A Sacramental Life

Marian solemnities are the hardest days.

I am going to try not to be on social media very much, and I’m probably going to fail because I always have a social media tab open while I do my writing. I wish I could go somewhere to get away for the day, but we still haven’t replaced the car, so I can’t. I don’t want to see all the people posting pictures of the Virgin Mary and reminding me that I’ll go to hell if I miss Mass. And I absolutely can’t go to Mass for Assumption Day.

I hadn’t been able to go to Mass for seven weeks running, because of being sick all summer and then losing the car. We have a lead on perhaps getting another used car soon, and please do keep that in your prayers. But this summer I’ve been grounded in my house, praying in the garden or in bed. I haven’t been listening to Mass on video because the prayers of Mass can be triggering for me. If I can be physically in the presence of God while I have to hear those prayers, I can often manage. But just hearing them recorded when the Eucharist isn’t there to comfort me is torture, so I don’t.

We have more news about Franciscan University, and the abusive cult leader who made it famous. Finding out more about Franciscan is always very difficult. It always hurts for a long time afterward. I trusted those people more than anyone in the world. I lost everything I had because I thought of them as the very best Catholics, and came here to learn to be a saint. I still live just under a mile from campus. I am learning to love my new life, but it’s a painful life as well. Jimmy the Mechanic gave us a ride to Sunday Mass in his truck a few days ago, and I got through the Liturgy of the Word, but I spent the rest of Mass shivering outside on the porch.

Some of my absolute worst trauma is associated with the Virgin Mary. The people I trusted the most deeply, who hurt me the most, revered Mary and felt closer to her than Jesus. I can’t go to Mass on a Marian feast and listen to Marian hymns. Last time I tried, the flashback lasted for hours. I can’t even pray the Rosary. The best I can do is get through a single Hail Mary at a breakneck pace and then feel terrible afterward. I have nightmares about Mary. Once I woke up crying after I dreamed she was holding a knife to my throat.

But I still believe.

This is the torturous place I find myself: I really do believe.

I recognize that the hysterical emotion of the Charismatic Renewal isn’t the Holy Ghost. But I believe in the things I’ve experienced and known to be true while praying, and while meditating, and while suffering, and while learning to help my neighbor. The very best expression of what I’ve come to believe about God that I’ve ever heard spoken is the Nicene Creed, so I am a Christian. And when I meet Christ face to face, I’m certain that He will be much more and much greater than I know. I have faith that Christ is real. I hope that He will show me that when He was lifted up from the earth, He gathered all people to Himself. My dear friends who are pagan and atheist and protestant, the people like me who were driven away from Father’s table by the abusive stewards who raped the servants when the Master was away, are all here, healed and happy. I even love Christ in spite of it all. I came into the family of Christ through my baptism in a Catholic cathedral and I learned all I know about Christ in the Catholic Church, so I’m Catholic. But I’m a Catholic who can’t live a sacramental life due to the PTSD.

This is a very lonely place to be.

Most of my old friends are either still devout Catholics who have no problem with the Church, or they’ve moved on and stopped trying to practice Catholicism. That leaves me.

I am not better than they are, but I’m lonely.

Tonight I went out to water the garden in the cool of the day. It was the very best time of day in late summer: the evening breeze was beginning. The sun was a golden ciborium at the bottom of the western sky. The sky to the east was still bright blue mantle over the Appalachian foothills. The choir of birds and crickets were making music everywhere.

The pigeons congregated on the roof. My friend the cardinal watched me from the electrical wire. The male cardinal is still too wary of me to make friends, but his mate and I have an agreement. She sits on the wire or the fence or the street lamp in her brown surplice and bright red zuchetto, watching me, scolding “Chip chip!” when I do something particularly silly. My other friends, the bees, were still browsing around the remaining sunflowers. They seem to love the red and gold Autumn Beauty sunflowers most of all. The great big branches of the Autumn Beauty were swarming with bees of several different kinds. I saw new bees I’d never met before, bees with a yellow and black thorax and a bottle green abdomen. There were three of them sleeping in the disk at the center of the very reddest flower.

A fat black grasshopper jumped onto my leg as I bent to examine the watermelon vine. There’s a tiny little fruit on there, the size of a bead, and I hope it lives long enough to be harvested.

I picked another armload of ripe tomatoes to make into a sauce or share with a friend. I watered with the hose the neighbors are letting me use.

I wanted to pray to God to please not hurt me, but I couldn’t. I was too certain that he wouldn’t. I was sure that I would be all right.

I sat for awhile, listening to things that are alive.

“Blessed are you, Lord God of all Creation,” said everything.

Maybe there is a different way to live a sacramental life.