NOTE: All patient names and any identifying details have been changed.
It’s a midwestern autumn morning. I wake up early after a late night at my cousin’s wedding. I’m disoriented – sleeping in a rental house in the city I grew up in, surrounded by my siblings and my dad, who are no longer really the siblings and dad I grew up with. Everything is slightly right and somewhat wrong.
I feel an urge to get to mass. I whisper to my still-sleeping husband that I’m going to hurry to go to mass. He nods. It’s been years since I’ve attended, but he is not surprised – my religiosity is always bubbling just under the surface.
I grab my dad’s car keys and head down streets I know by heart. I park just off Wisconsin Avenue on 13th, right next to Schroeder Hall, where I lived as a sophomore at Marquette University. My heart breaks for that tiny 19-year-old version of me, trying to find her way. But I guess it’s not so different from the 39-year-old me that is still trying to find my way.
I hear the church bells and cross the threshold of Gesu Cathedral.
Smells and bells. A visiting Haitian priest gives a homily and then the sign of peace washes over me. I remember how my grandmother came to Gesu all her life. I remember coming in early childhood with my mom and grandma together, until my mom broke with the church after she lost a sister to suicide and something in her shattered. I remember coming again, rediscovering on my own, each week during my university years.
In the years between then and now, I’ve gone to mass and I’ve gone to Unitarian services. I’ve gone to Buddhist services, and I’ve gone to synagogue. I’ve gone to Quaker meetings, and I’ve signed up for non-denominational spiritual counselling. And in this moment in this Cathedral with the whispers of my ancestors around me, I know the search is over. I’m coming home.
I enroll in the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults (RCIA) the next day.
***
It is an Easter Vigil mass in New England – lights dim, candles aglow.. “Did you remember your QR code?” I ask Troy as we sit alert in the pews. Together we have just completed the 9-month RCIA journey and are about to receive communion for the first time. For which you do NOT need a QR code.
Troy absent-mindedly starts to nod, and then registers what I said and looks at me with eyes the size of a Disney hero.
“I’m kidding!” I whisper-yell and squeeze his arm, wanting to undo the terror I sensed I caused.
In retrospect, not a very nice joke to say to my beautiful, brave, and gay friend who has been ostracized from religious settings in the past. Thankfully, Troy’s eyes crinkle in a smile and we laugh at the absurdity of such an image.
Troy and I stand up and queue in line for our first bite of that healing sacrament. It is delicious.
It is a January morning on my inpatient hospital unit. It is 18 degrees outside, and this Northeastern city is as slick as a frozen lake. I have bruises on both knees from icy falls on my commute. The first patient I assess is Frank. He is a curmudgeonly Christian bedazzled with three huge crosses and a WWJD bracelet. Today he’s also wearing a battery-powered heater vest over his hospital gown.
“Nice heater vest, Frank,” I say to him.
“Thanks,” he says. “I bought it because I spend so much time protesting outside abortion clinics, and I need to stay warm.”
Maybe he says this to me because I’ve shared with him that I’m Catholic?
My coworker Tina walks in. She steps right into it. “Hi Frank. I’m Tina! Oh, nice heater vest!”
And, he’s got his in–Tina gets the same deets on the heater vest origins.
OK, so it was not a misguided attempt at Christian bonding. It was just a virtue signal.
I don’t say anything. I stew. Later I think of a million snarky responses. Mostly I think how much more pro-life it would have been had Frank offered his heater vest to the beautiful and broken-toothed young woman surviving somehow in a snow-covered tent outside the hospital.
My atheist coworker Trevon and I bring the houseless woman hot packs after our shift. She tells us her name is River Love. We ask if we can take her by bus to a warming center. She smiles and says, “Thank you for thinking of me. But I would rather freeze to death than go to a shelter or a warming center. I have been hurt too many times in those places.” And I believe her. She zips up her tent flap. I worry she will not survive the night.
I feel as though I’m holding hands with Trevon and River Love together through some sort of cosmic body of Christ. And it helps.
It’s mid-afternoon on the oncology unit, and things are spiraling out of control with Ed, a 35-year-old patient having just gone through the hell of back-to-back autologous stem cell transplants. His immune system is nil, he’s in danger of hemorrhaging with platelets of 2, he is crying in pain, and his fever is on the rise. 101.6 degrees, 102.8 degrees – it keeps climbing. His heart is racing at 150 beats per minute. Septic shock looms. We draw blood cultures, we push fluids, we give platelets, antibiotics, and Tylenol. Then we rush him to the ICU. “Sarah,” Ed says before he disappears down the hall. “Something is wrong.”
His wife, the mother of their four children, asks me what she does now. I am not sure if she means logistically, like checking into the ICU, or macro-level – like, is this the end.
I tell her to go ahead and check-in and I’ll follow with their belongings. When we hug, I am not sure where my body ends and hers begins.
It is an Epiphany mass in Baja, Mexico. I can’t understand any of the homily so I’m trying to pray…But really, I’m just daydreaming. I look around the church: the plastic flowers and a toddler-sized plastic Jesus in the manger. There are hundreds of cracks in the ornately painted ceiling. I’m really into Leonard Cohen’s “Anthem” right now so I cling to these cracks. They are truly my favorite part of this church.
I think back to poor Frank and his very flawed offering of protesting clinics. Clinging to dogma, guilting women publicly. How does the grace get in if we try to force strangers to make OUR idea of the perfect offering? We can’t even make our own offerings perfect. But that’s the sacred paradox–we are all of us flawed, and the gift is that our brokenness lets the love in.
The same can be said of the Church. To choose to be Catholic in 2024 seems on its face to be ridiculous. A place that had been marred by years of corruption, violence, sexism, abuse of all kinds, and I could go on.
But there is so much in life that cannot be seen or even spoken. There is mystery. To deny that risks our humanity. I am cracked and broken, too, and so is everyone else I know. Together, we heal one another and heal the places we worship. Underneath all the human-drama and grime of dogma, Catholicism to me breathes life into that Truth. And through it, I am “plugged in umbilically to the energy and beauty in the universe.” (1) Plugged in through an unbroken line that goes back over 2,000 years, to a time when the Divine penetrated the secular.
Before St. Paul made a Faustian bargain to make the church more palatable to Hellenic society, Christian gathering was an ecstatic ritual, marked by feverish dancing and a communion meal. (2) There was born a conviction of the sacred, and an intentionality behind the celebration. Today when we accept the evolution of this beautiful offering, we touch all those who came before us and we graze that which can’t be seen or spoken. And we are made whole.
1 Lamott, Anne (2017, September 26). Radical Self-Care Changes Everything. Sounds True: Insights at the Edge. https://resources.soundstrue.com/transcript/anne-lamott-radical-self-care-
changes-everything/
2 Ehrenreich, Barbara (2007). Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy. Macmillan.
