Patty's Closet

Introduction

Last week I showed up at Mass more broken than I've been in a very long time. It was 6PM, long after my regular church has services. I walked into the alien church past the basket of palm branches, thought, I really don't want to deal with keeping track of one for most of the year and then returning it at the right time, and walked right on by. And then a still voice in my head reminded me that bitterness was a poor way to worship Jesus on Palm Sunday, and so I turned around and took a branch. Then I stood outside for the blessing of the Holy Water. I hung my head, too tired even to imagine myself laying it on Jesus' shoulder. I stood broken and empty, and the priest came through the crowd flinging Holy Water. It felt good in the Arizona heat.

I'm Catholic now, but I was raised Evangelical. Evangelical Christianity teaches that worship is one's own response to the liturgy: looking at God and being transformed by Him. So I always felt – on a level that I couldn't understand or explain – that a service where I felt nothing, learned nothing, did nothing beyond what was required of me, was wasted. I learned as much as I could until I hit the glass ceiling, complained about it, was chided for my arrogance in assuming that there ever could be a glass ceiling, and then suffered in silence, desperate to recapture the journey of discovery that had characterized my Christian life in my childhood and early teens. A Christian counselor told me to meditate on a specific chapter of Romans, to write down everything I thought of. I tried. I pulled apart the words, applying each one to things I could see and touch and understand, all the while hoping that God would reach through the words and change me. "You ain't meditating on the word," she said after receiving my feedback. Later I'd learn that she read my best efforts and learned that my heart was full of anger, and pain, and bitterness, and hatred, and ugliness. I had to "let" God change it, but I'd been trying for years without success. There wasn't much hope for me as a Christian from that point forward.

Last Sunday there were no Evangelical fireworks. I didn't learn anything new – since the Gospel reading was so long, we didn't even have a homily – and I didn't have any epiphanies in letting the old familiar truths transform my life. Last Sunday I didn't go into my usual failures as a Catholic. It was quite tempting to sit in the pew and brood and not pay any attention at all. I was actually disappointed when the liturgist said that the congregation would read one of the parts in the Gospel because that meant I'd have to do something. But it turned out to be the best way to usher me into the service after all. I've been approaching Mass as I would have as an Evangelical. Looking for my own responses, pleading with God to transform the pain and loneliness in my life, seeing mountains move and my own heart change. "Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day after day." And yet, after awhile, building those kinds of changes started to look like a circular path. They were important, but there was no life in them. This week I was just … there. Walking with Jesus through the Last Supper, into the Garden, outside, standing with Him before Pilate, and finally watching that one horrible monumental moment when the entire world went black. "How deep the pain of searing loss, the Father turns His face away," says the hymn. I can't remember how many times I've looped that particular hymn in my car over these past few days.

A few months ago, I started a project with a friend of mine to write journals chronicling our spiritual lives. I have only written three entries in mine so far. They aren't coming out right. I think a lot of my rage and pain at all the people who used God's name to try to force me to become someone I never could be – and at myself for trying so hard for so many years – comes through in the writing far more than my love for God. It is a failure in my words. Or perhaps … the magnitude of experience itself. Because my pain and rage at all those who tried to teach me what a Christian was is still very present and tangible. Not too long after that particular feedback from that particular counselor, I pushed everything and everyone out of my life, and started down the darkest path I ever have or ever will see – one that led me through the twists and turns of the mental health system, through the deepest possible methods to let my friends down, through the most extreme humiliation I've ever known, and eventually to the Catholic Church. And to the quiet peace of the chapel with its jar of the Host in the center and the words "Be Still and Know that I Am God" carved in the ceiling. It's been a long journey, but it's been worth it. I love being Catholic. And I am in love with Jehovah God, Creator of the Universe. If it wasn't for that, I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that I wouldn't be here. As it is, I'm finding my way.

But the question remains, what is a Christian? It's the central dilemma of my life, and it endures even beyond the traditional definitions ("a follower of Christ"), and – even though this surprises me – now that all the dust has settled in my transition to my new way of practicing my faith – beyond the liturgies of Catholicism. The Mass has forever transformed the deadness I used to feel in church when my feelings wouldn't cooperate, and now that I don't need to feel the same way as I used to try to force myself to as a child, the magic is returning in its own new form all on its own. But … day to day … what does it mean to be a Christian? For a long time I was hung up on the idea that it was that God was my best Friend, and that's true, but there are things only friends with flesh and blood and physical form on this world can do, and if that was all God was, He would be no more than an imaginary friend. Yet, He's not … it's much deeper and more quiet and profound than that. Most people in our society think that being a Christian means being a moral person. But only in the sense that being a gamer means you probably have good hand/eye coordination; it's a byproduct and not an essential one at that. Being "holy," set apart … doesn't give one an excuse for arrogance. I'm ashamed to admit that when I was a small child, there were a whole host of "bad" things that I was sure I'd never do. Looking back over my thirty years on this planet, I've done them all. And yet I feel closer to God now than I ever have been. And yet there are still unanswered questions.

My mother sent several boxes of items from my old room to me today. Tonight I pulled out items that I had not seen in ten years or more. I had a great time sorting out my old marble collection (and if I teared up a little as I remembered my childhood definition of beauty, there was no one around to see me) , and I introduced my eight month old kitten to my favorite teddy bear (and obtained at least one good photo of them together). Then I pulled out several folders of letters. These were letters that people wrote to me as a very young child, old camp cabin mates, summer letters from my dormmates in college, slightly awkward letters from those same dormmates when I'd left college suddenly and unexpectedly and for good, letters from the years beyond.

I barely remember my very early twenties (and don't ask me to describe my twenty first birthday for you, because I don't go there). That's not true – I won't let myself remember my very early twenties. The phrase "nightmare" doesn't even begin to describe it. I lost the old image of the Christian kid forever. I lost any hope of recapturing any of the old feelings, any of the old magic. My conception of Christianity was slowly and inexorably torn down, and as much as I grasped at the sawdust as it fell past me, there was no way to stop the collapse. I pulled away from people. I couldn't form enough of a coherent thought to have a conversation, let alone keep in touch by paper letters with people who I had loved as a child, but who I was no longer capable of loving since I was being enclosed in a constricting bubble of nothingness and thus had nothing good to say.

But yet there are letters from that period. Not just one or two. Three folders. Full of love and concern, full of thankfulness for my letters in reply – not just patronizing condescension, but real gratitude – conveying actual relationships. I hadn't remembered. And reading the openings and the signatures, I still don't remember.

It makes me wonder just how much the girl I was then shaped the woman I am now. It makes me wonder how much of her is left in me. I was sure there was nothing; after hearing my old favorite worship songs and feeling nothing, I was sure she had died and I had to build something brand new – a phoenix, traveling to Phoenix, AZ, to rise from the ashes. And I have rebuilt, and when I think of that little girl at all, I wonder how anyone could have stood her, and I pray for any vestiges that remain to be wiped from my life. And yet … I type the words but I can still barely believe the concept … people loved her. And God loved her. And she loved God.

Mom included something else besides the letters: a folder of essays I wrote for my Essay Writing class. Most of these are rough drafts. Most of them are printed on dot-matrix with the ink so smeared by the basement rains of ten years in Minnesota that it's barely legible. None of them are – in my eyes now – terribly well written. But they express a faith that was solid and real even before being transformed by Catholicism. And I think that, in remembering where I have been, I will be able to discover where I am going. As a Christian and as a human being.

I have attempted not to edit my work a great deal while typing it in. I have included reflections (written tonight, in the present day) after each essay.