Tag: change

You, on a gondola

This is me, slowly unpacking from our recent trip to a little island off the coast of Maine.

This is me, sheepishly putting away the seven (seven!) books I hoped to read on the beach, and then barely touched all week.

This is me, dolefully discovering that the “all ages” board game I ordered specially for the trip is still in its shrink wrap, after we spent zero evenings moving little plastic pieces around the table in raucous and wholesome family togetherness.

This is me closing the tabs with recipes for seafood dinners that I convinced myself we would not only cook, but also possibly harvest ourselves from the sea; and this is also me, cleaning all the cheeseburger wrappers out of the car.

The kites I packed didn’t even make it out of the trunk.

This is not me complaining about having been on vacation! It was lovely, and we’re lucky we were able to make it happen. We did swim and wade, clamber around on rocks, and eat ice cream. We came home tired and more or less happy, with pink shoulders and sand in our shoes.

And yes, I came home a little bit disappointed. I can’t help it: I have insanely high hopes every time I plan anything at all. I am who I am, and I know this; but I’m also perpetually disappointed when I don’t turn into someone else.

Right before we left, I saw an old video from Saturday Night Live, where Adam Sandler plays Joe Romano of Romano Tours.

He tells the audience, “Here at Romano Tours, we always remind our customers: If you’re sad now, you might still feel sad there, okay?”

He warns us:

“We can take you on a hike. We cannot turn you into someone who likes hiking. We can take you to the Italian Riviera. We cannot make you feel comfortable in a bathing suit. We can provide the zip line. We cannot give you the ability to say, ‘Whee’ and mean it.”

I laughed at the video, and then I went right ahead and told myself that, when we got to the island, everything would be different. Through the sheer magic of dipping ourselves in salt water, we’d become joyful, energetic, screen-free types who love spending all our time together. And that did not happen. We had the week we had, because we are the people we are. And it was good! But it was not magically, instantaneously transformative. Of course, it wasn’t.

Like Joe Romano says, “[I]f you don’t like how you look back home, it’s not gonna get any better on a gondola.”

This is not only true for going on vacation: It’s true for everything.

Are you getting ready for a new year of school? Even if you’re enrolling somewhere different or trying a whole fresh program, you’re still going to be who you are as a parent, and your kids are still going to be who they are as kids.

Are you starting a new job? Even if it’s an entirely different situation, you’re still going to be you, doing that job.

Are you perhaps new to the Catholic faith? Welcome, and we’re so glad you’re here! Your life has a very good chance of being transformed, one way or another.

But not magically. Not instantaneously. And not without you deliberately, consciously deciding to make that happen, taking advantage of what the Church has to offer, and putting it into practice day by day, minute by minute.

And also, paradoxically, not without you letting go of control and letting grace work with who you are.

I watched the SNL skit again, and I laughed even harder. It’s not only brilliant and insightful, it’s hopeful, not discouraging…Read the rest of my latest for Our Sunday Visitor.

 

From “rinse and repeat” to the living water

A priest I knew used to counsel against making New Year’s resolutions. He said that the first of January was an artificial deadline for starting new habits, and that, as Catholics, we shouldn’t feel the need to wait for that day. Do you want to repent and change your life? Why tie your plans to a date on the calendar? Now is the acceptable time.

I get the point, but I think he missed the boat with this advice. It’s very natural to want a nice, bright line for a starting point, and it’s very common to do better when we have plenty of people starting fresh on January first. If misery loves company, so does hope.

But there is something to be said for looking closely at both the secular view of “changing one’s life” with a New Year’s resolution and the sacred view. There is a lot of overlap, but also some gaps in each—at least on the surface.

I have been seeing a therapist for just over a year. She is thoroughly secular but extremely interested in and respectful of my Catholic worldview, and she wants to help me be a healthy and whole person. Our conversations help me clarify what it is I believe: Which ideas are helpful and healing and from the Lord (even if they look secular from the outside)? Which are terrible (even though they have always been mislabeled “Catholic” in my head)?

We talk about the phenomenon of people repeating undesirable behaviors over and over again. This is what she calls “rinse and repeat.” We talk about what it looks like when people start to make those small, uncomfortable changes toward their stated goals. This is what she calls “moving the needle.” We talk a lot about how to tell the difference between these two phenomena because when you’re in the middle of either, they can look and feel similar.

It is common to make the same resolutions over and over again. This is the year, we may say to ourselves. This is the year I am finally going to stop eating compulsively or smoking or using porn or lying around all the time while my body falls apart.

Secular and spiritual advisors would agree that is a good idea! These things you say you want to give up are bad for you, and they are probably bad for people you care about.

The basic Catholic advice for making a change is: Go to confession and confess anything you’ve done that’s sinful and make a firm intention to stop doing those things. Listen to absolution and your penance. Boom, done. A brand new person walks out of the confessional.

But if you took these issues to a therapist, they would probably say: O.K., awesome. What’s the plan? What are you going to do differently from what you have done before? Let’s figure out why you do the thing that you’ve been doing over and over, that you say you want to stop doing. What are you getting from it? And if it’s something you need, where else can you get that thing?

The basic Catholic advice is not meant to be everything you need. In some ways, it is just a starting point. A good confessor, who has the time and the expertise, will tell you almost exactly the same things as a good therapist. A good confessor will say, I absolve you, but what’s your plan? What are you going to do differently than what you have done before? Let’s take a hard look at why you’re committing the sin you’re committing. What are you getting from it, where else can you get that thing?

Most priests are not trained therapists and aren’t qualified to lead you through detailed analysis. But it wouldn’t be a bad thing for them to at least suggest that these questions are relevant and worth pondering. A good confessor will also answer that last question. The answer is: Everything you need, you can get from Jesus. But you’re a lot more likely to get it if you understand what you’re asking for. And this is where all those other questions come in.

Read the rest of my latest for America Magazine. 

Image via Wikimedia Commons  (Creative Commons)

All of life is worth living

The other day, I performed the solemn rite of white women in their late 40’s: I shared a photo of my lunch salad on social media.

The ritual goes like this: I post a photo of my lunch, and I complain about trying to lose weight, and then I humblebrag about my plate full of nutrient-dense leafy greens and lean proteins, and I say that between this and yoga, I’m going to live forever. Then my friends commiserate about how, if I keep it up, I’m not going to live forever; it’ll just feel that way. Then we all anoint ourselves in the digital stream three times, sprinkle ourselves with irony, and we are cleansed.

This ritual has worked for me for many years. I’ve always looked at health fanatics with something of a jaundiced eye, thinking, “If that’s what it takes to extend my life, I’d rather cut it short, thanks.”

Jokes like this were very much a part of my family culture, growing up. My father, in particular, believed that life was worth living as long as you were enjoying yourself, and if you weren’t, well, maybe your time was up. Or at least, part of him believed that. He especially liked to eat whatever he wanted, as much as he wanted, and he really relished heavy foods, sugary, fatty foods, noodles and greasy briskets and things filled with cream. (And so do I.) He wasn’t exactly a hedonist. He believed in constant conversion of heart and the resurrection of the body and things like that; he really did. But in practice, noodles and brisket often got the upper hand.

I want to tread carefully, because it’s easy to get carried away when you’re telling the life of someone who is dead. I don’t want to speak for him just because he can’t speak for himself anymore. So I will just tell you what I observed, as I remember it, and maybe the conclusions I drew were wrong. Nevertheless, this is what I saw:

My father’s health was poor for many, many years, partly because of his personal habits, and partly because of terrible genetics. I remember him going in for serious medical procedures throughout my childhood, starting at about the age I am now. He had a hard time staying motivated to take care of himself, although he did keep trying, for his family’s sake.

But eventually, he really lost enthusiasm. He had the choice to correct a problem with heart bypass surgery, and he didn’t want to do it. It just didn’t seem worth it to him. His family felt differently, and we urged him to consider it. We contacted a friend of his, who had had the same surgery done, and was very glad that it bought him some extra years of life; and that finally did it. My father agreed, and he got it done.

And he got better. He recovered well, even in his old age, and he started doing so well. He had a lot of health problems, still, but he accepted this; and my overall memories of him from this time are of him smiling. Smiling at my kids, smiling up at the sky, smiling at the brilliant clouds, at birds singing, at snow melting, at records playing. This was something new for him, or something he hadn’t felt in decades. He seemed to be enjoying himself in a way that I had never seen him do, ever.

But how strange it was, to see him looking small. I had to keep correcting the image I had of him in my head. I still thought of him as a powerful, deep-bellied, overbearing, heavily bearded man, taking up as much space as he wanted. Never bothering to whisper in quiet places, never bothering to follow signs that said “no admittance.” I still thought of him as doing what he wanted. And he wasn’t like that, anymore. His clothes hung loosely; the top of his head showed through his brittle hair. His voice was muffled, as if wrapped in cotton. He was so physically diminished, and he shuffled, and tipped over sometimes. But he smiled so much.

It was also during this time that some personal reconciliations happened, or started to happen. He knew he was at the end of his life. But that was the key: He knew it, and he was getting ready, rather than dolefully sliding along. He said that the Lord was taking more and more things away from him, and he was glad, because it was getting him ready for death. He smiled when he said this, too. He was grateful it was happening—the getting ready, not the dying.

So, then he died. It happened quite suddenly, and I’m not sure if it was COVID or not. He went to watch TV in his reclining chair, and when my brother went to check on him, he was on the floor. It was very hard when he died, and I won’t pretend he made his peace with every last person, or that he had righted every wrong, before he went. There were a lot of wrongs. But those last few years were undeniably, irreplaceably fruitful. For him, and for many of the rest of us. Fruitful enough that they are not yet over, even though he is dead.

If you are halfway imagining that people live the real bulk of their lives when they’re hale and hearty and doing as they please, and that they slowly dwindle into a less and less meaningful existence as the standard earthly pleasures drop away, well, possibly that’s true for some people. There are many ways for the course of a life to run, and not all of them are within our power. The end of my mother’s life looked very different from my father’s. But even that was not what you might think. Strangely enough, caring for her in her profoundly vulnerable and inert state was a huge part of what transformed my father’s final years, which makes me almost quake with fear when I think of my mysterious mother and her strange, quiet power to change people, for good and for ill. A power that continues to burn and insist, like the light from a star that is already dead. 

As I said, I am reluctant to tell you what someone else’s life means. So I’m not going to tell you that the last two years of my father’s life were his most significant. I’m just telling you that there was a time when he thought he could have done without them, and he was wrong.

Take care of yourself. Take care of your poor, dumb, needy body. Your body’s time will run out eventually, because it isn’t meant to last forever; but it isn’t meant only for pleasures and satisfaction, either. Most people are joking when they say life isn’t really worth living if you’re just eating salad, but most people also halfway believe it. Don’t you believe it. Your time on earth is your time on earth. If you’re still here, it’s for a reason.

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A version of this essay was originally published at The Catholic Weekly on May 5, 2023.

Discerning out: What happens when a Catholic leaves seminary or religious life?

Joe Heschmeyer was once so sure of his vocation to the priesthood that he forgot he was supposed to be discerning it.

Everyone around him thought he should be a priest. His mother, he discovered later, had offered him to the Lord as an infant the way Hannah did in the Old Testament. Mr. Heschmeyer wrote about his vocation frequently on his blog Shameless Popery, speaking of his ordination as if it were inevitable. Things were going so well, he lost track of the idea that he was in seminary to test and explore his vocation.

“Pretty soon after I entered [in 2011], I stopped asking God if this was what he wanted. I felt like the question had already been answered. My grades were good; I was well esteemed; everything internal to the seminary felt successful. That felt like enough validation. I forgot to ask, ‘Are we still on the same page?’” Mr. Heschmeyer said.

It was not until friends and family had already bought airplane tickets and reserved hotel rooms for his ordination to the diaconate that he began to feel some doubt. He tried to assign his misgivings to “last-minute jitters,” but a black cloud of unease hung over his head.

He described riding on a bus on the way back from a retreat.

“The archbishop has an open seat next to him. A sort of rotating spot, where you can share whatever’s on your heart. It’s usually pretty short, out of respect—a 10-minute thing. I was there for half an hour, pouring out all these difficulties,” he said. The archbishop immediately reassured him that if he had any doubts, he should take more time before making a final commitment.

“It was a tremendous load that had been lifted off my shoulders. It was an illuminating and painful experience. I realized I was happy I wasn’t getting ordained. It wasn’t what I wanted to feel, or expected to feel,” Mr. Heschmeyer said.

He decided to take time off and then consider rejoining—a plan which, according to the Rev. Matt Mason, the vocations director for the diocese of Manchester, N.H., is not uncommon. But nine days into a 10-day retreat, Heschmeyer knew for sure he was not meant to be a priest after all.

Leaving the seminary or religious life can feel like freedom followed by disorientation, or like rejection followed by clarity. For many, the experience eventually bears fruits of self-knowledge and a more profound relationship with God. But first comes suffering.

Read the rest of my latest for America Magazine. This article is also in the July print edition. 

Passing through the moor

This impulse, this drive to name, categorize, and find meaning in every experience, is the hallmark of a rational creature. We do not want to be like witless crickets, singing and leaping our way through the world, taking seasons as they come and then one day mindlessly coming to an end ourselves. We are made in the image of God, and that means we know there is meaning; and so we want to know why things happen. We want to know what our lives mean.

But sometimes, we can’t. Sometimes we are passing through the moor, on our way to a strange and new life we would never have chosen for ourselves. We cannot name what we see in that great expanse of dark. And it is normal to, like Mary, simply decide we do not like it.

Read the rest of my latest for The Catholic Weekly.

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Photo by Dan Cook via Flickr (Creative Commons)