The Journey Continues - more thoughts

I have been blessed in my life with wise women. Last week, one of my dear friends, who I'll call Adrian, read my Wednesday post and sent me a long, thoughtful private e-mail in which she conveyed her own thinking about these subjects over the years. On Friday evening, a couple of friends and I took Hubby Dearest out for his birthday. One of those friends is a Dominican sister, who I'll call Cathy. As we got caught up on our various weeks, I made a mention of some of the issues I've been working through. This was not a surprise to Cathy as she talked me down from a particular limb about five years ago when I said, "If Cardinal Rat gets elected Pope, I'm leaving the Church." At that time, Cathy had said, "At that point, aren't you just conceding the field?" Hmmm..... (Of course, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger soon after became Pope Benedict XVI, and I'm still here.) Similarly, a couple of years ago when our new bishop came to our parish and told us, in the middle of the liturgy, to change a distinctive feature of our parish's liturgy, and I nearly roared out of my seat to tell him off, it was Cathy who quietly said, "Sit down, Liz." (I did, and ended up writing him a letter talking about diversity of cultures meeting in a campus ministry parish.) On Friday evening, she said, "Liz, I'm not letting them drive me off."

Then, on Saturday, I checked in on the blog of an old friend. The story of Sister Rose working with women in the Caribbean got into my head. That afternoon, I sent a long answer to my friend, Adrian, in which I listed some of the issues I'm having. I realized that it sounded whiny and adolescent. As Adrian pointed out, every organization is made up of imperfect people, and there are always things we aren't going to like. As I reflected to my friend on Saturday, I started talking about how very Catholic I am in so many disparate areas of my life.

Some years ago, I read a piece by Andrew Greeley, who talked about the "Catholic imagination," the peculiar way in which Catholics see and experience the world. I'm sorry I can't point you to a specific piece, but so much of his writing is infused with this idea that one could start anywhere. Basically, there is a sense that the world is a glittering place full of mystery and wonder and hidden joy. All around us is evidence of the birth-death-resurrection cycle, and our job in life is to discover this evidence. At dark moments such as the one I'm going through, I find myself stepping back and saying, "Ah. I see where I am at the moment. I wonder what old thing is dying inside me and what fresh thing is waiting to be born."

About 20 years ago, I had the great good privilege of hearing Chaim Potok speak at the Jewish student center in Ann Arbor. He talked about culture as being like one of those large balls used in cooperative games. Many people interact only with the surface of the culture, still others live partway in, and others live at greater and greater depths in the ball. He told a story about being in a park and seeing a young Hasidic girl (a girl living very deeply in a larger-society-shunning culture) encounter a collie dog. "Lassie!" she exclaimed. This, he said, was a sign of the pervasiveness of some aspects of the larger culture. When it was time for questions and comments, I stood up and said, "Mr. Potok, I want to thank you for making me a better Catholic." There were gasps, and people visibly drew back from me. I went on, "Because of your books about people digging deeply into their Jewish culture, I've had to turn and look deeply at my own culture and see what treasures I can find. I have asked hard questions and deliberately moved more deeply because I've had the examples of your characters." By the time I finished, he was rocking back and forth, with a huge grin on his face. "Thank you. I have hoped that people would react like this to my books. Thank you for telling me this!"

On Sunday morning, I talked to another wise woman I know before Mass. We talked about my mother, now dead almost seven years, another wise woman. At Communion time, when I was standing behind the altar, preparing to help distribute Communion, I was standing next to my friend's husband, a wise and good man. I looked out at the assembly (I go to the old fogies' 8:30 Mass) and saw so many people who have lived through so much and come in on Sunday morning for community and refreshment and a little wisdom. (The homily was about focusing on the simple things and finding wisdom there - how very appropriate to my state of mind.)

On the way home from Mass, I said to Hubby dearest, "I don't think I can walk away from all of this. I'm still angry and upset, but I'm Catholic to the very depth of my being." He reached over, took my hand, and said, "You don't have to go through this alone. You have people around you who care." I spent a couple of hours on Sunday afternoon cutting down a thorny quince bush in my yard and planning the brick patio that will go in that spot next spring. As I worked, I listened to a new podcast, The Knit Wits, and got to the point where I was doubled over with laughter, almost choking, tears running down my face. Life is good. As Rory Cooney's song says, "This journey is our destiny."

The Journey Continues - but in which direction?

I've always considered myself one of the lucky ones. I was baptized into the Roman Catholic church when I was two weeks old. We always went to Mass on the weekend, except when the weather was really bad. I watched my parents' very different reactions to the changes brought about by the Second Vatican Council - my father unable to reconcile himself, my mother joyous. I knew from an early age that being part of the Church was not a simple choice, but one that had to be experienced on a deep level and with much reflection. At 8, I read Pearl S. Buck's New Testament for Children and experienced the power of The Story. At about 11, I read Morris L. West's The Shoes of the Fisherman and saw that the Church was a complex organization that had a deep history in Western Civilization, and that the people running it could be deeply flawed, but the Church would muddle through triumphantly. A month before I turned 15, I had a personal and very real encounter with the divine - a moment that still shines brightly in my life as a transformative experience; I have been a different person because of that than I might otherwise have been. As I say, I was one of the lucky ones.

When I got to college, the first week I went to the interdenominational campus ministry program at my small (mostly commuter) college and asked for directions to the nearest Catholic church. I spent my college years helping out with the campus ministry program and working on the student newspaper (and attending enough classes to graduate in three years with a degree in history and a 3.5 cumulative GPA). After college, I got a job on a suburban newspaper and registered in my local parish, agreeing to teach sixth-grade catechism on Saturday mornings. The job didn't last long, but the teaching continued. A year later, having taken a secretarial course and still not finding a job (this was the recession of the early 1980s), I moved to Ann Arbor to share my brother's apartment. Again, I got a job and joined the local parish, where I taught catechism, proclaimed the Word at Mass, and served on various parish committees.

At 28, I went off to the convent. It seemed like the logical thing to do. The ten months I spent there taught me so much about myself, about spirituality, about becoming a fully-realized adult, and about the Church. I came back so disenchanted and so unsure that I wanted to stay in the Church that when the subject of religion would come up, I would declare myself "unsure." I started slipping into back pews in the campus ministry church affiliated with my employer; it was there that the usher found me and start recruiting me regularly to pass collection baskets. At that time, the baskets were on long poles, and there was something about the simple exercise of pushing and pulling those baskets that moved things around inside of me so that I could start seeing the Church in a new way and could find my way back home to it.

In time, I became the usher coordinator, got deeply involved in liturgy, stopped being the usher coordinator, met and married a man who was also deeply involved in liturgy. We took theology classes (he finished the coursework; I did not). At the point where I realized that I would never bear a child, my brother died unexpectedly, and I discovered quilting. I am not trivializing any of these; each had a profound impact on the way that I lived my life and the kinds of relationships I've had.

There have been things shifting around inside of me for a long time. I've been very upset by the changes that are coming in a little over a year. I can feel myself moving in new directions, but I don't know where. The opinions expressed in this essay by Sheila O'Brien speak somewhat to this place I am. I got to this essay via Bryan Cones' essay in US Catholic. Bryan is talking about people like me, people who long ago made a conscious choice to be Catholic. I made that choice when I was a child, when I was a teen, when I was a young adult, when I was fully an adult, when I was in early middle age. I am now in late middle age and looking at this choice and saying, "I'm not sure I can stay." I don't know where this is going. Stay tuned.