by Pat Collins©2019
The Journey Behind the Words
This morning I unearthed a journal that I kept during three Lenten seasons (2008, 2009, and 2012) while I still considered myself a Catholic. In it I recorded my daily reflections on Thomas Merton’s suggested meditations in his book “Lenten and Easter Wisdom.” I apparently skipped over two years and in 2012, I only made it to the Saturday after Ash Wednesday. The rest of the journal is blank.
In the missing two years, my husband was heading towards the advanced stages of dementia. By Lent of 2012, he had been admitted to the dementia care unit of The Soldiers Home in Boston, MA, and I was living alone. At the time, I was still teaching writing at Lesley University, and I began to conduct a workshop at the The Soldier’s Home called “Telling Our Stories” which proved helpful to a number of men and women there and meant a great deal to me in understanding the many layers of a disease that has become more prevalent as our life spans expand. The intact personhood of each man as displayed in this group was astonishing.
I wonder now why nothing about that difficult period was included in my spiritual journal. In the years I did chronicle, however, the pages are not only full of pain and loneliness but contain the concrete formation of the many realizations and questions about my religious life that had been haunting me for a very long time.
On the Thursday after Ash Wednesday in 2008, Merton’s meditation is: What are the illusions in my life that I accept as reality?
My answers are: That I may have built my house on myth, That my faith is stagnant and cannot grow, That I am not strong enough for what is in store for me.
On the first Sunday of Lent in 2009, the meditation is on Complacency, and I wrote, I often wonder if my faith would be stronger if the news of the coming of The Son of God had startled me as an adult. I pray for fervor.
Throughout, my jottings are interspersed with anger at the church hierarchy and at certain doctrinal conclusions that seemed more magical than mystical. Many church laws confounded me as well such as the exclusion of women from ordination and the elevation of Mary as a mediatrix of grace so as to satisfy the female worshippers and provide a mother figure. My need to make a distinction between religion and spirituality was also growing. The discovery of rampant pedophilia, though repugnant to me, was not the last straw as it was for many others, but one in a whole broom-full of straws.
I was still wondering why I have been subservient to a church that often seems removed from the real problems of its people, but I was not yet aware that I would soon decide that the only honest thing for me to do was to leave that community altogether.
When I made this decision, I was eighty years old.
It is now six years later. Though I miss the liturgy, ceremony, and worshipful singing, I feel more spiritually strong than at any other time in my life and more in tune with the God of my younger years, whom I described in the Lenten journal as, “ the God that I know from within without visualization or pre-conception.” If prayer is the lifting of the heart and mind to God, that is still something I do on a regular basis. Gratitude is also a constant in this long life I’ve been privileged to live.
And as I go about the adventure of growing old, I find new discoveries and enlightenments with every new day. One such is that as the body declines, the spirit continues to grow and that while some things change (new friends, fresh ideas), others remain the same (old friends and attachments, long-held truths.)
On the First Sunday of Lent in 2009, in answer to a prompt on Significance, I wrote: The most significant part of the day for me is morning. It is a beginning. There is always hope in it. It is full of possibilities. The most significant part of the year is fall when nature goes to sleep while still on fire. There are profound messages in this advance towards winter – glimpses of the eternal, the way in which to die, how to endure what is left of living.
Ten years ago, this essay would have been very different. I had many more answers then, or thought I did, even as it didn’t escape me that God is worshiped in multiple ways throughout the world and that many wise and wonderful people don’t believe in Him at all. Now, the older I get the more questions I have and the more comfortable I am in this universe of paradoxes.
Pat Lowery Collins is a poet, painter, and author of many award-winning books for children and young adults which include I Am An Artist, The Fattening Hut, Hidden Voices, and Daughter of Winter.
She recently retired from teaching creative writing in the low residency MFA program at Lesley University and is now concentrating on writing for adults in Rockport, MA, where she lives and works.
Follow her blog Aging and the Creative Process at www.patlc.wordpress.com and find out more about her many contributions to literature for young people at www.patlowerycollins.com.
