20090114

Dear darlingest Miyang Marie,

Hi there sweetness! What can I say, my love - today is great. The weather right now is overcast and cool - reminds me so much of the Bay Area in springtime. Everything is just right. I've been in recovery now since before Christmas, my darlingest. You and I are pulling it together. Sometimes, the temptation is so near but then again, when I turn my thoughts heavenward, towards you, towards God and all of you, I get this near resolve that I must just with a little more effort on my part connect with my own will to fight and then the commitment becomes clear again - God's grace takes into effect and the will to stay the Straightpath becomes real and tangible again in my soul. To watch and to pray, like our most loving Jesus Christ said, is essential - and you are essential, my love - for everytime I think of you - I can easily think of all the rest of heaven - of our Lady, the angels, the saints and of our LORD and of our Lord Christ without Whom nothing is possible for me - including you, my love. And I do think of you very, very, very often, my love - and I know, you think of me also because you come into my heart by your own will many times as well.

One almost funny anecdote we could put down here, my darlingest - and I don't know if I already put it down - is when during one early morning I set out to meet this friend of mine who still suffers with me, the sickness of drug abuse - it was like 3am or close to that time and I was really, really tempted I almost fell into that pit again. As I was about to leave my mom's apartment - it seems I forgot to take you with me in my soul, my darlingest for lo! - This image of you appeared in my soul tapping your feet impatiently with a look in your eyes that told me - "and just where are you going without me?" My own thoughts were already far afield from you, my loveliest love, and you took hold of me in order to return me to my senses; in order to return me back home to you.

My heart's images of you, my love, is not like the images seen by the physical eye - their distinctions are not dimensional because I still pine very, very much to see you with my own eyes, my loveliest love. These images are sometimes difficult to express because if one can see love itself there they are, my darlingest - I see you the way I feel about you in my heart - it is not a physical sight - it is the same sight that enables me to see in my heart our Lady, the saints who are close in God to us and the angels who are assigned by God to us. Although sometimes, I could almost see your starlight smile so close to my face, I could smell your cheerful summer fragrance so near to me - it is only my heart and my will that is satisfied and never my mind or my reason that continually searches for you, my darlingest Annelies Marie.

At times, I do get lonely, and you know that, my love, for although I know that I am never alone - faith and the activity of faith - takes a certain effort on our part, it is an act that must be willed by a will that knows its virtue and therefore, it requires expenditure of energy - it exhausts the body more the soul (because the body must struggle to apprehend what the spirit is meaning to transmit to it) so you come out feeling really tired and must drop down to the level of the reality that we normally inhabit with our physical senses here in our inhabited earth.

One can not sustain continuously a deeper meditation on things that belong to the realms of the spirit because, if God does not guard us and the activity of our faith does not exhaust us, one would either lose one's self and go insane or one would become lured into the darkness of evil things where there is no more return. I am only fortunate to have the assistance of all of you and only by the pure grace of God do I keep my own sanity. And the Love of my Savior, Jesus Christ, through the Holy Spirit keeps me, through my own cooperation, from being completely and irredeemably separated from the reality of God's grace in my soul. God's grace in my soul - the activity of the Holy Spirit in my life and in the life of all of those God chose to be His portion - the one Communion of Saints - my Holy Mother Church - all of You, the one Fold of the one Light who are my friends and my companions forever - this is Christ's peace in my heart - something I understand that I absolutely need because it is the only merit that keeps me from being by the Devil totally and utterly consumed. Therefore, I never, ever question anymore where Jesus Christ leads me because I am in need and that is the truth.

That is why vocal prayer also has great merit, I have found - as a guide - like rails along the invisible ascent of prayer, their words hold us steady against the buffeting winds of distractions - they provide us with shade in the heat of aridity, the pious wisdom of other hearts to hold us fast against those trying times of uncertainty that often happen in the interior life and the light of hope to hold back those great spells of darkness that dominate here in exile time those seasons within. Vocal prayers as well as prayers focusing on hope refresh and rejuvenate the soul of the weary wanderer. One should always have a will to press on and advance in the spiritual life.

Truly, I am nothing but a pampered soul, my darlingest. It is in times of aridity that the Christian character of a soul really gets tried by fire. When all things seem distant, even you, when every prayer is like a long, vertical climb and every temptation seem to open up into deep, yawning chasms from below your feet; trying your hope, exhausting your faith, stretching your love - when all things seem easy and the right thing is but a suffering; when the one choice to obey is barren and empty of all consolation; when the only wisdom is to trust in the wisdom that is to come; when the only clinging that shall prove thee true must be a clinging of the heart and never more of the hands - that is when we are allowed by our God to grow in the way that we must all grow - from within.

Many times, I am so unsure - but certainty was never a trademark of our faith, my love. Nor is our hope one that is easy to hold on to, for we are created both of earth and of spirit and as thus, were never meant to fly with wings as all our hopes must with our prayers take their flight. But we are redeemed with Love, my love, and this gives us the power to walk into the heart of our LORD along paths that nature can never build to secure for ourselves a future and a destiny together.

A future and a destiny that is constantly met in our souls where our faith and our hope ever intersect in the every Now of our times.

I love you.

Always to always,

Pusing