Catholic mysticism is caught between two very different paradigms and it seriously effects the ability to dream really potent dreams. The following extract from an article by Tom Hoopes on Holy Spirit Interactive, brings this conflict in focus as it pertains to Mother Angelica.
Deacon Steltemeier elaborated. “The Lord told Mother, ‘Get it up there and I’ll take care of the rest.’” So Mother got the signal going, and then demurred from grand fundraising schemes, telethons, and the like. She simply asked listeners to “think of us in between your light bill and your gas bill.” And they responded.
“The listeners realized that Mother loved them,” Steltemeier said. “They could see that Mother loves them. The power of the Lord’s love compels us to do what God wants us to do. That’s dynamite stuff.” (Deacon Steltemeier has hit the nail on the head. It was the love that Mother Angelica radiated that got the attention of her viewers, that gave her the authority to teach, that made her more authentic than her ecclesial superiors.)
Hoopes then goes on to more or less discount the power of love in exchange for the power of suffering and selective obedience.
Behind the feisty demeanor, pain and suffering, obedience and faith have been the constants in Mother Angelica’s life. It’s as if at each stage of her life, God took a strange pleasure in calling her to do something big, throwing an impossible obstacle in her way, then watching her do it anyway. (This does not describe a God of Love.)
When she was trying to be a little girl, He watched her lose her family. When she was trying to be a contemplative nun, He allowed her to develop a swelling condition in her knees that made it impossible to kneel and almost cost her a place in the convent. Before calling her to lead crews in building an unprecedented monastery in the deep South, God watched her lose the ability to walk in a freak accident.
When she tried to serve the Church with a worldwide cable television network that inspired countless conversions, prominent bishops tried to shut her down. And after she built her own wildly successful talk show into a media empire, God took away her ability to communicate.
The jolly nun who spoke as much with her warm grin and mischievous winks as with her frank words is now all but unable to speak.
The jolly nun who spoke as much with her warm grin and mischievous winks as with her frank words is now all but unable to speak.
“He expects me to operate, if I don’t have the money, if I don’t have the brains, if I don’t have the talent—in faith,” she told Arroyo. “You know what faith is? Faith is one foot on the ground, one foot in the air, and a queasy feeling in the stomach.” (This is a succinct validation from Mother herself about the capacity of mystics and shamans to focus and live in two different worlds. You only need the queasy stomach if your focus is fueled by fear.)
Hers is a prime example of the spirituality of suffering that historians will likely use to define the Catholicism of the 20th century, despite so many attempts by Catholics to blaze easier spiritual paths. (A true spiritual path is seldom easy, whether it includes physical suffering or not. Some spiritual mentors would say that physical suffering serves to divert a person's attention from the serious ego flaws they refuse to see. Those ego flaws are the very things Jesus said we needed to shed in order to truly experience the power of love.)
One thinks of the stigmatist Padre Pio, whose shrine is the most visited in the world, but whose name is rarely mentioned in homilies. Or Mother Teresa, who spent decades in spiritual darkness. St. Faustina, St. Gianna Molla, Edith Stein—what so many of these modern saints have in common is that their causes were advanced by John Paul II, the suffering pope. Like Mother Angelica, he too lost his family, then his mobility, then his speech—and left an enormous mark on the world.
People who undergo suffering on this scale are usually crushed by it. But those who accept these blows as ways to commune with God open up channels of grace capable of moving mountains. (Some people open up these channels in this manner because they can't believe (or they haven't been taught) there might be any other way to open those channels.)
Thus, EWTN stands as more than a monument to the charism and powers of one woman—though Mother Angelica’s charismatic powers certainly didn’t hurt. (No, they certainly did not.)
“EWTN is God’s network,” said Warsaw.
*************************************************
EWTN is only one of God's networks. Followers of CBN would say their's is God's network, and followers of Islam would anoint other networks. EWTN just happens to be the biggest of God's networks and it got to be the biggest because Angelica had the most potent and least conflicted dream. She also maintained total control and never deviated from her core personal belief that God would provide all the resources the network needed. Money would appear like manna in the desert, miraculous and 'free'. Except of course, she did pay a price in her own personal health and she did barter, just like a lot of indigenous shamans make bargains and barter and sacrifice their personal health.
Jesus did none of this.
Satan attempted to barter and bargain with Him and He said no, I don't think so. Don't need to do that. Makes my Father out to be arbitrary and capricious. My Father is Love. My father gives freely. My father forgives seventy times seven.
From my perspective, Jesus was executed as a sacrificial victim so that the cultic dream of the capricious and vindictive God, who required contractual bargains and sacrifices would die with Jesus in one last sacrificial act, and a new more truthful universal dream would rise with Him from the dead. This new dream has it's faith in the fact that love is the power that runs the universe because God is love. That's exactly the dream Jesus taught us to follow, and that is exactly the dream the mystics we don't credence or hear much about experience. For the most part we still like our healers and mystics to suffer for the cause. This says a whole lot more about our truth, than it does anything about God's truth.
I look to the story of John the Evangelist for proof that humans need not suffer in order for God to work through them. John understood the message of Jesus because he is the evangelist who defined God as love. John's faith was such that he stood unafraid at the foot of the cross and witnessed the death of the old dream. Into John's loving arms Jesus entrusted His mother. How much bigger a validation of John's understanding of Jesus's message could there be. Oh, and last but not least, John was the only one of the Apostles who did not SUFFER martyrdom. He died an old man in his bed.
Deacon Steltemeier has it right about Angelica. It was her love, not her suffering that fueled the miracle of ESPN.
