Seriously, during my engagement, I became more aware of spiritual warfare than I ever had before, particularly when it came to chastity.  At the time, I was working full time as a chastity speaker, and my boss had told me to expect a battle.  Before then, to be honest, I’d always considered attacks from Satan to be kind of a superstitious thing.  As I began work, though, and as my husband and I embarked on our year of long-distance dating and engagement, we struggled constantly.  The deeper I fell in love with him, I realized, the more I wanted to express that love fully.  Don’t get me wrong; that’s a good and even holy desire, but of course, it has its time and place.  Up to that point, our physical relationship was something I was proud of–the degree of purity we’d preserved had healed me from a past relationship, and I could honestly say I’d never felt lustful towards him.  I heard Christopher West say that the human heart is a battlefield between love and lust, and he’s absolutely right.  I began seeing the reality of that statement more and more.  You know as well as I do that pretty much every women’s magazine portrays being lusted after by a man as an ideal, but that’s such a lie.  Even having not bought into the culture, I’m sure I’m not the only one who knows firsthand how disgusted with yourself you can feel after you’ve treated the one you love best as more of an object than a person.  I feel incredibly blessed to be loved by a man who constantly strove to put his and my desires aside in the interest of preserving as much as we could for our wedding night, humbly asked my forgiveness when he faltered in doing so, and always, always, made me feel so protected and honored even when it was hard.  He still does.

So, when we were together chastity was a struggle.  What I fought even more, if you can believe it, was purity in my own heart.  Even when I was apart from my then-fiance, I couldn’t get the devil off my back.  Between my engagement and my job, I was more determined than I’d ever been to be pure in my thoughts, words, and actions, yet at the same time, I was having a harder time of it than ever.  I was constantly going back to confession for what felt like the same old sins, and there were a few times when I just broke down with anxiety.  On the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, a day when Our Lady’s conception crushed the head of evil, I was consumed with worries about money and about my worth as a woman.  Rather than looking to Mary as a perfect model of faith, beauty, and especially purity, as I usually do, I saw her as an unattainable ideal whom I could never come close to imitating.  It felt like one thing after another, and some days, I had a really hard time not seeing my marriage as a finish line I couldn’t wait to just stagger across, when the whole fight would presumably be over.

Have you experienced anything like this?  Being in love is so exciting–you’re growing closer emotionally to another soul, and you’re probably spending plenty time together.  All of those things are good and beautiful, but they can also add up to serious temptation.  Most people probably wonder why, if it’s such a battle, not to just give in and stop fighting.  But I knew I wasn’t just following the rules.  I was so internally, happily convinced of the right path, knowing it was the best way to show my love.  I’m not saying all this to depress you.  Instead, I want to encourage you and remind you that it’s not just you.  There were times when I felt so unworthy of my friends, my reputation, and my fiance’s love.  I felt like a big fake.  It’s that feeling of, “if only they knew.”  But believe with your whole heart that you are good.  You are worthy.  You are also human, and the Lord delights in our humanity, flaws and all.  Looking back, I’m sure that through every attack on my purity, I was receiving graces I didn’t even know about, and certainly not because I deserved them.  So ask for the grace to refuse your temptations, to silence the part of you that feels unworthy, and to endure whatever trials your relationship is going through.  Run to His mercy as many times as you need to, and be renewed.  The Father is so loving and so gentle with us- remember to be that to yourself, too.

A Benedicitine monk told me once to combat spiritual warfare by standing between the pillars of Our Lady and the Eucharist.  He said that when we recognize darkness, to say, “Evil, I reject you.  I claim victory.  I claim the Cross.”  Easier said than done, maybe, but it really is so powerful.  You have my prayers.  Now go claim what is good, true, and beautiful and claim what’s yours.

The basis of this post originally appeared on Captive the Heart.

Is it that these spiritual onslaughts are because of my loving marriage?  Is it my efforts working with the youth of my parish?  Is it that my husband and I are on the cusp of major changes, involving more school, moving, and starting a family soon?

This is not to say that I think I’m completely awesome when I’m not feeling burdened this way, bursting with talent and perfect in virtue; far from it, in fact.  What I’ve become so aware of in recent years, though, is that anytime you’re doing God’s will, in discernment and in action, the evil one will pursue you in any way he can.  I felt it during the year I spent as a pro-life and chastity speaker, during my engagement as I tried, and often failed, to be pure of heart, and during a period of unemployment.

Have you felt this way, too?  Have you felt the same sorts of spiritual attacks as you feel like the least valuable, least perfect among your friends and family, asking the Lord again and again to show you your worth?  It’s that constant question of “What do I possibly have to offer the people in my life, when they all seem so much better than me?”

As young adults, we’re faced with so many unknowns and can easily have the sense that our lives haven’t really “started” yet: there are questions of what will unfold when school is over, where we’ll live and work, what our vocation is, and ultimately, how to be holy.  Sometimes, in seeking these answers, the pursuit of holiness can feel like nothing less than a battle.  That’s because it is.  Spiritual warfare is real.

I’m not revealing my struggles out of martyrdom, not to garner praise or invite pity, though I’d certainly welcome prayers.  I share them so I can share something else with you, too: hope.

A few months ago, on Halloween night, I attended a talk on this exact subject, spiritual warfare.  There was talk of temptation, talk of clinging to Our Lady, and talk of the incredibly real existence of evil.  What I absorbed surprised me.

St. John of the Cross, explained the monk who spoke, wrote about periods of spiritual dryness so intense that it feels impossible to believe God is present.  Though this notion is discussed in St. John’s Dark Night of the Soul, it’s ultimately all about the light.  When you feel like the Lord is so absent, said  the monk, He is actually more present than ever.  Think, he said, of when you’re looking into the sun.  Its light is shining so intensely that you can’t even sense it; all you are is blind.

It’s brought me such consolation and fortitude to meditate on the fact that the Lord loves in this way; He is always present, and most present, when we can’t even sense Him.  We’re conformed to Christ through our baptism, so doesn’t it make sense that we experience, to an extent, everything He did, for good or for bad?  This includes His temptations in the desert–temptations to weakness, temptations to self-doubt.

Even as weak as I’ve felt lately, and among my frequent awareness of spiritual attack, this season of Advent has me looking at things through a lens of anticipation and waiting in hope.  Jesus’ birth restores our hope, and here in these last days of Advent, we’re out in the desert in a different way.  We’re crying out; preparing the way.

My husband is such a living sanctuary of the Father’s love as I struggle.  He reminds me, as we heard in the talk, that planting myself firmly between the pillars of the Eucharist and Our Lady is spiritual armor and a wellspring of hope.  Constantly, he implores me to be gentle with myself, and as hard as it often is, I know that doing so is one of the greatest ways of rejecting evil.

We need to give ourselves permission, I think, to feel the aches of purification and to be vulnerable.  It’s okay, and it’s redeemed by the one who comes to us as a baby, ever so humbly.

I still can feel the floor under my little carpet square.   Seven years ago, I went on my first Steubenville-style retreat, Mount 2000.  There I experienced the lack of sleep, shortage of showers, and crowdedness of floor space otherwise known as the youth conference for the first time.  The featured speaker, Matt Smith, a Catholic who’d been on MTV’s The Real World, came to discuss being in-but-not-of the world and the various worldly situations he faced while on the show.  To my surprise, he spoke at length about how much he welcomed these situations as opportunities to witness to faith and virtue.  In fact, he said, he soon began praying to feel uncomfortable, the better to form himself more into who he was meant to be.

How ridiculous, thought my exhausted, unshowered self, who had been semi-permanently contorted, Indian style, all day.  At the time, I received the idea that someone would actually seek out discomfort as patently absurd.  That weekend, beautiful things happened as the Lord began His long work of refining my rough edges, yet I still couldn’t fathom a desire for awkwardness, self-consciousness, and vulnerability.

Maybe it’s the Lord’s way of humbling me, then, that in the years since my high school self struggled to comprehend that prayer for discomfort, I’ve faced plenty of sensitive, potentially embarrassing matters.  I didn’t even have to pray for them.  I never wished differences of opinion in moral matters would strain some of my relationships, never hoped to be reviled as I prayed and counseled outside an abortion clinic.  And I certainly never harbored childhood dreams of approaching strangers and talking to them about sex, as I found myself doing on my first day as a pro-life and chastity speaker, on a mission trip to the Jersey Shore.

No; surely I wouldn’t have desired any of those circumstances, but this life is a constant lesson to me that it’s not about what I want.  The Father gives generously, in ways we didn’t even know we were wanting, and He gives mercifully.  It really is a mercy and an act of love to let ourselves be broken and remade in pursuit of Heaven.

I’ve seen firsthand that many times, it’s only when you sacrifice comfort that you begin to honestly, fragilely connect with another person.   During my year of service after college (the same one where I talked about chastity on the boardwalk), I spent a week traveling between several Florida college campuses for an initiative called the Genocide Awareness Project (GAP), which involved standing all day next to graphic images of abortion and engaging students in dialogue about life issues and personhood.  Rightly so, passerby did not come quietly.

Like the other exhibit volunteers, I’d received extensive pro-life apologetics training beforehand, rooted in logic.  I began our first day apprehensively, though, unsure if I even felt at peace with this avenue of sharing the pro-life message. Around me, a few other volunteers seemed to take a rather combative stance and challenging tone, relying solely on arguments to strike up conversation.

I wanted so deeply not to view GAP as a debate to be won so much as an opportunity to speak the truth with love.  The truth was certainly there, in the form of twenty-foot high graphics, and it seemed to me that in the midst of such a polarizing, emotionally charged environment, charity was imperative.  I spent parts of the days in prayer, parts of them in conversation, and as the week progressed, I noticed something.

Logic-based discussion, I found, sometimes changed someone’s mind on abortion and sometimes didn’t.  Those conversations tended to end inconclusively, with each of us unsure of when to say goodbye.   Ultimately, without even making a conscious effort, my tactics began changing.  Somehow, I stopped seeing them as tactics and more as opportunities to listen and offer my attention to stories that some individuals had never told anyone before.

Instead of launching into a series of questions after asking a student, “What do you think of the images?” I started saying to students, honestly, that I hated the pictures as much as they did, and that I’d much prefer not to be standing there, except for the fact that I’d seen how men, women, and children have been so hurt by abortion and deserve so much more.

Something changed.  Being real, in a way that defied most stereotypes of a typical Christian, opened up so many ways to communicate. I spoke with post-abortive women, with victims of rape, and with students whose beliefs fell all across the spectrum.  It occurred to me that if I and each person I spoke with had stayed on the fringes of the issue at hand, afraid to wade into the messy center, we might have had an intellectual discussion, might have considered new viewpoints, both of which are good, yet we would never have truly seen each other.

Loudly tossing off arguments from a distance, I realized, was a safety blanket, and so were all of my talking points.  Yes, they were valuable, but getting up close and personal was so much better.  After all, what’s personal is oriented toward the person, as an individual and not just another passerby. 

I learned that honesty, empathy, and showing someone my scars go so much further than the safety of simple platitudes or surface-level discussion.  Leading with my heart let me get out of the way, so the Lord could enter the cracks and flood them with healing.  You have to literally cast out into the deep, to not fear the places in a soul where there’s darkness and hurt.

I certainly don’t say this because I feel qualified to judge or to preach; I say this because I know for myself what it’s like to feel called out.  Hearing the truth is rarely a comfortable experience.  Not when, like me, you face rejection upon sharing a message that the culture desperately needs to hear.  Not when another person draws attention to your flaws, and not when you’re faced with hard realities you’d prefer to ignore.  It requires such a willingness to receive.

I used to be so afraid to make myself vulnerable.  And yet, I’m slowly learning that it’s only in letting the Lord break me open into my realest self that I’m purified and that I truly become, in my limited way, a vessel of His love to others.

Matt Smith was on to something.  A willingness to be uncomfortable, I think, is a major part of self-knowledge and of bearing the Gospel.  Discomfort doesn’t indicate that something’s gone wrong; it means something is going right.  Look to the Cross: we’re not meant for comfort, but for greatness.  What better way to be great than to cast embarrassment aside; to be humble, with no falseness and no interest at all in our own glory?

My prayer is simply this: that I might do the Father’s will and His work only with pure love.  May I be humble, bold, and sincere.  May I be not afraid.

Reading this book was one of those experiences where there’s so much information that you freak out, convinced you’ve been doing everything wrong, go a tad overboard on amending every relevant part of your life, and eventually, after a few months, find yourself on a much more moderate keel, hopefully with new knowledge to spare.  That book, along with the coworkers who became my sisters and brothers during my first job after college, revealed to me a fascinating, heretofore unfamiliar breed: The Crunchy Catholic.

You might know one yourself.  It’s your friend who walks or bikes instead of drives whenever possible, composts, homeschools, cleans everything with vinegar, carries her babies in a sling, puts raw honey in his tea, prefers warm salt water over NyQuill, and would never touch meat with hormones or antibiotics.  The hardcore ones eschew microwaves, drink raw milk, and brew kombucha, a fermented tea made from a live bacteria culture that looks like a mushroom.  I am not making this up.  In my case, a marginal interest in all this eventually turned into a much deeper awareness of what I put in and on my body.  It turned to a life of kale, quinoa, Dr. Bronner’s Peppermint Soap, coconut oil, organic apple cider vinegar with apple strings floating in it, and a rampage during which I tossed most of my beauty products, deciding they were all toxic.

While I was drinking fermented things and giving chastity talks, my then-fiancé was living the lean existence of a bachelor and graduate student.  He spent exactly $30 a week on groceries and survived almost solely on frozen burritos.  I’m not making this up, either.  As my crunchiness increased, he’d ask me sometimes why I felt it so necessary to go above and beyond typical conventions of healthy living.

I asked myself a few times if my desire to be countercultural was just pride.  Maybe, at first.  But I had other reasons, too.  “Think our future children’s health!” I’d insist.  “I want us to have a nice long life on earth together before we go to Heaven!”  “Eating kale even when you hate it will sanctify you and get you to Heaven!”  He persisted, and I wondered: what’s the draw of a less processed, slightly weirder lifestyle, and what exactly distinguishes a Catholic hippie from a non-Catholic hippie?

I certainly never want to do anything for no reason.  That’s the great thing about the Church, isn’t it, that there’s always a perfectly natural, logical explanation, with our deepest fulfillment in mind, for every truth and every teaching?  And I definitely wouldn’t call myself a hipster, arbitrarily following a path just for the sake of being original.  So I thought about it — the appeal of the crunch. Aside from the fact that I feel physically better when I eat well and am content knowing I’m living more simply (thrifting, foregoing the gym in favor of runs and bike rides outside) and thinking critically about the medical and nutritional staples that are marketed as essentials (bleach, dairy, certain vaccines, and, of course, hormonal contraceptives), I think there’s also something deeper at work.

The answer, I think, lies in the Theology of the Body.  It lies in who we are.  According to John Paul II, the body expresses the soul, so why wouldn’t I want to nourish my body just as well physically as I do spiritually?  Maybe it is just temporary, this life, but I say it’s worth nourishing.  There is a deep peace that comes from knowing you’re living as you’re created to live; as in, living in a way that embraces our humanness.  After all, our bodies, our flesh, are so essential to who we are as humans and how we share in Christ’s life—it’s only through His body, and our own, that we can experience the deepest satisfaction of our longings in the Eucharist.

Do I want to be healthy?  Of course.  In a countercultural way?  Well, yes, but not just to make a statement.   In First Corinthians, Saint Paul says my body is a temple, but I don’t want to turn it into a site of idolatry as I worship my own pride in how I raise my future family, or my own self-image as a result of my eating and exercise choices.   I don’t want it to be a Holy of Holies, either, to be feared when I one day sit my child in front of the TV or eat the occasional slice of pizza.  No; I want to be a tabernacle, a dwelling place for what’s pure, what’s good, and what’s holy.