What better time than finals than to catch up on all those little tasks that have fallen by the wayside?!? So here we go – my spiritual life in a blog post.
My first spiritual behavior has become a much repeated family story. I said my prayers every night like a good girl. I had a horse named Star (only one sister at this point). Said horse kicked the bucket. I refused to pray. My mother asked why, and I calmly explained that I prayed for Star and God took Star away so I would not be praying for anyone else I knew because then God would take them away too. This is essentially my spiritual life for the past 31 years, in a condensed and somewhat more adorable form.
My early spiritual life is almost exactly like Lindsay’s, with the addition of another sibling (3 to her 2) and a mother whose mental illness is starting to get out of hand and a father whose codependency erupts in rage. Add said mental illness, too many kids, not enough money, and by the time we moved from smaller stinky town to larger snootier town I was already doubting this ‘unconditional love’ business. Our first church was more southern in design, with Wednesday night dinners and lots of ‘He-eys’ when the ladies would greet each other, smocking projects in hand. It might have been hard to navigate but it was definitely a community. Our new church was… different. I was the only one my age and hitting that awkward tween phase. I did not fit in. They did not get me. I sang in the adult choir. I tolerated the clown ministry as long as I could (don’t ask). There were sweet, well-intentioned people there, we just didn’t connect. And if we did, it was shortly torn apart by my parents behavior. There was plenty of political maneuvering and backstabbing going around too – it wasn’t just my parents.
Then came ABY and Marie. I was doing a better impression of someone who belonged, while trying to hide my mess of a family situation. I was coming in to my own with the obnoxious intelligence bit, and frequently challenged our pastor on issues such as why Christmas trees were allowed on the altar but secular music was not (I think I won on that one… sort of). I was questioning, I was seeking. Marie was honest with me and would have real conversations with me without giving me pat answers. It made a big difference. My senior year of high school I was probably as close to God as I have ever been. Irrational as this may be, it probably had a lot to do with knowing that I would soon be moving away from my parents house and going to college. Still, it was pretty clear to me that being an American Baptist was not going to be a viable long-term strategy.
At college a friend asked me to attend a Catholic mass with her. I had been in middle school (to my current church, actually) and thought that it was nice but whatever. This time was different – the lightbulb went off and I felt at home. I thought, this is CHURCH! This is what I have been looking for. This means something to me. And so, I fell in love with the mass. It didn’t hurt that our college’s outstanding school of music meant the music at mass was spectacular. I had a few people that I knew there but I wasn’t really part of the Newman center, I still wasn’t even Catholic. But as graduation loomed and I started planning a wedding, I knew it was something that I wanted to do before we started our life together. My husband was raised Catholic but certainly wasn’t anywhere near practicing. It seemed miraculous to me that once we picked out a church, joined it, and had our wedding date on the books he was suddenly getting up to attend 8 am mass with me before work. Our new church was small but kind, very accommodating by bending the RCIA process so that we could be married as Catholics. It became our home very quickly.
Life went on and we (mostly) regularly attended mass. I missed the structure of RCIA and of the spiritual instruction that was part of that process. But we participated in a variety of ways, mostly musical. During this time I started going to therapy weekly to deal with my family issues and learn how not to have panic attacks at work (no thanks to my crazy bosses). It was during this time that Scott and I became friends. Having started my dance company I was surrounded by a great group of friends, who wouldn’t really identify themselves as practicing Christians but were absolutely spiritual people trying to find their way in the world. We are still friends, but motherhood has had its way with most of us.
It was my quest for motherhood that really started what we shall call… The Burning Time. Over a period of about a year and a half, my entire life seemed to be actively dismantled and left in shambles. I experienced a very early miscarriage and 17 total months of infertility, complete with the testing, treatment, questioning, despair, depression and grief that go along with that. I was hurt badly by people who seemed well-intentioned but were really cruel – one particularly bad incident at a church meeting. I was bullied by a coworker after having been promoted to an equal position, which ended only when I left that job. My husband’s family completely unraveled, between his mother’s terminal illness and his father’s mental illnesses. We had begun to take a lot of time off work trying to help resolve their medical, financial and legal issues. We hired lawyers. We moved them into a handicapped accessible house. And then we picked up the pieces when his dad went off his meds and committed felonies. He was in jail for almost 2 weeks, and we were suddenly responsible for his mothers 24 hour care. In the end I took an entire month off work. Meanwhile in my own crazy family, my college junior sister became accidentally impregnated by her veteran with PTSD fiancé and they moved the crazypants circus into my parents house. We had asked a pair of our friends parents, who had been part of my dance company and in general just good substitute parents to us, to serve as our ‘adopted grandparents’ for the child we could not create. During this madness we learned that our adopted grandma had terminal cancer. She was originally given 6-8 weeks to live. Weeks. (She died 48 hours after holding my son.)
Before The Burning Time, I had been trying to seek God’s will. I very much believed that we were starting a family for the right reasons at the right time, and that God would bless us for that and for being good charting Catholics before that. During The Burning Time, I did not find God. I sought Him. I tried to find peace and comfort and hope. I mostly failed. I very much felt that I had tried to be who and what He wanted me to be, and not only did He knock me down, He kicked me and spit on me and left me alone. It was the most painful 18 months of my life, and my life hadn’t been a cake walk before that time. After this experience, I was completely unconvinced that there was a God. Or that if there was a God, He certainly was no friend to me. I made the mistake of telling my sister, who was in seminary at the time, that I didn’t believe in God. Unsurprisingly, this resulted in lots of frantic phone calls among my family about intervention. Thankfully my authority as the oldest kept that from ever happening. But still. They would have forced me to believe if I’d have let them have their way.
In the end, I finally got pregnant. We stepped away from my in-laws and let them live their own lives. Things seemed to quiet down – not really getting better, just not getting any worse. After my infertility, I was way too terrified to enjoy being pregnant. I was way too frightened to really believe I was pregnant. (Clearly it was mono with food poisoning and a good case of breast cancer.) So what did I do? I tried to hide it from God. If anything slipped out of my soul, it was "Please let him be okay. You can hate me all you want, but he hasn't done anything wrong." And then I would stop myself as soon as I could. Because if God knew that I was pregnant, He would take it away from me.
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