Meditation ~ Deep Healing

I would describe myself as someone who has, in my own way, strongly pursued my desires. As St. Augustine says, "our hearts are restless until they rest in you, Lord." As any convert can attest, I have found that to be true. However, I have found it to be true at an ever deepening level of my being as time has gone on. Some of those desires, many of which are interrelated:

1) The need to know that all things rest in the hands of a loving God
2) The need to know that suffering is meaningful
3) The need to know that life isn't random, but purposeful
4) The need to know that my life has a transcendent purpose
5) The need to "hand over the reins" to a competent higher power who can bring something good out of my weaknesses, sins, mistakes, and make up for all of the things I can't understand
6) Deep inner healing that capacitates me to truly care about others as much as myself
7) The regeneration of my desires, such that I can truly love what is good
8) Instruction that "puts it all together" so that I can understand how to harmonize seemingly contradictory goods (e.g. the goodness of both justice and mercy, physical pleasures and self-denial, healthy cultivating of the ego, the proper time and place for everything)
9) A new perspective that gives me joy in participating, instead of dominating and ascending
10) A spiritual renewal that helps me to enjoy life exactly as it is, given the inescapable realities of work, aging, and patiently enduring my own sinfulness and the sins of others
11) Deep communion with the transcendent, the "something" that is bigger than what I can articulate, but which I long for
12) Peace with the passage of time, so that I don't fear aging and death, but rather welcome the process of life
13) The ability to know myself and my purpose, which is hidden in God's Will. A sense of "vocation" and how I fit into the Body of Christ, so that I can objectively assess and cultivate my gifts, without competing with others.
14) A conscious answer to the question of what the purpose of life is, which encompasses the bewildering variety of goods that I see. A definition of ultimate good that is not reductive.
15) Help identifying and taming the vices that lurk deep within me, beneath the level of conscious drives
16) Freedom from needing things to be a certain way for me to be happy or content, or to believe that my life has value
17) By the grace of God, the healing of my various family relationships: immediate, extended, parochial, neighborhood, patriotic, universal brotherhood of man, participation in the Body of Christ
18) Healing my relationship with my body. Harmonizing the peculiarity of being spiritual and physical.
19) Healing my sense of "reality" and what it is: e.g. not living in my head only. Understanding that physical, concrete things are real and that God speaks and works through them. The transcendent is revealed through the physical.
20) Deeper wisdom about how God works through time and sin: that the universe is journeying towards perfection, that it has not yet arrived. To be patient and "stick with" the institutions God has created, (family, government, Church), even when they are not yet perfect. Our sin is not an obstacle to God accomplishing His purposes through what He has instituted.
21) Deeper understanding about both the beauty and limitations of human reasoning. On the one hand, it's a great gift that is meant to be engaged and challenged. It is also finite and flawed. Yet, it's limitations do not mean that it is "bad" or to be discarded. Reason ends up being like everything else in creation: we use it in faith, then leave the rest up to God, entrusting many mysteries about ourselves and others, and unknowns beyond our control, to Him.
22) The harmonization of eros and agape. Understanding that both desiring love and self-sacrificial love have their origin in the Trinity, therefore also a dignified place in human life.
23) A sense of time, and how to live as an infinite being in a finite world. Answer? The liturgical calendar. A time and a place for fasting, a time and a place for feasting. A time and a place for the various rituals of human life.
24) Jesus as Bridegroom. Seeing marriage as a sign of my relationship with God, such that I understand God as not only someone I am obedient to, but someone that my whole being and heart are destined for in a nuptial sense. In this way, religion engages not only my obedience, but my whole heart, which beats for romantic desire.
25) An understanding of relationships as being the most important thing, for God Himself is relational. To understand the greatest tragedies not in material terms, but in the sense of ruptured relationships. Understanding that I am fundamentally relational.
26) Wisdom on how to make sense of my emotions and how they are purposeful. A human anthropology that lets me think about everything that is going on "inside," and having vocabulary for it: passions, intellect, free will.
27) Greater integration of my whole self: I don't just worship in my head or sentiments, I worship with my body.
28) An integrated sense of history, wherein God has spoken consistently and purposefully to mankind from the very beginning. A way of understanding world events and empires as part of God's design to bring the world to Christ. Seeing God work through history in a stable way through His 2000 year old Catholic Church.
29) The ability to "offer up" my sufferings for others, so that I have a conscious participation in helping others through my suffering. The ability to help someone on the other end of the world through prayer and sacrifice.
30) The teaching on Original Sin helps me to make peace with my own incomprehensible complexity and understand why I have hurt myself and others, and why they have hurt me.
31) Healed relationship with my femininity. I can make peace with feeling less motivated by money and ambition, and understand why I have the need to focus on nurturing even though this offers less worldly compensation.
32) Greater respect for nature, and awareness that God works through natural processes. Increased respect for my human needs, including need for exercise, a balanced lifestyle, pleasure, and the reality that I have finite energy and can only learn things gradually, even spiritual things, which grow in tandem with natural development.

I'm sure there are more things.....

Without all of this healing, which I believe could only be totally achieved through my conversion to Catholicism, I was fundamentally alienated. I didn't know how to make sense of myself, my relationships, or the "big picture." It's not that all of my ideas about these things were flawed, it's just that they weren't anchored in something bigger and trustworthy beyond myself. It was just "my" idea. I wanted to know what God's ideas were. Only Catholicism taught that God Himself walked the earth and established a permanent Church that could impart His truths to mankind. Now, I can rest in knowing that the truth doesn't reside "in my head." It is something objective and historical, outside of myself.