Ash Wednesday

I have been a faithful Catholic all of my conscious life, although I suppose I need to qualify both the term 'faithful' and the term 'conscious', especially in the event my mother is correct that Jesus sees everything I do.  By faithful I mean that I never actively questioned my faith in God, nor did I ever disavow my (uppercase) Faith.  And by conscious I suppose I mean from the moment that being a Catholic became an act of will.

We all experience life, spirituality, and perhaps most of all, organized religion, differently.  My experience of the Church has been about what I expect Its experience has been of me - steadfast fidelity even in the midst of betrayal and disappointment.  I am human and my Church, like all instruments of Man, is also human.  I remember being in confession once while in my 30s and asking the priest, who was someone I trusted deeply, why there was so much vitriol and intolerance voiced toward gay people even as we were in the midst of once again not fully coming to terms with priestly abuse - none of which was about homosexuality.  I was really trying to understand spiritually rather than intellectually - because the latter was very easy to do.  The Church needed to survive and it faced a difficult course toward survival, especially in America, if it acknowledged not decades but centuries of covering for priests who harmed mostly women and children.  I understood that as an institution it would take a pragmatic course - but I was dismayed by how readily attention was being diverted away from what was abuse of power and position and trust by what was hopefully a relative few - to condemning the God-given nature of so many of the faithful.  And, honestly the greater evil in the abuse situation was keeping it quiet, moving priests around, and not allowing the law to intervene where it should have intervened.

It reminded me of when a father abuses a child or a wife (which is not to say a mother does not also does these things, but for this comparison fathers suit the paradigm), and families close ranks and don't want 'outsiders' to get involved.  This not only excuses the harm that is done, but it shifts guilt toward the silenced because silence connotes shame, and it continues to enable and empower the abuser. Worse, it forces the harmed to become complicit in the abuse.  On its face, especially speaking as a Catholic who lives actively in the realm of a Faith that is about forgiveness and redemption, the silence forecloses healing.

We have an important sacrament in our Faith one that takes on a larger shape for people like me on a day like Ash Wednesday when we are humbled and wear the ashes on our foreheads, the reminder that there is no eternal life without death - that something must be rendered to ash in the first place. Which takes me back to that confession many years ago, for I believe it was also during Lent, when parishes double up on confession times and access as we roll into the long days of Lent.  I was mindful in sitting before Father, for I wasn't in a darkened confessional speaking remotely through  little window of anonymity as we used to do, but I was sitting across from him, looking into his kind eyes.  I took to heart as we should the admonition when we confess our sins and are allowed to do a penance to forgive the sins, that we are expected to go forth and sin no more - meaning not continue to mindlessly or worse yet, consciously, commit the same sins, especially if we have confessed anything egregious.  We all tell lies again.  We all think of ourselves first when we should be thinking of others.  We fall victim to vanity, selfishness, anger and other motives that lead to bad action.  That is human nature.  The things I confessed to Father that day, as on any other day, were things I wished to do no more, to rise above - and they were mixed with things I wished I could stop myself from doing again and that I hoped to gain better insight, strength, grace into avoiding.  In the past Father had forgiven me my lapses as had every other priest I'd ever confessed to since I was seven years old. As an adult I remained silent about some things that I knew were regarded as sins, but that I could not embrace as such with my whole heart.  That was the discussion I was having with Father on that day, and he forgave me, a divorced mother, for intimacy outside of marriage.  He forgave it readily, as he accepted my explanation that I certainly did feel it was a sin at times, but not where there was love involved.  And failing a Vatican reversal on divorce, I was not going to be free to marry again because I would not annul my first marriage.  Even in the painstaking context of canon law, I did not believe our marriage was less than sacramental, and I did not believe in reversing that after the fact.  Sometimes we have to admit to failing at things we had every opportunity to make successful.  That was my position anyway.  I did not consider myself married in the eyes of God any longer, but I accepted I would not be able to marry n the Church without an annulment.  So we were at a stalemate.  Father forgive me and told me I was likely to have a long wait before the Church would recognize divorce and remarriage.  He reminded me gently that he knew of many couples in our parish who had not been married in the Church, and yet they came to mass and they received the sacraments.  He told me he knew they did this in good faith.  That was their approach to the stand-off, mine was different.

But, as Father had so readily forgiven me it raised another conundrum for me.  There was no danger that I would approach Father to receive Communion on Sunday and be denied.  He treated me as a Catholic in good standing.  He recognized the world had become a more complicated place and that I had the option, always, to seek an annulment and remarry and then this whole confession thing would take on a lighter overall tone for me.  He understood my discomfort with annulment in my situation.  Sometimes a 'valid' marriage was a very subjective thing, made even more subjective after the fact when purse strings get loosened.  But, I am quibbling.  The rules are what they are.  At least, I advised Father, I have a pathway to grace, a route by which I can share physical love and have it embraced as part of a sacrament, the sacrament of marriage.  Not all Catholics have that pathway to grace, I reminded Father.  Rather than try to embrace those Catholics for the love they hold in their hearts, at the time of my confession the Church and many of the faithful were lashing out at gay Catholics.  Some even tied the criminal and reprehensible abuse some priests had committed to too much tolerance for homosexuality in the priesthood.   

Father acknowledged that was misguided.  It's true enough that given the stigma of homosexuality in the Church certainly some nuns and priests entered the orders not just because they were called, but also because it was convenient.  Still, all were called to celibacy.  Overwhelmingly the priests who committed abuse, or who broke their vows and left the priesthood, identified themselves as heterosexual.  This is no different than the incidence of pedophilia in the general population.  Many who abuse are married.  Sexual abuse is an act of violence.  It is about having power over someone else, making someone else vulnerable.  And when done under the color of authority, well that is an even greater violation.  It is absolutely nothing like falling in love with someone when you are not free to be in love with them, which also happens with priests and nuns sometimes.  It happens with married people too.  And, funny thing, even when falling in love with someone you are not free to fall in love with leads to breaking up a family, casting aside a spouse, in time all is forgiven.  That is the nature of redemption.  We make mistakes.  The heart wants what the heart wants.  We are selfish or we failed to speak up about our unhappiness - and eventually we get past the initial harm of the sin and onto the path of redemption.

As Catholics, Father reminded me, we have to forgive those who have sinned against us, including those who have done us egregious harm.  I acknowledged this and I tried to think at the time if there was anyone who had done real harm to me or to someone I loved (and thus to me by association), who I had failed to forgive.  No, I couldn't think of anyone.  We have to be able to forgive in order for the process of redemption to truly take place.  So, when Father advised me that the Church was acknowledging the harm but forgiving it, I accepted this up to a point.  The Church was being irresponsible about the go forth and sin no more requirement.  The Church enabled and even fostered recidivism by keeping things quiet and putting priests back into situations where they would harm again.  Just like those families that close ranks to protect their own end up in most cases having only enabled more harm - so too had the Church exalted the abuser in quieting the abused.  More harm was done - and on a great scale of magnitude than would likely have otherwise taken place had the Church really intervened to actively educate while also allowing law enforcement to come in and handle civil and criminal punishment.  

My struggle at the time was with how warmly the Church had embraced individual sinner who had done great harm, who continued to do great harm - but as a body, as a speaking body on Sundays in mass, it turned its back on individuals who had harmed no one and who would not harm anyone.  Why am I a Faithful Catholic today, ashes freshly brushed across my forehead in the sign of the cross?  In part because the Faith is not a provenance of man even as the Church of necessity is such a provenance - but also because Father nodded his head at me that day.  It's a grievous harm, he acknowledged, and one we will be many lifetimes atoning for - beginning with today.  He did not qualify for me whether he meant to sweep the two circumstances - the harm of priestly abuse and the greater harm of its cover up AND the treatment of gay people - into this summation.  But he left me to think for a while about my own sins, my own redemption, which I think is as it should be.  No one compels me to treat any other person in a certain way. No one compels me to be silent, to tolerate harm.  I have had to leave loved ones to God's tender care, to trust in His love not just as an article of Faith, but also as a solace against my own loss.  There is no rising from the ashes without something first having to have been burned down. 

On Ash Wednesday, on this specific Ash Wednesday as I am still actively mourning the loss of someone who was a lightness to my own being and as I continue to contemplate how best to direct the next stage in my own life - what course to choose, I recall that last time of not doubt so much as uncertainty.  I realize how blessed I was to have that particular priest in my life for so many years, how blessed to have the nun I knew for only a short time who ministered to my older son as he was dying, how blessed to have the two church ladies who prayed with me daily years later in the hospital and brought me daily communion while I struggled to carry my younger son to term and bring him into the world without taking myself away as mother to my other children, how blessed to never have been short an angel when one was called for in times of need, darkness, despair.  We are God's tender care, after all.  We are gentleness, a  kind and calming voice in the silence of uncertainty or fear,. We are tolerance, celebration in the storm of intolerance.  We are kind and loving eyes that will not break contact even in the face of death.  We are the comfort we seek and also the comfort we cannot know we provide.  I think about someone I love very deeply, for death is not an end to love, and how joyous he was and what great joy I will know the rest of my life because of him, and that joy frees me from self-pity over other circumstances, from fear of things beyond my control and from any sense of injustice.  Being in mass today, lost in my own thoughts but in a familiar place that also made me think of that specific priest, I thought finally of the forgiveness that must come before redemption as I went to receive the ashes.  Forgiveness is an absence of judgment.  It sets judgment aside and empowers, enables grace.  With grace we are redeemed.  

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