There and Back, Part 1

While my journey back into the Catholic Church was a relatively swift one, spurred by a tangible experience of Christ's mercy and forgiveness back in 2002, my journey out of it had been long, slow, and meandering. I was never quite severed from my belief (someone once said that being a Catholic is like being from the South, something that marks you for life and that you can never really shake, no matter how you try); rather, I tried to pile a lot of other, strange beliefs on top of it, mostly in order to make the way I was living seem rational and justify it in my own mind. My trip away started in adolescence, when my parents, who were struggling in their marriage, stopped taking the family to Mass. From that point, I started down a path of a kind of casual, flaky neo-paganism to which I later on made more formal commitments, and which I now see allowed a great deal of evil into my life -- not that the doors to evil had not already been wide open, unfortunately, since my childhood.

There's a certain type of intellectual/artistic woman in New York City (and no doubt elsewhere) who rejects traditional religion and social morality in the quest for freedom and self-realization, but at the same time craves the connection and sense of rightness that those more traditional practices convey. She tends to take up non-western spiritual beliefs, or to accrue an amalgam of eastern and occult practices which she undertakes mostly on her own and sometimes with others. These patchwork belief systems are attractive because they seem non-judgmental; most of the time, this woman is getting her heart broken over and over in her search for love, because that's how it is, and, having abandoned traditional mores, she can avoid being indicted for her sexual behavior; the synthetic and syncretic belief systems instead provide means of explaining the heartbreak and jettisoning the notion of sin. While this woman is almost bound not to admit it, she's really searching and hoping for a real love, one that will last, i.e. a traditional husband, but she's not allowed, by the standards of the company she keeps, to come out and say so. The morality of this company accepts that people will partner up and then drift apart, and that women can't expect commitment from most men, even after they've given all of themselves; though they may try to pretend otherwise, this state of affairs is usually devastating for the women in question.

I think that in many ways the accretion of beliefs that these women profess is meant to soothe their troubled souls from so much heartache, and to give them a sense of power in the face of such powerlessness. I've known many of these women; they've been friends, colleagues, family members, and respected teachers. I can see now what I couldn't see then: that moral relativism is a subtle ploy of the enemy, one that has a particular appeal to intellectuals, and that it leads to sin, excuses sin, and then perpetuates the cycle. The first stirrings I had that it might be a load of crap were when I would hear women of this type say about abortion: "Well, I would never have an abortion myself, but I am committed to other women's right to have them." Being post-abortive, hearing this was always like a kick in the stomach to me. You mean you DIDN'T think abortion was okay? At least not for you? And if it's not okay for you, why would it be okay for me, or for anyone else? I assumed that something that people were organizing about, marching for, professing, and demanding must be something, well, in the interest of the common good, but my pro-choice friends clearly thought abortion was a bad thing that other women (subtext: other, less-fortunate, women) should be able to have without questions or restrictions. Believe it or not, I found this shocking.

The disconnect in logic, morality, and compassion in this paradox began to awaken my sense of horror at my own abortion, as well as my acceptance of the need for real forgiveness, not the kind of self-made forgiveness cobbled together from the ideas encountered in books on meditation or the tarot. The shifting definition of the good -- that what would be repellent to me might be swell for you -- was understood by the women in my circle to be the price we paid for liberation, and heartbreak the price for freedom and the journey to self-realization. This was the real world, was the message: no longer the safe, constricted world of our mothers. The real world, real relationships, real love, were categorically NOT safe, and we were brave women, we told ourselves, for venturing out onto those choppy waters. Because there were so few tangible rewards in any of it, the journey itself, or so all the books claimed, was supposed to be its own reward.

I am one of the lucky ones who got out. This has meant a certain distancing, if not a complete break, from many of my old friends. It's also meant that I am forever, in a certain sense, marked by heartbreak. This is not to say that I don't have joy in my life; I do. Joy, however, does not cancel out heartbreak; in fact, real joy can never really be that distant from heartbreak, as we know from the Gospels. Joy and pleasure are not the same thing. Conversion has made me a different person, and yet I'm also the same foolish, misguided, deluded, and desperate woman I always was. Heartbreak has left a permanent mark on me, and I pray that it may be a sign to others not to go the way I went.

The Cross

I signed up recently to get the e-newsletter of Canadian Catholic artist and writer Michael D. O’Brien. I have not yet read any of his novels, but have a couple of them on request through the public library. They seem to be popular; although I made my request a few weeks ago, they still haven’t arrived at my library branch. What interested me in O’Brien is the fact that two of his novels feature as their hero the fictional Fr. Elijah Schäfer, a Jewish convert to Catholicism and a Carmelite priest. As some of my readers know, the current focus of my scholarly work is the association between music and conversion, and I have a special interest in conversion stories (interestingly, the Carmelite path is one that has traditionally brought Jewish converts into the Church, the most famous examples in our time being Saint Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, who was martyred, along with her sister Rosa – also become a Carmelite nun – at Auschwitz. Carmelite saints Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross were also of Jewish extraction, though it was their parents who converted). O’Brien is also a wonderful icon painter who incorporates native Canadian techniques and iconography into his work.

His monthly newsletter arrived in my inbox this morning, and it was astonishing. He writes about the culture of moral relativism (i.e. the culture of death) in a fresh, illuminating way that transcends the defensiveness and partisan bitterness I’ve come to expect from American conservative Catholics, who sometimes have a bunker mentality when it comes to accommodation with the current state of things. One of the hardest things for me to accept in the wake of my own conversion from being a semi-glamorous and entirely selfish single New York singer is that the values I once held, while in keeping with this state of things, are antithetical to the way of life I now attempt to espouse. I often console myself for this by telling myself that the conservative Catholics around me are anti-intellectual Philistines who can’t possibly understand how important my life and work are (until I remember that arrogance and pride are among the defects I must work the hardest to conquer).

Reading O’Brien’s newsletter, however, has made me understand why my old values and lifestyle are not in keeping with the new life I stive for. “The economy,” he writes, “continues to inflate according to the now dominant model of family income: The majority of households in my country [Canada, though it might as well be the United States] are double-wage families with two or less children. The cost of housing, food prices, clothing, in fact the cost of almost everything, rises and rises. Contraception, sterilization, and abortion are the foundation stones of this economy [italics added]. So, too, is greed-profiteering, avaricious forms of speculation, and that old thing condemned by God... Usury. Yes, unfair interest, the backbone of our economy. . . . Those who do not play by those deadly rules have many crosses to bear. These extra crosses are due to the sins and blindness of others. Too often, a conscious or subconscious rationalism has infected the thinking of contemporary man, even men of good will, and one could go so far as to say many a churchman as well. In their assessments of what is 'reasonable' and possible for marriage in our times they have minimalized, or dismissed altogether, the factors of grace and the transforming power of sacrificial love. It's a temptation to get bitter about it. But we mustn't. The Cross is always unfair. Jesus's cross was the biggest unfairness of all time. But he bore it like a lamb and he turned it into a sign that confounded every device of the enemy. “

O’Brien goes on to exhort his readers to “do the impossible. Let us indeed do what rationalists cannot understand, that is, let us do the supra-rational thing, the eternal thing incarnated into the present moment. I mean, begin to praise and thank God for each and every one of the trials he permits in your life. Then watch what He does. He works everything to the good for those who love him. Don't give up, keep on praising and thanking, and locked gates will open, unhealable wounds will heal, the kremlin walls of hopeless situations will crack and let in light. One crack at a time, one brick falling at a time, one victory at a time. One step at a time and only enough manna for one day at a time, just as it was for our forefathers in the desert. . . . in this way we will advance in the Great School of the Soul that is married life and family. For none of us will it be easy. In taking our first tentative steps of radical trust, we will grow stronger, and I think wiser, and then our strides will become longer and more sure. Trust grows the more we practice trusting. And with it love grows, and in the process the unexpected occurs, the ‘impossible’ in the midst of the glorious ‘ordinary.’”

Inspiring words, and strangely timed to coincide with similar advice I received yesterday. I had gone to the church in the garment district in whose thrift shop I bought my beautiful wedding dress (which I’ll blog about later), where I hadn’t been in almost three years. It’s a rather decrepit old church, which I suspect is on the archdiocese’s list to close, but it’s beautiful inside, filled with icons and lit with dozens and dozens of real candles. I got onto the confession line, and when it was my turn, was astonished to receive a simple instruction that was nonetheless radical and transformative. As some of my readers know, I experienced both an ectopic pregnancy and a miscarriage in the past year, and a priest in my parish told me that God might be chastising me for the past sin of abortion committed seventeen years ago, for which I’ve long since been absolved. When I asked him how such chastisement could be squared with God’s promise to Jeremiah to “forgive their sins and remember them no more,” this priest cautioned me against “taking scripture out of context like the Protestants do.” After several weeks of despair, I decided that this what he said was simply a lie, and it ruined my relationship with him, whom I had considered a friend.

The priest in the confessional yesterday, however, said something that changed my heart. What my parish priest meant, he suggested, was that God allows us to suffer so that we can join our sufferings to His on the cross and offer them to Him in reparation for our sins. This seemed so different from the punishment I had inferred from my parish priest’s words, so different from the cynical spiritual economy I had imagined as God killing two of my babies for the one I had killed. I decided to try it, and to experiment with the belief that God’s allowing us to suffer might be for our good rather than for our spiritual destruction. The arrival of Michael O’Brien’s newsletter today illuminated this theology of suffering for me in a timely and beautifully cogent way.