A Candle in a Cold House

This morning I woke up in my living room, with my face stinging from the cold. Tonight I will be lighting candles.

With the severe polar blast, it had been negative five all day yesterday, with the wind chill in the negative double digits. The furnace had done its best, but with the drafty old Victorian windows and the high winds, the upstairs was unbearable overnight. We’d dragged my mattress down to the first floor where it was only chilly. We piled it with all the quilts and comforters, and watched Christmas movies together until we fell asleep. I woke up to Adrienne asleep with one leg slung over me, Michael snoring on the sofa covered with the electric blanket, and the guinea pig angrily chewing  hay a few feet away.

My phone had a layer of condensation on the screen.

The outdoor temperature was above zero, barely. The wind chill was still far below.

I microwaved some cold brew coffee from the pitcher I’d made. I hardly ever drink hot drinks, but I needed one just then.

And now I am going to light a candle.

We don’t even know anybody who gives rides to Mass anymore– I’ve been driving since March of 2021, so we haven’t needed it.  The Lost Girl is still sick at home with the flu. The one person I texted to ask for help is in Washington State for Christmas. It will barely get above ten degrees any time today– barely above sixteen tomorrow. It would be a suicide mission to walk. Besides, with the anxiety and religious trauma this year, I go back and forth between longing to go to Mass and feeling like Mass is a panic-inducing death trap. Just now I’m on the panic end of the mood swing. We will watch a Midnight Mass on television, on our mattress in the living room. It will get up over twenty on Saint Stephen’s Day and I will move the mattress upstairs.

We were going to go to Columbus to see our chosen family on Saint  Stephen’s Day, but that’s canceled now.

The mechanic who tried to save Serendipity has kindly let us park it there until after Christmas. The Lost Girl is still offering to let us haul it to her house and see if her uncle who works in a junkyard can rig up a fix, but it’s looking like the cost of a new electrical system will be more than the cost of the car. And that’s just if the only problem is the electricity and the junkyard motor. For all I know it’s a wreck all the way through. People keep telling me I got cheated so badly that the “as-is” contract I signed isn’t binding, but I’d need a lawyer to recover what I paid.

I’m at a loss.

If I went back over my hundreds of posts on this blog, and counted the number of times I’d said “I wish I could show you somebody else,” I’m sure I’d be embarrassed at the repetition. All I’ve ever wanted is to be somebody else, but I am myself, the cosmic disappointment and perpetual failure.

I wish I had something to tell you about besides this horrible year. In 2022 I have had two false alarms that I thought were pregnancies, but nothing came of them. I have had a severe panic attack in a parking lot in Pittsburgh. I have lost a little more of my mind from PTSD because of the stalking neighbor’s increased harassment.  I have lost what was left of a family who hated me anyway. I have lost two used Nissan sedans in terrible condition. And I’m beginning to feel I have lost my faith.

Why is it so hard to type that sentence: “I feel I have lost my faith?”

Why am I so ashamed to admit that I feel I have lost my faith?

If it’s really lost, I’m sure it wasn’t lost through my own fault.

I didn’t open the door to one of those ruined Nissans and throw my faith in the river in a burlap sack.  I  didn’t park my faith in front of a fire plug while I went shopping, and come out to find it had been impounded. I didn’t leave the back door open as I took out the garbage, and not notice my faith ran into the street. I think I’ve done my very best. I held onto Jesus as hard as I could, and watched in horror as the revelations in Steubenville got worse and shockingly worse. I kept holding on as the state of the Church in America was revealed to be worse and worse. I held on even though it hurt, as my good Catholic pro-life family cut what ties were left. And now, I am standing in a freezing cold house with my fists clutched around nothing on Christmas Eve, and I don’t know where my faith went.

I don’t know where Jesus went.

He is not where I was told He would be.

I keep lighting the Advent candles when my OCD gets especially bad. I don’t know why the candles calm a fit of swirling thoughts. I think it’s because candles are dangerous. You need to watch them or they’ll set the house on fire, an actual threat to life and limb. If you’re watching candles so the house doesn’t get set on fire, you can’t be distracted on the internet, googling the same terrifying nightmare scenarios over and over again. You’ve got a real nightmare scenario. It’s soothing.

When I was a little girl, growing up the strictest of Catholics in the Charismatic Renewal, I used to enjoy lighting votive candles in church. I used to pretend that the prayer I made would continue rising up before God for as long as the candle burned, making a two dollar pillar candle a far more efficacious prayer than a fifty cent divot. I pretended that the smoke that rose from the candles to the dark ceiling really was a prayer in physical form, a sort of eighth sacrament. God would smell the smoke and listen to your petition. If you accidentally blew someone else’s candle out, you’d be interfering with their plea reaching Heaven.

I am going to light the Advent candles one more time today.

I couldn’t go out and buy four white Christmas candles to put in the pink and purple candles’ sockets, not with the dangerous weather and the ruined car. So I will light the Advent candles again tomorrow.

I will keep lighting Advent candles in the cold, cold, terrible dark, until God smells the smoke and comes back to give me justice.

And in telling you that, I find that I still have faith in a God who smells smoke in the dark.

I have lost faith, as in, the naïve belief in a set of rules and regulations I can follow in order to become better than people who don’t. But I still have faith, as in, the belief in a Somebody who knows when you’ve lit a candle to beg for help. A Somebody who will listen. A Somebody who, if they are worth my time, will be patient with my ignorance. A Somebody I call the Holy Trinity, and they haven’t objected to that name.

I have lost hope, as in, the obtuse confidence that by following a set of Thou Shalts and Thou Shalt Nots, I will be able to win my way to paradise. But I still have hope that that Somebody may smell smoke and come back to make things right.

I have lost love, as in, I don’t feel loved by God anymore. And the greatest of these losses is love. But I have not lost the stubborn determination to put love out into the world, because I don’t want other people to suffer this horror of not feeling loved.

I haven’t lost my fascination with candles– a very Catholic fascination.

I will light them and see what happens.

And we’ll see where we go from here.

Mary Pezzulo is the author of Meditations on the Way of the Cross, The Sorrows and Joys of Mary, and Stumbling into Grace: How We Meet God in Tiny Works of Mercy.