Holding on to God and Letting Go of the Rest

About a month ago I was invited to a small worship night organised by a friend. Music has always played an incredibly special part of my life, and only recently have I begun to appreciate both its beauty and power in enhancing my relationship with God.

In one of the songs we sang through the night, the lyrics ‘I will climb this mountain with my hands wide open… there is nothing I hold onto’ struck a chord with me. In prayer, I found myself singing ‘I hold onto You’, without at the time being aware of what the actual lyrics were. Whilst opening up to worship through this seemingly small line, it also opened my eyes to an aspect of life I have always struggled with – holding onto God during the hard times of letting go.

The fear of letting go

I’m the sort of person who didn’t get a new phone for years because I thought it meant I would lose all of my Whatsapp chat history (Nb: I’ve now figured out how chat back up works). Despite the countless number of friends who persistently told me it was the worst reason to hold onto my shabby memory-storage full-iPhone 4s, I still maintained that the conversations and photos I had stored in there were more precious to me than any new updated version I could trade it in for. Why? Because they were my personal time travelling device. For the late nights when I couldn’t fall asleep, or situations when I had time to kill, I would read back over those old chats and laugh over the way things had changed, or smile over moments with people I had forgotten.

Without this already making me sound too sad, the point I’m trying to make is that there are several things in our lives which each of us struggle to let go of; be it friendships, hobbies, possessions or plans. Their existence gives us a sense of control and stability in our lives, and with time they begin to shape our identity. An unexpected or sudden loss of any of these things can therefore quickly set us back and instinctively cause us to question ‘why’; and without a valid explanation we often struggle to accept them or move on. At such times of hardship, it can feel challenging to turn our dependency to God and let go, especially when the future we had in mind is no longer clear. However, with time, I am beginning to see more clearly how it is in these times that God wants us to hold onto Him more tightly than ever, and form our own memories with Him that last a lifetime.

 ‘He is before all things, and in Him all things hold together’ Colossians 1:17

Fear of loss

One of my first wake up calls to confronting my own personal fears of loss came a couple of years ago during what was supposed to be the end of a blissful family holiday to Sri Lanka. Being an only child in a country with only a few other relatives, my parents have always been my rock, and the thought of losing either one of them remained my greatest nightmare from a young age. That nightmare appeared to become a reality when I was abruptly woken up on the morning of our flight home to hear that my mother had collapsed in the bathroom, and had very badly hit her head.

Rushing out of my room, I saw her laying on the ground, unconscious, with my dad by her side trying to shake her awake and the nurse panicking if there was any internal bleeding. Like in a film, the life that could lie before me slowly began to play before my eyes; watching my father’s heartbreak, dropping out of medical school, leaving England to be closer our relatives abroad. And for losing my mother; all the times that I didn’t reach out to her enough, show her how much she meant to me, or have the experience to learn from her faith suddenly hit me, and I was terrified that my greatest horror could be occurring in such an unexpected and unplanned way.

Amidst the fear, anger, and confusion I felt, I turned to see a picture of the Divine Mercy hanging in the corridor wall, with the line ‘Jesus, I trust in You’ written beneath. For many years, my faith had never been concrete or something that changed how I lived or what I wanted, and my prayer life had been virtually non-existent. But in that moment, I remember fixating my eyes upon His, and through the blur of my tears making my most fervent request that He could hear my plea to not take my mother away from me. Not now. Not this way. Not us.

By a miracle, my mother came around slowly, however that evening my grandma fell incredibly ill and had to be admitted to hospital. In the craziness of those few days, I came to realise how my faith was now the only thing I could depend on. All the plans I had made were now uncertain, and being miles away from home with challenging time differences and wifi opportunities to talk to my friends, all I could ask them to do was pray. And within those few days, God provided all I needed. My grandma was discharged the day before our rescheduled return flight home, and my mother was fit to fly.

I remember sitting on the plane back home and pondering over how just maybe, the whole drastic turn of events could have been part of God’s plan. If my mother hadn’t fallen, we wouldn’t have missed our flight, and would have left my grandma alone at a time when it was most important for us to be there. And through the drama, it completely shifted my outlook on what was important to me. Realising how insignificant my relationship with God had been in my life, I knew that things had to change, starting from then.

‘Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding; in all your ways submit to him, and he will make your paths straight’ Proverbs 3: 5-6

Handing over to God

My journey in faith has come a long way since, although I am still making baby steps. Right now, I am in the process of letting go of my first relationship with someone who played a very special and important part of my past year. Whilst my experience of feeling loved and cared for exploded, I constantly wrestled with my gut feeling that something was missing. 

Despite this, I still found it easier to turn to this relationship rather than to God during various emotional and physical challenges I faced, and with time I felt more disconnected from my prayer life or views on chastity. By the time of the break up, I was left feeling confused, saddened, and aware of my own personal withdrawal symptoms from the love I was used to. I constantly questioned God why He had put someone into my life that I had to distance myself from; changing from being the first person I opened my heart to, to now the person I had to act like a stranger with. More than loss of a relationship, I found myself grieving the loss of a best friend, and it was, and still is, incredibly painful.

I’m grateful to have had this experience with someone who was consistently understanding, and ironically one of the most beautiful moments we shared was going to the chapel together for the first time to pray about the end of our relationship. I realised that the struggles of the relationship was something I’d kept separate from God, and bringing them before Him could have been one of the most encouraging steps of faith I have yet experienced. It allowed me to feel like I was handing over the relationship to God, rather than simply letting go, and has given me the opportunity to pray not only for the growth in my faith, but in his also. Trusting that God knows what is best both of us, and has a bigger and better plan than we can imagine, is one that only through prayer, hope and faith I can learn to accept. I truly believe that God puts certain people in our life for a reason, and regardless of how long or short their presence was, the impact they can have on our journey towards Him can be monumental.

 “For know the plans I have for you,” declares the LORD, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.” Jeremiah 29:11

Finally… take a dive in with your faith

One last thought. Whilst the whole basis of this post has been triggered following an experience I had with worship, I’m not going to lie in saying that I’ve always found it the most comfortable or natural experience. This summer I went to my first Youth 2000 festival in Walsingham, and at the start I remember experiencing the fear of whether it was all just too much for me. At one talk about worship however, a particular analogy given by a Franciscan friar stuck with me. He likened the experience of embracing worship to the decision between standing on the edge of the shore and feeling the cold water touch your feet, or diving straight in from the edge of a cliff. The outcome is ultimately the same: the water is freezing, and you want to go in at some point. You can either choose to tip-toe your way in and experience the changes bit by bit until you are finally submerged, or you can embrace both the uncertainties and thrills and go straight for it, head first.

‘You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart’ Jeremiah 29:13

Faith, and the courage to step out of your comfort zone into seeking God, is exactly the same as the latter option. No matter what stage of faith you are at, He is a father that waits patiently for you to seek refuge in His own arms, and once you are there, He will never let you go. Coming back to the original lyrics of the song that triggered me, the concept of climbing a mountain with outstretched hands is incredibly powerful. It tells us that in moments of life when we go through our own personal challenges of change or loss, whilst it feels easier to try and cling on to the tangible roots of this world, the greatest strength we can receive is through surrendering over control to Him. None of us can predict what will happen in our life, nothing is constant; except that love and the promise He offers for each one of us.  It is this knowledge that in the strongest of tides that try to shake us, our faith should be what remains anchored, as it is the only thing that matters.

Let go, and let God in.

Dwelling in the Eucharist: The Architecture of Salvation

By Rosie Milne

There is a sense that we can inhabit and dwell in the presence of God. It’s something we hear in the Psalms and in the songs of today all the time, and it comes to its fullness in The Eucharist - the true presence of Jesus here on Earth - body, blood, soul, and divinity. The songs of today that speak of his presence recall this truth, while the psalms of the old testament foreshadow it:

“Your heart is my refuge”
- United Pursuit, Nothing Without You

“This is my home, to be with you, this is my home”
- Jason Upton, This is My Home

“"He is my refuge and my fortress, my God, in whom I trust.”
- Psalm 91:2

“The LORD is my rock, my fortress and my deliverer; my God is my rock, in whom I take refuge, my shield and the horn of my salvation, my stronghold.”
-  Psalm 18:2

“I’m learning to listen, just to rest in your nearness” 
- Will Reagan and United Pursuit, Not in a Hurry

“In your presence is where I belong.” 
- Jason Upton, In Your Presence

We speak of his presence like it’s a place, a house we can inhabit. The association of worship, the presence of God, and place is an important theme throughout Jewish history. This association is highlighted in John 4:3 when Jesus encounters the Samaritan woman at the well. She says: “Our fathers worshiped on this mountain, but you say that in Jerusalem is the place where people ought to worship.” Jesus responds:

“Yet a time is coming and has now come when the true worshipers will worship the Father in the Spirit and in truth, for they are the kind of worshipers the Father seeks. God is spirit, and his worshipers must worship in the Spirit and in truth.”  - John 4:23

His response likens ‘spirit and truth’ to a place, a space in which to dwell which supersedes all Earthly realms. If Jesus is ‘the way, the truth and the life’ (John 4:16), then this place, this locus of spirit and truth is Jesus himself.

 “Oh taste and see that the Lord is good. Blessed is the man who takes refuge in him.” - Psalm 34:8

The place where we find the fullness of Jesus’ presence on Earth is the Eucharist. 

“He who eats My flesh and drinks My blood abides in Me, and I in him.” - John 6:56

 Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament is a simple being in his presence, a repose in his gaze, a “resting in his nearness” (United Pursuit, Not in a Hurry). I know from personal experience, when I am really in that resting, I am home. It is not merely like home - the Eucharist is home. How can we explain that? How do we explain abiding, being at home, in the presence of a person? Can a person be a house?

 Many authors have shown the reverse, attributing human characteristics to houses. One of my favourite books is The Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard (read and sigh my friends, he uses phrases like ‘expressing a poetry that was lost’ and ‘shelter for the imaginer’ or ‘nest for dreaming’). He explains how the house is poetic in that it has “body and soul” in its material and immaterial nature. Many great architects agree. In an interview Peter Zumthor responded to an interviewer asking if buildings have a form of ‘intelligence’ in that they know something about time. He tilted his head, squinted at her and frowned in a definitive but not unkind way, saying “the building has a form of soul.” 

Bachelard refers to the ideal house as the human being’s ‘first Universe’ whilst also being their first ‘corner of the world’ - it is both ‘immense’ and ‘intimate’ . Our first point of encounter with other people and with ideas, it captures and compresses the vastness of the world (immensity), but at the same time the silent spaces - (like nooks, crannies, attics, niches, cellars) - compress the depths of the soul through the solitude they solicit (intimacy). Like a great poem compresses vast ideas and emotions into a few short lines, so the poetic house makes ‘miniature a refuge of greatness ’. 

The ultimate and most profound ‘refuge of greatness’ is the Eucharist - a dwelling place which is the vastness and immeasurability of God compressed in the minuscule and everyday. If we can apply human characteristics to houses, it’s not a stretch to do the opposite and speculate an Architecture of the Eucharist. Bachelard gives two criterion for the poetic house: verticality and compression, both of which are reflected in the Eucharist.

The Eucharist as a Concentrated House

The nature of poetry is to compress. In it’s poetic nature, the house compresses the Universe through its connection to the world, and it compresses the soul in its silent spaces of solitude - the nooks we retreat to, the places we store our memories and dreams in. Many have called God the Great Author, but he is also a great Poet; at every stage of salvation he wrote a new verse to the poem that would become the epic story of salvation; when he made man, he made us in his image. Poetry is mimetic, it imitates reality. In being an image of God, we were his first verse. When he put his son on Earth, he compressed his vastness, his greatness and his immeasurable glory into a tiny baby boy. In his ministry, Jesus compressed truths into short parables. In his death, he concentrated and carried the entirety of the world’s sin on his own back, and in doing so, by his resurrection, overcame it all. And in the Eucharist, when we thought he couldn’t make himself any smaller, he performed the the greatest act of poetic compression ever known to human-kind: he compressed and cloaked the wonder of his very self in the most basic, ordinary, everyday of things - daily bread. This daily bread is love compressed. Truth intensified, and yet accessible. The Eucharist, like the house-as-home, is a concentrated being.

The poetic house has a three-fold structure: a cellar, a ground floor and an attic. 

The ground floor gives the house an everyday quality, and facilitating the social and practical side of life. The polarity of the attic and the cellar give the house what Heidegger would call a meditative quality - these spaces solicit solitude and silence, spaces that are ‘refuges for memories and dreams’. They belong to the realm of the soul, giving the house a verticality. 

The ground floor is ‘within-timeness,’ the realm of everyday thought. It operates in the horizontal linear time of successive ‘this, then this, then this.’ It is the practical floor, with functional spaces - the kitchen, the living room, the utility areas. It’s the place of routines and the everyday tasks of life. The ground floor of the Eucharist-as-house is in God’s choice to cloak his immense glory in one of the most ordinary and everyday things possible - bread. Not even fancy artisan bread - daily bread. He chose not to only be an immense and transcendent God but to be present on Earth firstly as God-made-man, and then again to be re-presented (made present again, not imitated) every time we partake in the intimate mystery of Holy Communion.

The ground floor is also the social hub of the house. It’s where the family might share a meal or play board games together in the living room, or have a conversation in the kitchen (with wine and crisps and John Mayer playing in the background if you’re a Milne). This is another feature of the horizontality of the ground floor, which connects us to the world and the other people in it through windows and doors - without a ground floor we cannot be ‘in the world’, only above or below it. This is reflected in the Eucharist through the idea of being ‘in communion’ with God, with ourselves, with the Saints, and with our brothers and sisters in the congregation and the wider church. This is United Pursuit’s ‘full communion’ in Since Your Love come to its fullest.

Attics and cellars provide refuges for our dreams and for our memories. The cellar is ‘historicity,’ - the realm of memory. It represents our past, our foundations. It’s where we keep our ‘stuff.’ It is what we are built on. But it’s also where we invent stuff - consider the DIY enthusiast dad making a go-kart with his kids or John Mayer’s Walt Grace crafting the one-man submarine that will get him to Tokyo. For memory is not mere recitation - it is inventive. For the Jews, memory was an important concept that meant more than replaying an event in our heads- to remember was to become a member of the original event in the present now, something of particular importance for them in celebrating the feast of the passover. In this way memory facilitates becoming; the cellar as ‘historicity’ acts like an inventory of memories which we excavate from the Earth and use to invent things - memory facilitates becoming. The institution of the Eucharist at the last supper recalls the passover, it re-members it, but then Jesus does something radical - he performs an inventive transfiguration of the passover feast when he says ‘this is my body’ and then ‘do this in memory of me.’ When we partake in the liturgy of the Eucharist, we are not simply reciting what happened. We are rather making present now the reality of the original event - we become a member in the event - hence we partake in Holy ‘Communion’.

The attic is ‘temporality,’ which is the realm of becoming, the realm of dreaming. Heidegger calls it ‘being towards death,’ although it is not so morbid as it sounds. The Psalmist gets it right when they sing “to finish, I must be eternal, like you” (Psalm 139). It is a beautiful paradox, that we can never be finished in this earthly life which is finite - only when we enter into eternity - the realm without end, do we finish becoming who we are - and who we are is an image of him. We are always becoming, more or less, who we are. The attic is the place of ‘becoming’ because it is consistently a place our imaginations love to inhabit, and the imagination is never finished; the poetic image always leaves a room for the imagination. We love to dream in attics, or if we have never had an attic, we almost certainly longed for one as a child. I imagine that when Walt Grace was working on his One Man Submarine Ride he spent a lot of time climbing stairs between his attic and basement - dreaming in the one and making the dream manifest in the other. The structure of the attic helps us structure our ideas, and allows the imagination to transform the old things we carried up from the basement into new things. The attic of the Eucharist as dwelling place is transformative. We are images of Him, and when we rest in Him in the Eucharist and when we receive him in communion, we are transfigured by the transfigured one. We become a ‘truer image’ - more like him, and therefore more ourselves.

Bachelard says that words are ‘little houses’ in that they have the same three-fold nature; the etymology of a word is the cellar of memory. The everyday, taken-for-granted use is the ground floor of thought, and what the word might become is the word’s attic of dreams. Jesus is the ‘Word made flesh.’ Every time we enter into his presence in communion or spend time in adoration, we are entering into that little, immense house. 

“For in Him we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28)

The Mass even contains this language of dwelling, although it appears reversed, in the context of us being dwellings - Lord I am not worthy that you should enter under my roof - we enter him when he enters us. By abiding in him, he abides in us. We are consumed by what we consume, and we become what we consume, transfigured into a truer image of him whose image we were made in. That is the transformative power of the Eucharist.

Final thoughts

So much of what we encounter today is a reduction of truth, rather than a poetic compression of truth. The image is not inherently bad - we are images - but when we take it for all that there is we confine ourselves to a hall of mirrors; people are reduced to the sum of their body parts; conversations are eliminated; human dignity is eradicated. The world of pornography, for example, is a world of reductive images that strip away human dignity, both in the viewer and the viewed. It is bad mimesis, mere recitation with reduced meaning rather than a creative compression of meaning.

But to all these crises of meaning, the Eucharist is the answer. In answer to every disembodiment of meaning, every disincarnate act, Jesus responds “this is my body, given up for you.” As has oft been the case in different ways, the challenge our generation will be deciding to chase what is real, and rejecting what is not. Do we confine ourselves to the “campfires and masquerades” (Jason Upton) of the shadowlands, the cave, or do we wake up and say yes the morning light? It might seem counter-intuitive - but to take refuge in him is one of the bravest things we can do.

Courageous : The Derby Retreat

By Georgia Clewer

After spending a year in youth ministry, my faith was stronger than it had ever been. Through the ups and downs of the last year, my faith is something that always remained consistent. When your faith becomes your work and is the foundation for the community you live in its understandable for it to be so important. However, moving away to university, I started to notice my faith dipping. I was no longer living with other Catholics, my CathSoc meet ups clashed with my sports team’s night out. I would make an effort to attend mass, but what I was missing was sharing my faith with other young people through praise, worship and adoration.

The Youth 2000 Courageous retreat was my first experience of a Youth 2000 retreat and it could not have been more perfectly timed. The retreat gave me the opportunity to step back and take some time for myself and God. The opportunity to just sit and be with the blessed sacrament restored the tranquillity that I had lost in my busy life.

I found the workshops particularly interesting over the weekend. I attended Theology of the Body first, curious as to what this would entail. This workshop was very thought provoking and made me re evaluate some of the past choices I had made. I had always known the church’s stance on pre-marital sex, but I had never really thought to look into why as I felt it wasn’t relevant to today’s society. I found out that there is so much to it! The workshop explored how we value our own bodies and how God does as well, providing a positive and uplifting session opposed to the condemning and negative one I had feared.

At the university life workshop, I was able to talk to other current and ex students who were very open and honest about their experiences about their spiritual and social lives at university.

The talks with the students, and the reconciliation service that followed in the evening, gave me the reassurance that although I am a Catholic student, I am not defined by only that. Yes I make mistakes and my faith isn’t perfect all the time but I am able to recognise that I can always seek forgiveness- there isn’t anything I can do to keep me from God’s unconditional love.

Over the past few months I had been struggling a lot with my own self worth and where it comes from, leading me to make decisions that didn’t always make me happy and help me reach my full potential. During the talk on the last day, the seminarian Paschal Uche quoted the Dominican sister St. Catherine of Siena: '"Be who God meant you to be and you will set the world on fire.”' This quote sums up the retreat for me; the love I felt over the weekend was overwhelming, the love from God, my friends and the love from strangers has had such a huge impact on how I am choosing to live my life now. When I cannot recognise my own worth I know I have the strength to renounce the lies I sometimes believe, because being who I truly am in God’s eyes is more powerful than anything else, and I truly intend to set the world on fire.