I’m a teacher, but as a side gig I coach swimming. At the pool where I work, one guy coaches the morning practices and I take over in the mid-afternoon. I learned recently that he has a niece who swims in the group of kids he coaches. She gets out of the water and just hangs on his hands. It’s a heartwarming sight: my coworker is tall, somewhat gaunt, with an austere look to him, but this girl looks at him with a rare and pure kind of childish adoration, and it’s obvious that he is quietly but firmly protective of her, and that she accesses a spot in his spirit that I imagine is largely inaccessible to others, the place where he feels pure delight because of the love he receives so boundlessly from this object of so much of his affection. Every weekend she holds his hand as they walk out of the pool together.
Two weeks ago I began been helping with a faith formation group at my church. Once a week, we get together and discuss questions of faith and meaning, and who Christ was and is. The initial meeting was just for those who are helping with group—so last week was our first with real attendees, some of whom aren’t even Christian. I had looked forward to it all week, but the night of the event I found myself terribly on edge, to the point where, if I’m being honest, I felt like I was on the brink of tears all night, like I was horribly alone in my head and peering up at a confusing and menacing portion of the world from the bottom of a pit, like that poor girl in The Silence of the Lambs. I’m being dramatic because I’m a dramatic person. But it’s also just how I felt! (I’m not a leader, thankfully; I’m just sort of a helping hand.)
One of the questions during our small group discussion was something like, “If it turns out there was a God after all and you were able to ask that God one question, what would it be?” The girl next to me said, “I’d want to know why bad things happen—why God allows suffering.” Then it was my turn. I thought for a moment before answering. I had a lot of thoughts swirling around in my head and I wanted to make sure I said the right thing. I took a breath and said, “I don’t struggle with the problem of evil. That makes a lot of sense to me—Satan and demons are a very real and vivid part of the way I view the world. What I struggle with more is the flipside of that. It’s actually very difficult to wrap my head around the fact that God loves me in a personal way. I sort of want to ask what His reasoning is, why He put me here and what the big deal is about my really ordinary and kind of measly life. Or something like, ‘Why are You so obsessed with me? Why don’t You mind Your business?’”
That night, I went home and did about fifteen minutes of silent, meditative prayer, which my confessor, about whom I wrote last week advised me to do, having noticed in me a complete ineptitude when it comes to silence and peace. In prayer, I am supposed to sit with a clear and quiet head, asking the Holy Spirit to come to me with every breath. Of course, my thoughts still often wander—and this time, when they did, I realized something I probably should have seen about myself years ago: I am far more open to the possibility that things are terrible and will go wrong than I am that they will actually work out. The latter is actually far scarier, because it demands action and change, and it makes us accountable for our own joy.
Tonight I confessed a sin that I’ve been trying to kick for some time now. So much of my life has gotten better in the last couple of years since returning to the faith. I got chaste, I confronted a lot of previously held misguided beliefs about all kinds of things, I developed a practice of prayer and fasting. But this one just keeps hanging around my life. I want it out, but I’m in the age-old Saint Paul Bind: “The good that I would do, I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do” (Romans 7:19). In many ways it stems from this very stubbornly held nihilism and despair. I told my confessor about this discovery tonight, when I saw him before Mass.
“Ah,” he said, “this is a good discovery, that you have this habit of pessimism. I want to ask you: have you ever felt somebody’s love so intensely that it humbled you?”
“Yes,” I replied.
“Tell me about it.”
“It was with my ex-boyfriend or quasi-fiancé or whatever you want to call him. When I met him he seemed like this amazing man. You know, he was hardworking, and humble, and gentle, and had this truly astonishing mind and artistry. And every now and again during the day it would hit me that this man was in love with me, and I almost couldn’t believe it. And I was always thinking about how odd and happy it was that we found each other. I used to wake up in the night saying his name in my sleep,” I said. That’s true, by the way: I did.
“Well, Joan,” he said, “God gives us these kinds of love in our lives so that we can come to know His love for us more fully. These are finite imitations of the infinite love He has for us. Has there ever been a moment in your life where you actually felt that from Him?”
There have been many moments in my life when I have felt His love for me. In high school, I developed this nearly debilitating anxiety about Hell and Armageddon. It just so happened that in my literature class we were reading James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Several pages of the novel are dedicated to a sermon given by a priest who describes in elaborate detail the horrors of Hell. As I read these pages, I began to experience what I now know was something like a panic attack. My head was buzzing and so, so loud. I was under the impression that I was a horrible, horrible person, and that this was my destiny. I could hardly see straight. I was reeling and spiraling and devastated and I couldn’t escape my own head. But then something happened: it stopped. Suddenly, my mind was clear, and calm, and the panic was lifted from me.
In the silence of my mind I heard a voice. “Do you love Me?” the voice said. I recognized it as the line from John 21 when Christ allows Peter to redeem himself from his thrice-over denial of his Lord.
“Yes,” I said back in my head. “I love You.”
I predicted, given the scriptural echo, that the voice would say back to me what Christ said to Peter: “Feed my sheep.” But that’s not what happened. He said, “Then you’re fine.” No code in it, no symbolism. He even used a colloquialism. And then the voice left me in the stillness.
I told my confessor this story. Here’s the stupid thing: I had that experience and I still went off and lived a life that laid the seeds of all of these awful habits that I’ve been trying my hardest to unlearn. And that includes frequent descents into cynicism and sadness.
When he finally ended things with me, my ex said that one of the reasons he didn’t want to try to make it work anymore was that cynicism, something that takes hold of me some days and that I am often incapable of shaking in myself. “I try to lift you out of these awful moods and you never let me,” he said. I don’t think he was being entirely fair; some of the moods to which he was referring were responses to him being blatantly cruel to me in front of my loved ones, or lying through his teeth to me. But nonetheless I see his point: there are times when I let the despair take hold of me and I find it difficult and often impossible to shake it, or even put on a happy face and act like that isn’t happening as Francis de Sales advocates in his Introduction to the Devout Life. I imagine, in retrospect, that part of the reason my rotten moods were so distressing for him was that it was emasculating: he was trying (most of the time) to be good to me, and there I was rejecting his efforts and refusing to be joyful and grateful. In fact it reminds me of the age old trope of the frigid wife who always rejects her husband’s sexual advances. It must have felt very punishing and withholding, though I did not realize it at the time. If I ever get the chance to apologize to him about that, I think I will.
For obvious reasons, today during Mass I decided to focus on sitting with the love of Christ, and I realized what a terrible bride I have been to Him. He came to this earth knowing that He would die. John Henry Newman said, “He loves each of us so much that He has died for each one of us as fully and absolutely as if there were no one else to die for.” And each and every day He sends me message after message about how much He loves me and delights in me when I stay by His side. A small example: I sit in the same spot at church every Sunday without fail. There is a man who always dresses in a nice suit and wears his curly gray hair back in a ponytail who often sits behind me, but today he didn’t. After Mass, he came up to me and said, “I didn’t see you when I walked in or else I would have sat behind you like usual.” I was so touched by that! I didn’t even realize that he made a conscious effort to sit near me. I didn’t know I even really existed in his head. Most of the time I assume that I pass from people’s thoughts and memories the moment I exit a room. Maybe I should stop thinking about myself as so disposable and faceless and forgettable. In any case, this sort of poor self-esteem is the root of a lot of selfishness and ingratitude.
My confessor did not grant me absolution for my sin today. He wasn’t doing it to be cruel. He is trying to teach me and I am determined to let him. He said he wants me to feel more watchful about these sins and sit with the repercussions of them. A few weeks ago I confessed them to a different priest, who instructed me as a penance to meditate on the Magnificat, the prayer Mary says to her cousin Elizabeth upon visiting her before the birth of Christ. In it, Mary is ecstatically grateful for the Lord entering her life, and choosing her out of obscurity to bring Him into this broken world: “My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior, for he has looked upon the humble estate of His servant.” I was going to Adoration shortly after Confession, and I didn’t have a Bible with me, so I thought I would have to use my phone to do this meditation, and I was sort of dismayed by that. But I got to my church and pulled out a small book of prayers I sometimes carry with me, opened it up—and there was a paper copy of the text of the Magnificat, right there, which I had received the last time I had used this book during Adoration. God knows me: one of the quickest ways to my heart is to make me laugh, and this little joke of His made me smile and fill with delight. His comedic timing is unmatched.
In any case, tomorrow is Valentine’s Day. I don’t have a Valentine. But I’m determined to use the day to gaze upon the Lord like an adoring child, with so much love and not even a question about why, or like a woman at her husband when she is secure in her knowledge of his love for her. How humbling: God chose you, specifically, personally, for a mission so great neither you nor I can even fathom it, and for eternal closeness with Him. He tries even on your worst days to reach down to you in the Hell into which you cast yourself. He can’t stop thinking about you. Who are you to deny Him?
Hi Joan, I'm glad that you're embracing the struggle and finding joy in it as you become a better person. :D