How can one’s own suffering reveal the meaning of the crucifixion and draw one closer to Christ? If one has not undergone suffering in one’s own life, the appalling death that Jesus underwent for our salvation is almost incomprehensible. What is the meaning of the crucifixion of Christ for me? What are the implications of the crucifixion to my relationship with Christ and my willingness to live a life of discipleship?

“The challenge of human authenticity is to discern and to live within the creative tension of limitation and transcendence. Basic sin is to refuse to accept such a tension, involving a distortion on either side of too much transcendence (pride) or too much limitation (self-denigration).”[1]

My story of coming to live authentically as a sinner, a child of God, and a Catholic Christian, has involved exploring the reality of Jesus of Nazareth, the Christ, for me. I have approached this relationship through both the Incarnation and the Crucifixion, and I have come to a relatively balanced understanding most easily through the door of the Crucifixion first. I have come to know Jesus most as my crucified Lord, and through the implications and demands of the Paschal Mystery for my own life. The whole process of Jesus’ redemptive suffering has laid bare—for me—what is most human and lovable in me, and shown me what I must love if I am truly to love God. “Now in Christ Jesus you who were once far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ” (Gal. 2:13).

Like most people, my first knowledge of Jesus Christ came through hearing, reading, and proclaiming Scripture. To come to know the historical Jesus we must rely on four sources: the Gospels according to of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.

The four gospel ‘portraits’ can be classified as more representational and concerned with portraying historical details (Mark, Matthew, and Luke), or more (theologically) impressionistic and concerned with characteristic effects produced by Jesus (John)…. The Synoptic Gospels convey a high (albeit implicit) Christology. John, for his part… at times may be more historically accurate than the Synoptics, and arguably tells the whole story of Jesus’ death on the cross even more realistically than the other Gospels.[2]

For thirty-eight years now, I have been a lector, or proclaimer of the Word. It is the way through which I have participated in my Catholic community and parish liturgical life. Proclaiming Scripture has been the ‘holy ground’ through which I have best come to know Jesus Christ. I loved Bible stories as a child, and that love for Scripture has only deepened with the years. Gerald O’Collins says that “what [the Gospels] say about [Jesus] also acts as a mirror for our lives.”[3] The stories of Jesus’ life—but especially of his suffering, being misunderstood, abandoned, and betrayed—have given me an understanding of the meaning and purpose of my own suffering. Let me explain.

For most, the incarnation story—the Nativity story familiar from Christmastime—provides an easily accessible starting point in coming to know Jesus Christ. The story is well-known and relatively easy to experience imaginatively. I’ve always loved the story, but on one level the story made me sad, and I didn’t know why. Celebrations of Jesus’ birth always made me wistful for something I could never quite name. I came to see eventually that the complex feelings of my parents when they learned they were expecting me had imprinted deeply in my self-image. Through Jesus’ suffering, I came to accept as my birthright being a beloved child of God… but backwards.

I was born to good parents (though they were life-scarred), and I grew up in a good middle-class home. There is no overt intentional abuse, hunger, or neglect in my story. However, I believe that the sins perpetrated on one’s parents and grandparents play out for generations in the dysfunctional behaviours that affect their children and grandchildren (my own interpretation of Exodus 34:7). My father never learned how to father, in part because his father died when he was six. Clinical depression was common within his family, and it was one of the unspoken family secrets. Then (and even now) mental illness is seldom discussed in polite company. My father began to experience bipolar disorder when I was ten, though it was not officially diagnosed for ten more years.

My mother was the sixth of ten children in a very poor family. Her father’s family treated ‘Margaret and all those children’ with disdain. Mom also experienced incest boundary violations from her mother’s father, and her own brother. Of course, the activity was secret and it was never discussed… even into my generation. Mom’s ability to trust, to talk about unpleasant emotions, and to bond with her children, was compromised long before she married. So I had two parents with distressing family secrets who brought six children into the world, of which I was the eldest.

In the very natural human quest of a person to learn who she is, I eventually pieced together why I was envious of the little baby Jesus in Bethlehem. Through family conversations over the years, I was unsurprised to learn that the first emotion my mother experienced when she found out she was pregnant with me was disappointment. She actually did not mean about me personally, but she and my dad were just married, and she had planned to work while my father went to graduate school. My advent changed that plan and brought increased stress about money. To boot, I was a colicky baby and cried a lot. Still in their first year of marriage, my poor parents had a screaming baby to deal with in addition to graduate school and making ends meet. Having a child complicated an already stressful situation for them. But that child (me) still craved unconditional love and acceptance. Over the years, my father’s pursuit of tenure, his love for his work and quest for academic recognition, and his ongoing battle with manic depression absorbed him and my mother. To keep her husband and breadwinner functional, Mom needed to give him extra time and attention, and running a household with six children was exhausting. There was no extra emotional energy left over for us.

Each person longs to know love and tenderness and deep acceptance. Each person searches perpetually to find that unconditional love. I know I certainly did, until I found it—and keep finding it at every new Calvary-Resurrection experience—in Jesus Christ through the Roman Catholic Church. Father Ron Rolheiser expresses this universal longing for love well when he writes:

Deep inside each of us, like a brand, there is a place where God has touched, caressed and kissed us. Long before memory, long before we ever remember touching or loving or kissing anyone or anything, or being touched by anything or anybody in this world, there is a different kind of memory, the memory of being gently touched by loving hands. When our ear is pressed to God’s heart—to the breast of all that is good, true and beautiful—we hear a certain heartbeat and we remember, remember in some inchoate place, at a level beyond thought, that we were once gently kissed by God.[4]

When I was a small child and first heard the story of Jesus on the cross, it made me sad. However, I had no real understanding of the meaning or experience of crucifixion, other than it was probably worse than skinning your knee! When I first encountered the Catholic faith, I was at university. I had all the ideals and dreams that youth brings. However, with my first job and moving to live on my own, I found out quickly that life is never easy. Your good intentions hurt people’s feelings, your friends or colleagues betray your trust, your belief in management’s better nature is crushed, and you stand alone in the midst of a crowd fighting for someone else’s justice. Your spouse and your family members let you down, your boss does not acknowledge your good intentions, and your mistakes, assumptions, and humiliations bring disillusionment and despair.

Then you have your private tribulations. I was twenty when I was diagnosed with a very visible autoimmune skin disease, psoriasis. In Jesus’ day, people like me would have been ostracized from the community and sent to live in the leper colony. Believe me, you know how those lepers must have felt when you live with psoriasis! It’s an even more awful feeling to have red, scaly, unsightly skin patches all over your body when you fall in love. ‘What will he think when he sees? Will he be disgusted and turn away?’ The available medications were chemotherapy meds and had frightening side-effects. Feeling a bit like Job, I found comfort in knowing that Jesus knew what it meant to be isolated and unwelcome. Jesus actually sought out the outcasts and unclean people of his society, so I felt that he would not turn away from me.

A person must understand and appropriate for oneself both the Incarnation and the Passion (suffering, death, and resurrection of Christ). “Christ is our way to God. We go to the Father through him.”[5] However, we need to meet God’s infinite love in ‘our nakedness,’ our authentic self-knowledge of who we truly—are both graced and sinful—and not run away. At twenty in 1975, I felt misunderstood, unlovable, and different because of my ‘disconnect’ from my parents, my ‘one of the brainy kids’ status from growing up, and my newly diagnosed skin condition. It was then that I re-encountered Jesus Christ through a man who would eventually become my husband.

God obeys the deepest psychological law of acceptance: to be convinced of my acceptance, I must know that I am accepted at my worst. God shows me to myself as worse than I had ever conceived—a crucifier of the sinless one—in order to leave me no possible room for doubt… that he loves me and accepts me.[6]

Cynthia Crysdale’s book, Embracing Travail: Retrieving the Cross Today, retrospectively opened up a new understanding of the path I have taken to feel both redeemed and at peace as a beloved daughter of God. She says that “grace operates as an intervention into the distorted cycles of alienation. This intervention is at the same time extraordinary and quite ordinary.”[7] In retrospect, that’s how grace appeared in my life: through a very ordinary meeting in a class at university. Crysdale goes on to say that “grace is extraordinary in that we are given the required insights and the requisite willingness before we have taken the steps needed to generate them.”[8]

She says in her first chapter that “we were all struggling to embrace the pain of our situations while learning how to resist them and change old patterns.”[9] Coming out of my family and growing up experience, I had my “demons to deal with” and I found in the Catholic faith “ways of finding spiritual strength.”[10]

I have also learned through my life that true healing is born out of grief: grief for what I had never experienced, and grief for what I had. To reach a place of healing and peace, I have had to sit in the ashes of my broken dreams and unfilled hopes and weep and wail for a long while. As Crysdale said, I had to be “touched where [I] needed to be touched and brought relief rather than agony.”[11] But the grace of God reached me through Jesus, and I have come to really like and love who I am.

“The deepest and strongest peace a [person] can have is when [she] stops running away—when that is [she] need no longer run away… Peace is the cessation of [a person’s] flight from [herself] in the power of new revelation.” [12]

Through these decades of living the Catholic faith, I came to understand that I was created exactly this way—in this family with these struggles—for one reason: God wanted me thus. Feeling safe enough and brave enough to confront the pain and ungrieved losses came through reading, hearing, and praying Scripture and participating in the Paschal Mystery of the Eucharist. We are taught that we can do things with God’s grace through the Holy Spirit that we could not do without, and I have found it’s true. Jesus himself led the way for me to peace and harmony with God the Father, he sent the Holy Spirit to help me, and he leads the way for us all.

Scripture contains stories of every possible human flaw… stories of complicated, imperfect, ego-driven, sinful folks whom God still loves and chooses to call his beloved people. The New Testament, though, tells us how God’s plan of salvation for humanity is brought about through God’s Son, Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus was/is God, yet he freely chose to take on our humanity and to experience everything we do, except sin. Jesus tells us that he came so that we would have life and have it abundantly (John 10:10). How can we not pray to and give our lives to following a God who doesn’t ask us for anything that he himself did not give?

The suffering and death of Jesus make my sufferings and little deaths bearable: mine are so much smaller than his were. My second autoimmune disease diagnosis came in 1995: ulcerative colitis. With it came a two-month hospitalization for idiopathic acute pancreatitis, during which I came very close to death. A pancreas five times larger than normal caused immense pain: nasal morphine every six hours managed it. A self-employed contractor with the Alberta government, I did not get sick leave. Lying helpless (and feeling useless) in a hospital bed for two months was instructive. Ironically it happened over the Triduum and through Easter season. That year, I could identify more closely with Jesus’ arrest, trials, and execution… the helplessness of it. Living with ulcerative colitis since then has included periods of intense pain and suffering, and yet for some reason, this is how I was designed by God. Jesus’ example of doing God’s will through his suffering and death inspired me to search for God’s will in my own suffering: what lessons was I to learn from it all?

In 2000, I was back in the same Catholic hospital in ICU again, this time with double pneumonia, respiratory and kidney failure. That time, I was there for just under a month and came out with a long road of recuperation (and no income) ahead. Again, Jesus’ suffering was my inspiration: he struggled to breathe and speak while nailed to the cross; I struggled to breathe and to speak from pneumonia and being intubated. One of the nails in that illness was that, for many months, I could not sing at Mass. I love to sing; singing expresses best my joy and love for God. Being unable to sing for those months, I entered into Jesus’ helplessness on the cross in a new way.

The cross of Christ is for me a place of redemption, freedom, dignity, healing, and wholeness. Crysdale’s insight about this resonated deeply with me: “For those who approach the cross with an already beleaguered sense of self, what is to be discovered in the cross and resurrection is not—initially—forgiveness but healing.” [13] Those, like me, who have been wounded in life by other people—and who also suffer from painful, unexplainable medical conditions—discover ourselves “not primarily as crucifiers of a sinless one but as victims who have also been slain.”[14]

I have been scorned, belittled, betrayed, and rejected. I have been misjudged, unfairly condemned, misunderstood, and ostracized. And I have done all these things to other people. I have been both crucified and crucifier. As Sebastian Moore says, “the crucified is no stranger.” The crucified and the crucifier are both me. Crysdale says Moore’s “key insight is that Jesus represents for us our own potential Self—the deep and hidden person we are before God—which we crucify rather than allow to live.”[15]

She goes on to say that the drama works on two levels: the level of the historical Jesus and his Paschal Mystery, and in the life of each Christian believer, as they struggle to find, forgive, transform/become, and love their authentic self. In this understanding, “sin becomes not disobedience to a divine command but an innate conflict between who we are and who we can become.”[16] After sixty years of living, I know the struggles of St. Paul in Romans 7:15 very well: “I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do.” How can God love this me, when everyone else (including myself) has rejected, denied, or abandoned this me when I most needed their love and acceptance?

Jesus Christ crucified became my closest “ally and friend; God the Father [became] a grieving parent; and the Risen Lord signifies healing and empowerment.”[17] I was comforted by gazing on the crucifix, because Jesus too knew suffering and understood how hard it was. The next ‘road to Calvary’ arrived when my husband had his second heart attack at 52 (2005), followed by triple bypass surgery. Like many men at midlife, he had an agonizing time recovering from the experience: questioning everything in his life, his work, and his marriage. For me this brought identification with another part of the Paschal Mystery: the garden of Gethsemane. With Jesus, I was distressed and agitated for months, begging God to restore our relationship and to let the bitter cup of a broken marriage pass us by. I stayed in that garden with Jesus for many long months, praying, crying, and sweating blood. It was at Easter that next year that my husband resolved to leave the doubt and darkness behind, and rediscover with me the joys of new life in the Risen Christ.

Three years later, I was diagnosed with breast cancer. Two surgeries, six months of chemotherapy, six weeks of radiation and (excruciating radiation burns) ensued. Because of its length (sixteen months off work), my cancer journey felt like a very long Holy Saturday in the tomb just waiting for good news. Jesus descended into hell and, at times, so did I. I am simply thankful that my faith told me resurrection would follow eventually. I prayed Morning Prayer daily and discovered how much closer I felt to the Lord in silence. Now I understand why Jesus went off alone to pray; it’s only in silence that you can hear that still, small Voice in your heart. Throughout the whole cancer journey, however, I kept active in my community through proclaiming the Word and leading RCIA. It may have taken all week resting to build up the energy, but Sundays were (and are still) for God’s work.

Through these many years of dwelling in Scripture, participating in Mass, and discovering the richness of silence, I came to know and trust—through Jesus—God the Father. Jesus’ Father has become my father, too. Unlike my poor dad, this Father is always present and accessible, and he has never broken his promises. “The Biblical record shows that our Heavenly Father has kept each and every one of the promises he swore concerning our redemption—at the cost of his only beloved Son.”[18] The title of Scott Hahn’s book and my yearning for such a father is what made me buy the book in the first place.

Parents make unspoken promises to the children they bear, and our faith gives them the Way to do so. Only my mother held faith in God as precious. My father’s early experiences of abandonment and betrayal never allowed him to cross that trust threshold with God. In my family, I felt like an outsider and never really understood. Walking the Way with Jesus, and coming to know through Scripture the misbegotten troupe of people he gathered to carry on his mission, I felt right at home. As I lived my faith, I learned in Scripture how they “overcame obstacles and tasted defeat, laughed and cried, loved and lost.”[19]

Jesus’ suffering and death were more excruciating (the word itself means ‘torment from a cross’) than I can possibly imagine. Nothing I have experienced (and for which I still have ready access to morphine) comes even close. Crucifixion was a horrendously painful, slow, gruesome and barbaric public execution. Victims were gravely injured while being nailed to the cross. They endured the further indignities of asphyxiation, extreme thirst, shock, hunger, exposure, and exhaustion. In the Roman world, crucifixion was intended to be as humiliating as possible. Passersby ridiculed and mocked the victims, and dying ordinarily took a very long time. All in all, it was a ghastly way to die. To devout Jews, it also meant that the victim was “under God’s curse” (Duet. 21:23). According to the Torah, the method of death itself brought God’s curse upon the victim.

It’s no wonder that Jesus’ disciples were so disheartened and afraid following Jesus’ arrest and trial. After all, they “had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel” (Luke 24:21).

“Jesus was nailed probably to a T-shaped cross, not far off the ground, and guarded by soldiers, who were posted to prevent anyone from taking him off the cross… Some victims of crucifixion died quickly, due to loss of blood, but others survived for several days, the nails pulling horribly on the hands, before succumbing to either dehydration or more likely asphyxiation, as the weight of the body made expanding the lungs difficult.”[20]

I went on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land in November 2013. In the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, there is a staircase to the right of the entrance leading up to two chapels built on top of Golgotha. Pilgrims line up to reach an altar under which you kneel. There a hole in the marble through which pilgrims reach to touch the top of Golgotha. You have no idea when you kneel there how far you have to reach to touch the rock, but it’s not far. It’s a shock when you feel it, and you withdraw your hand quickly… then wish you had not. Our Lord died there for me. It takes more than a few minutes afterwards to realize where you actually are: standing immediately above the place where the Lord Jesus himself gave up his spirit to bring you back into community with God.

I hope to return to the Holy Land again and soon. To experience the land where Jesus lived and died, was resurrected and glorified, cannot be adequately described in words or pictures. So many times in that ten days I felt the Lord’s presence: beside and on the Sea of Galilee, at Caesarea Philippi, in the Basilica of the Annunciation, in Ein Karem, and in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Jesus had been real to me before, but he came alive in a new way in Israel. I could see things he saw, hear the same sounds of birds and breezes he heard, and watch the sun rise over the Sea of Galilee as I am sure he did. In Israel, I ‘read’ the Fifth Gospel, and I felt Jesus’ presence everywhere. The pilgrimage experience is one that changes you, and you carry it with you forever. I can see where Scripture stories happened; I can close my eyes and be there once again.

The Israel Museum in Jerusalem has a scale model of the Old City of Jerusalem in the Second Temple period, about 66 CE, only thirty years after Jesus resurrection. Being able to picture where places were, especially Golgotha, was very instructive. Golgotha was just outside the gates of the city, which altogether comprise less than one square kilometre. So much world history in one small piece of earth!

In our MRE class in Ottawa, the professor said he thought the crucifix had lost its meaning for our world today, and perhaps it has. But perhaps also—like understanding the sacraments—understanding the Paschal Mystery and the crucifixion is part of mystagogia. Perhaps one can only understand both with grace and through discipleship with the Crucified and Risen One. If I was presenting this paper to any group, I think that is what I would tell them: you need to choose to follow Christ to begin to understand. St. Paul says it in his first letter to the Corinthians:

“For the message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God… we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those who are the called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ [is] the power of God and the wisdom of God. For God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength” (1 Cor. 1:18, 23-25).

My experience tells me that knowing comes with living the Christian faith. The crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth is a scandalous occurrence that one can only understand through one’s own life sufferings. Operative grace (God’s action on us) is necessary, but it is impotent without cooperative grace (our willingness to examine what revelation means and pursuing the questions that arise from our own experience and God’s revelation in Christ).[21] Such is the life of faith.

Because the distortion of alienation permeates all levels of human living and because not everyone has embarked on the journey of healing and communion with the Divine, because those who have are still growing, living an integrated life will necessarily seem counterintuitive to many observers. To live an integrated life will necessarily seem counterintuitive to many observers… In sum, in an alienated world, to receive and cooperate with the grace of God necessarily involves embracing consequent suffering.[22]

Suffering has been made easier when I have joined it with Christ’s suffering (Col. 1:24). In accepting suffering, and offering it (and my many tears) for others, I have come to know myself as God’s beloved daughter. It is not an easy path, and many do not understand it, nor will they follow. But I know it is the right path.

Mark Hart, the Bible Geek, and vice-president of Life Teen International, posted a recent video on Facebook where he said: “If what you want to be is comfortable, then the cross would be the dumbest possible symbol for your faith!” [23] However, the cross is my symbol and it is much more than jewelry… it is the reason for my life. I will end with a quote from Blessed John Henry Newman:

“God has created me to do Him some definite service. He has committed some work to me which He has not committed to another… Therefore, I will trust Him, whatever I am, I can never be thrown away. If I am in sickness, my sickness may serve Him, in perplexity, my perplexity may serve Him. If I am in sorrow, my sorrow may serve Him. He does nothing in vain. He knows what He is about. He may take away my friends. He may throw me among strangers. He may make me feel desolate, make my spirits sink, hide my future from me. Still, He knows what He is about.”[24]

Bibliography

Barbet, Pierre, M.D., A Doctor at Calvary, Image Books, a division of Doubleday & Company Inc., Garden City, New York, 1963.

Benedict XVI (Joseph Ratzinger), Jesus of Nazareth, Part Two: Holy Week – From the Entrance into Jerusalem to the Resurrection, Ignatius Press, San Francisco, 2011.

Crysdale, Cynthia S. W., Embracing Travail: Retrieving the Cross Today, The Continuum International Publishing Group Inc., New York, 2000.

Hahn, Scott, A Father Who Keeps His Promises: God’s Covenant Love in Scripture, Charis Books/Servant Publications, Ann Arbor, Michigan, 1998.

Martin, James, S.J., Jesus: a Pilgrimage, HarperOne, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers, New York, 2014.

Moore, Sebastian, The Crucified is No Stranger, Daron, Longman & Todd Ltd, London, 1977.

O’Collins, Gerald, S.J., Christology: a Biblical, Historical, and Systematic Study of Jesus, Oxford University Press, New York, 1995.

Footnotes

[1] Cynthia Crysdale. Embracing Travail: Retrieving the Cross Today. (The Continuum International Publishing Group Inc., New York, 2000), p. 144.

[2] Gerald O’Collins, SJ. Christology: a Biblical, Historical, and Systematic Study of Jesus. (Oxford University Press, New York, 1995) p. 50-51.

[3] Ibid., p. 53.

[4] Ron Rolheiser. Press your ear to God’s heart; remember you were kissed by God, Western Catholic Reporter, June 13, 2011.

[5] Sebastian Moore. The Crucified is No Stranger. (Daron, Longman & Todd Ltd, London, 1977), p. 4.

[6] Ibid., p. 4.

[7] Cynthia Crysdale, p. 131.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Ibid, p. 5.

[10] Ibid, p. 5.

[11] Ibid., p. 5.

[12] Sebastian Moore, p. 24-25.

[13] Crysdale, p. 8.

[14] Ibid., p. 8.

[15] Ibid., p. 8.

[16] Ibid., p. 9.

[17] Ibid., p. 8.

[18] Scott Hahn. A Father Who Keeps His Promises: God’s Covenant Love in Scripture. (Servant Publications, Ann Arbor, Michigan, 1998), p. 14.

[19] Ibid., p. 21.

[20] James Martin, SJ. Jesus: a Pilgrimage. (HarperOne, New York, 2014), p. 375.

[21] Crysdale, p. 133.

[22] Crysdale, p. 147.

[23] Mark Hart (the Bible Geek), at https://www.facebook.com/MarkHart99, video posted June 17, 2015, at 10:46 a.m.

[24] John Henry Newman. From http://www.newmanreader.org/works/meditations/meditations9.html, accessed on June 14, 2015.

Narrative or story-telling is an important part of religious education and catechesis. We learn about God through both the story of our own lives and coming to realize God’s presence with us throughout. When we have tied our mundane story to a sacred story,[1] we adopt the symbols of the sacred story into our personal life story. Sacred stories form our consciousness… and mundane stories help us clarify our sense of the world.[2]

“Stephen Crites also suggests that action through time has an inherently musical style… The earliest narratives are thought to have been sung, and the song is even thought to have preceded its words.”[3]

When I hear music, I want to dance. In Scripture, the Psalms were certainly sung, and in some cases, sacred stories were also danced (Miriam and the tambourines in Exodus 15:20). The type of dance I imagine with music and two partners is a waltz. So my metaphor for this blog becomes two types of catechesis dancing/waltzing together.

Narrative and story-telling are cultural expressions. In 2016, our Canadian culture has moved beyond a primarily Judeo-Christian culture, but many threads of the Judeo-Christian sacred story still permeate what is now known as “post-modern culture.” The Judeo-Christian symbols first formed Canadian culture, even though the Christian sacred story may not be known in its entirety, nor understood, as Canada absorbs more non-Christian immigrants and becomes more secularized.

The Christian sacred (Crites) or canonical (Stone) story is a love story. This story is told in words, or more precisely, in the Word. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God… What came into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people” (John 1: 1, 3b). Our sacred story, which we call Scripture, tells how God created human beings in God’s own image and likeness. God’s image and likeness is a communion of Persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—or Love, Beloved, and Loving.[4] God the Father creates and sustains all life out of infinite love. But God’s most beloved creatures are human beings, especially the Chosen People, with whom he stands in covenant relationship.

Our God is steadfast in his love for us, despite our waywardness: our sins, failures, self-centered triumphs, joys, sorrows, hopes and despairs. Many people have never discovered the ability to see, hear, or sense God’s presence anywhere… or they have left it unused for so long that they have forgotten how. Many have never even heard the Christian sacred story, or they have heard incomplete or uninspiring versions of it. Many have never been shown the joys that come through walking in Jesus’ Way. They are imprisoned by their own decidedly unsacred world views. Longing for liberation from a prison they sense but cannot define, they yearn for someone to unlock their cell doors.

Our lives are unfolded within time. We live only in the present, the now, but we carry within us “the chronicle of memory.”[5] Stephen Crites says our sense of consciousness awakens within a sacred story (a big story or meganarrative) which gives it context. Our experiencing—our way of making sense of our lives and the contexts within which we find ourselves—is apprehended in narrative form as well. Our only way to make sense of the life events unfolding over the linear course of time is to place our little stories within a bigger, sacred story (in our context in Canada, it is still predominantly Judeo-Christian). Dwayne Huebner quotes Alfred North Whitehead when describing the language of religious metaphors used in religious education, in that “the foundation of reverence is this perception, that the present holds within itself the complete sum of existence, backwards and forwards, the whole amplitude of time, which is eternity.”[6]

“Catechesis must take account of the historicity of all human existing. Since narratives are the central access to this historicity, catechesis must be inherently narrative. Interestingly, the main source for catechesis is also narrative. The dominant literary genre of the Scriptures is narrative… [and] is central to a narrative catechesis… The narratives remind us that the doctrines found in our traditions have had their origins in these biblical narratives… Catechesis that is Scripture-based will honour the very pedagogy of God found in the Scriptures.”[7]

One symbol our faith offers us is the rhythm of the liturgical year, with its cycle of seasons and readings. We have a three-year cycle of Scripture readings, so the sacred story is proclaimed anew about every thousand days. The liturgical year contains two penitential seasons of waiting, two seasons of celebration and joy, and lots of ordinary days—much like life. To each Sunday Mass, persons come with new needs, wounds, and insights to hear again the familiar ritual and the living Word. “In Christian liturgy the whole church proclaims and celebrates the mystery of Christ, the mystery… which we call the Paschal Mystery.”[8] The liturgy celebrates Christ’s life, death, resurrection, and ascension to glory in chronos time, and in kairos time in union with Christ. The liturgy is scripted drama, in which speech, space, silence, art, architecture, music, and song are choreographed. Each person present has both a place and a purpose; there are no spectators.

“Sacramental celebration is woven from signs and symbols… As a being at once body and spirit, man (sic) expresses and perceives spiritual realities through physical signs and symbols. As a social being, man (sic) needs signs and symbols to communicate with others, through language, gestures, and actions. The same holds true for his relationship with God.”[9]

The liturgical ritual is full of symbols which catechize participants.

“Our faith commitment brings us together to celebrate, and every time we come together to worship, our faith is renewed… Through its liturgical celebrations the church continues to be disciples of the Lord, a community of believers, a pilgrim people… The liturgy is a ritual… a repeated pattern of behaviour that expresses meaning. ”[10]

Within the liturgy, a primary symbol is the People of God: a motley crew of unlikely companions of varying appearances, backgrounds, and characters gathered together by one God for worship and pilgrimage.

Evangelization and catechesis pass on or echo the Word which is God. Our baptism gives us the capacity and the responsibility to pass our faith on to others. Doing so in a post-modern culture is challenging. However, if people encounter the kerygma, they become hungry for rich, solid catechesis. My premise is that, if both narrative and symbolic catechesis are carried out together, the catechesis that follows the kerygma has the best chance of bringing about a deepening faith in adults. Good catechesis offers adults “the lure of the transcendent—that which we seem is not what we are for we could always be other.”[11] Catechesis leads us out from where we stand now into something new.

Underlying all Christian catechesis is one primary symbol: the true Teacher is Jesus Christ. The catechist is a person who uses her own mundane story of being led to a deeper relationship with Christ, and of her increasingly more authentic missionary discipleship, to facilitate an encounter between the adults being catechized and our Teacher and Lord. The differences between the catechist and the catechized “are manifestations of Otherness. They are openings in the fabric of everydayness. They are invitations [to those adults being catechized] to be led out, to be educated.”[12]

Part of growing to adulthood means beginning to define who you are. A person’s childhood and youth gives them the opening chapters and are set within the context of the “sacred story” of the family of origin and the surrounding culture. But the rest of the person’s story is largely theirs to write. As young people reach the age of majority, they begin to choose for themselves: they choose their education, their work, their partners in life, their world view, their meaning systems or faith. This process of choosing, correcting, realigning, and re-choosing lasts a lifetime. The predominant world culture seduces young people into believing that either lives of power or pleasure will fulfill them. These early adult years are where we often spend much of our time distracted and diverted from God. Fr. Robert Barron summarizes these diversions that take us away from putting God in the centre of our life as three: sensual pleasures and materialism, worldly power and glory, and the aggrandizement of ego or making ourselves into gods.[13]

It’s usually in the desert experiences of life that the clamouring of the distractions and diversions dies down, and we face again the big questions of life: “Who am I? Why am I here? What is my purpose?” If people never encounter an intentional catechist-disciple of Jesus Christ, they may never get the answers to these questions. They may never acquire the symbols to interpret their experiences as invitations to turn/return to God. However, if they encounter a disciple of Christ on their journey through the desert—of their ordinary lives—they will be invited to “leave their nets, their boats,” their lives of ‘dissolute living’ to return to the tender mercy (the hesed) of God.

As I have said before, my first encounter with someone who actually knew Jesus Christ was when I met my now-husband, Marc. He was connected with a whole community of people who knew the Lord. My mother and her Anglican parish knew about Jesus and taught me about Jesus, but they did not have a personal relationship with Jesus. However, Marc and the Catholics I met in the Newman community did know the Lord, and they talked about Jesus as if he was sitting right there with us. Those people incarnated for me what it meant to be “in touch, but also in communion and intimacy, with Jesus Christ.”[14] Marc and the Newman students talked so confidently about Jesus and lived [as if they knew absolutely that] “only [Jesus] can lead us to the love of the Father in the Spirit and make us share in the life of the Holy Trinity.[15]”

I was twenty years old when I encountered those Catholic intentional disciples. My personal story to that point had seen me leave behind my parents and their way of life (academia), and much like the Prodigal Son, I moved to a distant country (Calgary!) and took up “dissolute living” (see Luke 15:13). When I had “spent everything” through an aborted university attendance, two intimate unmarried relationships, and several unsatisfying and unfulfilling jobs, I returned home to Edmonton and my parents’ home to attend university for real. On my first day of classes, I encountered Marc.

In the unfolding of our relationship, and my closer encounters with Jesus Christ, I began to rewrite my personal narrative in light of what I was coming to understand about Catholic Christianity. Although I had returned to my childhood home, I had returned to clearly apparent disappointment and loss of regard.

One day that first fall of 1975 at Mass with Marc, I heard proclaimed the Gospel story of the woman caught in adultery. I heard that Jesus did not condemn her as the others had, but rather he told her to go and sin no more. Jesus spoke to me in that Scripture passage that afternoon and, as a result, I “left my nets” (my previous way of life and all the guilt and shame that had accumulated) to start to follow Jesus.

“The narrative quality of experience has three dimensions, the sacred story, the mundane stories, and the temporal form of experience itself… Sometimes the tracks cross, causing a burst of light like a comet entering our atmosphere. Such a luminous moment, in which sacred, mundane, and personal are inseparably conjoined, we call symbolic in a special sense… The cross, or a holy mountain, receive their meaning from the stories in which they appear… For a religious symbol becomes fully alive to consciousness when sacred story dramatically intersects both an explicit narrative and the course of a [person’s] personal experience. The symbol is precisely that double intersection.”[16]

That writing in the dirt, those stones dropping, and Jesus saying he did not condemn that woman, happened to me that afternoon. And it was exactly like a burst of light. I remember it as if it were an hour ago, and it has been almost 40 years now. I believe each conversion story begins with an inbursting of Light just like mine. The persons need someone to explain the experience in relation to Christian symbols, as Marc did that day.

Many adult Catholics have a “low regard for their own experience when it comes to matters of theology or, for that matter, of faith.”[17] However, we also know that when adults’ experiences are respected and valued—plus when they are shown how to value and derive meaning from their experiences in light of our faith—grace quickly enters in. Our challenge is to invite people to the dance between the stories of their own lives and the lives of others within the community—all woven together in the symbolic mystery of our God.

The process of symbolic catechesis laid out by Anne Marie Mongoven starts with reflecting on a common human experience. How would you identify a common human experience? A catechist would first listen to people’s everyday stories. When narrative catechesis and symbolic catechesis dance together, one moves from hearing common experiences through stories into probing deeply into how the common experience affects people’s lives.

Dancing with the “I Am Who I Am” who is God helps us discover the “I am” of who we are. As we begin to see “in the mirror dimly” who we are both created to be and becoming, we not only discover Who partners us, but also we begin to see God and bits of our self in the other dancers around us. We hear God tell us that we are his beloved children, and that He is well pleased with us… despite how much we don’t deserve it. I see us in a magnificent mirrored ballroom, listening to choirs of angels, twirling with God to our own song narratives, all blending into beautiful and harmonious music,[18] a real jubilation.

“To argue for the musical quality of experience is to say that the principle of organization is music, which consists not only of time (rhythm), and space (the shape of the melodic line), but also beauty (the evaluation of our perception).”[19]

“There is nothing more beautiful than to know Him and to speak to others of our friendship with Him.”[20] Beauty attracts people. Beautiful scenery, beautiful music, beautiful art… all draw us in and at the same time beyond ourselves.

When I am confronted with beauty, I feel it as a leap of the heart, an indrawn breath, and a sense of rising beyond where I stand to something more. As I wrote this blog, Marc was listening to TED talks of piano competitions: two Rachmaninoff and one Tchaikovsky piano concerto. As I listened from upstairs, I was distracted from my writing task and drawn to go downstairs for the climactic endings of each of the three pieces played. I was drawn out of my mundane work into a transcendent experience of music that had my heart and spirit soaring with the musical notes.

From April 2013 to September 2014, I had the privilege of journeying with my mother, Dorothy, through her final illness and death. It was an exhausting vigil, yet at the same time, graced. I am a photographer and, though amateur, I have been gifted with an eye for composition and for a striking photo. God’s grace reached me through many evening sunsets as I left the hospitals where Mom spent her last months. At one point, when my exhaustion was deep, and my sense of helplessness was almost overwhelming, I stood on a cliff above the river near our home to watch the sunset. It was unusual because I was all alone that evening. Most nights there were at least a half dozen other people standing there gazing west.

As I stood there breathing in the autumn air, I took a series of 24 photos of the sunset. At about photo 16, I noticed a dove shape in the clouds. The shape had head, wings, tail, and feet. I remember lowering my camera and placing my hand on my chest as I breathed a sigh of thanks to God. The symbol of the dove appearing in the clouds was a sign. I heard in my heart, “You are my beloved daughter and with you, I am well pleased.” I remembered getting tears in my eyes, that God would create such a beautiful sign just for me. That sign (faith symbol) helped me to carry on being Mom’s companion on that last journey. I had always known that I would do no differently, but now it became truly holy work. Although I was deeply tired throughout the eighteen months, from then on my heart and step were lighter because I felt God with me every day. Somehow it all became much easier knowing God was pleased. Once again, I learned that the Lord’s “yoke was easy, and the burden light” (Matt. 11:30).

Stephen Crites writes that cultural myths or sacred stories help people create their sense of self and sense of the world.[21] Both ordinary evangelizing and ‘new’ evangelizing, indeed all catechesis, must find ways to weave people’s commonplace personal stories into the Christian sacred story. Doing so lays the groundwork—prepares the way—for an encounter with the risen Christ. From that encounter, people can first choose to “leave their nets” and follow Christ or choose to stay with their boat on the shore. Jesus looks with love upon everyone, whether they follow him or stay where they are. Once people have become followers of Christ, challenges arise along with temptations to focus on the stormy waves instead of looking steadfastly at the Lord. “Faith symbols enable us to interpret life, and conversely, life symbols help us to understand faith.”[22]

Symbolic catechesis works with adults of small or big faith, and with everyone in between. It works for all races and cultures; for young, middle-aged, and elderly; for rich and poor; for high school drop-outs, tradespeople, and university graduates. Symbolic catechesis integrates life and faith in a culture that wants to keep them separate. It focusses on the diversity within unity: “Indeed, the body does not consist of one member but of many… As it is, there are many members but one body” (1 Cor. 12: 14, 20). Symbolic catechesis also models exactly what it teaches: the Christian way of life. “It has a natural appeal for most adults because it presumes their questions, concerns, and experiences are significant sources for developing a living faith.”[23]

Adults are capable of learning throughout their lives[24] and, in general, have very definite preferences about how they choose to do that learning. Unlike children, they are free to choose not to undertake additional intentional education of any type after they reach the age of majority. Adults must see a value for themselves in dedicating their time to adult learning, which includes learning more about their faith. If they do not see a benefit for their lives as being lived right now, they will not bother to take time from their already busy schedules. The appeal of symbolic catechesis is that it helps Christian adults to draw meaning from common human experiences or “signs of the times.”

Adults who gather together for any event bring hard-won wisdom with them. Whatever the topic, there will be at least one person who has experienced it from some angle. Inviting the story to be shared and then bringing a faith symbol to the dialogue allows those listening to appropriate what God has wanted them to know: that He is always with us. Adults learn through trial and error, and their very diversity of age, culture, and economic background brings a treasure chest of insight to the discussion.

Catechists who wish to conduct symbolic catechesis pay attention to the “signs of the times,” and build catechesis to help people make sense of what’s happening to them. People tell mundane stories all the time, to relate what happened at work or school, to explain their relationships with others in the family or community, and to interpret what’s happening in the world around them. “The mundane stories are also among the most important means by which people articulate and clarify their sense of the world.”[25] Symbolic catechesis starts with common human experience, and then partners the story of the experience with a faith symbol to help shed light on the experience. The catechetical dance ponders and probes story and symbol to yield meaning and reveal a pathway forward.

The symbols used in the Church’s sacraments, beginning with baptism are incarnate signs of invisible realities. Water symbolizes both dying with Christ and rising to new life. Oil symbolizes being received into God’s royal family. The candle flame symbolizes new sight and a new way of seeing our life and the world. The white garment symbolizes our liberation from sin and evil, and our innate dignity as God’s children. Baptism disposes us to live a life of faith. But as we are more and more aware today, it does not ensure that we will live that life. In the Church, the virtue (or grace) of faith is transmitted in the sacraments, beginning with baptism.

A person who has been baptized does not automatically choose to live a life of faith. Baptism gives the capacity or power to believe. It gives us the virtue of faith. The Church distinguishes between the virtue of faith and the act of faith (CCC 153-155). The act of faith is the explicit free choice of a person (older than the age of reason or seven years) to respond to God’s grace with belief and discipleship.[26]

“Symbolic catechesis associates or correlates the symbols of human events and experiences, the ‘signs of the times,’ with the symbols of faith: the Bible, and the teaching, life, and worship of the Church.”[27] It starts with a common experience, connects it to symbols within the faith tradition, and honours people’s experience as “the holy ground” on which they have encountered God. Symbolic catechesis is the work of community. It invites reflection and sharing, not of superficial matters but of events that have broken hearts. Whether the hearts are broken apart or broken open[28] can depend on how smoothly the dance between narrative and symbolic catechesis flows. If people are “able to enter into and consciously engage hard experiences… [their] hearts will get the kind of exercise that makes them supple.”[29] The catechist and the community dance together searching for ways to interpret and make sense of the signs of the times. “Since God created humans in God’s image and likeness, God can be found within the events and unfolding of our lives.”[30]

Narrative catechesis consists of helping people find the connections to God and the wisdom in tying their own life stories into the Christian story. As Groome says, “education at its best informs, forms, and transforms the very “being” of people and does so in ways that are powerfully life-giving for both themselves and their society.[31]” Our individual lives with all their tempests, tribulations, and triumphs shown us God’s “eternal wisdom… ineffable loving-kindness … [and we can] see for ourselves the thought and care he has given to accommodating his language to our nature.”[32]

“Faith is not a light which scatters all our darkness, but a lamp which guides our steps in the night and suffices for the journey.”[33] A catechist brings her own small light to shine on the dance floor where she and other adults will twirl around common human experiences, jostling them and observing them until they can incorporate the new steps into their dance. Then the music, the dance, the discovery, and the joy will help them soar and “touch the face of God.”

High Flight

Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I’ve climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
Of sun-split clouds, — and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of — wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence. Hov’ring there,
I’ve chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air. . . .

Up, up the long, delirious burning blue
I’ve topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace
Where never lark, or ever eagle flew —
And, while with silent, lifting mind I’ve trod
The high untrespassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.

— John Gillespie Magee, Jr[34]

Bibliography

Catechism of the Catholic Church, Publications Service, CCCB, Ottawa, 1994.

Crites, Stephen. “The Narrative Quality of Experience” in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Vol. 39, No. 3 (Sep. 1971): 291-311.

English, Leona. “Adult Education of the Laity” in Theoforum, Vol. 41, No. 1 (2010): 131-148.

Farey, Caroline; Waltraud Linnig, and Sr. Johannah Paruch FSGM, eds. The Pedagogy of God: Its Centrality in Catechesis and Catechesis Formation. (Emmaus Road Publishing, Steubenville Ohio, 2011).

Gallagher, Maureen. The Art of Catechesis: What You Need to Be, Know and Do. (Paulist Press, New York, 1998).

Greene, Maxine. “Seeking Contexts” in Releasing the Imagination: Essays on Education, the Arts, and Social Change. (Jossey-Bass, San Francisco, 1995): 9-13

Greene, Maxine. “Freedom, Education, and Public Spaces” in The Dialectic of Freedom. (Teachers College Press, New York, 1988): 1-23.

Groome, Thomas H., Will There Be Faith? A New Vision for Growing and Educating Disciples. HarperOne, an imprint of HarperCollis Publishers, New York, 2011.

Huebner, Dwayne. “Religious Metaphors in the Language of Education” in The Lure of the Transcendent: Collected Essays by Dwayne E. Huebner. (Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Mahwah, NJ, 1999): 358-368.

Mongoven OP, Anne Marie. The Prophetic Spirit of Catechesis: How We Share the Fire in Our Hearts. (Paulist Press, New York, 2000).

Moran, Gabriel. “Revelation, Dialogue and the Christian Community” in Theoforum, Vol. 41, No. 1 (2010): 31-51.

Ochs, Carol. Song of the Self: Biblical Spirituality and Human Holiness. (Trinity Press International, Valley Forge, PA; 1994.

Palmer, Parker J. Healing the Heart of Democracy: the Courage to Create a Politics Worthy of the Human Spirit. (Jossey-Bass, a Wiley Imprint, San Franciso, 2011.)

Palmer, Parker J. A Hidden Wholeness: The Journey Toward an Undivided Life. (Jossey-Bass, a Wiley Imprint, San Francisco, 2004.)

Parent, Neil A. A Concise Guide to Adult Faith Formation. (Ave Maria Press, Notre Dame, IN; 2009).

Pope Francis. Encyclical Letter Lumen Fidei, (Pauline Books and Media, Boston, 2013).

Power, M. Myrtle, and John Van Den Hengel, SCJ. “Catechesis in an Age of Secularity” in Theoforum, Vol. 41, No. 1 (2010): 53-76.

Regan, Jane. Forming a Community of Faith: A guide to success in adult faith formation today. (Twenty-Third Publications, New London, CT, 2014).

Regan, Jane. Toward an Adult Church: A Vision of Faith Formation. (Loyola Press, Chicago, 2002).

Willey, Petroc, Pierre de Cointet, and Barbara Morgan. The Catechism of the Catholic Church and the Craft of Catechesis. (Ignatius Press, San Francisco, 2008).

Footnotes:

[1] Stephen Crites. “The Narrative Quality of Experience” in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Vol. 39, No. 3 (Sep. 1971), p 294-297. I use the terms “mundane stories” and “sacred stories” as presented in this article.

[2] Carol Ochs. Song of the Self: Biblical Spirituality and Human Holiness. (Trinity Press International, Valley Forge, PA; 1994, p.25.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Rev Robert Barron’s explanation of Trinity in various homilies found online at www.wordonfire.org  I listen as I commute to and from work, so I cannot quote exactly which homily, but I have heard the explanation more than once, usually for Trinity Sunday.

[5] Stephen Crites, p. 297.

[6] Dwayne Huebner. “Religious Metaphors in the Language of Education” in The Lure of the Transcendent: Collected Essays by Dwayne E. Huebner. (Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Mahwah, NJ, 1999), p. 359.

[7] Power, M. Myrtle, and John Van Den Hengel, SCJ. “Catechesis in an Age of Secularity” in Theoforum, Vol. 41, No. 1 (2010), p. 64-5.

[8] Anne Marie Mongoven. The Prophetic Spirit of Catechesis: How We Share the Fire in Our Hearts. (Paulist Press, New York, 2000), p. 241.

[9] Catechism of the Catholic Church. (Publications Service, CCCB, Ottawa, 1994), 1145-46.

[10] Anne Marie Mongoven, p. 242-3.

[11] Dwayne Huebner, p. 360.

[12] Dwayne Huebner, p. 361.

[13] Rev. Robert Barron. Three Questions from the Desert, a homily given Feb. 17, 2013 (recording #632), found online at http://www.wordonfire.org/resources/homily/three-questions-from-the-desert/992/ Accessed April 10, 2015.

[14] John Paul II. Apostolic Exhortation Catechesi tradendae [16 October 1979]. (Ottawa: CCCB), 5.

[15] Ibid, 5.

[16] Stephen Crites, p. 305-6.

[17] Neil A. Parent. A Concise Guide to Adult Faith Formation. (Ave Maria Press, Notre Dame, IN; 2009), p. 50.

[18] Carol Ochs. Song of the Self: Biblical Spirituality and Human Holiness. (Trinity Press International, Valley Forge, PA; 1994, p.25.

[19] Ibid., p.26.

[20] Pope Benedict XVI, Homily at the Mass for the Inauguration of his Pontificate, 24 April 2005, quoted in The Via Pulchritudinis: Privileged Pathway for Evangelization and Dialogue, the Concluding Document of the Plenary Assembly of the Pontifical Council for Culture, 2006. Accessed at http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/pontifical_councils/cultr/documents/rc_pc_cultr_doc_06121999_documents_en.html on 22 April 2015.

[21] Stephen Crites, p. 296.

[22] Anne Marie Mongoven, p. 117.

[23] Anne Marie Mongoven, p. 120.

[24] Neil A. Parent, p.39.

[25] Stephen Crites, p. 296.

[26] Sherry Weddell, God has No Grandchildren: Forming Intentional Disciples for the 21^st Century, talk given at St. John Bosco Conference, July 2014. Video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ABq9ePuIj80&feature=youtu.be accessed  on April 24, 2015.

[27] Anne Marie Mongoven, p. 117.

[28] Parker Palmer. Healing the Heart of Democracy: the Courage to Create a Politics Worthy of the Human Spirit. (Jossey-Bass, a Wiley Imprint, San Franciso, 2011.), p. 60-61.

[29] Ibid., P. 59.

[30] Susan Barylo. “The Greatest “Happy-Ever-After Story” — How Personal Narrative and Divine Pedagogy Entwine.” From my final research paper submitted for Theology 5106 course in the Fall 2014 term, p. 12.

[31] Thomas H. Groome. Will There Be Faith? A New Vision for Growing and Educating Disciples (New York: HarperOne, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers), 2011, p. 94.

[32] Second Vatican Council. “Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation” (Dei Verbum) [18 November 1965],” in Vatican Council II: Constitutions Decrees Declarations, rev. ed., ed. Austin Flannery, OP, (Northport, NY: Costello Publishing Company, 1996), 13.

[33] Pope Francis. Encyclical Letter Lumen Fidei, (Pauline Books and Media, Boston, 2013),

[34] Poem found online at http://www.skygod.com/quotes/highflight.html  Accessed on April 27, 2015.

Why is narrative an important part of religious education, of catechesis? Do we learn about God through the story of our own life and, if so, what else does this narrative teach us? How do we take the insights we gain from pondering our own experiences—and God’s presence with us throughout—back to our vocational task of passing on faith to others?

From the dawn of time, humans have told stories about who they are, where they come from, and what it all means. Story-telling is a peculiarly human trait. All peoples, all cultures, all epochs, have their own stories.[1] It was always thus and will be forever.

Stories enchant us, inspire us, comfort us, and ground us in ‘now’… a ‘now’ flavoured with past events and future dreams. My own life has been grounded in the Christian Story since I was little. My awareness of God came soon after my awareness of my parents, particularly my mother. I first leaned my mother’s version of the Great Story: how God so loved the world and all the people in it, that God sent his own and only Child to share our human life, and to show us the way to “happily ever after.”

Prologue and character

Dad was a chemistry professor at the University of Alberta and he loved teaching and research. That love cost him a lot, though, and I’ve only realized how much by trying to make faith-sense[2] of my parents. Why did God choose Bill and Dorothy to be my parents? What did God teach me through them that enriches my role as a Catholic religious educator?

Mom had me and then my brother, Steve, kneeling beside our beds to say prayers when I was very little… probably about aged three.

Now I lay me down to sleep,

I pray the Lord my soul to keep.

If I should die before I wake,

I pray the Lord my soul to take. Amen.

I was told that my heavenly Father, God, would always look after me—no matter what. I could always talk to him and he would listen. I’m sure I was also told that angels watched over us always, too. I know we dressed up in our good clothes on Sundays and went to church. I went to Sunday school where people told stories with cut-outs and felt boards. I was always as close as I could get to the teacher and the felt board. I was so very excited to bring home the story handouts, so mom or dad could read the story to me again and, while I waited, I could look at the drawings on the front of those Bible people from long ago.

Stories have been a part of my life since I was very young. I love stories, because it meant cuddling with my parents, especially my daddy. I felt very special and well-loved sitting on his lap while he read to us. On reflection, I know I still look for feelings of love, comfort, and safety in my stories… because that was my early experience of hearing them. Those cuddly story times probably also laid the groundwork for my love of both romance novels and mysteries: always a happy ending after some trials and tribulations… rather like Bible stories.

Even now, I connect good feelings with books of all kinds. As I reflect on it, that’s probably one reason I read so hungrily as I—and the family—grew. As my parents added children to their family, their eldest child did not get the same level of personal attention anymore. My mom was simply too busy with the younger kids. Increasingly, I sought those feelings in my stories and books.

By Grade Four, the bookmobile from the Edmonton Public Library was both heaven and a haven… the bookmobile contained a never-ending supply of stories. More and more books would come home with me. Now there were five children in our family, and I was recruited/expected to be mom’s main helper, since I was the oldest and a girl. Years later, mom told a visitor that she did not know what she would have done without me but, at the time, I did not feel appreciated in the role. I resented it more and more as years went on.

Our family schedule had times to be in bed at different ages, and times until which to read. When you reached nine, your bedtime was nine o’clock but you had no reading time. I was proud to be becoming a ‘big’ girl. However, on my ninth birthday, my dad’s mom died. I had never seen my dad cry until that day. With no reading time in bed, there was no time or place to process the emotions provoked by a sad, then increasingly absent father. Though we didn’t hear it named until ten years later, my father began to experience bipolar depression in the mid-sixties. It was called ‘manic depression’ at the time. Although my father did not die until 2005, I believe now that I mourned the loss of him from when I was about ten.

My parents kept dad’s diagnosis a secret from their families and the community. Mental illness in a family still can bring shame and embarrassment. Consequently, many families suffer in silence as ours did. Those years from nine to eighteen when I moved away from home were very difficult years. Dad was either absent or angry. We children learned to walk on eggshells by suppressing any emotions that would upset either parent: stressed mom and depressed dad. As a teenager, when I talked to mom about things she always told dad… and I would be in trouble. I was trying to deal with the bubbling cauldron that is adolescence but found no safe place to process it at home. Although I felt emotions, I did not learn how to handle them in a healthy way. Neither parent could teach us children how. We learned to survive unscathed by keeping any emotion other than ‘okay’ buried deep inside. To let any escape would provoke dad’s unreasonable-for-the-offense anger.

As I developed and grew, visiting relatives fascinated me: my two grandmothers first. They told their family stories… extended family stories that my parents were very keen to hear. When my grandmothers visited, especially dad’s mother, my dad did not go back to the chemistry lab after supper. Having Dad home in the evenings became an increasingly rare occurrence. When Dad was manic, he wanted to be working. When Dad was depressed, I don’t think he wanted to be home with six children starved for his attention.

My grandmothers talked about other unknown people who were “family.” These family members didn’t yet belong to my definition of family: one always-working dad, one always-home mom, and ever-more children. I was tantalized by the idea of more family… perhaps I would fit in with them! The year I was six, we all went to New Brunswick to visit these family members. The year I was thirteen, my brother and I stayed in New Brunswick for three weeks while Dad was at a conference in England. The year I was eighteen I wandered around the ancestral graveyard (where we buried my parents’ ashes in November) with my father in his hometown. I was curious about the people with the same name who were resting there. Who were they? What were their stories? My father did not know. He had been born 29 years after his parents married—the after-thought child. Dad’s father then died when he was only six. He didn’t learn the stories and couldn’t pass them on to me.

Relatives’ stories have always captivated me. In fact, I still seek to understand my nuclear family and myself by conversing with my extended family, and by reflecting on what I learn in light of my faith. Over the years, I met grandparents, great-aunts and great-uncles who told wonderful tales about their childhoods and their parents. I have aunts and uncles who were like—but also not like—my parents. Cousins were almost like brothers and sisters… but they didn’t live with me full time. They knew you had baked beans and brown bread every Saturday night. Crisp gingerbread cookies every Christmas were Gram’s recipe. Big round sugar cookies in the cookie jar were from Grammie’s. Cousins thought overdone cookies were special because Grammie had liked to read while preparing meals for her ten children. Shared traditions knit us all together into either the Ayers or the Monteiths.

Listening to stories about family, where we came from, and about my parents growing up was one of my favourite pastimes. Hearing those stories helped me to reflect on—and begin to make sense of—what made people tick. One aunt said recently that I was always a child who hung around the edges of adult conversations. Maybe that’s why I have visited the Maritimes more than thirty times in 50 years: to learn my story. Hearing family stories revealed where I came from, gave me insight into my parents, and helped shape the woman I am today.

Making faith-sense of my story

My faith journey began within the Anglican tradition of my mother and her father’s ancestors, flavoured by the Baptist tradition of her mother’s line. Although my father was baptized Anglican before marrying my mother, his heritage was strict Baptist, which he had rejected at thirteen due to the hypocrisy he felt was exhibited by the people in the staunch Baptist community of Sackville,[3] NB. His spirituality (if you can call it that) was delving into the mysteries of organic chemistry, the chemistry of living things. The family faith stories I learned from my parents and my relatives were decidedly tinged with an unarticulated aversion to the Roman Catholic Church.

How then did I end up Catholic?

My awareness that God might really have a plan for me and my life began to unfold soon after I met Marc, the Roman Catholic man who is now my husband. Here was someone not much older than me who actually knew God. No one I had met before knew God, but Marc sure did. The certainty of his knowing shone from his eyes. I had an inchoate longing for all that seemed to mean. I know now that Marc was simply doing what all Christians are called to do: witnessing to his faith in Christ.[4]

From no previous person in my life had I ever sensed that they really knew the Lord, Jesus Christ. They knew about Jesus and taught me about Jesus, but they did not have a personal relationship with Jesus. However, Marc and the Catholics I met in the Newman community did know the Lord, and they talked about Jesus as if he was sitting right there with us. These people incarnated for me what it meant to be “in touch, but also in communion and intimacy, with Jesus Christ.[5]” Marc and the Newman students talked so confidently about Jesus and lived [as if they knew absolutely that] “only [Jesus] can lead us to the love of the Father in the Spirit and make us share in the life of the Holy Trinity.[6]”

My curiosity and interest in learning more about this personal God Marc spoke about was piqued. My evangelization had begun in earnest. I first felt I needed to re-explore my own faith tradition but I did not find abundant life there, nor anyone who spoke as if they really knew the Lord. However, I felt immediately at home when I went to Mass for the first time in the university’s Catholic college chapel. Here was life, youth, music, and joy… and the Story. Of course, I had heard the Story before, but now people talked as if it was really true! I had new insights into familiar tales, while homilies further uncovered layers and angles of richness and depth.

In the Story, I heard of a Father who answers prayers and keeps his promises. (Later Scott Hahn wrote a book with that title, which I bought because I had been searching for such a father since I was nine.) My poor dad had gotten lost on the road of mental illness, and my mom, too, since she had gotten entangled in supporting dad, keeping him functioning so he could provide for the family, and then having no energy left to meet her children’s emotional needs.

In Scripture, and in the Church, I found a Father who always loved and forgave me… no matter what I did. He did not yell at me or criticize me. I also came to know my Brother, Jesus, who understood everything I went through, still loved me, and even gave his life to keep me in the family! It took many more years for me to realize that I also had a Mother who would always be there for me, and never abandon me.

Suddenly, I could make new meaning from the too-bleak landscape of my inner life. Perhaps I could now hope that my sense of not fitting in my family, my suffering and loneliness actually had some meaning and purpose. Maybe I had found a place to belong, to blossom, and to be blessed for exactly who I was. Jerry Stone captures what new vision began to dawn in my heart in those early days:

My own life story is a recollection of happenings that I [now could] interpret within a story-frame of meaning, and through that interpretation these happenings carry a mythic power to change my life.[7]

Through Marc, the Newman community at the University of Alberta, and the Catholic friends I began to make, I learned how much God loves me and wants to be in relationship with me. I discovered that I had been trying to fill the “God-shaped hollow in my heart”[8] with many, many things: boyfriends, shopping, drinking, and romance novels, to name a few. God graced me with a new way to see my life, and I began to ponder the events in light of Scripture and of the faith I was beginning to learn about. Long conversations with Marc about all these topics became my favourite activity. I started a spiritual journal which is now at notebook sixteen. I discovered other Catholics also liked have faith-filled conversations, so I began to open up with more people about my faith life. All these exchanges with others allowed me to stumble into a practice of theological reflection, but it would be two more decades before I knew to call it this.

Theological reflection, making faith-sense of my life, was excellent formation for becoming a catechist. Some people have referred to me as an “old soul.” Hearing that label for me, and using it since for others, has meant the person is mature for their years, feels apart from most people, thinks deeply about life, and sees a bigger picture than most. I have always chewed situations over in my mind until I understand them, but trying to comprehend them from the divine perspective enriched the process exponentially. I am now able to see God’s hand at work in my whole life, even if just in retrospect. Theological reflection has been a balm to the wounds I brought into adulthood, allowing them to heal with scars that add character, not just disfigurement.

God’s great gift to me is a huge and grounded faith: a well full of ‘living water’ that never runs dry. Daily I thank him for it. It’s a grace that has made life’s storms bearable. As I have endured the storms, and talked with others about them, people have seen me as a witness of faith, steadfastness, trust, joy, and love. I have been truly evangelized: I listened to Catholics, accepted and assimilated what they told me, and have genuinely adhered to the truths the Lord has revealed. As Pope Paul VI said, the Gospel inaugurated a new world for me. I have a new manner of being, of living, and of living in community.[9] My life has been transformed and I have found a family in which I truly belong, am accepted, can blossom, and am blessed. I have also entered a community, the Church, that is (or should be) continually evangelized herself. It is this evangelizing dynamism that propels me into the realm of religious education and catechesis. Once your own life has been transformed, you are impelled to share that Good News with others. The joy bubbles over, and you want to share it with a world in desperate need of genuine joy.

The joy also makes one hungry for more: more knowledge, more community, more liturgy, more prayer, and more holiness. The inquiry course into the Catholic faith (before RCIA was implemented); theology courses at the Catholic college; parish retreats, missions, and workshops; and my own reading all opened my eyes and heart to the unending riches within the Catholic tradition. As I was informed, I was formed and transformed, while I continued to reflect on my journey with my fellow pilgrims. Through encounters with others along the journey of faith, we shared our convictions and insights, heard our own stories with ‘new’ ears, and grew as disciples of Christ “in wisdom and in years, and in divine and human favour” (Luke 2:52). Since my own cup was overflowing, wasting the bounty seemed stupid and ungrateful, so I continued to share it with others both at work, and at home. I did not want to be a righteous zealot shaking my finger at sinners, though. I wanted to invite them to discover the same joy and abundant life I had found. I wanted them to join my family of faith, too.

By grace, I have been gifted with some of the insight and humility required of catechists: to always feel inadequate to the task before us, and to know that we too are simply on the journey with those we catechize. Jesus Christ is the Teacher. Jesus continues the pedagogy of God by embodying holiness/perfection in his fully human person, and he calls each of his followers to do also.

In his words, signs and works during his brief but intense life, the disciples had direct experience of the fundamental traits of the “pedagogy of Jesus,” and recorded them in the Gospels:

• receiving others, especially the poor, the little ones and sinners, as persons loved and sought out by God
• the undiluted proclamation of the Kingdom of God as the good news of the truth and of the consolation of the Father
• a kind of delicate and strong love which liberates from evil and promotes life
• a pressing invitation to the manner of living sustained by faith in God, by hope in the Kingdom, and by charity to one’s neighbour
• the use of all the resources of interpersonal communication, such as word, silence, metaphor, image, example, and many diverse signs as was the case with the biblical prophets [the formatting is mine].[10]

As Groome says, “education at its best informs, forms, and transforms the very “being” of people and does so in ways that are powerfully life-giving for both themselves and their society.[11]” Our individual lives with all their tempests, tribulations, and triumphs shown us God’s “eternal wisdom… ineffable loving-kindness … [and we can] for ourselves the thought and care he has given to accommodating his language to our nature.”[12] Many years later, I now see that what seemed to be heart- and spirit-breaking events and encounters of my early years were still shot through with God’s glory… be it in laughter around family board games, summer vacations in the Rockies, or shared Sunday dinners.

God knew my personal story in full colour… as he knows each person he has created. God knows my ‘everything.’ He helped me see all my hurts, hopes, scars, and broken dreams in a new way. I continue to take my life experiences and try to make faith-sense of them, and I converse with fellow pilgrims as they make sense of theirs.

God designed us to receive his self-revelation,[13] so we naturally want to ponder what the happenings in our lives mean.

Mary, our Blessed Lady, reflected quietly in her heart on all the things that occurred with her and her son. Limited by her humanity, she could not possibly have understood everything as it was happening. However, she pondered all as we too must do. “Interpreting and illuminating experience with the data of faith is a constant task of catechetical pedagogy.”[14] Private experience alone cannot show us “the way, the truth, and the life.” Only an adequate account of the Christian Story and how it may be connected to the private experience can shed light on an experience’s meaning in our lives of faith. Theological reflection or seeking to make faith-sense through the lens of divine revelation is the key. Our Blessed Mother has become my model and mother… although it has taken me decades to shed the remnants of my own family’s anti-Catholic/anti-Mary prejudice.

Thankfully, God is always teaching us with great love and patience. God always finds a way to reach out to us and draw us to himself. God knew the best way to reach us was to become one of us. The Incarnation of Jesus and the Paschal Mystery bookend the Christian Story. Everything we need to know about who and whose we are is contained within the Story.

The unfolding of my own life story and my vocation as a catechist has humbled me. Who am I to try to tell anyone about this greatest happily-ever-after story? Yet my faith prods me with this: who am I not to?

As a catechist and religious educator, I am simply called to sow the seeds of the Story. I am to sow by casting seeds everywhere I travel, without regard to the soil conditions. Sometimes I can rest awhile with fertile soil. Oftener still, I am tangled in thistles and weeds. Still the call is to cast out all the seeds I receive. Paradoxically I am soil for others’ seeds. Sowers do not stay to ensure the seed will grow; they carry on sowing. Knowing you are not responsible for the growth is a profound relief when you first become a catechist! For it is “only God who gives the growth” (1 Cor. 3:7).

God causes the person to grow progressively and patiently towards the maturity of a free [child], faithful and obedient to his word… He admonishes with reward and punishment, trials and sufferings, which become a formative influence. Truly, to help a person to encounter God which is the task of the catechist, means to emphasize above all the relationship that the person has with God so that [she] can make it [her] own and allow [herself] to be guided by God.[15]

My faith has matured and deepened as I have pondered my hard-won life wisdom in the light of Scripture and Tradition. God has graced me with becoming a better catechist, by showing me again and again that I am not the Saviour. He is. One of the sins of the creature is to think they are the Creator. Being a disciple is hard work—disciplining your own nature to allow the various persons of the Trinity to reign as God. Jesus Christ is my Brother and my Saviour. He is my Teacher, my Way, my Truth, and my Life. The Holy Spirit can only breathe through me to others when I open my own life and story to God’s Word.

Divine pedagogy and my personal narrative have entwined to become an identity that has as much integrity and authenticity as I can possibly manage. Parker Palmer calls this a hidden wholeness and living an undivided life. The concept he says that is crucial to thinking the world together (wholeness) is the concept of paradox.[16] My personal narrative has many paradoxes: anti-Catholic beginnings, childhood emotional turmoil and mental illness, and a non-traditional pathway to the field of religious education. Like Palmer, although I have years of theological reflection and study behind me, I face every new challenge is this field believing myself incapable of any real insight worth sharing. My inner identity becomes clear only in the mirror of encounter with another. My intellect and my emotions intertwine with everyone walking the same Catholic pilgrims’ way as I walk.[17]

Being a teacher and coach came naturally for me, but being a catechist—called by God to the task—can be daunting. Religious education brings people beyond comprehending information to being equipped to make sound life assessments and decisions.[18]

What does it mean to balance educating the mind with educating the heart? In terms of action in the world, it suggests that a tool is only as good as the hand that guides it, and the guiding hand is only as wise and compassionate as the mind and heart that direct it. [19]

In finding my way to God through reflection on my own life story, I am presuming that since God created humans in God’s image and likeness, God can be found within the events and unfolding of our lives. Teresa of Avila seems to have thought so also.[20] I’m looking forward to the unfolding of this Master’s program and to seeing God write my story from here on.

[1] Megan McKenna. Keepers of the Story: Oral Traditions in Religion. (Seabury Books: New York, 1997), p. ix.

[2] This term for theological reflection comes from the title and contents of a book by Robert Kinast, Making Faith-Sense (Collegeville, Minnesota: The Liturgical Press, 1999), p. ix.

[3] Sackville boasts the oldest Baptist church in Canada, founded in 1763 upon the arrival of Baptist settlers from Swansea, Massachusetts, from Rhode Island, and Connecticut. My 4xgreat-grandfather was one of the settlers.

[4] Pope Paul VI. Apostolic Exhortation “On Evangelization in the Modern World” (Evangelii Nuntiandi) [8 December 1975]. (Toronto: Daughters of St. Paul), 21-22.

[5] John Paul II. Apostolic Exhortation Catechesi tradendae [16 October 1979]. (Ottawa: CCCB), 5.

[6] Ibid, 5.

[7] Jerry Stone. “Narrative Theology and Religious Education,” Theologies of Religious Education. Birmingham: Religious Education Press, 1995, p. 271.

[8] Thomas H. Groome. Will There Be Faith? A New Vision for Growing and Educating Disciples (New York: HarperOne, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers), 2011, p. 10.

[9] Pope Paul VI. Apostolic Exhortation “On Evangelization in the Modern World” (Evangelii Nuntiandi) [8 December 1975]. (Toronto: Daughters of St. Paul), 23.

[10] Congregation for Clergy. General Directory for Catechesis (Ottawa: Libreria Editrice Vaticana / Concacan Inc., 1997), 140.

[11] Thomas H. Groome. Will There Be Faith? A New Vision for Growing and Educating Disciples (New York: HarperOne, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers), 2011, p. 94.

[12] Second Vatican Council. “Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation” (Dei Verbum) [18 November 1965],” in Vatican Council II: Constitutions Decrees Declarations, rev. ed., ed. Austin Flannery, OP, (Northport, NY: Costello Publishing Company, 1996), 13.

[13] Joseph White. The Way God Teaches: Catechesis and the Divine Pedagogy (Huntington, Indiana: Our Sunday Visitor Publishing Division, 2014), p. 20.

[14] Congregation for Clergy. General Directory for Catechesis (Ottawa: Libreria Editrice Vaticana / Concacan Inc., 1997), 153.

[15] Congregation for Clergy. General Directory for Catechesis (Ottawa: Libreria Editrice Vaticana / Concacan Inc., 1997), 139.

[16] Parker J. Palmer. The Courage to Teach: Exploring the Inner Landscape of a Teacher’s Life – Tenth Anniversary Edition. (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, a Wiley imprint, 1998, 2007), p. 65.

[17] Ibid, p.66.

[18] Thomas H. Groome. Will There Be Faith? A New Vision for Growing and Educating Disciples (New York: HarperOne, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers), 2011, p. 97.

[19] Parker J. Palmer and Arthur Zajonc, The Heart of Higher Education: A Call to Renewal (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2010), p. viii.

[20] Elizabeth A. Dreyer. Accidental Theologians: Four Women Who Shaped Christianity – Hildegard of Bingen, Catherine of Siena, Teresa of Avila, Thérèse of Lisieux (Cincinnati, Ohio: Franciscan Media, 2014), p. 78-79.

The assignment for today is to describe the path I am walking. What does it look like, sound like, smell like? Who is walking with me on the path?

My “road” is a small path along a sea cliff. It’s only wide enough for two people at a time to walk abreast. It’s a dirt path, worn lightly into the greenery. Below the cliffs, magnificent breakers crash against the jagged rocks, spraying high and then dancing out again. A fresh morning breeze with a touch of spring warmth ruffles my hair. Just a while back, there were mountains visible in the distance, but I can’t see any today.

Every once in a while, the path meanders off through the nearby woods. The woods are usually cool and pleasant—full of squirrels chattering happily as they chase around the trees. In the woods, the birds are singing cheerfully, while overtop the cliffs, the seagulls are shrieking and whirling madly on the breeze. Sometimes, though, the path is dark and scary. I always want to hurry through those sections, but I have learned to savour them as also essential to my journey. Important lessons await in the dark bits, but I have to wait until the light comes back before I can see why.

God lets me know each day how far He wants me to walk. He walks with me, too… I feel Him in the breeze. I’ve been skirting the cliff’s edge for a few months now. Ahead I see that the path eventually descends again toward the water. I don’t know why I know the path rises again afterward because there’s no map on this journey, but I know. Signposts are missing as I walk along… but oddly, I can see them when I glance back over my shoulder. I can see where I’ve been only when I look back. I don’t spend a lot of time looking back, though, because the path needs watching as one walks along… there are treacherous places. I do not know where I’m going… other than that I’m walking toward the horizon.

My companions are a blessing. Always walking with me, especially in my heart, is my husband, Marc. I am walking this path alone, but regularly I can rest in a meadow beside the path… and Marc is always there. He is the fire in the hearth of my heart, keeping me warm at all times in all places. A wounded soul is my beloved, a man whose music is constrained. Sometimes only I can hear it in the silence of my heart. Scarred deeply by the wounds of others, he is the song of joy and love in my soul. I wish he could hear the song like I do… it is beautifully written!

I walk side by side with many friends, though one at a time. Just last year, I finished my trip through the town of Cancer. I’m not sure I want to stop there again; it was a hard, hard place. Wonderful, loving people lived in the town, but it was still a hard, hard place. Gina walked with me through Cancer, and I would have been adrift without her… she brought a sparkle, a joy, and a comfort to those long and difficult days.

My longest friend, Sabrina, appears at every path-side shrine, every thin place. You know the kind of place? A place where someone encountered God and marked the spot with an altar like Jacob did at Bethel? Sabrina waits there at the thin places for me. She waits with her love, her faith, her compassion, and her real presence. She is a lamp for my journey. Sabrina continues to light my heart.

Raeleen was the quiet, sturdy coal, glowing steadily in the fireplace. Long covered with the ashes of invisibility, she waited at the small cafe table in the next village, just inside the door. She was stronger for a while, my friend Raeleen, and she held my tears and laughter gently in her heart. But she lost her way, and I can’t find her anymore. What I thought the friendship was is gone, and I grieve its loss.

I stopped often to see Claudette, as she spent much of her time in that town named Cancer. She left for the sunrise from there. I was happy to spend that short while as her friend, and she as mine. Like Claudette, my mom lived in Cancer, too, and I did not want her to go. But she did, two years ago now. She didn’t walk with me during my life journey as much as I wished for. She taught me my prayers, about God, and how to cook. She loved me fiercely in her own way. She loved each one of us, but had a hard time showing what wasn’t shown to her by her mother.

Mom gave me a precious gift before she left: she let me pour out my hurts, my questions, my lonely daughter’s heart. I think she was surprised to know how much I had missed her company on my life journey. I know she felt she needed to walk with dad through the valley of bipolar disorder, more than walk with us kids, especially after we left home. I have missed my mother’s attentive presence for most of my life. Now that she is really gone, it’s almost easier, because she is more present to me now than she could be in life.

My sister, Judy, has been my lifelong companion. She keeps her distance because her route is different. It was pretty bumpy for her for a while, but now she’s found a resting place and a purpose with Joe. Always the fiercest of family guardians, my sister is my precious friend.

I’ve been blessed with many women friends and mentors along my path: Sr. Annata, Nancy, Ruby, Lesley, Swarnamala, Kathleen, Myrtle, Miriam, Joanne, Dolores, Trish, Jean, Christine… and more. When we have a chance to meet at the local well to talk, we draw life-giving refreshment for our respective journeys. We talk about weighty, mystical things as we womenfolk share the path together… life, God, love, growth, pain, joy, suffering, loss, mothers… Sorrows are deep. Tears are close to the surface. Silences are pregnant with unspoken scars. Words are often replaced with hallowed presence. Laughter has a sorrow to it. Mourning and giving birth to a new self at every twist of the path is hard labour. We’ve many wounds, but we bind one another up, and bring each other gently along to the next thin place.

This life path is difficult, but it’s a good path overall. I’ve learned much that I didn’t even know I wanted to know. I’ve walked on holy ground, seen “touch points of grace,” and sung songs of joy. I’ve buried the dead, comforted sorrowers, confronted sinners, and picked away steadily at the plank in my own eye. How fragile our hearts, yet how indestructible… Being in ongoing formation is pure gift. It’s a touch of mystical holiness in a year of new beginnings.

Here I am, Lord, tell me what you would have me do for you! Teach me to truly pray. Each day, let me be still and remove my shoes, for this life path is holy ground.

Thursday, my heart – Marc – had a heart attack, his third. He is still in the hospital, and is still in considerable pain. The three bypasses he had nine years ago are clear (in itself, miraculous) but other heart arteries are almost completely blocked.

Further surgery — bypass or transplant — is not an option because he has diffuse heart disease (clogged arteries everywhere in his body).

Yesterday, we laid a photo of Venerable Mother Ignacia del Santo Spiritu (RVM foundress) on his heart to ask for her intercession to clear up all blockages. The Catholic community is praying, and God’s will shall be done.

My 80-year-old mother has been in the hospital for two months. She had surgery to save her life, various complications, and has now been in rehab mode for two weeks. There are six children in our family but only two who live close enough to help regularly. I am the eldest and my husband and I have been with Mom almost very day. My other sister visits a couple of times each week as she lives out of town. Another sister visits as many weekends as she can manage while living in another city. The other three came ‘home’ for the surgery weekend but have not been back since.

Now we must transition Mom into a new supportive living ‘suite.’ She is not going home to the home she has lived in for almost 50 years. She will go from the hospital to the new place, with my sister and I overseeing the movers and setting up the new place with familiar furniture and belongings.

What I find challenging (besides the sheer exhaustion of two months of visiting and caring for Mom in the hospital) is the engagement (or lack thereof) of three of my siblings. I do understand there is most of a country between Mom and one brother, but another is only a few hours drive away. He has not returned to visit Mom yet, though he says he will come this weekend. Another sister said she would come to visit in May but didn’t. Some keep in touch by phone with Mom, but she does notice who she can lean on and whom she cannot.

The irony is the jockeying for primacy from the away ones. Everyone wants to be the most important child! At the same time, the away ones have the excuse of being away to not worry about Mom as often, nor to have to deal with her fears and anxieties, her triumphs and progress, her weariness and her human frailties, and her simple gratitude for our faithfulness and constancy during this overwhelming experience of aging.

Although I am tired and overscheduled, I have the better part of journeying with my mother through her last years. I can see her gratitude and love every time I visit her… even if she’s asking me for another favour, task, or errand. She feels safe and loved enough to ask.

“Honour your father and your mother, so your days may be long in the land that the Lord your God is giving you.” Exodus 20:12

Some of the most beautiful scenery on earth lies a four-hour drive west of us in Jasper National Park. Marc and I never tire of it. I’ve been going annually since I was four, and we spent our honeymoon in Jasper. This year, thirty-one years later, we spent three days there with a friend from the US, Fr. Tom.

Waking up on our first morning we found pouring rain and socked-in, low-lying clouds. Marc marvels at my child-like faith in God answering prayers, but kneeling in front of the cabin’s picture window, I asked the Lord to please lift the clouds so we could show Fr. Tom the spectacular scenery on the Parkway between Jasper and the Columbia Icefields. Confident that God would hear and answer as He always does, we set off in the rain for our drive.

Without fail, as we travelled south, the clouds lifted and the sun shone through. We got breath-taking views and photos and had a glorious day (the next day was a repeat of weather, prayer, and God’s gracious response).

To cap off the first day, God created an awesome double rainbow, completely touching the lake in front of the cabin from one side to the other (see video). On the second day, he sent a partial double rainbow as we drove east through the pouring rain (which only began after we left the mountains!). God is good. Alleluia!