Tag: confession

here, you have a tissue…

… and I’ll just be over here having an epiphany during Mass

One of the purposes of penitential seasons is to simplify, gain clarity, grow closer to Christ. And here is my confession, borne from clarity, that materialized this past Advent season: I am having a crisis of identity. Not my own identity, but of God’s identity. And maybe struggling to see God clearly would naturally muddle my own identity, or vice versa, since I was created in His image. There’s a thought.

January 1 of this past year, 2022, opened with a surgical Confession, the kind that cuts open the chest, takes your heart out, flips it over, sews it back in the right way and you come out a different person. But I didn’t walk out of the church waltzing with Christ into a sunset. I left struck dumb, paralyzed yet free, wondering what was next.

There was a whole lot of “next”.

While in the confessional, the priest had me speak to Christ (like at him, towards the monstrance, inches away from my face) and tell him how my heart had been broken. I said things I didn’t even know were inside of me. It was like I was watching myself, gaping, she just said WHAT? You don’t tell God you’re angry at Him. At yourself, sure, because you deserve every tear you shed. But to cry at God, to ask Him why He wasn’t there, didn’t stop things, etc., was… life-changing, yes… but so f-ing terrifying. The priest, in persona Christi, gently listened, offered wisdom, and assured me how much God loved me.

A few years ago, during the consecration to Jesus through Mary, was the first time I realized that I had a messed-up image of God. I had distinctly separated out the persons of the Trinity in my head, and I didn’t really like talking to God. Jesus, yes. Holy Spirit, yes. But Father-God was terrifying. This awareness had been present, but dormant in my mind until that confession when the damn was broken. I was swimming in it now, the full consciousness of my distorted perception of Father-God.

But what to do with that?

The rest of the year is a longer story, but fast-forward to this past Advent of 2022. I was sleep-walking through it in many ways, but maybe that was a grace: I think I was able to receive what God wanted me to hear.

It was Gaudete Sunday, when you can expect the readings to be hopeful and comforting certainly, but I wasn’t expecting it, wasn’t paying as much attention this year. The church was packed, and our family of nine was sandwiched in a pew between a smaller family of four, and a young woman. We were only a few minutes into Mass when I realized the young woman beside me was weeping. I felt an overwhelming, maternal/sisterly love for this stranger and I wanted to give her comfort. We heard the words of the prophet Isaiah:

The desert and the parched land will exult;
the steppe will rejoice and bloom.
They will bloom with abundant flowers,
and rejoice with joyful song.

Such hope for this suffering young woman! I wanted to proclaim to her, with Isaiah:

Strengthen the hands that are feeble,
make firm the knees that are weak,
say to those whose hearts are frightened:
Be strong, fear not!
Here is your God…
he comes to save you.

The readings continued, and into the Gospel we went where Jesus tells John’s disciples to report to him in prison about what is actually happening: the blind see, the lame walk, the dead are raised. Yes, yes, yes, Christ offers not just promises, but actual healing! I was singing this with my heart as I offered her the only comfort appropriate in the middle of Mass towards a weeping stranger– a tissue.

But this sobering thought hit me soon after: with what enthusiasm I wanted to offer Christ’s tender mercy, comfort, and miraculous healing through the passing of a tissue to a complete stranger, someone I was certain God loved. Why couldn’t I believe that for myself? I believed that God was a healer, a good Father– that’s what I’ve been taught in my twenty years as a Catholic, that’s what I’ve read, that’s what I’ve told others.

My mind wandered back to Isaiah 35:

Those whom the LORD has ransomed will return
and enter Zion singing,
crowned with everlasting joy;
they will meet with joy and gladness,
sorrow and mourning will flee.

Those whom the Lord has ransomed. That’s me.

{Allow me this brief tangent that will connect, I promise: in marriage, you say your vows, you say “I love you” and you mean it. But then something happens, difficulties arise, you quarrel or whatever, and you say “I love you” but it means something even deeper than before in a way you couldn’t have foreseen the first time you said it. And this keeps happening, again and again, until you realize you love your spouse more deeply than ever before, even though you loved them as much as you were able fifteen years before.}

That’s the best way I can think to describe what’s happening to me, only in media res, stuck in the hard part. I said, “I believe, amen”. And I really did believe in God and salvation and Divine Love. But when the damn broke in that confession, all the mucky soil from underneath rose to the top and now I’m swimming in refuse and it’s harder to imagine that I will “bloom with abundant flowers and rejoice with joyful song”. I believe, but it’s a tired “amen”.

This weeping stranger in Mass was a reminder of myself. Offering her one tissue just made her weep more. I persuaded her to take the whole pack. A small gesture of tenderness broke her a little more open. And just as I had wanted to draw her close, comfort her, assure her of God’s love for her, so I must remember that God feels that way towards me. Even when I come to Mass or present myself to Him in prayer weeping, parched, enraged, weary, He wants it all. He takes it all.

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.

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.