The Still Point of the Turning World

Unlocked and Re-sent: Finding Christ In the Fire of Suffering

January and February were tough around here. Between nearly a dozen snow days for the kids, about as many sick days for all of us, and my trip to Texas for SHE, I lost a lot of already precious writing time. And I am currently paying the piper for that. I’m a month late on turning in my next children’s book (on St. Joseph), scrambling to take care of some last minute needs for the forthcoming cookbook, and have so many unanswered emails in my inbox that Google is telling me I need to upgrade my storage. Accordingly, this week, I had to sacrifice the one thing I never like to sacrifice: writing a new newsletter.

Instead, while I’m pacing around my office, trying to figure out what rhymes with “redeem” (scheme, dream, seem…), I’m resending one of my favorite subscriber-only newsletters. This is the first time I’ve unlocked it, so it will be new to most of you. I wrote it about two years ago, just weeks after a dear friend died and just weeks before we lost my father. I’m stressed out of my gourd right now, so rereading it this morning was incredibly helpful for me. I’m hoping it will be helpful for you, too.

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My heart palpitations are back. They visit most often at night, when darkness and silence allow my worries to take center stage. But really, they’ll take any moment of quiet as an open invitation, including this moment, when I’m sitting in my office, writing for you.

I’m not worried about the palpitations. They have visited before. They are my body’s response to extreme stress. Or, as I like to think of them, my body’s show of solidarity with my anxiety-ridden soul.

The palpitations used to come when I was working under pressure to meet unreasonable deadlines. My cardiologist told me that, of all his patients dealing with stress-related heart problems, the professional writers always seem to be the most stressed. This is why I don’t generally recommend writing as a career path.

Right now, however, the palpitations have only a little to do with deadlines. It’s more about …. well … everything.

It’s my parents, who are fast slipping from this world.

It’s my aging, exhausted, perimenopausal body, which is rebelling on the daily.

It's my house, which is overflowing with books, toys, clothes, papers, rocks, and remnants from our long since completed house renovation.

It’s the ceiling light shorting out in our bedroom, the shower fan clogged by a grackle’s nest in our bathroom, and the 133-year-old steps crumbling on our front porch.

It's the minutia of life—the taxes that need to be filed, the health care bills that need to be appealed, the subscriptions that need to be cancelled.

It’s also friends who keep dying, leaving spouses and young children behind, upending all our expectations of what life should look like.

It's my babies, my beautiful babies, who are growing and changing and needing so much from me. It’s the tantrums, fighting, crying, whining, and my fear that I’m responding to it all wrong, that I’m feeding them wrong, disciplining them wrong, entertaining them wrong, catechizing them wrong, loving them wrong.

And yes, it’s my work. It’s work I can’t get to because of aging parents, aching bodies, messy rooms, unfiled taxes, beautiful babies, dying friends, and a mind fragmented by the whole lot of it.

It is, as I said, everything. Nothing earth shattering. Nothing life ending. Just a mountain of ordinary things piled up all at once, that together have set my heart to racing.

At the same time, though, on another level, it’s not any of those things. it’s just one thing, one common problem underlying every individual problem. It’s control. Or, more accurately, my lack of control.

That’s really what has my heart pounding. Life is whirling and swirling all around me, at a pace I can’t match. People, places, and relationships that have anchored my life are disappearing or have already disappeared. And I can’t do anything about any of it. I can’t make the days longer or the distance between my parents and me shorter. I can’t save the dying or bring back the dead. I can’t fix what’s broken or protect my children from all life will throw at them. I can’t even find the time to file papers, let alone my taxes. Even my tried and true ways of maintaining some illusion of control—cleaning, organizing, exercising, sticking to a strict schedule—aren’t at my disposal anymore. Time, exhaustion, babies, and age have stripped them from me, one by one.

And I am so, so grateful for that.

The other night, back in Illinois, I was lying awake, crying over my parents’ decline and trying to calm my wildly beating heart. Nothing worked. My mind just hopped from one worry to the next. The chaos felt like it would overwhelm me. Then, I remembered the One who is not madly spinning. I remembered “the still point of the turning world.” I fixed my mind’s eye on Him. I mentally rested my head on His Sacred Heart. And I breathed.

This is the gift of my current chaos. This is the blessing of losing the illusions of control that hound so many of us, especially those of us who excel at “doing”—at planning, organizing, directing, managing, working, creating, accomplishing. The loss of control drives us back to Him.

For Christians like me, the single greatest obstacle to holiness can be thinking sainthood is another objective to accomplish. We make our plans, say our prayers, and map out how we think our journey to God should go. Then we hold so tightly to those plans that we don’t give God room to work. We close down avenues for grace because those avenues aren’t part of our carefully mapped journey. We pour ourselves out for Him, but we don’t make time to just receive Him. We say we trust Him, but who we really trust is ourselves, and when one part of life slips out of our control, we just double down on our control of another part of life. It’s all pride. It’s all the Garden, over and over again. It’s forgetting who’s God and who’s not.

God is not letting me forget that right now. He is too kind and merciful to leave me to my own devices. He is permitting chaos to strip me of my illusions about control and self-sufficiency. And as my world spins, He is reminding me that all is grace. All is gift. Apart from Him, we can do nothing. Apart from Him, I can do nothing.

I am not learning this lesson easily. The heart palpitations bear witness to that. But I have zero doubt that I need this lesson. T.S. Eliot has been a good friend to me as of late, reminding me: that my “only hope or else despair/Lies in the choice of pyre or pyre/To be redeemed from fire by fire.”

This is true for each of us, regardless of our struggles, whether it’s pride or greed, gluttony or lust, envy, vanity, or wrath. All that is not truly us—the wounds, sins, and habits of life in a fallen world, which have accumulated on our souls like calcifications on a bone—all that must be burned away. We can’t enjoy heaven unless those calcifications are gone. We can’t enjoy Him unless they’re gone. They will just keep getting in the way—obscuring our vision, limiting our love, pulling our attention away from Him and towards ourselves. That’s what they do now. That’s what they would do then … if given the chance. God doesn’t want to give them that chance. Hence the burning.

The fire is hot. It hurts. But it also heals. I know it does because I have been burned before and healed before. There is not one fire for the Christian who truly desires God. There is fire after fire after fire. As I told my friend Elizabeth two weeks ago, while we watched our friend’s grieving children play with my children, sometimes the pain of purification is enough to make you want to jump ship, tell God thanks but no thanks, and walk with the world instead.

That’s a fool’s leap, though. For the choice is always fire or fire. We have to pass through one fire or endure eternity in another fire. There is no escaping the burning, not for anyone, no matter how it may seem from the outside looking in.

This is why I am grateful. Because this present fire is the better one. As hot as it is, there’s also a sweetness to it. In the midst of the tears, palpitations, and panic attacks, there also are moments of profound consolation, where I feel Jesus so near. For He is near. He does not ask us to go through the fire alone. He stands with us through it all, arms around us, taking on the worst of the pain Himself. He burns with us. He suffers with us. And as He does, He strengthens us, healing our wounds and transforming them into scars made glorious by flame.

For Him to do that, though, we have to say Yes. We have to allow Him to do His work in us.

But how do we do that?

I’m not a mystic. Just a really tired and anxious mom. But, in my experience, saying Yes to God’s healing work can be as simple as remembering that He is there. Acknowledging His presence, closing our eyes and imagining ourselves looking at His face or resting on His chest or touching our lips to His wounded feet can bring almost an immediate rush of consolation.

Saying yes also looks like joining our suffering to His. One of the questions I most frequently get asked is, “How do we ‘offer up’ our sufferings.” I’m not sure what’s been said or not said to make offering our sufferings seem like a complicated thing, but it’s not. It’s just accepting what we’d rather not accept—heartbreak, stress, exhaustion, fear, worry, hunger, illness, discomfort, or pain—and saying “Here, Lord, take this. Do something beautiful with it.”

Offering up our sufferings is an act of solidarity with Jesus on the cross. It’s uniting our suffering heart to the heart of the suffering Christ and imitating the attitude of our Lord in Gethsemane when He prayed, “If it be possible, let this cup pass from me; nevertheless, not as I will, but as thou wilt.”

We don’t have to be excited about suffering. We don’t have to throw a parade for our pain. We can ask God to take away our cross in the same breath that we tell Him we accept it for love of Him. If Jesus did that, we can, too. The necessary attitude isn’t joy; it’s love. And trust.

Offering up our suffering, at its simplest, is carrying whatever cross we presently bear with love and hope, trusting that God lets no sorrow endured in faith go to waste. He joins it, somehow, mysteriously, mystically, to His own sufferings on the cross, and transforms it into saving grace. This is what Paul described in Colossians 1:24, when he wrote: “Now I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I complete what is lacking in Christ's afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the church.”

It seems an impossible thing that God’s afflictions could lack anything. He is the Lord of creation, the One who spoke worlds into being. How could His pain not be enough? It is a scandalous thing for Paul to even say. Yet say it he did. And mean it he did. The Holy Spirit gave Paul the eyes to see the radical generosity of our God, a God who doesn’t want to claim the glory of victory all for Himself. He wants to share the glory, empowering His sons and daughters to be His co-workers in the redemption of the world.

God didn’t do this for Himself. He didn’t need our help. He did it for us. He did it because we needed to help. We need to help. We are made in His image. And even in our wounded state, traces of His love, compassion, and generosity remain in us. This is why pain becomes easier to bear when we know it’s for a purpose. Those traces of Him make us want to be loving, generous, and compassionate even in the midst of our suffering. We want to make something in this world a little bit easier or a little more beautiful for someone. We were made to do that. We were made to be like Him.

Offering up our suffering helps make that possible. It allows us to be who we were made to be and love how we were made to love. It allows us to be like Him and ease the pain of this broken world, even just a little bit. The more clearly we see this, the more consolation we receive in the midst of our own pain. It gives our time in the fire meaning. And from that, flows not only waves of sweet relief, but also, eventually, joy.

This is what I’m focusing on when my heart beats so hard that I wonder why others can’t hear it. I focus on what’s not moving: Him. Over and over again I think of Eliot’s words—“the still point of the turning world”—and I hold fast to that Still Point. I also give thanks for the work He is doing in me through this present stripping, even though I don’t like it one bit. And I offer it all up, every drop of it, even the things I know it’s silly to be anxious about. Maybe especially those things. I keep saying, “Here, Jesus, take this. Do something beautiful with it.” I believe He is.

I also believe that no matter how it feels—no matter what is happening in the Church or the culture or my heart—the chaos cannot win. It is not running wild, unchecked by Divine Power.

Near the end of the Book of Job, God references Behemoth and Leviathan, the great monsters of land and sea, who personify evil and chaos in the Bible (40-41). God doesn’t speak of them with fear. God has no fear, especially not of mere creatures. Rather, He speaks of them almost like pets—as creatures whom He has “on a leash,” (41:5). By that, He doesn’t mean that evil and chaos are His will or that He delights in sorrow and destruction. What He means is that nothing is outside of His control.

I love that image: God holding two great and terrible monsters on a leash. It is a comfort and consolation to know that the worst powers of chaos and destruction are limited by Him. They won’t win. They can’t win. God keeps them in check, subverting the devil’s plans and using everything, even chaos, for the good of those who love Him.

Soon, this present fire of mine will pass, and my heart will beat normally again. It always does. Whatever fire you are presently enduring will pass, too. One way or another, peace will return. Until then, fix that same image in your mind. Know that God truly has chaos on a leash. No matter what is out of your control, nothing is out of His control. No matter what is moving and changing in your life, He is not moving and changing. He is and always will be the “still point of the turning world.” And in the end, once more in the words of my friend T.S. Eliot:

All shall be well and
All manner of things shall be well
When the tongues of flame are infolded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one. 

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In Case You Missed It

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Let’s Meet in Person This Year!

May 3, Buffalo Catholic Women’s Conference, Buffalo, NY

May 8, The Canadian March for Life Rose Dinner Gala, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada

August 1: Superior Diocesan Council of Catholic Women Convention, Woodruff, Wisconsin

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