‘Here I am. Send me’…
‘Be ever hearing but never understanding.
Be ever seeing but never perceiving.’
– Isaiah 6:8

She struggles. I pray. If you met G today, you would never know how much she struggles. If you met me, you would never know how hard I pray.

It is dawn on Easter Sunday. For the past thirty-six hours, I have been reflecting on the Stages of the Cross. To remember them takes me back to 5^th grade, Catholic school. I remember the hills, the stations, the stories. Was I in one of them? Which one? It bothers me that I cannot remember. Parts, I do. I remember the three falls. The crowd. The person who was forced to help.

Jesus is sent to the cross for reasons that don’t make sense. At ten, I know all about being in trouble for things that don’t make sense. For feeling innocent but treated as guilty. I relate to carrying something too heavy. And getting up, continuing to walk. Going toward punishment. No escape. No reasoning with authority.

*

Easter 2022 to Easter 2023—I have been going to church almost every Sunday. Sometimes even during the week in Ohio or New Jersey. If I am at a loss, if I am beseeching, if my cup runneth over and I want to express my gratitude, or if I just seek comfort. I am an Episcopalian by baptism but I have been going to Catholic Mass. There is no sacrament here for me; I can only receive a blessing. I am here because the doors are open, I love someone who loves this faith, and I feel God here, like a neighboring country that speaks the same language and feels proximate to a home I do not have.

I attended Catholic school from fourth to twelfth grade, and I discover the Catholic ritual is a main line to this age, especially grammar school. A child’s view of faith and early leadership. In seventh grade we were paired with a second grader to take into Mass; in eighth, a first grader. I cannot begin to tell you how much joy and pride that bestowed. All of those years, five days a week we had an hour-long religion class, but in high school non-Catholics were treated differently. Curiously, World Religions may be the class content I remember best from all of high school.

Although I married at twenty-two in a Catholic church and attended the required Engaged Encounter weekend, our wedding day was the last day we went to Catholic services except for family obligations. My dad died eighteen months later, and I insisted that he have a proper memorial service at our hometown Episcopal church, but after that I grew separate from any established religion.

I did not attend services for about two decades. Until G’s teenage years when she felt unreachable and I got lost. I went in the direction of my childhood faith on my knees, in tears. https://whereiendandshebegins.com/2017/01/19/the-greats/ . The first time, I sat in the back and sang the hymns of my youth, my voice breaking at times. At the end of the service, the choral director turned around and asked me to join the choir. So I did.

When we moved to Brooklyn I considered studying interfaith ministry but missed the application cut-off. I took reiki instead and explored shamanism. I found peace in the pagan much like I found spiritual depths in early parenting.

*

Retrospectively, I see how naïve I was about parenting in general. I thought it was possible to achieve excellence. If I did it right, she would hurt less that I did. She would not feel falsely accused. I believed we could avoid the excruciating divide that many mothers and daughters experience. It hurts me to admit this; it hurts more to look back at myself and my conviction. Did I not read Winnicott? Did I not listen? Did I not hear that “good enough” is the best we can do and is exactly what a child needs? No, I was going for the A. Plus there was my family at the time. I remember writing in my journal: why am I not enough for everyone and then I listed what my husband, mother, and child wanted and how I could never do it all (and this was without a job outside of the home). No one argued for me to be “good enough” either. Thus it was on all sides—my drive to be excellent and theirs for me to meet their needs. Where this left me and my own actualization was not under consideration. Above all, I wanted their love and thought I had to be excellent to achieve it.

I raised Little G with my favorite aspects of faith. A patchwork quilt of Episcopalian-ism, Catholicism, God, angels, hymns, and prayers of hope, gratitude and supplication—and back to gratitude if it turned out. I probably helped her question classic, organized religion.

But I see now my own little heart did not. My heart still holds the call and response of Mass in perfect memory. It remembers Hail Mary in French from fourth grade. It remembers the first months of high school—boarding school—on my knees, begging God to look after me in my loneliness and overwhelm, praying He would look after my parents and pets in my absence and help me do well in school.

Whenever my path is overcome by fog and doubt rolls in, my hands come together and my knees hit the floor. My sacred seeking augments. This was never more accurate than the past four years.

After G’s college graduation, I decided to pursue Interfaith after all. What I never could have known was a month into it G’s plans would fall apart and her well being would plummet. Then the pandemic. Luckily there was an option to study virtually even before lockdown so I continued the program from her apartment. All of my coursework was affected by my attempt to help G. I found wells of patience from seeing my time with her as an early form of ministry. Interfaith broadened my spiritual portal and brought me closer to myself, somehow. Here I am. Send me. Wherever I was, whatever I was doing, this was the work.

*

What I did not know was the layers of trauma she had hidden within her. Hidden in plain sight. An affront to my attempt at excellent parenting, but at this stage we were walking around in the dark. For two years we worked toward this, as G appeared to be growing stronger. Not revealing the iceberg beneath.

Slowly and reluctantly, we went from saying she had disordered thinking to disordered behavior to a full fledged violent eating disorder laced with traumatic stress. The messages I received confused me; my Pollyanna mentality led me to believe that things were getting better. I didn’t see there was an iceberg at all, merely a little hill or two with solid earth beneath.

Early on I suggested twelve-step; she insisted on one with “no higher power.” Eventually she tried to access a higher power of some sort, but it never really worked for her. Something about the powerlessness and the surrender. I don’t think we understand what works for her. Yet.

I reference again the fact that I didn’t give her a foundation of classical faith, and I wonder if that is a significant hindrance to healing. There is so much I do not know. My own powerlessness is epic. My daughter is sick and I pray. Every morning, every night, every Sunday and some weekdays.

As Deacon Albert Anderson Jr.* said on Good Friday at the Stations of the Cross, I suppose I “put my cross next to His cross and see if it feels lighter”—which immediately reminded me of Footsteps in the Sand, “it was then that I carried you.” I have always hoped so.

Here I am. Send me.

*

In my helplessness and in my fog, I have prayed to be an Instrument, yet no one is more surprised than I to find me leaning on Catholic rituals and spaces. Not the church of my childhood, but the church of my education. “No one educates like the Catholics,” my mother would say, always reminding me that it was not exactly our faith but it wasn’t far off. Like Sonoma, Marin and San Francisco. One home, one school, one a place we love to go. Not truly belonging anywhere. The early seeds of Interfaith.

Some of the liturgical language changed since my last Mass. My most favorite line—Lord I am not worthy to receive you—is now Lord I am not worthy that you should enter under my roof. And the second half—but only say the word and I shall be healed—is now but only say the word and my soul shall be healed.

However, at the start of daily Mass there is a confession that I never learned. Several phrases strike the center of my heart and hit my pain in not seeing the iceberg, not stopping what was hidden in plain sight, and failing my determination to do an excellent job.

Memorizing the confession, I am fascinated by what I love most: the relief I feel admitting I am at fault. In what I have done and what I have failed to do. Also I love the sense of belonging, reciting it together and asking my brothers and sisters to please please help. As we ask Mary, the angels and saints to help, too. It feels like we might be heard this way.

I turn to the Stations of the Cross again. After a year of liturgical refreshing—a year of bringing the Catholicism that was trained into me into the light of my adulthood—I experience a homecoming of my own. It interests me that my first Mass was Easter, the celebration but also the cornerstone of doubt if you juxtapose it with other faiths.

First may I tell you how Taoism got me through the death of my son and six months of bedrest? How Buddhism got me through my divorce? How shamanism and mother nature herself connect my soul to an unfathomably exquisite sense of holy home? But then I ask myself, what is home, where is home? I am forever in expatria in some way. Just as I am the Episcopalian in Catholic services I don’t want to stop attending.

*

Once I tried to make myself open to God-ness in prayer by beginning (as I still do sometimes) with a meditation something like this: God of all Gods, Love of all Loves, Light of all Lights, Kindness of all Kindness, Goodness of all Goodness, Heart of all Hearts… I go on like this until I feel unfurled, wide and vast and ready to speak further, to reach further—beyond time and space and all of this.

I pray around the gulf of what I do not know, the gulf of my faith but not my lack of it. I carry it all to the edge of the water. But I do not know what to do next. Jesus walked on water. My childhood self knows all of the stories. Vividly. It amazes me how few readings are new. I am steeped in this faith. I believe with certainty in God the Father and the Holy Spirit. I make the sign of the cross and kiss my thumb in a cross the way my devout and adored Spanish teacher taught us in high school.

I also believe in the sanctity of Mary, the angels, archangels and saints, and I believe strongly in the afterlife. I believe in heaven like a child and like a grownup.

I believe the veil between us is thin, and I believe there is a oneness more vast than we can begin to imagine. I believe that all of this suffering that gets me on my knees is part of this great eternal oneness. My lessons. Her lessons. Our lessons. I believe nature is one of the languages that shows us this. Free Church. I believe one day this will make sense and we will laugh at how obvious it all is.

If only we could see now what we will see then.

I believe in the life of Jesus and His good works, His compassion and His goodness. I believe in Good Friday and His devastating death. I want to believe in His resurrection and His seat next to His Father. Our Father. I really do.

I listen, I live, I hope and I pray. And I say I believe in His life after death because I truly do believe in life after death. I am told more than once that it is His resurrection that began life after death. He opened the doors to heaven and let everyone in, all of the prophets before Him, everyone who died before Christ.

*

This I know: on Easter Sunday I got dressed up and went to Mass for the 53^rd week in a row, and I completed a cycle of the Catholic calendar. I integrated a faith that I studied from age nine into my fifty-three year old self.

I also know this: beside me every day, in some capacity, sits my own son who died before I could know him but who sends me signs all of the time to let me know he is nearby. My response is to try to pour as much good as I can back into the system in pure gratitude for these messages of hope.

In the course of the past two days, I hear something twice which may be one answer to my questioning: “I am in You and You are in me” (Deacon Anderson, Easter Mass*).

And Barbara Brown Taylor’s prayer **, “thank You for being in me…thank you for letting me be in You.” She continues, “I have this odd sense that what was outside has become very inside… that is how close God is to me now…‘I don’t know, and I will go anyway.’”

Me, too. Here I am. Send me.

Happy Easter.

Welcome, Spring.

*St Josephs, Alexandria VA
** with Krista Tippett, On Being