The soul is made of love and must ever strive to return to love.
– Mechthild von Magdeburg

Reconciliation seems to be a thread running through my life at the moment. When I started going back to church, one of the things I recalled was this sacrament. At my Catholic grammar school, all of us were allowed to meet with a priest and follow the protocols to the letter, except non-Catholics could not receive absolution. To this day, I can see the gauzy ecru curtains and 1970s utilitarian furnishings in his office; I can feel the kindness in his words and sense my questioning, why not I? Yet there was a gentleness to the priest’s admitted limitation. I remember a sense of relief from merely being able to speak of my wrongdoing and the comfort of his blessing upon leaving. It is something akin to how I feel when I receive a blessing at communion these days. Lord, I am not worthy to receive You.

Worthiness is another recent thread. One of the things I value about the Catholic Mass, as opposed to the Episcopal service, is an acceptance of fault. I mean, I feel guilty for what I have done and left undone. I couldn’t have said it any better myself.

These things swim in the seas of my consciousness lately as I perform my ritual of weekday walks across the bridge to sit in a glorious house of God and receive the sense of quiet grace that emanates from the place. When asked where I feel peace, one of my answers was: getting to my pew and kneeling. I hear it in the steadying of my breath. I suppose this speaks to the level of my surrender, to the great question of how much input I really have on this journey. More than ever, I feel the energy in Shakespeare’s words, “there’s a divinity that shapes our ends, rough hew them how we will.” Oh, I rough-hew them aplenty. Perhaps it’s time to bow, to pray, to allow for a bit of divine order to reveal itself.

Increasingly I write less in prose. Increasingly I invite more in spirit. Increasingly I hear things when I pray. Surely I am imagining everything, but what respite it is to put it all down for half an hour, to listen, to invite a conversation. Now that my only living kin is my adult child, and now that she and I are not always on the same sheet of music, the closest intimate conversation I might invite is on the other side of the veil. I try to get as quiet as I can to hear the Holy Spirit within me. Sometimes it feels like members of my family come forward.

As recently I have completed of two acts of reconciliation for Dad—his grave marker and some writing—it dawns on me that I have done a lot of therapy around my mother but very little in the spiritual realm. No sooner do I make this realization than I go to morning Mass and hear a recitation with newly tuned ears. “Lord I am not worthy” transposes into “I am not worthy” in my mother’s voice, intensely grieving her parents, long ago.

This is not a scene revealed from my unconscious; I know it well. It happened to me in a timeless sense, but today I do something different when I pull back from this memory. I check my size. Am I as tall as the refrigerator? I am not. Am I as tall as the kitchen table? No. As tall as the stools stuck under the table (that I always forget to slide back under, that can so easily topple), one blue, one yellow, that my mother painted with daisies? Yes, I am just as tall. Do my eyes meet the level of my mother’s elbow folded on the table, her head hidden within it, her sobs radiating from it? Yes, my eyes do meet that elbow.

But I do not sense myself as young. I sense myself as me. Gradually, I release this scene and step into recognition that this is where my mother’s pain is housed. This is where she hurt. This is where she needs her reconciliation. At the end of Mass, I get myself to a candle, but the lighter doesn’t work. Someone hears me clicking and helps me get another. I bring it back. I light the candle. Tears fall as I pray for my sweet mother’s release from her pain throughout time and space. I think of how, curiously, in my most recent imaginings my mother sits away from us, over by the votive candles. I bring her pain into the candlelight, recalling my favorite line from Henri Nouwen, “the great spiritual call of the beloved children of God is to pull their brokenness away from the shadow of the curse and put it under the light of the blessing.”

One of the things I am beginning to believe is the power of action. Two weeks ago, I found a rug for my home that reminded me so much of my mother that I purchased it in her honor, with the intent of trying to make greater peace with her.

I know, none of this really makes sense, even to me living it. I am trying to get quiet enough to hear my intuition. I want to follow each avenue of reconciliation wherever it leads.

Meanwhile I am completing a circle with the gorgeous soul who brought me back into church. We are making our own peace, matching every bookend, releasing each other to love and serve others in the year to come.

And meanwhile my grown child takes step after baby step out of her safety zone and back inside it. One step on the ice after the next, cautiously, hopefully, even occasionally prayerfully. I walk this sheet of ice with her, in sun, in rain, in warmth and cold.

On my knees, I have another image: of a bright light coming through the gap beneath a closed door. I see the light and am drawn to it, to the whole scene. I hold it near me.

*

Several months ago I went into this same nearby church during the hours of confession. I waited my turn, allowing several people who arrived in haste to go ahead of me, fascinated with how they strode in and out, receiving this holy sacrament. When it was quiet, I went in and spoke. “I can bless you,” the priest said, but he could not absolve me. I understand, I replied. Thank you. That should be enough. I keep going to Mass. I walk up for the Eucharist and receive a blessing that often makes my eyes sting.

I am drawn increasingly to those for whom their lives are a vocation; I reflect on when and how mine ever feels that way. This has been a concern all of my life, being worthy, perhaps in response to my mother’s insistence in her lack. You and your father would be better off without me. I am not worthy, she would say, followed by a litany of why.

The time when I felt the greatest relief from questions of worthiness was when I was parenting a young child, but now that my girl is grown up, parenting is not where I find relief from these doubts; on the contrary, it is where I find most of my worry.

Then I think of a line that has given me much comfort recently. “Let God tend to the hopeless-looking things… Worry, you know, is a kind of reverence given to a situation because of its magnitude; how small it must be through God’s eyes … you are only a child of God and not God himself.” (Father Walter Ferrell, OP; italics added)

*

At a point, I realize that these circles of reconciliation are really about my own excavation of spirit— about the spiral that invites us to return, over and over again, to scenes from the past, to relationships sometimes long gone, and to our very own selves in those moments.

As an example, traveling through familiar terrain, I found that with one piece of official paper, I could get my father a grave marker, thirty years after his passing, and make peace with something I thought would be unresolved forever. (At Christmas, I received an extraordinary gift: a flag that flew over the Pentagon in Dad’s honor—on his thirtieth Angel Day—proving again that reconciliation is never too late; sometimes now is the perfect time.)

Or I can return to a well-trodden memory and realize afresh how small, how young and how utterly powerless I was. It may feel like the same me I am today, but then I was not near the height of a refrigerator as I am now. I was as tall as a hand-painted stool I used to forget to push under the table partly because it was so wobbly and easily tippy.

But also, I can light a candle and say, I see your pain. Does this help? Does this help set you free? I can speak to my imaginings.

When I picture all of my angel family kneeling, I begin to feel our energies getting lighter. I look forward to going back to Mass to see if they show up tomorrow. Even at home, I feel us knitting, our souls leaning in, rising, closer to reconciliation. The rough-hewn ever more smooth; our brokenness healing and our hearts increasingly under the light of the blessing.

In the upward spiral, by opening bravely to the pain we carry, seeing and feeling it all again—the apology, the acceptance and the encouragement (the instilling of courage)—we can turn another corner, keep ascending and strive ever onward to re-turn toward love.