For your penance, I want you to tell God who you
are. Not because He needs to
know—He already does—but you need to say it.”
My regular confessor is not of the “say three Hail Marys”
variety.
“OK, Father—that may take a while.”
“Maybe.
Depends on how open you are to letting grace in. Could be real short. Now say an act of contrition….”
It’s not like I haven’t thought about that concept—who am
I?--rather a lot over the past months and
years as I have drawn deeper into the Catholic faith. Regular examination of conscience will do that to a
person. After all, looking at
one’s faults in light of the sacrament has a way of bringing the whole person
into some sort of focus one way or another. Something of a perpetual identity crisis, only deeper and more
productive. The trick for someone
of my personality is not to focus totally on the negatives.
In some ways,
defining ourselves is almost as hard as defining God. Most of what I know about God can only
be clearly articulated in what He is not. That which He is tends
to be fuzzier, harder to grasp.
God is not an angry judge
with a long white beard playing a game of “gotcha!” with mankind. He is Love (as though I have a grasp on that concept…).
He is not a being. He is The Very Act of Being, He Is Who Is. See my point? Easy to point out the nots, but I can get lost in those positive statements for
a long, long time and never come to the end.
So it is, I think, with myself. It’s easy for me to see the things I am not: not kind
enough, not patient enough, not charitable enough…but over the past few years,
I have decided I am not just what I do, good or bad. I am not just a pathologist for example—that is what I do. But I am a physician who is called on
to use her expertise in caring for sick people by helping make a diagnosis of
illness in what even the law defines as a doctor-patient relationship. I am not just a person who commits
this, that or the other sin—I am a sinner, broken and in need of grace but more
than just the sins I commit, in relationship with God.
I am not just a mother—I am mother to two particular
children with whom I share life. I
am not just wife, I am my own husband’s bride with whom we have made a life far
different than either of our lives apart would have been.
All of those self-definitions are loaded with
indefinable. How to define the
knot in the gut I got when they called from the ER my son’s freshman year in
college, telling me he had a broken jaw and was missing two teeth? How to explain my fear in sending my
daughter off to New York City on a one way ticket a month after graduating from
college? How to explain that if
you cut my husband, I bleed? How to explain that, even as I pour out my heart in
confession, I know in the very deepest part of me that there is more than just
those acts needing contrition? How
to explain that who I am is in some way
related to a mass of connections to those I love?
What makes me me is
more than grey hair, a few excess pounds, various pecadillos, and six
decades. It is more than college
and professional school, more than a job, different, somehow in its essence
from what I have achieved or
acquired or failed to do. It seems
that my life—the real life inside me, the one that plays itself out in endless
ways, is a combination of what I
am, what I do, what I am not and
how I play off those around me. It
is, in short, defined by relationship.
It makes sense.
Part of development of the human person is establishing an identity
separate from the world around us.
Babies learn how to distinguish themselves from their mothers, an art
teenagers hone to elegance as they prepare to go out and face life alone. Part of that comes from being loved and
wanted and reassured. Babies learn
something of who they are by the way their parents hold them, cuddle them feed
them. They grow and flourish when
they are connected to their parents, and if that—or some reasonable
facsimile--is absent in the earliest years of life, children can emerge so crippled
from that they never learn to relate to others at all. So, it seems, in the arms of others we
learn who we are—and what we are not.
It has certainly been true in my life, I learned from my husband that I might not be the world’s biggest misanthrope. I learned from my children that all
parents really get to do is supply what amounts to a nice finish coat to the
personality of a child; I am definitely not in control of my child’s personality, gifts and
destiny.
And I’ve begun to learn—really learn-- from my confessor
that I really don’t have to be perfect
for God to love me. A fairly
significant discovery for a perfectionist who wants 105% on every test and who
has made a comfortable career out of doing so. A very significant discovery in a word where human value too
often equates with productivity, a world where others are all too eager to tell us that we are not good enough,
wanted, cared for because there’s something we cannot—or will not—do. A world in which the externals matter
far too much. A world in which
human dignity gets caught up in the nots…
It’s begun to come home to me that this business of being
Christian—inward and outward, outward and upward, is all about finding
ourselves the only way we can. In the mirror of relationship. Every relationship shows a different
facet of ourselves and a different aspect of God and the process of discovery
never ends as long as we are willing to risk the connection and look in the
mirror. As long as we are in relationship with God who is Relationhship
Itself—a communion of persons. If
we wish to enter the life of God, or to find our very selves, there’s no other
path. Only relationship.
But I didn’t really think of any of this as I walked up the
aisle of the church to kneel in front of the crucifix and do my penance and
prepare for mass.
All I found myself saying in awe and wonder was this: I am Your daughter, God. And You love me.
Only relationship. Amen. Love and hugs from J&L
ReplyDeleteOne of your better putting-into-words-what-cannot-be-put-into-words, Barb. Another blogger I glanced at recently posted that she looked at her self in the mirror and saw she was adding a few pounds, questioning if she was a pretty as she once was. Having read many other of her posts, I counseled her that she was looking in the wrong mirror; to see herself she needed to look in the mirror of those around her, her spouse, her children, and her friends. Look at her reflection there, I said, and she will see her true self, and her true worth. From what I saw in her previous writings, I saw a person of great beauty. I do in you also, Barb. A great beauty.
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