Having known about this for a while, I am thrilled beyond belief to be able to announce in these pages some absolutely fantastic news: my wonderful friend and fellow Catholic blogger/podcaster Channing Dale, of This Catholic Life, is going to be entering the Discalced Carmelites this coming July.
YOU GUYS I’M SO HAPPY AND EXCITED FOR CHANNING I DON’T EVEN KNOW HOW TO PUT IT INTO WORDS WITHOUT RESORTING TO BOLDING AND ALL-CAPS!!!!!!!
*ahem*
Sorry about that. Maybe I should just let Channing tell you in her own words instead.
Praised be Jesus Christ! For those of you who haven’t listened to the last four episodes of my podcast, and for those who do not know yet, I have made the decision and have been accepted to enter the Carmel of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph on July 13th of this year as a postulant in their community. Yes, you heard it right. I am working my way to becoming a Discalced Carmelite nun and dedicating my whole life to Jesus!
This decision was almost four years in the making, and since the spring of 2009, I discerned this choice while finishing my degree at Millersville and afterward, working in the “real world.” I tested several potential career paths in the Church outside of my job (I didn’t quit my job, only investigated), but nothing seemed to fit and the thought of becoming a religious never went away. I finally said “yes” to God at the end of July last year, applied for Carmel in the middle of September, and was accepted by the community at the end of September.
If you want the full story, dear reader, you can listen to “A Call to Love” in episodes 24-27 of This Catholic Life for how I got to this point.
Go read the whole post; she goes on to talk about the Discalced Carmelites, the monastery in Elysburg, The Carmel of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph (where she hopes to spend the rest of her life here on earth), and about the formation process of going from entering as a postulant to becoming a fully-professed sister.
In all seriousness, I could not be happier for my friend. To listen to Channing talk about her vocation and how deeply she has fallen in love with Jesus, to the point where no one except Him completely and Him alone will satisfy the longings of her heart, is to come face-to-face with the undeniable reality of Christ’s infinite and personal Love, not just for Channing, but for each and every one of us. It is an awe-inspiring truth upon which to meditate. You know those couples you meet, be they 25 years old or 90, who make you believe in true love? That is what I see in Channing and her relationship with Our Lord.
It gives me SO much joy to think that Jesus has stolen my heart and is keeping it all to Himself. <3 I pray that I can give all to Him.
— Channing Dale (@ChanningDale) January 28, 2013
I feel so blessed that God gave me the opportunity to meet Channing via Twitter, and that He saw fit to forge out of that meeting a deep and genuine friendship I have with my sister in Christ. I am overwhelmed with gratitude that He is going to be making her all His own, answering all of her prayers and all of her desire for His love, and that He is shaping her into a holy, beautiful, and extraordinary Bride of Christ. Her life, I have no doubt, will be a hidden fountain of grace that will nourish and strengthen His Church, His priests, and all His people.
650,000! That’s how many people are estimated to have taken part in the March for Life last Friday! Extraordinary! I was one of that number, and my March for Life experience can be summed up thusly.
So yesterday I marched for the unborn, shook hands with the papal nuncio, attended my first EF Mass, and kissed a bishop’s ring. #Catholic
— Ordinary Mike (@MikeCGannon) January 26, 2013
After meeting up and riding the Metro into DC with the aforementioned Channing, she and I met up with Billy Newton of Blog of the Courtier, who was hosting a pre-March get-together and informal recording session for SQPN’s Catholic Weekend podcast in the Cascade Cafe of the National Gallery of Art. I’ve followed Billy on Twitter for over a year and have an immense amount of respect for the man, so it was a huge pleasure to finally be able to meet him in person.
Left to right: me, Channing Dale, Fr. Kyle, and Billy Newton
After about an hour, Channing and I made our way down the Mall and took part in the March in the company of a few of the seminarians from Mount Saint Mary’s, because that’s how we roll! During the March, we were quite randomly introduced to the Papal Nuncio to the United States, Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, who was wearing a straw cowboy hat with a “Nashville” patch on the front. Apparently that’s how he rolls!
There was cold! There was snow! There was foot-stamping and teeth-numbness and dining on bison meat! There was talking with Irish pro-life activists across the street from the Supreme Court and videotaping a message of solidarity for them to take back to Ireland. It was an crazy, inspiring, and amazing time!
That evening, as I mentioned last week, I attended my first ever Mass celebrated in the Extraordinary Form. Confession: I didn’t know until just a few years ago that there was such a thing as the EF Mass. I had been to Novus Ordo Latin Masses before, and thought that was it. So this was an entirely new experience. Even cooler, this was an incredibly rare Mass to attend: a Sung Pontifical Requiem Mass, celebrated by Bishop Joseph Perry (and yes, after Mass I was able to greet him and kiss his ring, another first for me).
It was mind-blowing, though not in the way I expected. The prayers and the liturgy I found challenging to follow. If Channing hadn’t been there to guide me through, I would have been totally lost. But the Holy Spirit…I don’t know how to describe it; He was just there! It was like being penetrated and having all of the worries and concerns of my soul laid bare before the Lord. By the time of the Consecration, I was down on my knees in tears, begging God to forgive me for being so worthless, so incapable of living out any kind of vocation, of loving Him and giving myself to Him in any meaningful way. Before that moment, I had no idea that I was harboring such feelings, but the Holy Spirit drove right down to the center of my heart and brought everything gushing forth!
The Divine Physician, good surgeon that He is, never cuts us except to excise a malady, and always binds up His incisions. I was gently reminded, through the knowledge of the Real Presence and the living witness of my friend kneeling next to me, that Jesus loves me and that He and I share the same ultimate desire: that I should love Him with all of my heart. The God Who loves me so much that He would take on the appearance of bread and wine, just to be physically joined with me, would not fail to provide me with the means and the ability to pour myself out for love of Him.
Over this past week, the Holy Spirit has been quietly building on this in a number of ways. So many of the things that I have been struggling to overcome, often through a brute force approach of applying “patience” and “trust” in my life, He has conquered with me. I’ve had a number of ups and down in my interior life this past week, but all of the insights God has illuminated for me are coming together, and with that comes an immense sense of peace and joy. Rather poetically, this all occurred in the week leading up to…
The Feast of the Presentation of the Lord! Of all of the Mysteries of the Holy Rosary, the Presentation is my favorite. Even now, just composing my thoughts for what to write about it, I have tears welling up in my eyes. What does this feast tell us, if not “God keeps His promise to bring us joy”? Here you have Simeon and Anna, a holy man and woman both reaching the ends of their lives, both longing for God and trusting that He will reveal Himself to them. And He does! Oh, He does, and in such a beautiful way, through a young mother with her infant son in her arms! And Simeon, what faith and love, what humility and joy comes pouring forth from his soul as he proclaims, “Lord, now let your servant go in peace; Your word has been fulfilled: my own eyes have seem the salvation which you have prepared in the sight of every people: a light to reveal You to the nations, and the glory of Your people Israel!” He can die happy, for he has tasted of the only thing that matters in this world or the next: the love which God has for us.
For the past couple months, I have been struggling to find peace in my current state in life, feeling dissatisfied with my current state in life and striving to impose a sense of patience and trust in God’s plan for my life, all the while dreading deep in my soul that whatever plan there once might have been, I have screwed up irrevocably through my own weakness and sin. I couldn’t see any higher purpose in what I am doing, but I kept telling myself, “Well, God knows best, you just have to trust him and be patient.”
But that’s not true. I didn’t have to trust God; I have to love God! Love for Jesus is the well from which things like trust, patience, and humility all flow. Simeon and Anna possessed that love of God, and that was what gave them the trust to so patiently await the fulfillment of His promise. My friend Channing loves God, and that is what gives her the trust to believe the truth of His call to her: that she will find no greater happiness in this life, and enter no more deeply into His love, than she will by giving up the world and all its allurements and dwelling with Him and for Him inside the cloister.
That, as I have learned this week, is from whence my own peace and joy will come. Trusting God like I am a sailor on the main deck who sees only open ocean, and He is sharp-eyed lookout high aloft the rigging announcing the sight of land, is insufficient. An attitude of “Well, I suppose He has a better vantage point…” is not enough to sustain the soul. Genuine trust in God is the trust one has in one’s Beloved. I trust that, in God’s eyes, what I am doing right now by going to school and living this quiet life, is important. I trust that if I continue to seek His face and live in Him, Christ will lead me to more joy than I can imagine, more happiness than I dare think possible from my current state in life. I trust all this, because Christ loves me, and He will never abandon me or lead me astray. He has fallen hopelessly in love with me, and all He asks is that I fall hopelessly in love with Him.
O my Jesus, I love you; increase my love! O my Lord, I trust you; increase my trust!
Speaking of school and my current state in life, classes are going well. One thing I have discovered over the past couple weeks is that homework itself can be a form of prayer. When I am facing a long session of homework and feeling the urge to put it off until sometime “later”, I take a deep breath, remind myself that what God desires most of all is that I do what I ought before doing what I want. I then make an explicit act of consecration, offering up to God the homework I am about to do, usually for a few specific intentions. I have found that this is even more effective than my medication in helping me to get motivated to complete my assignments in a timely manner. Knowing that others may be in need of whatever graces I might earn on their behalf definitely lends an extra sense of urgency and accountability, and this consecration serves as a reminder of what I described above: the work I am doing right now is something that God finds to be important, mysterious as this often seems.
The past couple days I have become practically addicted to the soundtrack of The Hobbit! Howard Shore is a flippin’ musical genius!
In other iPod related news, after reformatting it to clear out some ghost files, I realized that I could download the iBreviary app, and I love it! It has a lovely, elegant design and is quite user-friendly. I try to pray Lauds and Vespers every day, using my one-volume breviary Christian Prayer, but I had never prayed the Office of Readings until I did so yesterday using the app. Admittedly, I felt a little awkward at first pulling out my iPod in the middle of the Perpetual Adoration Chapel, but it felt good to add another hour of the Divine Office to my morning routine. Besides, as I was leaving, I saw another woman in the chapel with a netbook in her lap. Any lingering guilt pretty much disappeared after that. 
I pulled this photo of Blessed Pope John Paul II looking cool beyond cool from the Lighthouse Catholic Youth page on Facebook…
…and I just had to have some fun with it!
I mean, if that’s not worthy of becoming a meme, than what’s the point of even having an Internet?!
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