Ash Wednesday – An Invitation

"Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do." (Luke 23:34)

This Lent, please join me in praying for those who perform, those who assist in performing and those who support abortion. It’s easy for us to remember their victims but those who perform and support killing children suffer far more than we or they know, than we or they admit.

Those who abort children and those who support such unspeakable acts debase their own humanity, create a huge split in their hearts and psyches and inflict terrible damage on themselves. At the same time, they must become extremely adept at ignoring their own pain, at ignoring their natural repulsion to what they are doing – God did not create us to destroy children but rather to love and nurture them as he loves and nurtures us. We cannot know what their souls suffer. We do know that whenever we cut ourselves off from being fully human, we cut ourselves off from God.

So during Lent, please add a petition to your prayers for those who “know not what they do” to tiny babies, to their mothers and fathers, to all of us, and to themselves. Pray for the healing of abortionists and abortion supporters. They too are created in God’s image. They too are called to be heirs in hope to God’s kingdom. They desperately need our love. And if we are to be conformed to Christ’s image and likeness, then we must prayer for those who heartlessly cause suffering just as we pray for their victims. We must not close our hearts but must love as God loves us. Love isn’t a matter of what we feel but a matter of what we choose to do.

God and the Problem of Suffering - Risk

I was utterly dumbfounded when I realized it. No words could express my immense shock and disbelief but though it seemed impossible, it was true, God had used my foster father to save my life. For perhaps half an hour, quite a long time by my standards, I could neither think nor speak; I felt that the room had suddenly expanded, that the world held far more now than it had an instant before. It was like the first time I saw a water bug. That sight was so astounding, I sat on my bed shaking my head in disbelief: how could anything be that big? And yet water bugs are that big and now, the world was revealing itself as something far bigger than I had ever imagined, something that might contain all sorts of things I had never before encountered. Finally, I heard myself say aloud:

“How could you be so stupid?”

My words surprised me but the anger they revealed was an even greater surprise. But with God, I had learned not to dissemble so I demanded:

“How could you be so stupid, God? How could you take such a risk? On me? Why would you do such a thing? Don’t you know me? What if I had not turned to you? Don’t you know how awful I can be? How much I hated him? How I wanted him dead? How badly I wanted to die? How could you do such a thing? How could you take such a risk on me? It was apparent that God was unimaginably dumb.

My thoughts turned to the Annunciation. Often I had imagined heaven holding its breath as it waited for Mary’s response. But really, what else could her decision have been? She had been prepared. Immaculately conceived. Made able to say yes when it would have been so natural to say no, so natural to believe that the angel was just a silly fancy. But I am not the Blessed Virgin – nothing like her. I am self centered and terribly childish. God takes care of me, protects me from myself, mitigates my worse impulses; his presence makes it so I need never grow up. But without him, I would not be at all safe. I would be an enraged child making the world pay for all I have lost, all I have suffered. Or I would be dead. And though he has always been with me, though I have absolutely no memory of a time when he was not a palpable presence in my life, I am so much less than I should be; I do not respond to his love as well as I could and sometimes mine is willful failure. I am definitely not someone on whom he should take such a risk .

God made no answer but the world did not regain its accustomed size. Instead possibilities presented themselves to my mind: What if heaven had held its breath for me too? What if I too had been prepared? What if four and one-half years with my parents and a lifetime of hanging out with God had been part of it? What if God knows me better than I know myself? What if he knew that I could have said no but also knew that he had given me everything I needed to take my immense pain, my horrible wounds to the only parent I knew and say, like the little child I am, ‘I’m broke. Fix me.’ What if God really did know what he was doing?

Again I was dumbfounded because I knew my possibilities were facts so that whereas I might have chosen to wallow in my pain and be a tortured soul, I had also been given what I needed to be a broken little girl presenting her wounds to the only doctor able to heal her, her Father. And with that knowledge came wonder – that God would do such great things for me, that he would love me that much, that he would take such risks and have such hope for me. With the wonder came immense gratitude – perhaps the first real gratitude I had known since I was a child. And in the midst of gratitude, another possibility arose, something so big I could not even begin to express it. All I could do was whisper:

“There is more going on than I ever realized, isn’t there God?”

The Mercy of Disappointment

Two or three weeks before Christmas each year when I was a child, I became ill, usually with strep. During the day, my foster mother had me rest in her bedroom where it was quiet and I was allowed to watch TV for short periods as a treat. (For us kids, watching TV was strictly limited to an hour on Saturday morning and a film after dinner on Sunday evenings.) And while she and the housekeeper dusted and vacuumed and scrubbed the rest of the house, I lay in her big bed with a book and the remote control and a glass of orange juice in the morning or ginger ale with crushed ice in the afternoon – a perfect picture of a little girl being very sick. And I was sick, very, very sick. But still, while they were downstairs cleaning, I explored my foster mother’s closets and drawers because I was curious and because it was Christmastime and I wanted to find the presents which she hid in her closets; I, along with my foster siblings – both the natural children and those born to other families – feared that we would not be remembered and somehow searching eased that anxiety.

Buying Christmas presents was a year-long adventure for my foster mother. She loved giving gifts and, with so many children in the house, shopping was a big job. She hid gifts bought earlier in the year in the cellar or the attic or at the top of the linen closet. But as Christmas approached, her closets were also pressed into service. Most years, we kids discovered everything except those hidden in her room, which was a sacrosanct place, only entered by us after her invitation and usually while she was present. So for me, being ill each year was the opportunity we all awaited – it was my job to memorize the gifts I found and report back when I was well enough to come down to the living room in the evenings.

The year that I was seven or eight I found a doll’s carriage and tea set which must be for me (at eleven, my next oldest foster sister had already announced she would not be playing with dolls any longer). I was very excited – these would be the first toys, since coming to live with this family, that would belong just to me. There was one problem – no doll. I did not own one and though my next oldest foster sister had given up such childish toys, she refused to give me her doll, would only allow me to play with it for brief periods under her watchful eye. How could I play with a stroller and tea seat if I had no doll?

I imagined approaching my foster mother and telling her that she had neglected to get me one. But if I did, she would know that I had rifled her closets. Finally, I found an advertisement in the newspaper that pictured two dolls, a toddler and a baby. “I really want a doll,” I said as I showed it to her. “Do you think this one would be alright? Is it too expensive?” She replied, “We’ll see.” A few days later, she called me to her room and showed me the toddler doll, “Is this the right one?” “Yes,” I said even though I had really wanted the baby doll which would have been far more suitable in the carriage. But I could not tell her and, taken unawares, I did not know how to ask for what I really wanted. That Christmas morning, I was terribly disappointed. I had seen all my gifts, had even chosen one of them. Though I had been remembered, there were no surprises.

We try to provide for ourselves and we fail – or we succeed, giving ourselves exactly what we wanted or at least near enough. And usually we are more or less disappointed. Something is not right, something is missing. Doing it for ourselves, doing it on our own is empty, hollow. Something inside us longs to receive from someone who sees us and knows us, a teacher, a parent, a spouse, a friend. We long for surprise – to have someone look inside us and see something that we do not know about ourselves, something that answers a need we do not even know we have, something we would enjoy, something that shows us that we can be more than we thought possible.

To live without being known and provided for, to live without surprise is agony, terrible loneliness, something greater than any heart can bear. And yet we cling to our attempts to be self providers and regard disappointment as a flaw in our psyches when in truth, it is a gift of mercy telling us that we are not enough for ourselves, that our hunger to be seen and provided for by another is our heart longing for the one who really knows us. Disappointment hurts, it reminds us that we are not in union with the one who really knows us, that we are not at home where we belong. But the mercy of disappointment is being reminded that my manipulation, my imaginings, my way are far too little. Disappointment demands that I seek more than I can give myself.

The gifts I receive these days are usually books, music or personal accessories – all of which I love. I no longer want dolls but I do long for trucks. Actually, I’ve grumbled and groaned because of a dearth of trucks. (I’ve never understood why being an adult means I must give up the innocent things that I still enjoy.) But the lack of toys, and trucks in particular, has continued. Until this Christmas when a friend, who had told me she had no money for gifts, handed me an interestingly shaped package that was obviously not a book, nor a CD and was probably too heavy to be a personal accessory. It was, in fact, a truck and I was very happy. But not only was it a truck, it was a Transformer, and only years of training in manners and proper deportment kept me from leaving the dinner party to rush home and play with it. And nothing could stop me sitting up with it into the wee hours. As I write, it sits about three feet away and each time I look at it, each time I play with it, each time a guest takes it up and transforms it from one iteration to another, I smile and my heart melts in gratitude a little bit more. It was more than I knew to ask for. It tells me that my friend sees me and loves me. It reminds me of the one who has always seen me and loved me and provided for me even in the midst of my misguided attempts to provide for myself.

Both Sides Now

My foster mother’s death was ugly – months of loneliness, anger, frustration. Sickness and death filled the house. The children existed to be shushed, to fetch and carry and participate in the most intrusive aspects of caring for her declining body, to be pummeled with helplessness and torn down whenever we reached for something that was not illness, something that was happy and joyous and full of life. We were not important. Neither was she. Impotence, my foster father’s impotence, was what really mattered. And anything any of us did trumpeted that one fact, he was powerless before death.

She shouted repeatedly, “The devil is a liar!” – a mantra he had insisted she use to fight demonic possession, to fight the disease, to fight off death. And as she became sicker, he heaped much blame on her: she didn’t fight hard enough, she should have insisted that she was really, really sick, she hadn’t somehow prevented this terrible disease from taking hold of her. A great deal of money was spent on ambulances and private nurses and attendants who accompanied every member of the house when we were bundled into sundry vehicles and transported to faith healers and miracle workers; their requests for donations continued to come for years after her death. Ultimately, my foster father began to be convinced that he too could work miracles. When she died, he took me and one of his daughters to the funeral home to show us how beautifully he had arranged for her to be prepared for burial and the two of us held our breaths in terror as he commanded my foster mother to “come forth!” What if she did?

Years later, after Mass one Sunday, a friend who often gave me a ride home asked if I’d accompany him to the hospital to visit his cousin. For me it was one of those overwhelming, tingly experiences of God telling me this was very, very important. On the way, my friend explained that his cousin had lived a prodigal life: gambling, prostitutes, alcohol. No one in the family had heard from this wayward child until his mother had received a telephone call about a week earlier that he was very ill and in hospital. My friend, the only family member in the area, had been visiting him and doing what he could but now, feeling helpless, sought the comfort of a friend; his cousin had AIDS and was very close to death.

An emaciated, severely jaundiced young man lay in the bed. He was being well cared for, my friend had seen to that, and was very happy to see both of us. He kept repeating something over and over but my friend’s queries began immediately we entered the room, in a hollow, almost booming voice and prevented us from hearing what he was saying. I walked closer, finally told my friend to hush, and finally we heard the young man’s breathless amazement: “I’m going home. I’m finally going home.” “Yes you are,” I said. And then turned to my friend and said, “Sometimes questions aren’t important. Sometimes all you need to know is that you’re going home.” And I took the cousin’s small, wasted hand and put it in my friend’s large, strong one. We prayed together, thanked God for making him, thanked God for making home. About a week later, my friend’s cousin died.

I had hated hospitals, remembered them as places where I was left to sit in the waiting room or hallway because I was too young to see my foster mother stuck full of needles. It was an experience of awful smells, of loneliness, of despair. Without God telling me it was important, I would have refused to go with my friend. And I would have missed something. Because the awfulness was not the smells, the being left alone, the illness, or even my foster mother’s death. The awfulness was despair, was impotence before death, impotence before life. The awfulness was that in the midst of the agony, we could not thank God for her, we could not thank God that she was finally going home.

Holy Innocents – What I Left Out

Thanks to all who have commented on the Holy Innocents pieces and please forgive my failure to respond. This has been a very busy time in my life and, as Anonymous commented on Holy Innocents – Part I, it is very difficult for me to write about the loss and the abuse, and perhaps even more difficult to write about what God has done with them. And that’s odd since through therapy and prayer and grace, I have already worked through everything I am writing about. Except, perhaps, the working through is a bigger process than I knew and this too is part of it. And too, writing about this makes God’s grace more real, more palpable but it’s excruciating, like warm water over frozen fingers (I have Raynaud’s and that pain is very familiar).

One thing I edited out of Part II that I’ve come to realize is important to the story: As a child, I honestly believed that I was supposed to be dead – I knew I belonged with my parents and if they were dead, I should be too – that is why I waited for the executioner to come and chop off my head. In fact, I would apologize to God whenever I failed to kill myself – that is how deep the conviction went.

But I wasn’t some sort of extraordinary child, conscious that suicide was wrong. I saw death as young children do and it certainly did not mean to me then what it means now, what it began to be after my foster-mother’s death. Death was a journey, was being with my parents and God. It was a very good thing and what God wanted for me.

His response to my childish conviction was a resounding, “No!” and he gave me exactly what I needed to stay alive until I was old enough and strong enough and healthy enough to accept life even without my family. I am continually awed and overwhelmed with gratitude. And I suppose that one reason I began this blog was to give a Catholic witness to God’s presence in our lives – to his extravagant love. Just thinking of how much he loves us is one of those warm water experiences.

Thank you all again. And thanks for making me aware of the Ravensbruck prayer – I was not aware of it. More to come soon.

Holy Innocents – Part II

As for you, you meant evil against me; but God meant it for good. (Genesis 50:20)

There is much I never told my foster father. He heard many of my complaints, quite a lot of sarcasm, earfuls of vitriol; though it cost me in tears and scars, I refused to back down. After hitting me, he would say, “I am doing the best I can.” After my foster mother died, he often added that he had to be both father and mother to us. I would mutter that he was neither to me which often led to another attack. But I never muttered that I loved him. Nor did I tell him that his worst crime was that he was unable to give me my parents. And I never told him that his best, though it was filled with rage and hate, had had immense value in my life. But then, while he was still alive, I didn’t know how important he was, how God used him to help me.

In my foster father’s house, I was never allowed to speak of my own family. It was assumed that I would forget them, would accept his family instead of my own. My foster father prided himself on loving us all equally. But I ached for my parents with an indescribable pain that filled my life, made nearly every moment dark. I was never happy, only distracted for a short time. Everything, every book, every moment of play, every bit of quiet, every conversation led back to tears, to confusion, to longing for death.

From five until about a year before my foster mother’s death, I’d crawl under the bureau in my room, place my neck over the stretcher and wait for the executioner to come and chop off my head. I tried smothering myself but couldn’t keep my face pressed into the pillow long enough. Night after night I begged God to let me die but each morning I awoke to the pain. Eventually I began rummaging through the medicine cupboard and swallowed anything with a warning label – aspirin, Tylenol, cold medicine – except they didn’t work. When I was nine I found some quinine tablets. My foster sister had collected a prescription for her boyfriend who was planning a trip to the far east. I hid them, read and reread the warning label, talked to God about them and one afternoon, when I had been sent off to have a nap, I swallowed four capsules and thought that now I would go to sleep and not wake up. Half an hour later I was vomiting and crying inconsolably. No one understood the violence of my reaction. I had often been sick before.

Soon after that, my foster mother’s illness permeated every corner of our world. A nurse and daily helper supplemented the regular housekeeper – there were more eyes around and no opportunities for anything other than attempts at smothering myself. Within the year, my foster mother died.

While she lived, she had stood between her husband and my responses to the abuse. After her death I faced my foster father’s brutality without any mitigation. But he also faced me, my anger, my rage, my stubbornness. I fought him just as I had fought her and refused to give way. Whereas my foster mother had often tried to understand me, he only tried to control me, to break me. I would be neither controlled nor broken and continued to fight with everything in me. Fighting him saved my life.

I was deadly serious about dying, more serious than I knew. As I grew older I became more daring. And because I am so smart and so curious and so capable, I would have found a way, would have succeeded – eventually. Kindness hurt too much. My foster mother’s kindness, though sullied with her own brand of abusiveness, was still excruciating. But that brutal child abuser was not kind and neither was I. We fought and fought and fought. And I learned that my life was worth fighting for, worth living; I learned to fight my own desire for death. My crazy foster father directed my attention away from wounds that were too big for me, wounds that were destroying me. Had I not been forced to fight him, I would have died at my own hand and God knew it.

John Hume in G.K. Chesterton’s, The Moderate Murderer, asks, "Did you ever hang somebody to prevent him being hanged?" I did not know what God had done until my mid-twenties and when I saw it, I was awed that God knew precisely how to break my insane focus on death and bring me back into life, that he would risk hanging me to prevent me being hanged. The abuse in my foster father’s house was horrible, was absolutely real, something no child should experience; I saw it do immense damage to me and my foster siblings. But that damage is only one part of the story and not necessarily the biggest part. Once I stopped insisting that I had already fulfilled my quota of suffering, once I was willing to see how God used abuse for my good, it became a source of healing, became additional evidence of God’s favour and love.

I wonder what use God might make of the abuse in the lives of my foster siblings. What story might they someday tell? And I wonder about my foster father. Whether he sought forgiveness as he died. Whether God credited to him all he did for me. I was never able to tell him how God had used him to help a desperate little girl but perhaps he knows now. Perhaps he knows that for a time, he wasn’t my father but he was the father I needed. Perhaps I will see him again one day and with my papa, we will all laugh for joy because of what God has done.

Holy Innocents – Part I

Then Herod, when he saw that he had been tricked by the wise men, was in a furious rage, and he sent and killed all the male children in Bethlehem and in all that region who were two years old or under, according to the time which he had ascertained from the wise men. Then was fulfilled what was spoken by the prophet Jeremiah: "A voice was heard in Ramah, wailing and loud lamentation, Rachel weeping for her children; she refused to be consoled, because they were no more." (Matthew 2:16-18)

My youngest foster-brother was born into hell. I remember him a tiny baby nursing, so sick at a few months old he could hardly breathe, stuffing marshmallows in his mouth as one of my foster sisters and I wheeled him down the street on his first birthday. And I remember my foster father spanking him at a few months later because he didn’t want to wear the red corduroy pants, the ugly marks left when his hands and legs were slapped because he reached for something fragile, or spilled his milk, or did not want to be changed, his horrible cries of pain.

By three, he delighted in hitting me with his large plastic train. When I hid behind the rocker, my foster father would pull it away so he could get to me: he was just a baby. He couldn’t hurt me. Why was I making such a fuss? His mother died when he was three and a half; he did not understand. Neither did he understand why it was wrong to chase me, towel in one hand a butcher’s knife in the other, so that he could make the “blood streamed banner” he sang about in the children’s choir. But then he also didn’t understand the beatings, the incessant flow of verbal abuse, the locks on the food cupboards and refrigerator, the neglect, or any of the other indignities and offenses that filled his life. He was just a baby, born into a house filled with furious rage and only I knew to weep for him when I wasn’t fleeing him. When he was seven or so, I told my foster siblings that I was afraid of what he would grow up to be if something wasn’t done about his father.

He was nine when I left and still very much a baby, teased by his siblings and foster siblings for being fat, for being stupid, for being a virgin. But his face had passed from the sweetness of babyhood to a permanent state of confusion and of something else, something scary. He doted on the fish in the pond and pulled salamanders from under it to dissect on the kitchen table while they were still alive. Package after package of salt disappeared and we discovered he was using it to melt snails. One afternoon, I came upon him trying to chop off my dog’s tail. He seemed to enjoy killing and maiming; the adults were amused by it. Later I learned that as he entered his teen years, he had become increasingly angry. At fifteen, the last child in that house, he stabbed his father over and over and over, continued stabbing him after he was dead.

Often, we want to demand that God intervene – just in this one instance. He should prevent, should somehow fix things so that children have an opportunity to grow up before being attacked by the horrors of this world. How can he possibly allow little children to be scandalized, to have their consciences offended, to suffer the sharp swords of Herod’s soldiers? But all that is only distraction from the real question: Why doesn’t God protect little children from us?

We are Herod. We are his soldiers. We hurt children, abuse them, kill them. We ignore their cries, their pleas for help, their needs. We may harangue God, may insist he is callous and hateful, but our tirades only serve to distract us from the crimes we commit against babies, against children, against little helpless people who cannot understand the hells we make for them.

Freedom is a terrible gift: We are free to choose to be made like God, free to try to be gods. When we try to be gods, we cut ourselves off from God and become diabolic, create parodies of hell, destroy those we should love and protect. And God does not undo our choices: if freedom is to be free, consequences must be real. When we choose to destroy, there will be victims and children make excellent ones: it is so easy to impose our will on them, so easy to destroy them.

Abusers do not admit that they are destroying children. They are teaching them, correcting them, giving children what they need, what they deserve, what they are asking for. Fond of quoting scripture, my foster father, a Southern Baptist minister, had often repeated, “Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it.” (Proverbs 22:6)

I was not surprised to hear that my foster brother had killed his father. He did what he was taught to do. And I do not know if at that moment, my fifteen year-old foster brother was free to choose or if his pain overwhelmed him and all he could do was lash out in an attempt to end it. But I do pray that he and my foster siblings and all victims of abuse will choose to depart from our training, will choose to seek healing. And I pray for my continued healing. We can set up our own hells but they will be no better and can be much worse than the hells others created for us. We can become Herod or we can be like St. Joseph and our Blessed Mother – destroy or love and protect ourselves and the children God brings into our lives. We could not choose then. Though it is painful and heartbreaking, we can now.

Matthew

Matthew died half an hour before I met him. As we entered the hospice, a nurse met Sr. Josephine and me and asked that we go and pray over his body. I do not like dead bodies but I felt the familiar intense tingling that told me this was important so I followed the sister to the small back room where he lay.

As we walked along, the nurse told us a little about him. Drugs had ruled most of Matthew's brief life; he was about thirty. Just before Halloween, he had taken an overdose; no one knew if it was accidental. Matthew had been in a coma for about a month. His brain still functioned but medical science knew no way to wake him. His older brother had died of AIDS in this same hospice a year earlier and when the doctors determined that death was certain, Matthew’s family had arranged for their younger son to die also in this familiar place. Half an hour after his arrival, while the nurses were still settling him, Matthew died.

The nurse opened the door and we breathed in sweetness. A clear, high, just within range of hearing chorus filled the room with a song of joy. Peace welcomed us into its richness. Heaven was rejoicing here in this room, invited us to add our voices to its song.

“Can you hear it?” I asked Sr. Josephine. “Yes,” she replied as she opened her prayer book to the prayers for the dead. I followed suit and our prayers joined the song:

“Into your hands, O merciful Savior, we commend your servant Matthew. Acknowledge, we humbly beseech you, a sheep of your own fold, a lamb of your own flock, a sinner of your own redeeming. Receive him into the arms of your mercy, into the blessed rest of everlasting peace, and into the glorious company of the saints in light. Amen.” (from the Book of Common Prayer)*

Whatever dissipations he had indulged in, whatever sufferings and torments he and life had heaped upon his soul, something had happened to Matthew while he lay in coma. I believe some cleansing, some healing, some radical change had come into the young man whose body lay on the bed. And now, in this place that should have been so terribly sad, heaven sang Alleluia.

This was almost too rich for human presence. I was nearly exhausted with wonder and was glad when we fell into silence. It was very good to be here but I could not stay very long. The experience was too big. Actually, I was too little. I wanted to leap into a grande jetes. I wanted to sit quietly and let it encompass me. Sr. Josephine sent me out of the room; tears began to flow as soon as I closed the door.

The operation of heaven in this young man’s life, its condescension were overwhelming. I wondered if Matthew had been like a broken limb that must be immobilized in order to heal. I wondered that God would do it, would immobilize this little lost sheep who must have been filled with terror, unable to seek healing without enormous help. I believed that God would do anything to find us, knew that heaven rejoices when we are found, but I had never seen it like this before.

The risk that heaven took was heart breaking. What if even a coma had not been enough? What if the suffering he had undergone during these past weeks had not led to this?

Yet now heaven sang Alleluia. What should have been an occasion of great sadness was a time of immense gratitude and joy.


* I was a member of the Anglican Communion at the time and was discerning whether I had a vocation. Though the community was mostly contemplative and becoming more and more so, the hospice was their one external ministry.

Rebellion

Two nights ago I lay awake after I had said my prayers and read enough to be nice and drowsy. Sleep would not come. I was not hungry. I was neither too hot nor too cold. There was nothing preying on my mind. I had taken my medication and my vitamins. It was none of the usual culprits. The air in the apartment was extremely dry, it recently became cold enough in New York for the heat to come on. The pain in my sinuses was terrible but surely it would not keep me awake. I lay awake in the dark wondering why sleep eluded me and fussing at God.

In my study, two doors away, the humidifier I use in the winter was out ready to be filled when the air became dry. But I was too tired and decided to do it another night. Then I remembered the trivia quiz that I must submit before the end of the day. Since forfeiting was unacceptable, I got up, went into my study, booted my laptop and completed the quiz. I decided I was much too tired to carry the humidifier down the hall to the kitchen and went back to bed. A while later I got up, passed my study and continued on to the bathroom but decided I was just too tired to deal with the humidifier. Finally, about a quarter of two, I decided I would not sleep, got up and filled the humidifier. Over the next hour and a half, as I waited for the pain to subside, I told God that I am exceedingly stupid, that I might have been asleep already, that lack of sleep meant the next day would be awful. Finally I said, “You know what the problem is, don’t you? I’m in rebellion against you.”

It’s true. I am in rebellion against God though my actions don’t look or feel like rebellion. I’m certainly not doing anything as horrid as Lucifer did (whatever it was) to be thrown out of heaven. My actions can’t be as bad as Eve’s or Adam’s. Most people probably would not consider them rebellious at all. But I can’t escape the truth. In its tiny little way, my rebellion is absolutely real.

I was angry that night. I have lived with illness much of my life but until four or five years ago, I could usually ignore it. Now I can’t. And sometimes, much of the time, I just want it not to be real, not to be in my life. Certainly pain and fatigue and feeling like crap are no fun. But what I really hate is all the work. I don’t want to wake an hour early to take the one prescription that will only fit into my schedule at that time. I don’t like that I must be closely attentive to my diet to be certain that I get enough protein. I don’t want to need to remember to remove my contacts as soon as I get home and use eye drops. I don’t want to have so many medical appointments. There is a long list of things I don’t want to do and that night, filling that humidifier was just another thing on the list and the list was just too long.

My rebellion isn’t limited to an occasional humidifier incident or skipped pill. I rebel every single day, sometimes many times a day. It’s so easy for me to begin reading a book because I don’t feel like getting dressed in the morning. I will ignore a necessary task because I’m just not in the mood. I will even put off buying something I need, even food, because I’d rather watch reruns of (the original) Star Trek than go to the store. Reality is often not to my liking.

There’s something petty and inept about my rebelling. Big rebelliousness would require an awful lot of work and I’m much too lazy. Perhaps if there was a lot of unguarded money lying about or if it was easier to remember to hate or if I didn’t get distracted when devising interesting things to do to the people who annoy me or if I could think of how to kill someone without becoming utterly disgusted and knew how to dispose of the body effectively, I might do something really spectacular. But I’m usually limited to some sort of pout.

My rebellion is effective though. I excel at exacerbating my sufferings, even at creating suffering. I’ve missed many nights of sleep because I was pouting at God. I’ve been cold and hungry and had really gloomy days because I refused to do something that I felt I shouldn’t have to do anyway. As a teenager, I ignored increasing pain in my foot until the injury was so bad I was forced to give up ballet because I didn't want anything to interfere with my dancing. (I’ve been rebelling since I was a child.) And because I had better things to do, I ignored my worsening health for months until my skin was literally breaking apart because of malabsorption and my oxygen intake was down to 29% of normal. Certainly others are affected, perhaps more than I know, but I always, always hurt myself, sometimes very badly.

And I have absolutely no excuse. My life has been very difficult but God has cared for me, has been a palpable presence to me as long as I can remember. In fact, I have absolutely no memory of a time without him. I have been without people, I have never been without God. Even before I had language to express it I knew, people might do horrible things to me but that wasn’t God’s fault, wasn’t God’s desire. My life is evidence that God is trustworthy, evidence that he loves me. I know I am very, very fortunate. I have what I need. I have enough: a humidifier, food, medication, clothing, some of the best doctors around, a job with excellent health benefits, even an alarm clock that reliably wakes me so that I can take the first pill of the day. All I must do is toss out my list and use what God has provided.

There is only one reason I rebel, I want to be exempt from living in this broken, sinful world. I want the world to be as I think it should be. I want to be as I think I should be, as I know I should be, something greater, something not limited by all the silliness of this reality. I am aware of an immense desire to be free from the discomforts and restrictions of life on earth. I am Eve’s daughter; I even want God to be as I think he should be. Chances are I would have listened to the serpent too even though I love God. But I don’t love him enough so that I consistently obey his command to love as I have been loved, even when I am the person I should be loving, even when I know the cost of disobeying him is suffering.

Those Damnably Inconvenient Corpses – Part III

In the book of Job, Satan is depicted as an accuser who insists that Job only loves God because God has blessed him. He desires to prove his point by harming Job, first destroying all that he has including his children and then, when Job’s response fails to fulfill Satan’s expectations, by afflicting him with noisome boils all over his body. It is a cruel stroke. Not only does Satan deprive Job of his health but also of his community.

Job contains an excellent snapshot of Satan: always looking for evil in God’s creation, looking for evil in us, desiring to harm us in any way he can, out to separate us from ourselves, from community, from God. The ancients Israelites accurately depicted Satan then and he hasn’t changed.

He was calm. Concerned for me. Concerned for marmar. He waved us back but his focus was on them. I have no auditory memory of his last words but I understood their meaning then as I do now: ‘You needn’t do this thing.’ They had choice. They behaved as if there were no possibilities. Like Adam and Eve, they had suppressed God’s voice until there was no memory of that which would have caused them to laugh at themselves in disbelief or bawl because they contemplated committing such horrors. So they followed even when they were led away from being human.

If we have enough courage to examine suffering closely, we will find “hatred for God and his kingdom.” (1) We will find Satan – not as a curiosity, nor as a convenient name for evil, nor as a metaphor for the process of maturation in which we separate from our parents and become autonomous, but as an actual being. Paul’s principalities and powers and “spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places” (2) are not just bad feelings and inclinations. We are involved in something more than a psychological exercise. We are involved in a real fight with real casualties.

We don’t want to believe in the existence of Satan. He’s something out of a past we think best left behind, a past full of unimaginable ignorance. We are convinced ignorance saw demonic possession where there was only illness, saw the devil in normal behaviour, saw the wiles of Satan instead of the backwardness of society. Today we are wise. We have explained the devil away. And though we have learned much through science and through psychology and medicine, if we are honest, we know we have not been able to rid ourselves of Satan. We hear his voice insisting we can do quite well without God. Satan’s power is not the brilliant spectacle depicted in horror films or in science fiction and fantasy. He is a being with a seductive voice who lured our first parents into disobeying God and today is still “prowl[ing] around like a roaring lion, seeking some one to devour.” (3) We are his prey. We are the casualties.

Since our first parents listened to him, we have been prone to give credence to that voice sounding in our hearts and, through the voice of a stranger, the voice of a loved one, in our ears. His promise to us is the same as it was to them. We are to be like God knowing good and evil. Satan seeks to frighten us, mislead us, entice us into joining his rebellion not for our good, and certainly not so that we can be free from the shackles of ignorance and superstition. In a hideous parody of God’s ultimate plan for us, we are to be free to hate and destroy, to enslave others, to be enslaved, to be so familiar with evil that we hate good – we are to be free to be like Satan.

We play into Satan hands by convincing ourselves that he is merely a figment of our imaginations. In truth, we have been born into a war zone where we are “obliged to wrestle constantly if [we] are to cling to what is good.” (4) But if we will not even admit his existence, his battle is won. We are like the dwarves in the C. S. Lewis’ The Last Battle sitting impotently in the darkness. We can only fight him if we will acknowledge his existence and seek help. At times I wonder what might have happened if our first parents had told the serpent they’d get back to him after their stroll with God. (5) How might the story have been different for all of creation? We cannot know but we do know that through heeding Satan’s enticement to disobey, they lost humanity’s original holiness and justice and now, against Satan, the strongest of us is less powerful than a newborn fighting an adult. Alone we can never hope to withstand him.

The scandal of Christianity is that God has not treated us at all as we did him. Though we chose to rebel, God has chosen to enter the war and fight for us not as supreme commander transmitting orders from a safe, distant place but as one of us, subject to the same battles that beset each of us each day. He enters into the fray against the forces that seek to destroy us and is betrayed and executed as an enemy of the people; he is the supreme casualty. The story should end there and if you or I were the author, it would. But where we would end, God makes a new beginning. Though war rages, the outcome is sure, God will win. He has neutralized the enemy’s best weapon: fear of death. And by becoming man, “by taking [our] manhood into God,” (6) he has made it possible for us to participate in his victory if we will turn away from that insidious voice, if we reject Satan’s ‘freedom’ and instead be set free to be fully human, to grow into God’s image and likeness, to love him so much that even the wiles of the devil can only make us more like him.

I sat on the floor in the church between the coffins – one for grandpére, one for Ti. The adults cried but I did not understand why. Lying there crumpled against the wall, he had not been unhappy, had not been in pain. He had been concerned for me, for marmar, for them. I could recall his face. And even now, he was more calm, more still, more full of peace, more my grandpére.

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1. The Catechism of the Catholic Church ¶ 395
2. Ephesians 6:12
3. 1 Peter 5:8
4. Gaudium et Spes
5. Genesis 3:8
6. The Athanasian Creed

Changes

Upon reflection and consultation, I decided to split my original posting of Those Damnably Inconvenient Corpses - Part II into at least two posts.

Also, I've turned off the word verification feature. It's terribly annoying. Assuming there is no onslaught of advertisements, it will stay off. (It truly is terribly annoying.)

Those Damnably Inconvenient Corpses - Part II

The sufferings and tragedies that befall every living being may be nothing to "God," but they are ne plus ultra to the experiencing individual. And though "God" could presumably cause us to forget them utterly in that fabled Heaven, even he cannot cause them to not have happened! They are not illusory; they happen--and they are unrecissible [sic], even for "God."(1)

The story of Job is ancient, predates the account we have of Abraham by hundreds of years. It is a sophisticated book, a retelling of an ancient tale and related poetry that was specifically structured for a Hebrew audience. The Hebrew author probably added the introduction and conclusion as well as Elihu’s speeches. But the original core material is contemporaneous with the Epic of Gilgamesh. Both are concerned with basic human desires: Gilgamesh with the escaping death and building something that will exist after it, Job with loss and suffering.

Losing a child and certainly all of his children would have been an immense tragedy for an Israelite. So the deaths of Job’s ten children would have precisely expressed the overwhelming loss that Job suffers. Yet, as the story progresses, only once does Job mention his dead children: "Oh, that I were as in the months of old, as in the days when God watched over me; …when my children were about me…” (2) When Job is restored, his children are not mentioned at all which, from a literary perspective, is not surprising. The Hebrew author was writing a story that ended ‘happily ever after’. Just as her dead mother is not mentioned as Cinderella rides off with the prince, Job’s dead children are not mentioned as part of his restoration. Doing so would cast a pall on the happy ending.

But for us, Job is more than just a story in the Bible. His dead children cannot be forgotten. Their unremarked deaths are horrifying. They are like an accident in the road. We must look. We point to them as if to say, ‘Didn’t you forget something important God?’ We have a sneaking suspicion, even a firm conviction, that if God is all good, all love Job’s restoration would not have included ten replacement children, but the resurrection of the ten who cannot be replaced.

For years I begged God to return my parents. I pleaded, even raged at him. It was impossible to accept their deaths, utterly impossible. I became like Sarah Crewe in Shirley Temple’s version of Frances Hodgson Burnett’s, A Little Princess: I did everything I knew, followed every suggestion, every shadow, spent more money than I had. They must be alive. They simply must. When I found them, everything would finally be alright again. All my work, all my suffering would result in restoration. I found blank, empty death. But I was not empty. I was filled with a liquid heartache that had only increased with the effort I expended in wishing them alive, a heartache that was always on the verge of spilling forth. How could I possibly live with such loss? How I could possibly live without my marmar and papa?

I did my best to accept that their deaths were in service of freedom. That they had been an opportunity for those who killed them to choose life rather than take it. That choices are real and so the bullets which killed them must also be real. That even my suffering as a consequence of others’ actions must be real. But my losses were too heavy, absolutely unbearable. And what of my marmar and papa? What did they lose? How badly did they suffer?

One night I dreamt that I walked down a road. Marmar held my left hand and papa my right. Angels surrounded us, two on the left, two on the right, two in front and two behind. I knew that it had always been this way. I knew marmar and papa had never left me, that I had never been alone. I knew that they are alright, that they have not been forgotten.

To the Hebrew author, Job’s dead children were a literary device who could be used to convey something to his audience and then discarded. But we can’t discard them and neither can God. He does not unmake their deaths. That would trivialize their final action. Though they did not choose to die, death was still their final action and it had great value: it began the process of grief that led Job to confront God face to face. Job’s children participate in his transformation and, though the author forgets, God remembers them. More to the point, he remembers us and those we lose; he knows how heavy our losses are.

The Christian claim is that Christ died and, because he is God, rose again from the dead. Because he is also man, we participate in his death and resurrection; through Christ, we are God’s adopted heirs. Death can no longer hold us: if we will follow the method he has given us, death, though not stripped of pain and suffering, is simply a doorway that leads to our inheritance. The emphasis is nearly always on us, on how Christ made it possible for us to become like him, to become more than dust, to do more than return to dust, but we spend little time remembering God’s losses.

How was it for God when our first parents chose to disobey him? When they chose death? What is it like for him when we continue to reject him? We know he loves us and longs for us so much he constricted himself into human flesh and came to be with us but what was taking flesh like for God? What was it like for the Father as he watched his Son die? How was it for God to somehow abandon himself?

If we imagine that God does not understand our losses or forgets them or trivializes them, then we must also imagine he trivializes his own. If he is cold to us, he must be cold to himself. Yet Christmas is heralded by angels and astronomical wonders. Good Friday witnesses an eclipse, earthquakes, opened graves, the tearing of the Temple veil. God marks events in his Son’s incarnation and he marks them in our lives. There is no coldness in God, not towards his Son, not towards us. But if he is to honour our freedom, he cannot unmake the consequences of our choices without making freedom meaningless, without making our lives just a film to be edited at a whim - even when they break our hearts, even when they cost us our lives.

The dream brought me a great deal of peace, was one of many gifts that made it possible to accept, to heal, to work towards truly living happily ever after. And though a story, Job could die satisfied even after losing ten children. Not because he had ten more, but because he had seen and spoken to God. And once you’ve seen him you know, he does everything to heal and restore us except violate the very thing that makes us like him, our freedom - even when it breaks his heart, even when it is at the cost of his life.

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1. Everybody’s Favourite Victim,Comment #52, The Raving Atheist
2. Job 1:2-5

Those Damnably Inconvenient Corpses - Part I

“Why?! Why did you –” I could not finish the sentence, could not let myself say those words. So instead, “Why did I have to see it?! Why?!” That expressed it, or at least enough of it. My next words came out in a wild, shrill crescendo of rage: “How could you have done that to me?! How could you?! How?!”

For days I had exuded searing misery. I cried at home, on the train, as I walked down the street, even at work in a very conservative, very correct law firm. My office was also the document repository for a mega-litigation but I emitted such pain that my co-workers sent lower level employees who knocked timidly and only when absolutely necessary. Occasionally I would hear, “Are you alright?” as I opened the door just enough to pass out what was required. But mostly they simply took what I proffered without comment.

Mine was an ancient pain beyond utterance and I could not have said whether I was angry or sad or filled with hate. And until now words had not come along with the tears only pain. But when words did come it did not surprise me that rage accompanied them. That too was ancient. In this time of looking into the past, of accepting that what was there was part and parcel of me and could no longer be ignored, rage had finally been given safe passage and was quite pleased to emerge whenever necessary.

I have no memory of a time when God was not a palpable presence in my life and I had become accustomed to his voice: a soft absolute certainty within the ears of my heart that I usually understood without words. But this afternoon a voice rang clearly and though my physical ears could not hear it, that voice filled my cavernous office: “Your grandfather’s life was worth no more to me than the lives of those who killed him. Your parent’s lives were worth no more to me than the lives of those who killed them. Your life is worth no more to me than the life of every other person I have created.”

In that moment I saw again the scene that had been replaying itself in my mind for years, the scene that had finally left me overflowing with misery. Two men in fatigue green uniforms faced grandpére separated from him by his desk. Marmar and I stood across the room, perhaps five feet away. I was about three. Even though it was all excruciatingly familiar, there was something new this time. Usually I saw it from the height of a three year old. With the confused lack of knowledge of a three year old. Experienced the numbing shock as a three year old. But this time my perspective was different. This time I observed from outside, from another height, another place.

The commander spoke. The other soldier took a gun from his holster. I knew what the gun held, knew its contents were real, that they must be real, that it was fitting for them to be real. I watched him level the gun at grandpére and waited in an eternal instant; I knew I watched choice. And when the soldier moved his finger and grandpére was thrown against the wall I heard myself moan in agony not because grandpére was dead, not even because I had seen it, but because of their choices.

The most important people in the room that day were those soldiers and years later I finally saw it. But at the same moment the ugly hatred that had filled my soul, that I had suppressed when it longed to demand of God why he had let my grandpére die began to well up inside me once again: What those soldiers had done to me was all that mattered. What they deserved for hurting me, for hurting him, that’s what counted. (I could feel my face pouting.) Yet I was curious: I wondered how they had felt. I asked God if they had had children, had had little girls like me. If they would want their children to see such a horror. I wanted to know what had happened to them: If they had found healing, had sought forgiveness. God did not answer. The ugly hatred tugged at my attention but I wanted to know. It was intolerable that they should carry that ugliness forever, intolerable that they should never be free of it. I heard myself asking God to please make them whole.

That request opened a new flood of tears but not tears of misery, nor of rage, nor of hatred. Now I cried because something hard and painful had been pulverized and was being washed from my heart. I cried because I realized that my beloved grandpére had loved those who had killed him. I cried because I was worth no more than anyone else. And I cried because I realized that God had offered me choice and showed me that I could love the unlovable.

Everybody’s Favourite Victim

“God was unjust to Job. His faithfulness and piety deserved better treatment,” proclaimed the professor of a course I was taking in literary depictions of justice. I was shocked and totally disagreed but at seventeen I had no words to help me express my dissent only the absolute conviction that God is never unjust and that the professor was missing something of vital importance. Of course most people would agree with my professor. Job suffered terribly. God gives Satan permission to harm Job and even admits that Satan "moved [God] against him, to destroy him without cause." So it should all be very simple. On this occasion, God must be unjust.

I first read the book of Job when I was five and was chiefly struck by the image of a dirty old man, clothed in rags, smelly, probably drunk (I’d already read about Noah), perched atop a pile of ashes scraping giant boils. A gruesome image. Over the next ten or twelve years, I read Job again, two or three times, and while the gruesome image remained, by nine, I realized his ‘friends’ were blaming him and wondered fearfully if they were right. By fourteen I was impressed but puzzled by God’s response – he never answers Job’s demands and accusations. Then there was the course when I was a sophomore in college which signaled the start of another eight years of pondering Job, of trying to understand God’s justice. On perhaps the twelfth reading I noticed for the first time a phrase I’d missed in the past. Sitting on his ashes after a seven day silent watch, Job curses his very existence in frustration and rage ending, “…the thing that I fear comes upon me, and what I dread befalls me.” But what had Job feared? He had had everything. I went back to the beginning and paid very close attention. As I walked alongside Job in my imagination, I saw him making continual sacrifices just in case. His was the behaviour of a frightened man, of appeasement – Job seeks to avoid God. In his speeches, Job expresses his feelings about God in language that is at first reminiscent of Psalm 8 but quickly moves to a place of terror and darkness: “What is man, that thou dost make so much of him, and that thou dost set thy mind upon him, dost visit him every morning, and test him every moment? How long wilt thou not look away from me …thou watcher of men?”

For Job, God is cruel and exacting, lying in wait for him to err, lying in wait to punish him with His terrible glance. This had not been discussed in that course on justice. In fact, no one – not my foster-father (a Southern-Baptist minister), not the priests and nuns who had catechized me, not even my old Testament professor – ever mentioned how Job feels about God. They focused on Job’s sufferings but failed to look at his actual relationship with God, a relationship in which he seeks to remain safely in one corner and to keep God safely in another. They did not see that Job’s sufferings begin long before Satan “move[s] [God] …to destroy him without cause." To worship God in an attempt to keep him far away is to suffer horribly.

And it’s not that Job has done anything wrong. “There is none like him on the earth.” He is “a blameless and upright man, who fears God and turns away from evil.” In the midst of his fear, Job has done something very right. We would reward him. God does. He takes Job from an existence of anxious watching and waiting and sets his path through true suffering.

Before Satan is allowed to touch him, Job’s sufferings are of his own devising, they are the product of his convictions about God. But true suffering, increasing suffering, and in particular, suffering through his friends’ ‘consoling’ speeches, causes a gradual change in Job who at first speaks in platitudes about God, “the LORD gave, and the LORD has taken away; blessed be the name of the LORD." Eventually though, he begins to speak to God: demanding that God look away, insisting he is right even though God prove him wrong, proclaiming his conviction that he has an Redeemer, an advocate, someone who will take his part and that no matter what, he himself will see God face to face. And finally, the man who intensely desired God to stop looking at him recalls the time before he lost everything: “Oh, that I were as in the months of old, as in the days when God watched over me” and demands: “let the Almighty answer me!” Suffering has stripped Job down to his intense need for God to respond, to hear God’s voice.

And God speaks saying, This is what I have done, Job, where were you? Without answering any of the demands and accusations on Job’s list, God answers everything. His presence, his voice, his attention, his self revelation – God himself is Job’s answer. I imagine the anxious man filled with awe and wonder, laughing at himself and capering for joy as he says, “I had heard of thee by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees thee.” He must have flung the dust and ashes on which he had sat in the air for joy: how could he have known that God was really like this, that God would really answer him?

We are often like Job. We look on suffering as if it is the worse thing that can happen to us but fail to see that sometimes there is nothing else that will break down the stony walls we erect around our hearts, the adamant convictions that separate us from God. He made us to fit into and participate in the love that has always flowed between the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. But we are such terribly wounded people that we run from him as though he really is a hateful, cruel enemy. Yet we always run with hunger in our hearts, wanting him to see us, starving to know that he is watching. We will always be young children longing to call out, “Watch me! Watch me!” as we pedal our tricycles around the yard for the twentieth time in half an hour. God knows the hunger in our hearts whether or not we declare it. He sees us, not from high up in heaven, not from a far corner, not even through the kitchen window as he finishes the washing up, but right here, right now – we always have God’s undivided attention.

And sometimes that hurts – horribly. But the alternative is to have our way. And our way is filled with precise tallies of what we have lost and what we are owed, with minute detail of exactly how God is supposed to be. How tragic it would be if He gave in to us. Thank goodness God is not as we want him to be. Even when it means excruciating suffering, he knows how to give us the ability to relinquish our ash heaps and give up the bittersweet agony of being victims of his wrath; God always has far more for us than we can include on our lists. He has freedom and victory for each one of us – which is another thing that is so often missed, the end of the story, the victory.

Something radical happens to Job. He is given restoration and then some. His family and friends return: his community is restored. When Job prays for the three friends who came to “console” him he becomes the instrument of their restorations; sacrificing just in case another sinned becomes prayer for the real transgressions of his friends, prayer that acomplishes the mission God has given him. Job even becomes frivolous: at a time when daughters inherited only if there were no sons, Job shares his wealth among his sons and his beautiful daughters. Where once he was frightened and constrained, he is free to act outside the social boundaries, free to delight in the gifts God has given him.

Ultimately, we don’t understand God’s justice. It's not at all like ours. It doesn’t give us what we deserve. His justice gives extravagance, an abundance. And to call God unjust because he leads us through suffering is always to miss something vital. Often it is to miss that God has chosen to be not only a “watcher of men” but a participant in our lives so that real suffering will lead us to real joy.