a direct and profoundly personal encounter with God. Theirs is a special love affair with the Divine, the goal and heart of all religion. We call them the mystics.

The reason we don’t often meet these people is that prayer, silence, and solitude—often in nature—is the way God has led them into this union. Solitude is the fertile ground from which they occasionally emerge, motivated by the fire of Love, to share life’s most hallowed possibility of passionate love, deep wholeness, and profound healing and joy. Always their messages are variations of God’s all-encompassing love and desire for us, often with the encouragement and hope from their own stories of enormous personal struggles fought and won. They then withdraw again into their private world of God’s love and presence.

Betty Walthour Skinner, whose story we have chronicled in The Hidden Life Awakened, is a 21st Christian century mystic. Her burning quest, her “flaming yes!” to God throughout her ninety-plus years, and her all-consuming love affair with the Beloved is the marvelous thread that runs through her story.

The words below are hers, written in 1998.

God speaks and we, as His people, are called to be still and listen to His Voice. Those who have learned to listen, who are truly drawn into the mystery, also are impelled to give away some of what they have received. They have learned that what is not given freely is lost to them as well as to others.

Now, in the twilight of my years, I feel very pressed to encourage people who are on their spiritual journey to persevere, to trust God, and to not stop short of the goal—the gift of the Giver Himself, divine union. It’s a long, lonely journey that comes in steps and stages and takes a lifetime. There isn’t much encouragement. Your family and friends won’t understand. You have to want it so badly you are willing to sacrifice everything. So pray for more desire. If you persevere it is well worth it. The gates of heaven are everywhere. Our part is to simply embrace and open to the new seasons of our inner and outer journey as preparation to receive this gift of Love. Divine union is for everyone, and the experiential knowledge of this Love and freedom is everything. Now, at 94, I face death with no fear. At last, we are grasped by the hand of the Spirit and led into a wilderness free of distractions and temptations: a wilderness of trackless mystery, beauty, and sound. This is the ultimate food in the feast of our redemption—a foretaste of heaven. 

 

To watch a video of Betty talking about her favorite mystic, click below.

Julian of Norwich, Part 1

March 5

Blessed are you who mourn, for one day you will feel the joy as deeply as the sorrow you feel now. ~Betty

A Letter From Betty

Dear Ones,

The Lenten season has begun. Here in the solitude and silence I ponder the great Paschal mystery and pray that God will quicken us for Easter. In my listening there seems to be a love that longs to give some of what I am receiving back to you, that together we might gratefully return a love gift to the Holy One. 

Lent is a time when we as believers enter into an extended retreat with Jesus.  It is an invitation to participate with Him in His time of prayer, solitude, silence, and privation in the wilderness. It is a call to an ever deepening conversion experience, a call to repentance, and a call to choose change.

The wilderness, the desert, the solitude are the furnace of transformation. Jesus willingly entered into this furnace where he was tempted with the three compulsions of the world: to be relevant, to be spectacular, and to be powerful. There He affirmed God as the only source of His identity. If we will consent to the wilderness in love and trust, alone with Jesus, we too will learn to take our identity not from the world, but from the Voice within Who calls us Beloved.

May we come in humility and gratitude to accept His invitation and offer not a candy bar or a glass of wine, but our hearts, ourselves.  Such a sacrificial offering, such consent and commitment, creates an openness and emptiness within our hearts where God can give Himself, through Christ, back to us.  It is in this giving and receiving of Love that we are immersed in the flow of divine relationship and begin to experience the freedom to live our lives in the Spirit of Love. So to live in the Spirit, in Holy Communion, is to live in the flow of divine relationship with all that it has to offer us.  And what it offers is the Paschal mystery of life out of death, love out of pain, ecstasy out of agony, the Word out of silence, light out of darkness and power out of poverty.

What a supremely precious gift this Spirit of Love is.  It is a gift that continues to transcend—spirit touching spirit.  We are all held unconditionally in it and experience, moment by moment, that such a Love cannot be said; it can only be felt with the heart.

Beholding the Beloved, trusting in the mercy,

~Betty

February 20

To make the choice for life, we have to be willing to let go of our old ways that aren’t working. ~Betty

Let Be. Let Go. Let In.

Science has now documented that you can make choices to help ameliorate your suffering by changing your brain’s structure and thus your perspective. Your brain is a living, dynamic computer that is always moving and changing, cataloging and processing information, and it never shuts off until the day you die. What you choose to give your attention to feeds your brain’s cells—firing up the network; sending blood, energy, and oxygen through pathways it has built to those particular neurons; building out more and more structure to hold what it is fed. You can begin to build new structure in your brain simply by choosing what you focus on. If you focus on negative things, your brain will build more structure to hold negativity. If you focus on positive things, your brain will build more structure to hold that. Your first efforts at changing your thinking and habits are more difficult but ultimately will become easy and automatic as your old neural structures are slowly dismantled and replaced with brand new structures.

So pay attention and notice your negative or fearful thoughts. This is so important. They are so subtle, but they are so defeating. Your brain is hardwired to protect you from threats, so any negative word or thought will release dozens of stress-producing hormones. Most people spend their life imprisoned in the tiny confine of their thoughts that are nothing more than firings and wirings within their brain. You don’t have to do that. Your unhappiness is not coming from other people or your circumstances but from your mind’s conditioning. Research now shows that holding a positive word, such as “peace” or “love,” in your mind will actually alter your gene expression and stimulate the motivational center of your brain to build strength there. If you are currently dealing with debilitating physical or emotional pain, don’t pile onto it by saying, “This will never end; I hate my body; I hate myself; It isn’t fair; I’m a terrible person; I can’t do that; I am worthless.” These are perceptions; they are not reality.

Today, will you make the decision to stop breaking your own heart? The fight is not against yourself or your circumstances but against your negative thinking. You can be set free from the tyranny of these habituated reactions into a spacious place of trust and hope. Will you begin by simply noticing and acknowledging any negative thoughts you are having right now? Next, refusing any more defeating self-judgment, just let them be. Now, let them go. Then, let in the good by redirecting your thoughts to gratitude. Each time you lift your heart to God in gratitude, you are brought nearer to Him. Nothing is wasted or beyond His healing touch. Everything has divine purpose. Your wounds will become your place of authority; the place from which you can touch another with compassionate understanding. Consistently choosing this new way of thinking will take time and it will take desire, but it will happen, creating in you a transcendent joy that is not dependent on your external happiness making you a powerful participant in your own healing. The Hidden Life Awakened page 24-25

To watch a short video of Betty talking more about this, click below.

February 6

We have lost patience with solitude and silence, the home of the Word, thus leaving the depths of life untouched. ~Betty