• I don’t know how God has been communicating with me today. I used to have a Jesuit priest as a spiritual director, and I used to practice the examen pretty regularly as a means of trying to discern God’s presence in my life, but I could never tell when I was just engaging in wishful thinking. Is a feeling of consolation always a sign of God’s communication? Or desolation, a failure of communication? These and other doubts and questions accompany throughout most of my days. It was reassuring, then, when I found the entry on “Crisis of Faith” in our glossary, which reads:

    “or Crisis of Self, a normal and expected part of faith. It’s precisely because you are
    relaxed about someone bigger than you holding you that you are relaxed enough to undergo
    crises of self. If there isn’t anyone bigger than you holding you in being, then you have to hold
    tight to yourself, and not allow yourself the luxury of being re?worked from within.”

    So I hope that it’s through these doubts I’ve been having that God is communicating with me today. I suppose that in hindsight, most of the spiritual growth I’ve experienced has been because of my doubts. I used to be a very, very rigid, conservative, legalistic sort of Catholic, and honestly, I’m embarrassed by a lot of the views I once held, many of which came mainly from a place of insecurity. I’m grateful to have moved past those kinds of views, but a lot of the feelings of insecurity and unease still remain. I suppose that’s one big reason for my being in this course. I hope that somehow it will help me continue to grow and eventually reach a point where I can just relax into our faith and do without these negative feelings.

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