Intecessors of the Lamb

We are called to the Cross. We are called to follow the Lamb wherever He goes, and that's where He goes. That's why He came. Our baptismal consecration invites us, all of us, to live Jesus and His Cross as victim lambs. The first time God put victimhood in my heart, I became fearful. I was in the novitiate in the cloister at the time. He began speaking to me of victimhood. The way He explained it to me was by leading me to the writings of St. Therese, the Little Flower. She understood victomhood so beautifully. She was consecrated to God as victim, but as a victim of His love. He began to show me that He looks for victims of His love. He need victims of His love because there are not a lot of people who want to receive His love.

We experience a lot of rejection in our culture. We know a lot of people who are in terrible pain today because of rejection. But our rejection is nothing compared to the rejection of God-not only the rejection while He was on the earth but the rejection that continues today. This was what He was asking the Little Flower to do-to be open and receive His merciful love. It's really painful to love someone who doesn't want your love. So there's pain in the heart of God. And so we, because of Baptism, because of our consecration, are saying, "We will answer Your invitation to be little victim souls, little victim lambs." He says, "Thank you. I'll just love you to death then." And He does-every day if we let Him.

In John 15:12 we read, "Love one another as I have loved you." This is the New Commandment. In the Old Testament, they weren't able to love in this way. They didn't have that presence of God within them like we do. This commandment can only be kept with Jesus, in Jesus, and through Jesus because the condition of loving one another is, "As I have loved you." Jesus has loved us from the Cross. He has loved us unto death. He gave His entire life to love us. Now that's what He is asking us to do-to give ourselves totally-everything. He wants it to be our lifestyle.

We've heard, "It's the life that prays." That's true. It is the life that prays, but it's the life of Jesus Christ within us that prays. We always have to remember that there's only one Intercessor-it's Jesus. There's only one Mediator-it's Jesus. There's only one High Priest-it's Jesus. Jesus has taken up residency within our hearts. He is here.

In Romans 8:26, we read about the travail of the Holy Spirit. You know, the travail where there isn't any words. It's just your life. Sometimes it comes out in groaning. That's the travail of the Holy Spirit. And so "in union with the intercessory travail of the Holy Spirit, we join the Suffering Servant as burden-bearers" (Our Holy Rule, p. 8). The Suffering Servant is depicted beautifully in Isaiah 53. That's our calling. There He goes, and He's asking us to follow Him. It's travail because there are times when we can't pray, but our life can pray.

We have a friend who was in travailing prayer several years ago in a different type of way, but the Holy Spirit was groaning within her. Her family had put together a video of their mother who was no longer living. It was a very special video of remembrance for the family. They sent it to her to watch, and when she went to rewind it, somehow she erased it, and there were no other copies.

Well, she was devastated. When you're in that state, you don't even know how to pray. So she did the best she could. She went and visited the Lord in the Blessed Sacrament. She went to God, and she said that all she could do was say, "Oh, God. Oh, God. Oh, God." She did that for about two hours. She just said, "Oh, God. Oh, God. Oh, God." That was it. That is good prayer. That's travailing with the Holy Spirit. When she came home and put the tape back in the VCR, just to try it one more time, it worked! So if that's the best you can do, know that's good prayer. Jesus didn't say a lot on the Cross, but what He did say was very costly. But look at the fruit of His prayer! That was lived prayer. Our Lady's whole prayer was her life and her lifestyle.

At these times, we shouldn't think that we're not praying because we're not saying prayers or receiving something in prayer. If we are faithful to our time with the Lord, especially when the cross is really heavy and all we can do is travail with the Holy Spirit, believe me, that's still powerful prayer because it's the Holy Spirit. It's the Holy Spirit travailing within us and God hears that. God always answers the call of the poor, and no one is in deeper poverty than when a person is in pain or suffering. It is a powerful type of prayer.

Burden-bearing is another level of intercession. It becomes a way of life. But we don't decide the burdens; Jesus does. So if we feel, "Oh, I really need to ask God to carry this cross or that cross"-fine, if we want to but that doesn't mean that God is going to let us. He's a very loving Father. He knows what we can handle. Sometimes we ask for things that we haven't any idea of what we're asking for. We have our moments of extreme generosity. We think that we can take on the whole world. We may tell God, "Let me have that cross. Let me suffer. Let me do this or let me do that so that they can have this and that." Well, that's wonderful, and God may honor our request but He may not. A parent doesn't give a child everything he or she asks for. The parent knows what's best. The Father knows what's best so let Him decide. But anytime that we are terribly burdened, we shouldn't think that God has laid a burden on us beyond what we can carry. He never will do that. Never. He said, "My grace is enough for you" (2Cor 12:9). "I'll give you only what you can handle. I want you to take care of it. I will give you the necessary grace to do it."

And so we become burden-bearers. There are times when we don't feel any burdens. Maybe it's a time to rest. Maybe the heavy intercession has been given to others. God has many intercessors. He has many friends. We're not the only ones. But there may be times when we are the only ones. This is why contemplative prayer is so important. We need to hear what He is saying. We may be the only one who He wants to carry a particular burden for a particular person. So we always have to be in that state of listening to the Lord.

Excerpt from Powers and Principalities Conference, "Sword of Blood: travailing prayer," Omaha, NE, 2003.

08-09-04 Made Perfect In Our Suffering

August 9, 2004

"Made Perfect in Our Suffering"

In the Garden of Gethsemane, Jesus literally released blood out of the tremendous agony that He went through. He was carrying sin. He was going to repair it. He was going to eradicate it. It had to totally disappear, and it could only disappear in the way in which it had appeared. It appeared through disobedience, and so Jesus came against this disobedience with perfect obedience in the flesh.

Every time we say, "yes," we are eradicating sin within ourselves and for the whole world. We are letting God's grace manifest itself through us because it's still the Lamb who is taking away the sin. It's only done one way, and that is through suffering. The suffering may be physical, but He has shown me that there's a deeper suffering than that-the suffering in each yes, "Not my will, but Yours be done."

I just had a little incident that happened the other day when my cat was dying. I thought I was totally surrendered. First I prayed for his healing. Then it became obvious that God wasn't going to heal. This cat was suffering a great deal, but I think I was suffering more. So then I thought, "I'm going to be real surrendered then. Fine, Lord. I'm going to let go." But God didn't do either one. He didn't heal my cat and He didn't take him home. Now the Lord was saying, "This isn't about Andrew, your cat. This is about you. You have to let go and embrace My perfect will. My perfect will is that I'll decide how long he's going to suffer. You have to let go. You have to surrender to My will." It was a tremendous teaching for me!

So we never know. We think that we're in His will until all of a sudden, we want Him to do something and He doesn't do it. That's suffering, isn't it? That's what He's talking about. He is calling us to perfection. He wants to make us perfect through suffering. Often the suffering comes because we're trying to hang onto our will. When we can let it go, then we can start making the passover and taking others with us.

Excerpt from "Formation on the Rule," Omaha, NE, 2003.

08-02-04 Let God Be God

August 2, 2004

"Let God Be God"

Intercession is always for others. There is prayer of petition, there is prayer for ourselves, but intercession is always for others. One of the reasons intercession has so much power is because it's not for me. It takes total self-forgetfulness. One priest used to tell people when they came to his House of Intercession years ago was, "The first thing you need to do is repent: repent of your self-concern and self-love." Maybe this is why there are so few intercessors. We have to lay ourselves aside and really get into the heart of God and His interests and His concerns.

Often I'm asked, "How did you ever get into intercession?" That was an interesting question because I hadn't realized how it ever started. When I came into the Catholic Church, I was baptized as an adult the day before Christmas. The priest who baptized me said, "How would you like to make this a Christmas that you'll never forget?" Of course, I have never forgotten it because it changed my life. But to make it doubly unforgettable, the very next day my father disowned me for becoming a Catholic. That came as a tremendous shock to me because we were very close. I'm an only daughter, and we were very bonded. My mother had died and my father had remarried and was living in another town. He wrote to me telling me that I was no longer his daughter.

So I sat down and wrote a letter back, "Well then, I won't be your daughter" in a very childish way that we do sometimes when we are really hurt. I was in terrible pain, but for some reason, instead of dropping it in the mailbox I took it to the priest who had just baptized me. I showed him my response to my father. He sat there very kindly, very wisely, very lovingly, and he shook his head and said, "No, we don't send this letter." I said, "What do you mean, ‘We don't send this letter'?" He said, "Nadine, we don't. You continue writing to your father like you have been doing, telling him about your activities. But," he said, "I want you to start coming to church every day and pray your heart out for him."

That was my introduction into intercession. For three months I prayed my heart out for my father. That's all I did, and I just begged God, "Touch his heart. You can walk into the heart. You walked through the closed doors on Easter night. You can walk into my father's heart, too." I didn't know how God was going to do it. Sometimes intercessors have to be careful that we don't tell God exactly what He has to do. Have you ever prayed, "Lord, I have this problem, and You really need to do this" or "This person really needs that." We don't pray that way. Our Lady didn't, and she's the intercessor par excellence. At Cana, Mary simply said, "They have no more wine" (Jn 2:3). Then she turned to the servants, "Do whatever He tells you" (Jn 2:5).

God knows best. We've found that if we release our loved ones into God's hands for Him and allow Him to handle things the way He wants them handled, things happens so much more quickly. And so without even knowing some of these basic principles of intercession, that's what I was doing. "Just touch the heart of my Dad somehow." Three months went by, and I received my first letter since his letter disowning me. My father wrote, "I had a dream. My father appeared to me in this dream (which would have been my grandfather, who was not living) and he said to me, ‘It's all right. Nadine is a child of God's now. It's all right'." Once my father heard from his father, it was okay. I thought, "How beautiful! I never would have thought to ask God to have my Dad have a dream about his father." So I really learned, "Let God be God. Let Him figure out how to walk into a person's heart." That was the beginning of my life and my lifestyle as an intercessor.

Excerpt from "Let the Fire Fall: Intercession," Saugherties, NY, 2002.

07-26-04 Do I Believe?

July 26, 2004

"Do I Believe?

We know that to believe is not enough. Scripture says that faith alone without good works is dead (see Jas 2:17). So if we say, "Well, I really believe that God loves me," but walk around all day like we've lost our last friend, obviously we don't really believe He loves me. We need to check ourselves now and then and ask, "Where is my faith level? Do I really believe?"

One time I spent an entire Lent doing this. It was my prayer for the whole six weeks. I pondered some favorite Scriptures that I thought I really believed in. Then I saw that I believed them part-time-I really only believed them when the sun was shining. I believed them when things were going really good, but I wasn't a believer around the clock when things weren't so good. Then my prayer changed to, "Lord, I believe, help my lack of trust!" (see Mk 9:24). There will always be little elements or areas where we don't fully believe.

We need our faith to become a stronghold. We need a faith that will stand firm, a faith that we can hold our ground and defend our faith. We probably all will be called upon more and more in the future to be defenders of what we believe. We need to believe with our whole hearts, our whole souls, our whole minds, with all our strength so that we can stand firm on that foundation. I used to think that the foundation of everything was our faith until I was meditating upon the passage where Jesus called Peter out of the boat and Peter was walking upon the water (see Mt 14: 22-33). I had always meditated upon Peter for some reason, but this one time, I was drawn to Jesus because Jesus was also on the water. I asked the Lord, "What kept You on those waters?" He said, "My Father's love." I began to realize that even faith, as important as it is, needs a stronger foundation." The Lord led me to St. Paul, "May Christ dwell in your hearts through faith, and may charity be the root and foundation of your life" (Eph 3: 17). We need to go into prayer to rest upon the heart of God, to rest in His light, and to receive this kind of faith so we can rest in His love.

In Baptism, we receive this gift of faith, and in Confirmation, we received the gift of understanding to enable us to put our faith into action. But we need to keep questioning, "Do I believe?" For example, one of my favorite passages is when the Lord said, "I am with you always" (Mt 28: 20). I could just live out of that-"I am with you always." But when I was meditating on this one time, I began to realize that I did believe that He was with me, but I was having trouble with the word "always." So I asked Him, "Father, give me more faith so I can believe that You are with me always-through the struggles, through the trials, through the misunderstandings, through the rejections, through the mistakes, through the dark days, through the struggles, through the storms, and through the loneliness. Help me to especially know that wherever the Cross is that you are there always." By the end of this particular Lent, I had grown in this beautiful gift of faith. We are always growing in this beautiful gift.

One time a priest came to our Center who was suffering from severe depression. He had been to many places throughout the world for healing. He had been to some of the top healers in the Charismatic Renewal. So when he came to our little place, I was wondering, "Lord, what is it that You're going to do? He is still depressed. He has not been healed." I thought, "Obviously there's another root here." So we started a retreat for him. During the retreat, he shared some of the beautiful things he was getting in Scripture. They were really beautiful things. I knew he was really hearing from God. And I couldn't figure it out. I said to the Lord, "Why would anyone be depressed when they're receiving this from You?" The Lord said, "It's because he doesn't believe that he's hearing from Me. He doesn't believe it." The Lord told us to start interceding to the Father for this gift of faith, and that's what we did. About three days later when the Lord was still speaking to him, he believed it! It totally changed him. Today he still believes and he's still flying high. It's very beautiful.

The enemy will try to put doubts into this gift of faith, particularly when it has to do with our relationship with God. That is the relationship that the enemy wants to divide more than any other. So he can put questions into our mind, "Is God pleased or displeased with me? Does God still know that I'm even around? Does God really love me?" Again, this is why our identity is so important. We do need to know what God thinks of us. We do need to know where each of us stands with God because that is what we stand on-our relationship. When we know that we know that we know that God loves us, nothing and no one can shake us or take that away.

Excerpt from "Wings of Light," Manila, Philippines, 2001.

07-19-04 If It's Worth Living, It's Worth Logging

July 19, 2004

"If It's Worth Living, It's Worth Logging"

Sometimes people say, "I can't journal. God doesn't speak to me. He doesn't respond to me." But when they share their journal, I can see what is happening. They are getting everything out-they might have a paragraph or pages. Then they wait for God to respond to all those words, questions, and feelings all at the same time. When this happens, God often will be silent. We have put so much information before Him, how do we know what He would be speaking about? We can go into a guessing game and come out of our journaling and prayer period not really knowing anything more than when we went in. So I encourage you to put only one thing-one fear or one question or one aspect of a problem before the Lord at a time. Journal your question out and wait for Him to answer that part. Then go back and ask Him another part and let Him answer that. Journal it. We want a dialogue going back and forth. It's all being done in this writing process in tremendous simplicity.

Especially let your feelings, whatever they are, come into the light. This is important. We encourage you to journal daily because we have events that happen in our lives that need to be brought before God each day. We have things that happen in our lives that we need to hear about from God daily. There might be certain times when we get that prompting of the heart and we understand what the Lord is saying. But many times, when it has to do with our emotions, we have a tendency to suppress them or to gloss over a situation or pretend that it really didn't bother us. "After all, I'm a Christian. I can love everyone." We respond to the things that the world tells us or all the shoulds in our lives-but that's not who we really are. Jesus will meet us wherever we are. If we're hurting, that's where He will come.

We also journal the Scriptures. There are so many beautiful passages of Scriptures and things that we hear at Mass that we pray through every day. We have that "anointing," that quickening of our heart, and we know that there's more there. So we journal, "Lord, this is what You said in Scripture. What do I need to know? Teach me the deeper mystery. Break it open for me." There are many teachings that come through the Scriptures in our journaling. Many priests who have made retreats at Bellwether actually get their homilies through their journaling, beautiful teachings right from God Himself.

John the Contemplative said, "As for you, the anointing you received from Him remains in your hearts. This means you have no need for anyone to teach you. Rather, as His anointing teaches you about all things and is true-free from any lie-remain in Him as that anointing taught you" (1Jn 2:27). It's an anointing that is upon us when we journal. We may not be sure of it at first. This is why it is important to have a spiritual director, someone who knows us and the way God works with us because there will never be two journals alike. There are never two souls that are alike. God works with us individually and with our individual temperaments. So it's good to check out our journaling with our spiritual director. When we begin journaling, ninety-percent of what you receive might be just us-it could be-and maybe only ten-percent the Lord. But as we keep at journaling, our listening antennae will become more sensitive. We will kind of get those rabbit ears of the heart, and we will start to pick Him up. We will be able to begin to discern, "Oh, that's the Lord" or "Oh, that's me again." We will start to see the difference.

Then put your journal aside, and reread it the next day. Often we will be able see very clearly when it was God who was speaking and when it was us. Sometimes we think "it's just me" because it can come so naturally. But remember, God became one of us, and He speaks to us in a very natural way. When we reread our journals, we will begin to see, "I couldn't possibly have thought of that. I couldn't have said that." God's word to us will always build us up. Our journal will never tear us down. This is one good way to know if it's the Lord. He will affirm and build us up because He is a God of love. He will speak truth, but it is truth in so much love that we want that kind of truth.

There are events of the day that we might want to journal out. Often we journal when we're waiting at airports. There's something about waiting at airports, now more than ever, or waiting on the plane on the runway. Just get out your journal and ask, "Lord, why did we miss this plane? Why did we miss the connection? Why are we waiting? Is there anything You'd like to say to me? Is there anything You'd like to show me?" It's amazing the revelations that can come in these little moments. Use these little windows of time. Journal wherever you are. There's something about journaling that keeps us focused. We can talk to the Lord, but some of us are dreamers. We can say something to Him and then all of a sudden we're off in our own dream world before He even had a chance to reply. Journaling is a safeguard from that.

One of the major blocks to journaling is if a person is angry or upset with God. The block could be, "I'm not really open to hearing anything You say." Another block could be that we may doubt that God really wants to speak to us. If we are childlike and really want to hear from God and expect to hear from Him, it will happen. It will happen. An abbot once said, "If life is worth living, it's worth logging." I always liked that because life to me, and life to each of us, is Jesus. Jesus is worth living. Jesus is the Word of God. Whatever this Life says to me, it is definitely worth logging. It is definitely worth recording and remembering.

Excerpt from Pillars, "Journaling," Omaha, 2001.

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