Below is a reflection from Gracie Sharp on her time at SEEK 2015.
Gracie is a Freshmen studying microbiology and psychology at Colorado State University.
Some people are posting about SEEK2015, and other brave souls shared their stories on the bus back from Nashville. Regrettably, though I was not one of these souls, I still feel the urge to share my story. I usually fail on an epic scale when I attempt to speak publicly. To quote Erin Dowdy, “Public speaking is painful at this hour, and at any hour for me.” I stutter and ramble when I get up in front of people unprepared; my thoughts flow much better when I write them out. So here they are, for any and all who are interested.
I knew SEEK was going to change my life. I even had an image in my head of what that change was going to look like. The image was of a transformed Gracie who was very Catholic and a better person because of it. This image was so dry, blurry, and trite compared to the truth I would come to know and love. I will spare the reader the stories of the bus ride and the ensuing craziness upon our arrival at the 600,000 sq. ft Convention Center – that is old news to any of the attendees and easily imaginable for anyone else.
The real story of SEEK was like the slow, but nonetheless well timed progression of the breaking (and subsequent realignment) of my bones. Each day, a few more joints popped and cracked and the muscles attached thereto realigned. Rather than give an exhaustive list of all of the adjustments I underwent, for there were a great many, I will simply give the gracious reader a summary of the results. It is indeed difficult to describe one’s spiritual journey because in order to describe such things, we are forced to contain the infinite Divine into finite language. To do so is to dull His glory so that our eyes are not blinded, but instead may look upon Him with wonder and awe (though I promise no such wonder from my language).
The supposed “transformation” I had in mind turned out to be a total conversion of the heart. I find myself employing the help of George MacDonald, a great writer of faerie stories, in order to depict what happened. He writes in his work Lilith about a man named Mr. Vane who enters a parallel world through a mirror whilst following a ghost he sees in his library. The ghost turns out to be the old librarian of the house, a strange creature called Mr. Raven whose permanent residence is in the strange world. Mr. Raven guides Mr. Vane to his home nested near a cemetery over which he is charged. As the two travelers walk through it, they pass by the ruins of an old church where some unseen souls are praying. When a pigeon flashes in front of Mr. Vane’s face, he cries out, “I see a pigeon!” The raven croaks, not without a touch of exasperation at the foreigner’s blindness:
“Of course you see a pigeon,” rejoined the raven, “for there is the pigeon! I see a prayer on its way.—I wonder now what heart is that dove’s mother! Some one may have come awake in my cemetery!”
Mr. Vane, clearly confused, questions the strange bird:
“How can a pigeon be a prayer?”…”I understand, of course, how it should be a fit symbol or likeness for one; but a live pigeon to come out of a heart!”
Again, with exasperation, Mr. Raven responds to his companion:
“It MUST puzzle you! It cannot fail to do so!”
“A prayer is a thought, a thing spiritual!” the man pursues.
And finally, MacDonald through the croaking voice of a raven, captures the very nature of prayer itself:
“Very true! But if you understood any world besides your own, you would understand your own much better.—When a heart is really alive, then it is able to think live things. There is one heart all whose thoughts are strong, happy creatures, and whose very dreams are lives. When some pray, they lift heavy thoughts from the ground, only to drop them on it again; others send up their prayers in living shapes, this or that, the nearest likeness to each. All live things were thoughts to begin with, and are fit therefore to be used by those that think. When one says to the great Thinker:—’Here is one of thy thoughts: I am thinking it now!’ that is a prayer—a word to the big heart from one of its own little hearts.—Look, there is another!”
What J.R.R. Tolkien calls “subcreation,” the desire to imitate our Creator by creating, MacDonald calls a form of prayer. When we human beings pray, we think and love and in doing so, we become like children who imitate their father; but we imitate our Heavenly Father, who thought of us first and then loved us into existence. To put it shortly, all of us human beings, different and diverse as we are, were loved into existence by Love Himself. This wondrous fact of life is often reduced to the now very trite phrase “Jesus loves you!” It remains true, but when put in the context of the very nature of God, it strikes a cord of the heart unplayed by common Christian catch phrases such as this.
At the beginning of SEEK, I knew God loved me and in an abstract way I knew I loved Him, but over the course of the conference, He found me. He found me, a small little heart created from His own Sacred Heart, and gave it new life. To return to the metaphor I used in the beginning, He rebroke my bones so that they, and all the attached structures, could realign so that He could reign in my soul and love and guide this little heart back to the big heart that is His. Now, it is all I can hope that with His guidance that I may not only produce pigeons from my little heart, but to produce the Holy Spirit Himself.
I would like to especially thank Christina Wirth for telling me about SEEK and encouraging me to go in the first place and all of my dear friends who made, and continue to make, the journey back to Christ a blessed adventure.