Month: February 2022

2022 ~ Word of the Year

Ok, Pee-Wee Herman, get your giant underwear ready, I have picked a word of the year. Wait for it, drumroll… 

RECEPTIVITY 

No, wait that’s not it… The word of the year is: 

FORGIVENESS 

Ach, that’s not quite right… Yes, I know: 

MERCY 

Can it be all three? Are there rules about the word-of-the-year? I’ve had a hard time settling on just one, as you can see, and I think that’s because I am going into this year with more of a concept-of-the-year. 

Nearly the very first thing I did this year (besides waking up, eating breakfast, etc) was go to Confession. This wasn’t an ordinary Confession, but a healing general Confession with a priest who offers deliverance prayers and blessings. By the fall of last year, the piercing, revelatory light of God’s love uncovered dark cobwebbed corners of my soul. A better image would be wounds that had been scabbed seven times over with grotesque scars. (I have written about that elsewhere, and more about the general confession elsewhere.)  

But January 1, I marched up the church steps, slid into the narrow confessional, and encountered Christ the Healer in a way I never have before. It pulled back the scars from those wounds and laid them bare. But the powerful prayers called off any evil that had laid claim to those dark memories, leaving them exposed and raw, though protected by grace. Just as my baptism didn’t end a conversion, but began a new life and deeper conversion, so this sacrament of Reconciliation blew the lid of some dark shit and led me into a deeper stage of conversion.  

That’s what I’m focusing on this year: inviting God to heal what has festered for so long. That will require receptivity, right? I need to have a spirit of surrender with Christ the wounded Healer. I need to be vulnerable with Him. This vulnerability can lead so quickly to shame that I need mercy, both to claim it and accept it. The Divine Mercy was one of the first images that pricked my heart all those years ago at the beginning of my conversion to the Catholic Church. Now I have to live it, open my heart to it, bathe in its light. And in receiving it, I need to reflect it, to pour it out on those who have wronged me, both intentionally and unintentionally. Thus, forgiveness.  

You can see how I have to have three words this year. So if there’s a life coach out there who’s like, No, you only get ONE ya loser, to them I bite my thumb and cry, Fie! Leave me my three, the world depends upon it. I truly believe this is a new phase in the Church, a time of healing and wholeness. We need to heal so we can heal the Church, which can then heal the world.  

Barf, sentimental hogwash, you say. Trust me, healing is afoot.

Word of the Year

{aaaahhhhhhhh!!!}

In January of last year—2021—my lady-friends at church and I got together for a friend’s birthday. The birthday girl requested we come to the gathering with “a word”. A word-of-the-year: apparently, it’s a thing. I immediately went to sarcasm and thought of every children’s television show with their words of the day: would Word Girl greet me mentally every morning, her cape flowing behind her, with a reminder of my word-of-the-year? It was hard not to imagine Pee-Wee Herman screaming in hysterics with giant underwear on his head every time this word-of-the-year would be uttered. That’s where my brain goes, what can I say. 

aaahhhhhhhh!!!

But the pop-up image of Pee-Wee Herman wearing giant underwear on his head wasn’t the only turn-off to this exercise. I admittedly have a knee-jerk repulsion to female groupings of any kinds—prayer groups, Bible studies, book clubs—which is objectively unjust and something I’m in the process of examining and hopefully rectifying. That being said, my first reaction to my friend’s request was panic and repulsion. But I simmered-the-hell-down and realized the more appropriate and reasonable response between avoiding the get-together and making up a saccharine and dishonest response, was to politely decline word-choosing and be a good listener. 

This lady-friend group continually challenges my repulsion towards lady-groups with their sincerity and generosity of spirit. And this was no exception: as I sat and listened to their honest, and non-saccharine responses, my heart softened. I understood more the purpose of the exercise, and in that moment of emotional receptivity, a word floated into my head: healing. 

I was pregnant, due that May, and I had approached and begun this pregnancy with the intention of learning to trust God more fully. There were a lot of knowns and unknowns to fear with this pregnancy. I had been praying for complete and total healing, but also that God would help me trust Him more, whatever the outcome. St. Gianna Molla’s mantra of whatever God wants was purposely on my lips, even though there was fear in my heart.  

I swallowed my pride and suspicion and told my friend later that week what my word-of-the-year was. She was a physician, a mother of four, and a recent convert to Catholicism. She explained that she wanted to know her friends’ words so she would know how to pray for each of us. And later that year, she would—unbeknownst to me—begin a novena to St. Gianna Molla towards the end of my pregnancy when things got scary. It would be Gianna’s feast day when I was finally released from the hospital. Only then did my friend let me know about her novena, and it had been the first time she had ever entrusted a prayer to the intercession of a saint.

It is experiences like these when I feel God lighting a loving flame to melt one more hardened, sarcastic piece of my soul. My friend requested vulnerability, which I systemically responded to with suspicion. But through the vulnerability of my friends, my own heart was softened so that I could hear the Holy Spirit whisper, “Healing.” That year—2021—really was a year of healing, but in more ways than I could have anticipated. God needed to prepare me, needed me to have my eyes wide open and my heart attentive. Even though the prayer for healing was already on my lips, I needed to entrust that to the body of Christ, these lady-friends with open hearts. 

my new old love: BOOKS

{I originally intended to post this at the end of 2019, but it got lost under a stack of drafts. This is my 2018-19 reading list!

I am a jilted reader. For one, I am a very slow reader. I read out-loud in my head, sounding out every word. I do the voices. I have to underline things and make notes, otherwise I won’t remember what I just read. Sometimes I’ll be reading for a good ten minutes before I realize I’ve been thinking about an old “Friends” episode and completely missed what happened over the past five pages. So you can imagine how difficult it is to read with lots of distractions (i.e. children) around. My husband, on the other hand, is an incredible reader. He has an amazing ability to tune out everything (and I mean EVERYTHING) when he’s reading. He has an astounding memory: if he wants to share something he read, maybe even years ago, he can quickly thumb through the book and find the passage he wanted. Me, on the other hand: people will talk about a great scene, character, dialogue, or fact from a book, I’ll respond and ask what book it’s from, only to find out that I have actually read that book! (Only, I clearly didn’t actually read that book….)

I wasn’t always like that. I used to love reading. I would run into things because I was reading so much of the time. But somewhere around the age of 10 I just kind of stopped, unless it was assigned reading (which I usually skimmed). Of course, during my conversion I read a ton of books about everything Catholic, ate those up like candy. And then for years I was reading picture books to my children (which I love because, you know, all the voices).

I mostly struggle with fiction. It has to really grab my attention, otherwise I start getting distracted by all the useful things I could be doing with my time. I could quickly name the fictional books I have read in the past 16 years (which is when I graduated college and no longer had required reading): Anna Karenina (read that on my honeymoon and into my first pregnancy), Eleni (read that while nursing my first baby), and the High King series (read those while pregnant and nursing my fifth baby). The first Harry Potter book, and half of the second. Yep.

I’m much better with non-fiction. It feels less like a waste of time. If I’m learning something, acquiring factual (or mostly factual) information then I can justify a good read. Over the years this had been sporadic spiritual reading (I Believe in Love, My Mother Zelie, Advent of the Heart, 1000 Gifts, various Al-Anon literature).

But something happened to me a couple years ago. It was … I don’t know… maybe a mini-crisis of faith? A new batch of challenges popped up quite suddenly and all at the same time and I didn’t have a vocabulary for it. I mentioned this to a friend, something about beauty and aesthetic in the Church and the role of women– none of which was said coherently, so his fluid and fitting reply could only have been the Holy Spirit using that golden moment to open a floodgate.

At first I caught the names Houselander (whose effect on me I’ve written about elsewhere), Edith Stein, and a slew of “vons”. The year that followed was enormously important for my whole being- my mind, heart,and soul. I rediscovered a love for reading. And not just reading, but contemplative reading, reading that inspired my interrupted prayer life. I know this is old news for most people, but it awakened me right at a time I needed it.

This past year I finally read a book that has been recommended to me for years: Sigrid Undsett’s Kristin Lavransdatter. Chances are, you’ve already discovered this treasure, but if you haven’t… READ IT. I’ve never read a novel that encapsulates what it means to be a woman in all her stages of life as this book. Undset possesses a deep understanding of humanity. Her characters remain unchanging in their unique personalities, though altered by their life experiences.

Another book that I read this past year that I would recommend as a life-changer is Love Alone is Credible. I know people have some hang-ups with Hans Urs von Balthasar, and though I’ve heard the reasons, I don’t understand how anyone could not appreciate this poet-theologian’s explanation of anything trinitarian. His work has changed the way I see God and the way I understand how He sees me, if that makes sense. And Adrienne von Speyr’s Handmaid of the Lord is a rich companion text (and I’ve written about that more). It doesn’t directly relate to Love Alone is Credible, but her reflections on the life of Mary fit beautifully alongside Balthasar’s meaty text.

In brief…

My 2018-19 Book List

  • Kristin Lavrandsatter by Sigrid Undset
  • Handmaid of the Lord by Adrienne von Speyr
  • A Key to Balthasar by Aidan Nichols
  • Love Alone is Credible by Hans Urs von Balthasar
  • The Privelege of Being a Woman by Alice von Hildebrand
  • Into the Deep by Abigail Favale
  • The Passion of the Infant Christ by Caryll Houselander
  • Humility by Dietrich von Hildebrand
  • That Nothing May Be Lost by Rev. Paul Scalia
  • Awaking Beauty: The Art of Eyvind Earle

mystery scar

Heal me, O Lord, and I shall be healed.

Save me and I shall be saved.

For you are my praise.

Jeremiah 17:14

I have a long, gnarly scar on my shoulder. It even has a couple crossbars like a jacked-up railroad. The fun thing about scars is the stories behind them. I have an especially grotesque one on my left arm that’s a weird conversation starter. (“Wow, what happened there?” “Oh this? I had a huge-ass mole removed when I was 16.” “Was it cancerous?” “Nope. Purely cosmetic. Vanity, vanity, vanity.”) But I have no idea how I got this new one. Even stranger, I didn’t notice it until just a few months ago, this long, gnarly scar that deserves a better story than, “Yeah I don’t know what happened.”  

This is what I want to say if someone asked me about it: You know it’s funny, this scar is a manifestation of the hidden scars that have just recently started surfacing, forcing my prayer and attention, making me an emotional, crumbling mess, and inconveniencing the hell out of my life. But that would probably make for a dismal conversation starter. 

The thing is, part of me wonders if it’s true. 

With this mysterious scar, I feel more like a character created within magical realism whose spiritual wounds begin to manifest themselves outwardly, etched in her skin, deforming her body, where she can no longer hide them or—worse—lie to herself about their existence. 

Something happened to me when my last baby was born. The torrent of afterbirth—which was especially grotesque this time around— was followed by a metaphysical torrent. A few months later, I wondered if I was in some kind of bizarre post-partum depression, when I reconnected with a friend who told me a harrowing story of a car accident that had unleashed past trauma during her rehabilitation. I learned that it was neurologically possible and even common that present trauma could indeed activate memories of past trauma. These weren’t memories or feelings that I had forgotten; it was more like I had separated and parsed the traumatic events out and stored them in different parts of my brain. I can pinpoint moments in the past twenty years when a memory or two has been jostled into my consciousness, usually because of a trigger (damn, I hate that word right now because of how over-used it is, but I mean it in its true, psychological sense). 

Since then, I’ve been on this speed train of healing. The timing was right, I guess. The funny thing—GET THIS—is that when I found out I was pregnant this last time, I was justifiably terrified, but really wanted to practice total trust, and prayed for complete healing through my body. This was, hilariously, the most traumatic birth yet. My body is shot, folks. No more babies for this super-uterus. But God was most certainly healing me, yet in a more whole way, a way I didn’t see coming and didn’t know I needed. He was preparing me for mercy. Labor ripped me open, and with that came a torrent of healing grace.  

So this scar… It’s a reminder to be honest, to resist wanting to quickly patch this all up and move on. It’s also a reminder that the past is a part of my story, and I’m beginning to see how it’s not a source of shame, but a sign of grace.