How Does Your (Spiritual) Garden Grow?

Faithful to Change

Recently, I wrote about my decision to leave the convent, and how I felt, at the time, that staying would be a kind of betrayal of what God had made me — that I would have to change, become a different sort of person, in order to live that life.

At the time, I thought — in all my 19-year-old wisdom — that we are called to be true to ourselves as God created us.

That kind of thinking requires that we define creation as a static situation. That kind of thinking denies the possibility — and the benefit — of change.

When I left the convent, I did not understand how necessary change is in our lives — how essential it is to growth. And when I left the convent, I had no understanding of the transformative nature of God’s love.

Early in my studies of change management in the business culture, I used the analogy of stagnant water to demonstrate how change is essential to beneficial growth. When water is stagnant, only one type of growth is possible, and it’s of a kind that chokes off life. When water is moving, it supports all kinds of growth — fish and plants in and under the water, and plants and animals on the ground that is nourished by the flowing water. All is light and reflection and motion and freshness; constant change supports constant growth.

I became enamored of change. I welcomed it, and sometimes I created it. People around me feared that I was a “change junkie,” that I went too far beyond managing change and lived in a space where change for the sake of change was the norm. Whether or not that was the case, I became adept at living with change. My ability to adjust quickly to change and to overcome natural resistance to it meant that I was generally happy and pretty unflappable.

As time went on and I began to grow in faith, I set aside my thoughts about change. Faith, I thought, was a wonderful constant in a shifting world. Living in faith, I knew what to expect and I would experience life without the turmoil of uncertainty and constantly shifting views. I saw faith as something that, ideally, was unshakeable — and, therefore, had nothing to do with change.

That actually worked, for awhile. And then I experienced a couple of major shifts in direction in my life that caused me to start wondering if my past study of change and the ideas I had developed might have some application in this new world of faith I was experiencing.

Certainly it was true that I was experiencing faith itself in an entirely different way from what I experienced as a very young woman. When I looked back at my time in the convent, I recognized that during those years, I saw faith as a set of practices and rituals — a response to rules and obligations, really. And that’s why I found myself on the outside of the main entrance to Maria Immaculata Convent, back in 1966. I wasn’t prepared to live in response to a set of rules and obligations.

Beginning with my return to the Catholic Church in 2012, my experience of faith took a very different form. With sudden and uncharacteristic insight, I realized that faith was a response to love, not to obligation. Faith was a living, growing, flowing thing that supported life and grew from love — and in a small explosion of enlightenment, I saw that faith was the ultimate definition of change!

This new understanding of faith as a culture of change began to flourish when I saw how Jesus, in His coming as the promised Messiah, turned everything the people of Israel had anticipated upside down. I think this is illustrated by three main truths:

• First, Jesus came as a humble workman from a poor family — far from the kingly warrior the Jewish people had come to expect as their Messiah, based on their interpretation of the promises delivered through the prophets. His mission was to save them from the oppression of sin, never mind the oppression of conquering nations.
• Second, this Jesus Who revealed Himself to them as the promised Messiah chose death by the most humiliating form of torture and execution possible in that time, as the means of redeeming His people from their sins.
• Third, as I learned from a recent homily, throughout his public ministry, Jesus repeatedly restored sight to people who had been born blind. This kind of healing had never occurred before. Old Testament prophets foretold this restoration of sight, but although some prophets had raised the dead, there is no record in the Old Testament of giving sight to a person born blind. This kind of healing — and what is healing, but a profound change? — is unique to Jesus.

In reflecting on these ideas, I begin to see Jesus as the ultimate bringer of change, and I begin to see faith not so much as a defense to the foibles of the world around me as a way of responding to the changes that God offers me as a means of staying alive and flourishing in my relationship with Him.

Now, when I look back at that turning point when I decided to leave the convent, I recognize that God was indeed calling me to change in profound ways. It has taken me many years and repeated promptings of His grace to recognize that and to see how He continually calls me in faith to respond to the change He desires to accomplish in me, perhaps through me in the world.

You see, something I lost sight of at some point is that my human nature is, left to its own devices, essentially sinful. Whatever we may believe about the story of original sin told in the book of Genesis — fact or allegory — the truth is that in a misguided exercise of free will, mankind separated itself from God and chose to sin. Jesus came to repair that separation, to heal that breach, and to teach us that living in the grace of His Spirit requires us to constantly seek to change in response to His call.

And so, my way of thinking about change has come, in its way, full circle. Change is essential for life to flourish — the spiritual life, in faith, as a response to God’s call. All is light and reflection and motion and freshness; constant change supports constant growth. God’s call is to transformative change — change that cuts to the very essence of our being. And that requires us to own this change and to focus our energy, the life force that we have through God’s grace, on the things we can do something about.

Change, Always Change

A dozen years before I retired, the company I worked for entered into a merger of what was, for us, of  unprecedented size and complexity. We brought four organizations together — organizations with identical charters and strongly similar, if not identical, missions and purposes; organizations with enormously different corporate cultures. As the pieces of this big merger puzzle began coming together, we recognized that a great deal of change was about to happen. At first we thought it was going to be pretty easy — after all, we weren’t going to change how people did their jobs from day to day. And we started down the road to completing the merger thinking that the biggest thing we needed to manage was keeping the change as transparent as possible to our customers.

It was the consultant we hired to help us manage the change with our customer base who clued us in to how much change our staff, all the way through the ranks to the top executives, would be experiencing as we brought these four very different cultures together. Once we realized the magnitude of the impact it would have, we expanded the consultant’s role to help us manage change with our employees.

Those plans were sidelined when, at the time of my retirement, my husband’s terminal illness required and merited my full attention. Over a period of weeks in early 2012, I transitioned from full-time middle management to full-time caregiver. I devoted myself wholeheartedly to my new role and even applied some of my own newly-developed principles of change management to the transition: owning the changes and focusing my energy on those areas where I had control, I felt that I was doing a pretty good job.

Even more important, during this time I also began to pray for God’s guidance and inspiration and leading. I came to understand the importance of being “in the moment,” in the very special construct of faith and complete trust in God. I began to see how quickly peace and comfort and joy — those wonderful consolations of the spirit — come into my life when I allow myself to be where God wants me to be, doing what He wants me to do. With that kind of peace and comfort and joy, pouring one’s whole self into that calling becomes much easier.

And just when I thought I had nailed it, everything changed.

Tom died on July 1, and it did not take me very long to realize that his death changed everything. Nothing in my life, in my world, was ever going to be the way it had been on June 30, or back on February 1 when I retired, or back in September when Tom and I together made the decision about my retirement. Nothing was ever going to be the same, and I thought, “That’s what I’ve got to live with.”

I thought if I could just adjust to that change — own it, focus my energy on things I could do something about — I’d have it made.

I was wrong.

I guess God is really the ultimate change-management expert, because He has really showed me some interesting paths over the past few years.

As my writing over the past several months has carried me into memories and reflections about how I got to this point in my life — nearly six dozen years, now — I kept returning to one significant moment, turning it over and over in my mind and trying to see what it was that kept bringing it back.

That moment was the moment when, as a young first-year novice, I heard my directress tell me that I needed to seriously question whether I belonged in the convent. In that moment, I made my decision to leave the convent because, as I put it that day, it seemed like staying there would require me to change everything about myself. I saw it as “thwarting” what God had made me, and as long as I saw it that way, there was no hope of my ever succeeding in the religious life.

It has taken all these years, and all this reflection, to see that indeed God was offering me the opportunity to change everything about myself. If I had been able, in that moment, to see it as an opportunity, I might have decided very differently. In fact, as I look back now, I probably did have a vocation, and I rejected it that day. I see two important facts as a result: First, that I might have avoided much of the sin and struggle that marked my early-to-mid-adulthood; second, that God has, as is His way, brought ever so much good out of the (probably) bad decision I made.

I think God calls us always to transformative change (and that isn’t a redundancy, by the way; “change” is just something being different, whereas “transformation” involves the very depths of being). I think God asks us every day to be open to change — the kind of change that He leads by filling us with His grace.

More, tomorrow, on what that kind of transformative change looks like. Meanwhile:

Father God, create a new heart in me — for a new heart is a changed heart. Let me be like those jugs of water at the wedding feast at Cana: changed in nature by the hand of Jesus, then poured out in the service of others, in whom I find You every day. Amen. 

Attachments, Advent Perspective

Oh, we are so very attached to this life and this world. And really, that’s not terrible. After all, God created this world, created us in it, and gave it to us to take care of and enjoy. (And the fact that we don’t take care of it as well as we ought would be fodder for a whole string of blog posts…worthwhile, but not today’s topic.)

No, it’s not terrible that we love our lives and the world we live them in. But the season of Advent, perhaps more than all others, asks us to take a look at the depth and strength of that attachment and compare it to our attachment to God and His Kingdom.

We can get so wrapped up in what we are doing here that we lose sight of the fact that this is just a temporary phase and that our true destination is eternal life in God’s heavenly kingdom.

That all seems abstract and ephemeral to us. I think this is so partly because it really is so different from our experience here, and partly because we don’t seem to have a very good frame of reference for that next phase — the one we call eternity.

But wait! We do have a frame of reference for it! In fact, we have wonderful and specific descriptions of it. Throughout the Gospels, Jesus frequently refers, in parables and directly, to what the kingdom of God is like. And the Book of Revelation is filled with descriptions of John’s visions of heaven. Scripture is one of God”s greatest gifts, and spending 10 or 15 minutes a day reading and pondering some portion of scripture is an incredibly rewarding way to begin to understand its richness. Make it a small portion — the Bible is not meant for speed-reading. Begin reading at some point — perhaps locate a favorite passage — and read until something jumps out and stops you. Then sit and re-read that one bit, and reflect on it, and ask your Father for understanding. Talk to Him about what the passage is saying to you and ask Him to guide you in exploring it. And then….just listen.

I promise that you will gain more from doing this than you can imagine — But I digress.

If this world and this life and the things they are made of are temporary, and our life with our Father God in heaven is eternal, it makes sense to view our attachment to this world and this life as a time of preparation for the next world, the next life. And when we do, it completely changes the nature of our attachment.

I had such a graphic and intense experience understood that there were no treatment options other than palliative/hospice care — that his life was, without question, going to end — there was a sense of being cast adrift on a very wide sea. Everything we’d held to be important up to that point was still there, still visible, still tangible — but somehow meaningless. Our very human tendency to still cling to those things — to live each day as we always had, to do the things we always did, to plan and dream as we’d always done — was drawing us into a spiral of frustration. It seemed like everything we did, every conversation, every plan, every action led us to the same conclusion: It isn’t going to matter. In 3 months or 6 months or 8 months, but in any event in less than a year, barring a miracle, he would be dead. Yes, that’s the word: dead. No euphemisms, no sugarcoating. His time in this world was going to end.

The only conversation we ever had about the next life, while he was still able to converse, went something like this:

Tom: Where do you think I’ll go?

Me: What do you mean?

Tom: Well, heaven or … you know …

Me: Oh, definitely heaven, maybe a stop in purgatory but you know, you’re one of the good guys. 

Tom: I wonder what purgatory is like.

That conversation got me thinking, and the thinking got me praying. I really wanted Tom to go to heaven, so I began simply asking God to take him there. In Tom’s last hours, I prayed out loud with him, commending his soul to God and asking the angels to carry him to heaven. I’ve written elsewhere about that experience. Today, I just want to dwell for a bit on what it taught me about attachment to life and things this side of heaven.

Because we’re human and thus imperfect and sinful, we tend to become all too invested in what our human nature is accustomed to. We cling to material possessions, we agonize over failed human relationships, we cling to the very time we are given in this world as though those things were all that had meaning.

Don’t get me wrong — they do have meaning. God made them to be meaningful so that we could make the best of our time before eternity. But because we are human, we are all too likely to magnify their importance to such a size that they can blot out what God really made us for.

When I think about eternity — about the life we were truly created for, the life that Jesus came to earth and died to save us for — as it is partially revealed for us by the Gospels and by the Book of Revelation, when I sit and try to visualize it and think about actually being there, fulfilling my ultimate purpose by constantly praising God with all the angels and saints, it creates an amazing sense of both anticipation and peace. The God who loved me into being wants me, after all, to spend eternity with Him. To the God who brought the entire universe into being with His Word, my individual soul is more important than all the vastness of the oceans and the mountains and the sky and the earth.

Believing that — and I can and do, because it is the very heart of the promises Jesus made while He was here teaching — changes everything for me. I can love this life and all the blessings in it, and I can live it to the fullest — because that is what God wants of me, provided it all happens in the context of His desire to have me with Him for eternity.

This is not pie-in-the-sky; this is not some abstract idea to be grasped only by the greatest of thinkers and philosophers.

This is personal. This is between God and me. This is about the promise my Father has made, through His Son, that He watches for the tiniest sparrow, lest it fall — and that I am worth more to Him than many sparrows. When I think of life in these terms, my heart is filled with anticipation. What I have here is wonderful! I’m meant to enjoy it. I’m meant to use it as God intended — a stepping stone to the fullness of life with Him. And I’m meant for something much more meaningful.

For most of my life, I feared death; it seemed terribly unfair that the one thing I dreaded most was also the one thing that I could not possibly avoid. To understand this focus on eternal life — the ability, so to speak, to look beyond the window rather than at it — both required and enabled me to release my fear of death.  The dread of death, mine or that of others, is tied to my attachment to this world. When I focus on the life that Jesus has promised, the dread disappears and is replaced by anticipation. It will come, when and as God wills. It will be the end of me as this world knows me, and it will be the beginning of me as the fulfillment of God’s will for me.

That’s what Advent is about: the anticipation of something, Someone, greater than we ever imagined, and yet coming in the form of a tiny child — embraceable and loveable, so small and so eternal.

Father, Creator and Lord of all I know to be real, teach me to see beyond the bonds and attachments of this life to the greater reality of Your kingdom. Teach me to trust in the redemptive act of Your Son, Jesus Christ, and the sanctifying power of Your Holy Spirit. Help me to grow in the knowledge that I have nothing to fear, that I can trust in Your grace and rely on your mercy and compassion to keep me focused not on the temporary things of this world but on the eternal glory that awaits. 

Promises, and Anticipation

In the Gospel reading for this third day of Advent, Jesus tells his disciples, “Blessed are the eyes that see what you see. For I say to you, many prophets and kings desired to see what you see, but did not see it, and to hear what you hear, but did not hear it.” As I reflected on these words early this morning, I thought about those prophets and kings and how their desires sprang from the promises God made over all the years beginning with His promises to Adam and Eve after their great sin.

The Old Testament is replete with these promises, and they follow a pattern. God creates and preserves His people; they sin against Him and turn away from Him; and God responds with covenant promises to bless, save, and redeem His people; they sin and turn away, and He responds again with a renewed sacred covenant.

Those prophets and kings of the Old Testament, those leaders and judges and rulers of the people of Israel, took God’s covenant promises seriously. They knew, in faith, that one day the promised Messiah would come, and with the light that the Holy Spirit put in their hearts they longed with all their being to see that day and to hear the words of that long-promised savior. One by one, they lived their lives in the hope of that fulfillment; one by one, they died without seeing and hearing that day and those words. And so it continued until that last prophet, John the Baptist, who was privileged to see and hear Jesus and to know Who He was.

In these words of Jesus, we learn how very privileged we are. As I follow the daily Scripture readings at Mass and the Psalms and brief Scripture readings of my daily morning and evening prayers, I am struck with a sense of wonder at the realization that people have been reading these same scriptures and praying these same Psalms, in one language or another, for thousands of years.

The same words I read this morning have been read by others every single day of the past thousands of years since they were first written under the Holy Spirit’s inspiration.

Each morning, my prayers take me to the Canticle of (Luke 1:68-79), which reminds me, “He promised to show mercy to our fathers and to remember his holy covenant.” And I consider two wondrous concepts: first, that these words have comforted the people of God for thousands of years, and second, that these words emphatically underscore the truth of God’s intentional salvation and redemption of His people.

We have, it occurs to me, the benefit of several thousand years of history – those thousands of years from creation to original sin, to God’s covenant with Abraham and His renewed covenants over the centuries, to the culmination of His plan in the life, death, and resurrection of His Son, to the more than two thousand years since Jesus walked among us as the Son of Man. We have the grace of knowing that God’s Word has stood firm throughout all this history; we have the grace of learning from others who have studied it and spread it and lived it, and from whom we can further learn it; and we have the grace of the Holy Spirit working directly in us to own it and live it.

We have, by God’s mercy, the grace to see and hear what those long-ago prophets and kings longed for: The truth of God’s Word.

For each of us, the question is whether we ignore it, take it for granted, or embrace it with all the gratitude it merits.

Against this backdrop of grace, my own sinfulness is both magnified and made insignificant: magnified, because I am reminded that in spite of all that history, despite the completeness of God’s Word and Covenant and redemption, I am so small and so imperfect that I turn my back on Him time and time again; made insignificant, because I am reminded, by these same daily readings and by prayer and by participation in the Eucharist that God’s forgiveness and mercy and compassion are complete and deep and abiding.

The story of God’s plan of salvation and redemption, laid out in these daily Scripture readings, allows me to understand that to Him, all of those years I spent (by my own sinful choice) outside the light of His grace are now as nothing in His sight. When He forgave me, through the words and actions of the priest who heard my first confession after my 45-year absence, He forgave me so completely that – as the priest told me that day – even the sins I didn’t remember having committed were wiped out.

Forty-five years became a drop in the bucket, but by the grace of God it also became a learning ground. From that experience, and through the great blessing of Reconciliation, I gained a depth of appreciation for God’s Word, for the redemptive act of His Son, and for the sanctification of His Holy Spirit, that far exceeds what I think I might have gained otherwise. I learned more about His grace by needing it so desperately than I might have learned otherwise. I feel a much stronger and deeper call to share His Word and His love in all the aspects and corners of my life than I might have felt if I had been content to stay put rather than take that first step away from Him when I was 20 years old.

I think that this is so; who knows, though, what I might have become had I not gone so far astray before my return? I can only believe that the story my life tells is one that affirms the depth and breadth and width and height of God’s love and mercy and that proves that He can, and will, and does, create good out of even the worst things we bring to Him.

Abba, Father, those long years I spent turned away from you are but a drop in the boundless bucket of Your grace, and I am filled with gratitude that with the benefit of Your timeless Word, with Your boundless mercy and forgiveness, and with the combined grace of all those millions of people over thousands of years hearing and reading and reflecting and sharing Your word in Scripture, I can live my life surrounded by Your love. You have brought good from my worst actions, Lord, and in the humble knowledge that by myself, I am capable of nothing, I ask to be filled with Your grace so that as one of those countless millions, I may reflect and share Your goodness and love with others.

A Father’s Love

When my mother was about 8 months into her pregnancy with me — just before Christmas, 1946 — my father took one of his infamous walks. “Going for cigarettes,” he’d say — and he might come back, or he might take off for several months or years. The youngest of my three older brothers told me that this particular departure happened a few days before Christmas. He remembers being secretly glad, because then the man — who was an alcholic — couldn’t ruin the family Christmas.

In all of the previous 15 years of their marriage, my mother had always taken my father back when he showed up again. This time, he came back on the very night I was born in January, 1947. He professed to be thrilled at the birth of a daughter after three sons, and I’m sure he made amazing promises — but perhaps not; perhaps he just relied on what my mother called his natural, and sinister, seductiveness.

In any event, she was done. She told him no, that it was over and she would not live with him again. His response took the form of threats — she shouldn’t try to get child support, because he would harm us all — and off he went. I learned, much later, that he got as far as Indiana, where records show he entered into a civil marriage less than 8 months after I was born, and without benefit of a divorce. Less than three years later, he abandoned his new wife and 2-year-old daughter on the side of the road and headed farther south, where he “married” again in New Orleans and fathered four more children that I know of (one of them with his wife’s niece). He never told his New Orleans wife about the four children in Michigan or the one in Indiana until, disabled by a stroke in 1963, he had to make disclosures to receive social security benefits. He lived another 17 years after that, but I never met him. My brother — the same one who was secretly glad the man had left — established contact in 1980 shortly before our father died. Our father wanted to be forgiven, and all of us extended our forgiveness. It cost us little to do so — all the pain was in the past.

There is much more to the story, some of it sordid, some of it poignant; the fact is, I grew up in a single-parent home and never knew my father at all. And for a very long time, that fact got all tangled up in my relationship with God. For much of my life, I felt and believed that my experience of God as my Father was limited and somehow unsatisfactory because I had no real idea, no first-hand experience, of how a father functioned in the family. Just as I always felt uneasy in the homes of my childhood friends when their fathers were around, I felt a little uneasy about God the Father. I didn’t know what to expect.

Over the years, I guess you would say I kept my distance. But God wasn’t keeping His distance, not at all. Tantalizing clues kept peering out from Bible studies and from the Liturgy of the Mass. Some kind of awakening began when one Bible study I attended posed a discussion question about how we address God, and I was intrigued by the image of Jesus referring to God as Father in the intimate manner of a family relationship: Abba — almost like “daddy.”

One appellation really drew me in — a deacon who taught one of the studies I attended used to start his prayers with “Father God….” and that seemed to speak in my heart. Over a period of a couple of years, I pondered this relationship, this sort of fuzzy distant feeling I had about God the Father as unapproachable and unknowable, and something began to change.

As I prayed to my “Father God,” He began to answer me, and this is what I learned: How very fortunate and blessed I am that my first real experience of a father is with the Father of all creation! I began to understand that He loved me into existence and that as the Creator of all the universe, he knows me personally and intimately and wants me to come to Him every day, every hour, every minute of my life. When I begin to pray, I seek to put myself in God’s presence, and the image that forms is of me sitting at the feet of the most fatherly person you could imagine, leaning on His knee and feeling utterly cherished.

In this imagery, little tags of Scripture take on a whole new meaning. “To your Father, you are worth many sparrows….” I’ve learned to take all kinds of things to my Father in the conversation of prayer. I don’t need the experience of an earthly father to form this relationship; rather, I understand that my Father God wants to reveal Himself to me in His own way, that He is waiting every day to show how much He loves me.

I find myself at a loss for words to describe what this new understanding of God as Father means to me. It’s nothing I’ve invented or conjured out of the experiences in my life or from my own lacks and wants. Instead, it is something that God Himself creates and renews constantly in my life, and my soul rests in His embrace as surely and as safely as any infant in a father’s arms.

And for this, I give thanks. I can’t waste time wishing I’d figured it out sooner — it’s enough just to live in gratitude for it.

~Sparky~

Happy New Year!

Advent is here and with it, a spirit of anticipation.

We live amid an odd mixture of secular and religious symbols and preparations for celebrating the birth of Jesus. I remember fondly and somewhat wistfully the purism of my convent days, when the season was all about the spiritual preparation for Christ’s coming. The Advent wreath was the focal point of our preparations; no Christmas decorations went up until Christmas Eve; and everything Christmas stayed in place until Epiphany — some even until the Feast of the Purification on February 2.

Now, we start decorating as soon as the Thanksgiving dinner leftovers have been put away, and the days between Thanksgiving and Christmas are referred to as “shopping days,” and for many, if not most, Christmas is over on December 26.

If we are listening carefully to the Sunday homilies, we get a better feel for what this season is really about. It helps to remember that all of the crazy commercialism really has its roots in Christian tradition. The practice of giving gifts in celebration of the birth of Jesus has a long history; we’ve let it get far out of hand, but still, we can trace it back to Christian roots. And the lights! Jesus is light of the world. From the lighted trees, the bright angels, and the sparkling reindeer on the front lawn, all those lights really began as a way to remind of us that fact.

As my faith and spiritual life have grown and evolved over the past several years, since my return to the Church in 2012, I’ve come to desire a more radical approach to Advent and Christmas. That is, I favor getting back to the roots of Christmas celebration. The lesson for my 7th-grade catechism students for this first Sunday of Advent emphasized how, with this first Sunday of the new liturgical year, we prepare for the celebration of Jesus’ birth as a way of also preparing for His second coming. We know when Christmas is, but we don’t know when that second coming will be — only that He tells us to hold up our heads, for our redemption is at hand, and He tells us to be vigilant.

Yes, I’ve strung my Christmas lights and put up my trees and other decorations; this year, I’ve done it with greater focus on what they symbolize. Yes, I’ll be giving gifts; I’ll give with a greater focus on my own gratitude for the greatest gift God gave His creation — His Son. And I just might leave the lights and decorations up until “Twelfth Night,” or Epiphany, remembering that December 25 is only the first day of Christmas.

It’s a small way to have the courage of faith — courage to witness to the birth of our Salvation, the Light of the world, courage to set aside the commercialism and secularism in favor of the celebration of Jesus, our Emmanuel and our Savior.

It’s a new year in faith. Our pastor, in this morning’s homily, said that the daily readings for Advent will lead us through the Old Testament prophecies of the Messiah and the New Testament recounting of how those prophecies were fulfilled in Jesus. In this new year in faith, I am resolved to pray with those readings daily, and to write, here, about what those readings reveal to me as the Holy Spirit does His work in me.

I am the child of a God who loved me into existence; I am the child of a God Who created the entire universe and everything and everyone in it, and Who yet reaches down to love me individually and personally and very, very deeply. This infinite God wants to be with me, wants to be in my life, and rejoices when I turn to Him in Love.

He is coming, and everything in my life must be focused on welcoming Him — both in the celebration of His birth and in His return, whenever that may be.

A New Direction

I’ve promised myself the opportunity to write daily beginning with the first Sunday of Advent, and this blog space will be the space for fulfilling the promise. As a proud and unabashed Catholic Christian, I love telling my own faith story. In the coming weeks, I’ll post both new material based on daily experiences with Lectio Divina as well as material from the past couple of years.

This morning, I want to talk about how I got to this point in my life — both my spiritual life and my life in the world God gave us.

My mother went to great lengths to have me baptized a Catholic way back in 1947. Our local parish church was about five miles away; the priest there refused to baptize me, because Mom didn’t have a car and, therefore, he said she could not fulfill her obligation to bring me to Mass. I’m not sure what he thought about my baptized older brothers who also weren’t being taken to Mass. Mom found a ride to East Lansing, some 20 miles away, and she presented the two of us to Father Mac (Msgr. McEachin, then pastor of St. Thomas Aquinas parish) and told her story.

Fr. Mac was more than happy to baptize me, and I still have the certificate of baptism that my mother brought home with her. Many years later, I had an opportunity to thank Fr. Mac — and even though I was a lapsed Catholic at the time, I know that his generous blessing and his prayer that I would return to the arms of Mother Church when I was ready had a positive impact.

While it was true that we didn’t have a way to get to Mass on Sundays, Mom saw to it that there was never a doubt about our being Catholic. She was proud of it. My earliest memories are of her teaching me the basic prayers of our faith — the Our Father, Hail Mary, Guardian Angel prayer, Glory Be, and Apostles’ Creed. She would say a phrase and have me repeat it, and our nightly sessions resulted in my quickly memorizing the prayers. To this day, I recite these prayers in order as I go to sleep at night, and they are a balm to my mind and soul if I wake up anxious or restless during the night.

When I was about 9 years old, in 1956, one of my older brothers was about to graduate high school and go into the US Army, and the next younger was going into his senior year. Mom had been getting rides to her job in Mason, 8 miles from our home in Dansville, but it was obvious that she needed her own transportation. And so it was that our family purchased a 1949 Chevrolet, and my mother learned to drive.

The first and most important use of the car, though, and a big priority for Mom, was to get the family to Mass on Sundays and to get us children to catechism classes. I remember she and my brothers going to great lengths to transport me out to the little Catholic Church, Sts. Cornelius and Cyprian, in Bunker Hill Township, for two weeks of preparation for my first Holy Communion. Mom took the amazing step of taking me out of public school for these two weeks. I probably will never know what she sacrificed to get my lovely white dress and veil; I still have the tiny white prayerbook she got me. I was then confirmed a year or so later when I was about 12.

We were regular and faithful in our attendance at Mass and at catechism classes over the next couple of years. I attended the local public school, where one of my closest friends was a devout Baptist. We often talked long and deeply about our respective faiths; I suppose, given the tenor of religious teaching at the time, that we tried to convert one another. And so it came about, early in the summer after our freshman year of high school, that we were together one evening having one of our long discussions. And I told her about my feeling that something big was missing in my life, that I wanted to be closer to God but wasn’t sure how to go about it.

Her response changed my life forever, and in ways I’m very sure she never intended.

She told me that the answer to my craving was to turn my life completely over to God. Now, that statement meant something completely different to her Baptist mind than it meant to my Catholic mind. She saw me going up to the altar one Sunday and being “saved,” while to me turning my life completely over to God meant entering the consecrated religious life as a nun.

Her mother arrived to pick her up, and I thanked her profusely, knowing in my heart exactly what I wanted to do. I think she was quite horrified by the direction my response took. I remember that as soon as I closed the door behind her, I turned and told my mother what I wanted to do.

And my mother, whose relationship with me was usually a combination of almost smothering care and almost impossibly high demands and expectations, took the ball and ran with it. Where I expected insurmountable objections, she paved paths and made plans that were entirely out of character for her. Through our parish priest (the same priest my middle older brother used to sit and drink whiskey with while he was still in high school, contributing significantly to his alcoholism), we became acquainted with the Sisters of Christian Charity, an order which had a special high school for girls who wanted to discern and pursue a vocation to the religious life. He put us in touch with the SCC group at St. Mary in Westphalia, where Sister Claracille became my sponsor and guided me into acceptance to Maria Immaculata Academy.

I arrived at the “Aspirancy” on August 26, 1961, and there I remained until June, 1966. My years there were marked by what I now understand as a strong desire and ability to follow the practices and rituals and by a sense that those were what would drive my success. I spent five years living out what I saw as obligations; when I was accepted as a Candidate after high school graduation in 1964, I simply entered upon a new era of compliance with practices and rituals. That lasted through postulancy and into my first year novitiate, until the day that my novice directress, in our regular monthly interview, told me that she felt I needed to “seriously question” whether I belonged in the religious life.

Today, I can look back and understand that she was challenging me to test my vocation; at the time, however, all I felt was that I was being told I didn’t have one. She explained to me the areas in which I was lacking, and the changes I might need to make, and I told her that I felt that doing so would thwart everything that God made in me. Again, all these years later, I have a much better understanding that God indeed calls us to change, change of a deep and continuing kind that overcomes our sinful nature and leads us to be who He calls us to be, not what the material world we live in would make us. Back then, I wasn’t able to see it, and for whatever reason, Sr. Judith wasn’t able to explain it. Our conversation that day ended with a decision that I would leave the community, and by the end of that week, I was back home in Dansville.

There are so many stories I could tell of my slide away from the Church and from God over the next years. Suffice it to say that I walked away from the Church in a fit of stubbornness, about a year after leaving the convent, when a priest told me that I could not marry the man I thought I was in love with. The fact that my mother wasn’t in favor of the marriage made me even more determined to marry him, and I did.

From that brief marriage came my oldest daughter and a new understanding of how helpless we are to change the behavior of other people. I divorced my chronically unemployed alcoholic husband after little more than a year of marriage, and I moved back in with my mother and got a reasonably good job. By the time my divorce was final, I was dating the man who became my second husband, and I had begun attending the local Lutheran church. My mother, who also had left the Catholic Church by then, encouraged me to go and to have my daughter baptized there, even though she wouldn’t attend herself.

In June, 1970, I remarried, and in January, 1972, gave birth to my second daughter.

I remained active and involved in the Lutheran church; I also got a new job with a law firm and began pursuing a degree at the local community college. And it was those two situations that led me down a path that even today, I blush to recall. While my husband and my mother took care of my children so that I could go to night classes, I began going out to clubs with a woman I befriended at work. I met a man at school to whom I was attracted, and had my first affair.

From that point, my life descended into a pit of drinking, affairs, one-night stands, and even an affair with a pastor at church. I don’t like looking back on this period of my life. I failed my husband, my children, and my God so miserably — and all I could think of was continued gratification of my own desires.

I ended the affair with the pastor, and not long after that my marriage ended in a disastrous tangle of false accusations and criminal charges against my husband — a situation I deeply regret but in which, at the time, I had little choice if I was to keep custody of my children. My ex-husband and I have resolved our relationship, and my oldest daughter and I are estranged mainly as a result of these events.

During the period from 1985 until 1992, I floundered through a series of disasters and crises; I often prayed for help, and indeed I received it. Although I was far from the Catholic Church during those years, I continued to be active in one or another Lutheran church until I reached a point where I found no direction and no comfort there, and I stopped attending church altogether.

That is not to say I lost my faith. Somewhere deep inside an ember stayed aglow, and if anyone asked I was quick to say that I was raised Catholic and still considered myself one, even though I didn’t go to Mass.

The late spring and early summer of 1992 was a crazy time. I finally filed bankruptcy, having created a financial mess I couldn’t find any other way to resolve; and I met Tom, who became my third husband and who, without ever intending to do so, led me back to the Church in the end.

When I met Tom, he had been widowed a few months earlier, and I had been single for about seven years. It was the proverbial love at first sight; we were together from the time we met, and we married about a year and a half later. There was no great epiphany of faith here; we had a pretty hedonistic lifestyle which revolved around happy hours and weekend house parties and all the drinking that went with them. One thing that stood out, compared to my previous way of life: We took our marriage very seriously. We were faithful to each other, and we worked at making our relationship a good one.

Tom was diagnosed with lung cancer the day after Christmas, 2003. His treatment options were limited — the tumor was inoperable, and he refused to consider chemotherapy. He underwent a six-week course of radiation treatments with all the side effects and complications that come with it, and I did a lot of praying (albeit very unfocused praying). He survived the radiation treatments and achieved a sort of remission that lasted for eight years.

Then at Thanksgiving 2011, he got sick; five weeks later, we learned that he was terminally ill, the cancer having returned with a vengeance and having spread throughout his chest. A couple of days after Christmas, we learned that he had about six months of life expectancy; treatments that might prolong that prognosis would almost certainly carry a variety of unpleasant side effects and diminish his quality of life. After much discussion, he opted — with my support, even while my heart was breaking — for home hospice care.

He came home from the hospital on January 4, 2012. I worked from home that month so that I could care for him, and I retired at the end of the month, fulfilling a decision we had made back in September before we knew about his illness returning.

After we returned from a trip to Florida at the end of February, and settled into the knowledge that the end of his life was both inevitable and imminent, I found myself turning more and more often to prayer for solace. Tom would not talk about his condition or about his approaching death; we did talk sometimes about faith, and he spoke of believing in Jesus and about what he had learned in Sunday school as a boy. And I began to think more and more about what was going to happen to him, and where he was going, and I began to pray in a different way than ever before.

I began to consider what heaven was going to be like and what it was going to be like for him when he passed from this life to the next. I can remember thinking about heaven as a place where souls praise God constantly. I wondered what that might be like — and I realized that this was what God had created us for, and that it would be, accordingly, exactly what fully satisfied our souls at last.

During this time also, I began to think more and more seriously about how we submit ourselves to God’s will. I prayed — first to have the grace to know and accept God’s will, and then to ask God to show mercy. Tom’s dignity was important to me, and I knew that as he got sicker, it would be so hard on him to be cared for. I was determined and prepared to take care of him at home, as he had expressed that he did not want to be in the hospital again; I told God that I would willingly and lovingly take care of Tom for however long God chose to leave him here, and that at the same time, I wanted God to have mercy and not subject him to prolonged and horrible suffering. And I began to understand what it meant to fully submit myself to God’s will.

We went through some difficult times, and Tom had some very bad days among the better days and even some very good days. We learned to treasure whatever good came from each day.

One day in late June, I’d been talking to my younger daughter, who was dating a Catholic man and who was very enthused about her experiences attending Mass with him. I said to Tom, “You know, I really miss going to Mass.” He responded, “Then I don’t know why you aren’t there.” I had to file that thought away, because a day or so later, Tom’s condition worsened dramatically. He became bedridden on Wednesday; Thursday, hospice brought us a hospital bed; and in the small hours of Sunday morning it became apparent that the end was upon us.

I sat with him and held his hand and talked to him; and then I began talking to God. I told God that I was commending Tom’s soul to Him, and asked that He send angels to guide him to heaven. I kept repeating those prayers out loud, and when Tom took his last breath, at 3:33 a.m. on July 1, 2012, I am very sure that I felt the presence of angels in that room. I was very much at peace with his death, and I expressed my gratitude to God that he did not suffer a prolonged and painful death.

The following Sunday found me at Mass in the local parish church, and I began to feel like the Holy Spirit had simply opened a channel in me. It is hard to describe, but all of the things that used to feel like burdensome obligations to be gotten past when I was younger, now felt like great privileges — I couldn’t get enough of them. I sat with my parish priest and made a full and general confession, received a general absolution for all those misguided and misspent years, and opened my heart more and more fully to the Shepherd who had called me back to His fold.

Over the next few years, I experienced a continuing sense of wonder as I grew in faith, praying for God to lead me and to show me what He wanted me to do. And He did. Through a series of moves, from houses to apartments and finally to the house that I wasn’t even looking for, but which has turned out to be my dream home — and through some trials and difficult times, He has always led me. My life is so very different from anything I might have anticipated when I was in the midst of retiring and taking care of Tom — and so very much in tune with where God leads me.

At one point, I woke up one morning thinking, “There is no reason I’m not attending daily Mass. There is so much more grace to be found, and I want to find it.” And thus I began going to Mass daily, and growing in my prayer life. I believe God has showed me that He calls me to a life of service to others, both in the work of my daily life and by praying for people in their various needs. I try to listen carefully for what are the ways I’m meant to serve; sometimes the call is very clear, and sometimes it is not so clear. Sometimes it is easy, sometimes it is very hard, and sometimes I have doubts and fears, but always it comes with a sense of peace and joy.

And so, in a few weeks, I will have six dozen years behind me, and if God wills it, I will wake up the next day knowing I am ready to serve Him and that He is not quite done with me yet.