word of the year

Good Friday

by His wounds

I didn’t pick a word of the year for 2023. I can’t really call it a tradition yet, just something I did two years in a row at the behest of a friend. And while I scoffed at the idea originally, it was meaningful in the end. So I really did try to think of one for this year, but nothing stuck. Yet as Lent draws to a close, I think I’ve found it, the word of the year: wounds.

One of the reasons I was opposed to the idea of a word-of-the-year is that it seemed like a goal-setting mechanism, and that’s really not my style. Goals are anxiety-inducing, just threats of failure looming in the distance. I tend to do better with a day-by-day go of things, so I can go to sleep taking note of little victories and examining little failures. But the word-of-the-year is more like a sacramental, a mode through which Christ speaks to me. The year my seventh baby was born, the word was healing, and that year would reveal a path of healing I couldn’t have anticipated. The next year it was receptivity, and soon I was listening to the heartbreaks of my children, which set us on a road of discernment to relocating, something I couldn’t have imagined. And this year wounds have been the mode through which I’m learning to know myself, and this Lent, a mode through which Christ is revealing Himself.

Listening to Him through wounds has been very challenging. For a while, all I could hear was self-loathing, neglect, and despair. It cast a shadow over everything in my life. At times I thought I could retreat again, push it all back into the shadows and manage like I have for the past many years, but once a leviathan like that has been unleashed, it’s out. It will have its reckoning. All I could do was surrender to the time it would take to process and heal. In the meantime, facing the ugly and walking around with open wounds has been exhausting.

My reckoning with God has taken time, but has left me with significant moments of revelation. It was during the 33 days of consecration to Jesus through Mary that I first realized how distorted my view of Father-God was. It was at the confession-of-my-life where the priest opened that pandora’s box for good and allowed me room to express anger at God. He explained suffering to me in a way that I could understand, and inserted Christ as a light of hope into my darker memories. On my way to daily Mass a year ago, I suddenly was given an image of the Trinity with the words, “Everything I [Christ] am, God is. He has given me everything”. And just in the short time I’ve been in counseling, I feel like I’ve been able to organize feelings into right places, redirecting the anger I had towards God.

What has become increasingly clear over Lent is how well God knows me. That probably sounds silly– of course He does as my Creator. But I think there’s always been a self-protective front between myself and Him. There were parts I hid from Him, not completely on purpose. But He always knew what was there in the deep and waited for the right moment in my life to face those dark depths with me. And He hasn’t left my side.

At times Mass has been difficult, sometimes impossible to sit through. But a source of strength is the wounded, crucified, naked Christ on the cross lifted up for all to see. He leads the way in vulnerability, exposure, and suffering. This is what turned the heart of the thief on the cross. The thief shows us how to approach Good Friday: “He sees a Cross and adores a Throne; he sees a condemned Man, and invokes a King”*. Sometimes we want to turn this around and believe that Christ’s divinity made suffering beautiful, and Christ’s salvific work made the cross easy and light. But suffering is still terrible, the cross is still the way of death. But we’re no longer alone; our pain is seen and experienced by the Creator of the cosmos. We are on a cross beside Him, tempted to curse the day we were born, but strengthened by His fortitude in suffering and the look of love in His eyes as He suffers alongside us.

If I can know myself better through my wounds, and I can know Christ better through His wounds, then I have to believe that the only way to understand others better is through their wounds. It’s hard to watch others suffer, and I think sometimes out of our discomfort we try to fix it, fill the void with platitudes, and sometimes pretend it doesn’t exist. But here lies one of the beautiful mysteries about not just Good Friday, but Christ’s entire mission on earth: he dresses the wounds of others—both physical and spiritual—and is wounded Himself for all to see. There is no hurt unknown to Him, no wound too terrible to mend, no cry of the heart that escapes Him. It’s not simple, nor is it easy. It’s tiring and exhausting, requires a heroic amount of courage and patience. But He is all of that on the cross for us, showing us the way, ever before us.

*From The Seven Last Words, Fulton J. Sheen

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.

{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.