Thinking about Him
a brief explanation
Ten years ago and godless I was driving with the windows down in traffic 103 degrees to get to work late. I smoked cigarettes and even though I was 24 years old ten years ago everyone was already younger than me. I doused myself in matcha-scented perfume from Urban Outfitters and you have to believe me but it was before matcha was cool. It did not mask the scent of cigarettes or the scent of my unwashed clothes but I was painfully unaware of myself in certain ways and painfully aware of myself in others. I had disavowed God and wanted to kill myself and each day I thought about killing myself, but if we are being honest I just wanted to condemn the people who loved me to a life of grief. I was angry. Every person I had ever loved was fucked up in some irrevocable way and so was I. Some of them were not so lucky, like how I found my ex boyfriend’s obituary the other day and it wasn't even a real obituary because it had all these typos and it wasn't even on one of the good obituary websites and they held his celebration of life at an apartment clubhouse and I know from how the obituary is written that he killed himself like he always said he would. There but for the grace of God go I.
Yesterday I took the baby to daycare for the first time and I hated the way the daycare smelled, like milk, like small children who do not belong to me. I cried and cried and I sat at my desk at work, my teacher desk because I have a salaried job now, and I remembered how I felt in the throes of postpartum depression when all I wanted to do was sell my house except for I do not have enough equity to sell my house so I was stuck here and I was forced to work a job instead of spending every single hour with my tiny little baby.
There is something profoundly wrong with how we are made to live. I knew that ten years ago and I know it now and I knew it as a child and I will know it for the rest of my life. And it has occurred to me that so much of this is because God is no longer present in our lives, and I don't think He has abandoned us but we have abandoned Him. Everything makes more sense now that I know I can look to him. I am still angry and still frightened and still anxious but I can confide all of this in Him and trust it will work out. When I look back on myself, godless strung out and in the desert, I know that He was watching over according to some larger plan. I do not know the end because none of us can never really know the end but I know that He knows me and he can see into the depths of my heart for better or for worse.
I felt strongly that I needed to post online about becoming Catholic because it felt dishonest to not post about it. Like I needed to say, to those of you keeping track at home, I Was Wrong all those years and I must Make It Right. One nice thing about faith is that now I get to believe that I am forgiven and absolved, and even better is that I cannot hide from God and I cannot hide from the Truth. So what I am saying is that God knows the truth and this is comforting to me. Every once in a while I will speak to someone I knew intimately five ten fifteen years ago and I come away surprised that they want to speak to me at all because at some point I convinced myself that anyone who knew me prior to however many arbitrary years ago would refuse to look me in the eye after everything I had done. And some of them would do that, refuse to meet my eyes, but the ones who still face me and have love for me - that's how I know God is there and knows me deeply. He saw everything I ever did, the same things people who are reading this and thinking maybe she has developed some acute form of mental illness saw and yet I am loved beyond measure.
When I first started down this path, I think maybe it would be known colloquially as a faith journey but I refuse to call anything a journey and certainly not a “faith” one, I listened to this podcast where the woman said that faith is a gift we have to keep asking for. And so I did. I did not think it would work but I kept showing up in this little church meeting room that has this sticker decal that says “THERE IS FUN TO BE HAD HERE” and I went to mass with my five month old and I said prayers and I asked for faith and then on Easter when the priest anointed my head with the chrism oil I wept and when I was able to take the Eucharist after all those months of preparation I took it on my knees because there He is and I am barely worthy of such a thing but who am I to doubt the depths of His love.
One thing about Catholicism is that they are always speaking of the mysteries of faith and when I went to OCIA I always raised my hand and asked for the etymologies because I didn't understand words like “grace” and “passion” and “covenant.” But before I could even ask one night the priest explained mystery from the Greek myein which means to shut or to close, which is a way of communicating there are some things we cannot know because our tiny little human brains cannot fathom those things. I have spent a lifetime trying to solve various mysteries such as the mystery of myself or why so and so was they way they were like what happened to you etc. so perhaps you would think that I would not be satisfied with being shut off or closed off from any knowledge. But it seems to me that mystery was written to calm my anxious mind. And it does in ways both known and unknown to me. And I'm not saying any of this will work for you but I am saying that I have been touched by His grace and I will spend the rest of my life trying to be worthy.
