**WARNING** This is totally a navel-gazing blog entry, and I’m not even all that ashamed about it. But if you’re OK with that, read on. **/WARNING**
Last Saturday I wrote a journal to myself about habits I needed to start weeding — e.g. whining and griping, worrying about productivity and time, worrying about the future, etc. I particularly urged myself to stop worrying about the future and stop obsessively looking for signs about what may be to come or what I ought to do next.
Go figure that that same night I would go to see Noche Flamenca at the theater and run into all kinds of people I knew in the most coincidental circumstances. I pulled out my phone to make a note, jokingly asking God (on my phone’s notepad — what a geek!) if this was supposed to be some kind of sign. Then throughout the performance I couldn’t stop thinking that old, annoying, terrifying thought that maybe I should be a scholar. (I hate that thought. Why won’t it take a hint and take a hike already?!) When I got home I wrote this stirring piece to myself and an imaginary audience:
[If it happens] it will happen according to God’s will, and He will give me the signal and the push. But I might as well stop forbidding myself the option. I keep waiting for something extraordinary to come along, something totally different and unexpected, like a call to the missions or some crazy thing. But it doesn’t have to be THAT crazy to be unexpected. Sometimes the most truly unexpected things are the very things we expected all along, but which end up being quite different from what we imagined.
The scholar-thought drove me crazy for the rest of the week, as it always has before and will continue to do until I finally quash it either through fulfilling it or opting for something clearly better. I have an enduring attraction to the idea of furthering my studies (especially in German literature — oh! my love!), alongside a kind of dread and anxiety, or, perhaps better put, a feeling of consternation. No, I think. That can’t be right. It’s so worldly. It’s so selfish. I want it for selfish reasons and not for godly or charitable reasons. How can I keep avoiding Real Life Out There? (What that even means, remains to be seen.)
But last evening during class, another thought occurred to me. It came as a question: Are you saying “no no and no” to the university life because you really feel called to live a “selfless” and “simple” life and help others in a more obviously charitable way a la Mother Teresa, or because your pride tells you it’s the holier and more important thing for such a holy and important person as yourself to do? I realized that perhaps my vision of what it means to live a simple life, a hidden life, a life for God, is probably too narrow and too influenced by stereotypes. And perhaps I just fear the inevitable spiritual trials that must come from trying one’s best to live a simple, faithful, and holy life in the midst of the “worldly” university. If academia is as spiritually bankrupt (hmmm, or maybe rotten) as I often imagine it to be, then it needs the witness of a person of faith all the more. This chick right here is hardly up to the task — but God qualifies the called, does He not?
I still have much to discern, as well as much consternation and fear to surrender, but at least I can start to see how becoming a scholar might not be the most selfish thing in the world. After all, it was just last Sunday that we heard in the second reading: “Now the body is not a single part but many. If a foot should say, ‘Because I am not a hand I do not belong to the body,’ it does not for this reason belong any less to the body. Or if an ear should say, ‘Because I am not an eye I do not belong to the body,’ it does not for this reason belong any less to the body. If the whole body were an eye, where would the hearing be? If the whole body were hearing, where would the sense of smell be? But as it is, God placed the parts, each one of them, in the body as he intended.” — 1 Cor 12:14-18
We have a prayer, istikhaarah, (it means asking for the good) which we perform when we’re unsure about an important undertaking. We make an voluntary prayer, and because we believe that you’re closest to God in prostration, we spend extra time in it, and when the prayer’s finished, we say,
“Oh God, I ask You what is best according to Your knowledge; and I ask You for ability/strength by Your might; and I ask You from Your great bounty, because You are capable/mighty and I am not capable/mighty; and You know, and I know not, and You are the Knower of the unseen. Oh God, if You know that this matter [name it] is good for me in my religion, my life, and my final affair [hard to translate, but meaning hereafter], then ordain it for me, and make it easy for me, and bless me in it. And if You know that this matter [name it again] is evil/bad for me in my religion, my life, and my final affair, then turn it from me, and turn me from it, and ordain for me the good/best, wherever it may be, and then make me happy/pleased with that.” It’s a lot shorter in Arabic, lol.
Most people sleep after this, and act on whatever dreams they have. If they don’t dream anything they can understand, but they no longer feel conflicted when they wake, they consider that an answer as well. For me, it brings extra comfort when things aren’t going the way I wish they would. I say to myself, “I made istikhaarah, it’s gonna be ok in shaa Allah.” Kind of like saying “I remembered God, He hasn’t forgotten me.”
You mentioned being worried about pride, and I think that’s the biggest trap Satan’s got. He tells you, “What if your intentions aren’t as pure as you think they are?” and hearing those whisperings sends us running from the good we should be doing. When Muslims have these thoughts we say, “I seek refuge with God from Satan, the rejected,” and the thoughts that disappear, we consider to be his whisperings. I’ve always wondered, do you guys have anything similar?
I really like that longer prayer that you translated; I think that is an excellent discernment prayer. I don’t know of any particular written or recited prayer that we say in such circumstances (other than one of the “trust”-themed psalms or the popular “serenity” prayer by Reinhold Niebuhr), but the recommended Christian attitude toward discernment is exactly that.
Your Satan-rejecting prayer is also interesting! To answer your question, it seems to me that among Catholics, at least, people have different ways of handling this. In general the idea is to “flee to Jesus” or sometimes also to “flee under the mantle of the Virgin Mary.” Many people cross themselves and say a quick prayer, like “Jesus, I trust in You.” St. Faustina Kowalska sometimes said the beginning of the Angelus prayer, “And the Word became flesh…” which made the devil flee from her.
Worrying about pride is definitely a negative “whispering” I’ve been hearing a lot lately, although in this case (the thought that occurred to me in class), it was a rather amusing, comforting thought that helped me puncture a hole through my own naysaying. In any case, I have been taking refuge in the trust prayer, the psalms, Scripture, and the Rosary!
Thank you for answering so thoroughly. I’ve never heard about fleeing to Jesus. I particularly like the image conjured up by the phrase, “flee under the mantle of the Virgin.” It seems like a safe place to be!