A Royal Invitation is Issued and Accepted

Isn’t that a beautiful young couple up there, circa 1957?

They’re still a beautiful couple 62 years later, but the joy of that day — one that was reflected for all these decades through all of the ups and downs that go with a marriage, and a live fully lived — has become a bit strained. Through years of financial struggle and toil, and holding several jobs while trying to make ends meet in a working-class neighborhood in Queens, through raising five children and — in the toughest of moments, outliving one of them — this couple never flagged or failed. She was the one who couldn’t do enough for you, whether you were family or just a neighbor, maybe even a neighbor she didn’t particularly like but who nevertheless would be gifted with soup or plates of her meatballs and pasta if she’d heard you were sick, or struggling. She’d offer to throw your kids into the mix with her own, too. She’d pray a rosary for you while she was ironing shirts at ten o’clock at night.

And he was the man who worked several jobs, at all hours, but if he saw you working on your car as he was walking home from one of those jobs, he’d stop to lend a hand. He’d always have the tool you needed. If you were working on your house, all the better, because he loved carpentry, and doing dry wall, or just hammering wherever hammers were needed, and fixing where fixing could be done, because that was always fun!

They took the gospel seriously — those adjurations of Christ to walk the extra mile, to give without thought of cost. They raised their children to be like them: Faithful, giving and forgiving, out-reaching, helpful and kind. I remember, when our brother died, how they never sat, never rested during the wake; they were too busy consoling others, upholding young adults who sobbed in their strong arms.

When I think of the phrase “Saints alive!” I think of this couple.

My younger son — the one I used to call Buster — was married recently, but neither of his grandparents were able to attend, because Mom is now very ill. There has been months of deeply painful, difficult-to-watch suffering made even worse in the midst of lockdown and isolation, and by the limited ways their children were able to help.

And now, we are in a moment of true crisis, and whether we come back from any part of it all is at this point unknowable. The fine young priest, who officiated at their wedding, alive with the Holy Spirit, unknowingly delivered a sermon that hit on everything the family was going through, from the grandmother with the unduplicatable meatballs to the fact that all happy wedding days eventually encounter the cross, and particularly so at the end.

As I have written in this piece for Word on Fire, currently my in-laws, and by extension the family, are living the truth of his words.

And it’s hard. It’s really, really hard. But we are Catholics and so we know that while it’s hard, it’s also a privilege. We know that we have, with Mom and Dad, been issued a Royal Invitation:

Along with the Theotokos,

the Woman of the Fiat,

Jesus of Nazareth

a Son of David,

the Christ, the Messiah

the Strong One of Jacob,

King of Kings and Lord of Lords,

cordially invites you to join him

for an occasion of immense and exquisite suffering,

of indeterminate length

on the Via Dolorosa of his own travels

a path of isolation and loneliness

and the misunderstanding of others

concluding at Golgotha,

and with a shared experience

of his Cross

upon which room has been made ready

exclusively for you

for the sake of the life of the world.

You can read all about it, here.

It’s a time for hard questions. And hard answers. Ask Mary.

It’s a time for hard questions. And hard answers. All week long, I have been pondering this piece I wrote a while back, a mediation on why, if we keep the crucifix before our eyes, it will teach us everything, and train us for the long view

It’s not that I’m an egoist, so fascinated with my own words. In truth, most of the time I forget what I’ve written unless someone reminds me or I come across an old piece while doing research.

But this piece has been singing to me all week, and forcing me back into a contemplation I have always found instructive and stirring. So, I’ve been praying with it, as though I’d never written it.

Today, I was struck in particular by this graph:

“Ask Mary to teach you what she knows too, what she learned while she stood beneath the reality of it. Ask the Blessed Mother to explain about taking the “long view” of things, about keeping the faith even when one does not understand why things happen as they do; about how sometimes what is horrifying and unjust must happen, if something else—something remarkable and unimaginable and precisely what is required—is to be able to happen.”

That’s a hard, hard teaching to share with anyone. How to say to someone who is processing trauma that, “this must happen; you must surrender to it, allow it to happen, because there is a greater plan at work.”

It sounds so awful, so smug, so condescending, too. “Deal with your personal horror for the sake of future glory” is a hard message to take when you’re in the thick of something so awful you can’t wrap your mind around it; when you feel violated and shredded and you know with certainty that everything you thought you knew, everything that ever felt common, ordinary, reassuring or warm would now feel forever changed, because something has pierced you to the heart, beyond your heart, into your very soul.

And perhaps that’s why — if the instruction of the crucifix (which teaches precisely that hard lesson) is hard to absorb because Christ Jesus is the man-god and we are all too human — we might ask Mary, his fully human mother, to explain it, to show us how to do this. How to keep going in the belief that all of our sufferings are not pointless but full of meaning — especially when they are joined to Christ’s sufferings on the cross — and wholly purposeful within the divine plan beyond all understanding.

O Mary, teach us what you know. Pray for us who have recourse to thee.

Image: Wikimedia Commons/Public Domain

When a friend is suffering and you can’t help…

Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord, Lord, hear my voice!
O let your ears be attentive to the voice of my pleading.
— Psalm 30:1-2

The anguish Letitia Adams is experiencing as she is trying to process a whole life of pain, a lifelong sense of abandonment is more than most people can describe, but she lets loose on it at her blog, even as she declares she’s “taking a break” from writing from a Catholic perspective because, right now, that perspective is shot:

Before Anthony’s suicide, I knew what I wanted to do with my life and I knew what the purpose of it was. I wanted to go around and tell everyone what God had done in my life. I had 100% faith that God was going to take care of me and my family’s needs.

Right now, on June 27th, 2018, I do not even know if God is real. And if He is real then I am so damn mad that He has allowed this shitshow that is my life to happen, starting with my father abandoning me, a man raping me when I was five, losing two children in horrific ways and ending with the only man to take care of me dying in front of my eyes. I see other people complain about having to maintain their pools or “downsize” by buying a new house and I really want to just blow things up because if ONLY that was my problem in life instead of this crapfest that is my life which involves watering my son’s grave pretending that I still have something of him to care for.

I am not going to Mass anymore and I really don’t know if I ever will go again.

Letitia is in the hardest of hard places right now, and she is wailing and lashing out a bit in permissible, understandable anguish. There is really nothing one can do in the face of it, because no words can really answer it, as I write at Word on Fire:

We want to say, “Go to Mary, the mother who suffered the unjust, inexplicable and torturous death of her beloved son; she will understand and bring some consolation to you.”

But Mary, whose heart was “pierced by a sword” saw her son’s life remembered, and his death re-presented, by people who knew him. This mother is watching the world move on from her son, from his pain, and her own pierced heart.

We want to say, “Look at Jesus on the crucifix, and realize that he experienced everything you are feeling or have ever felt: isolation, abandonment, grief, betrayal, physical torture, injustice.”

This woman might reply, “But even Jesus had the good things I did not, like stability in childhood, a present father-figure, parents who did not leave him vulnerable to predators. I can identify with Jesus, and Mary to a point. But how can they identify with me?”

We have things we want to say — some of them are here, but right now, they cannot be received. And so all we can do is stand near, off in the shadows a bit, and consent to be a prayerful, loving witness to this pain.

If you are so inclined, please remember Letitia and her family in your prayers, and if you can hit her tip jar (see her sidebar), it’s another way to let her know you’re standing near.

Image: Public Domain

Suicide and Love’s Suffering: “Put religion on it” cannot be our only response

?Within days of each other, Kate Spade and Anthony Bourdain took their own lives, and the world responded as the world always does, by trying to find the simplest answer as to why people commit suicide and then finding the fastest and most practical way to address it so they can stop thinking about it. The number one guess for most people is “Depression”. And more times than not, this is true. Sure, there are treatments available and things that people can do – like have counselling or try using marijuana (although it’s important to be aware of the dangers of torches) – but not enough of those suffering with depression end up finding a suitable treatment before it’s too late. It’s simple; suicide is scary. We don’t understand it. We know we don’t want to ever experience it in our own families, and perhaps some of us feel like “there but for the grace of God, go I…”

So in the aftermath of Spade’s and Bourdain’s deaths, lots of people, feeling like they had to throw some sort of advice into our collective aching void of understanding, put suicide hotline numbers out into social media. Some offered prayers. A few voices — and sadly some were Catholic — thought the best thing they could do was say, “If only they’d had faith, they wouldn’t have killed themselves.” As though faith is a psychic bandage.

As I write today in my column at Word on Fire, “[If they’d only been Catholic] is a terrible charge to make against another; it’s right up there with saying that if only one had enough faith, one would never become ill. You might as well say that if only one had enough faith, one would never sin-something said by no saint, ever.”

Still, I don’t want to be too hard on people, because suicide makes all of us feel helpless, and when we feel helpless we babble incomplete thoughts, particularly when we encounter the bruising statistics about it. In our culture homicides get the headlines, but in 2016 there were 26,000 more suicides than homicides. Yes, it is a crisis, and so we must try to complete our thinking on this matter.

But where to start?

Yes, religion can help, but it’s not the “easy answer” some might think. For some, it takes years of study and devotion to get to the point where they feel happy and content in their faith, and they still may find themselves looking for Clergy resources to continue to enrich their studies and faith every now and then. Religion is certainly a lifelong pursuit.

At Word on Fire, I’m suggesting that we start by recognizing that not every suicide is due to depression. I’m also suggesting that perhaps we need to focus less on “having it all” and give a little thought to the fact that everyone suffers, or will suffer, and what suffering means when it resides right next to love.

Sometimes we are so full of self-loathing that the idea of anyone else loving us, much less the Almighty God who is All Good, seems frankly unimaginable because we’ve become convinced that we are All-Bad. This is a dark lie, of course, but when the feeling becomes ingrained within us the battle against it can be lifelong. It is usually in the weakest of our moments-moments that will pass, but while we are in them we cannot see how-that the fight is lost. We throw ourselves away, and the people we leave behind are left to agonize over why it was we did not believe in their love, call on their love, depend on their love, trust their love.

The thing is, we often don’t call on love because we do not understand love-few of us do, really. “Love is patient, love is kind,” wrote Saint Paul, and yes, it is that. But love is also complicated, as any child who has been molested by a family member or abandoned by a parent can tell you. Love means being vulnerable; love brings the pain, and the deeper the love (or the sense of having lost it, somehow, either through our own actions or the actions of another), the deeper the pain.

That’s why, even though we crave love and want to give love, we so rarely fully trust love.

I don’t have any answers. But you can read the rest of my thoughts here.

?By Source, Fair use, Link and AdrianKwok-cc

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