Seeking

My morning meditation began with a quote from St. Francis: You are that which you are seeking.

What am I seeking? Good question.

Is that the same as, what do I desire?

That reflection led me to the question, what is my deepest desire?

As I pondered that question, the answer appeared: I want to be accepted.

This is not a new thought. I have long known that rejection is my primary brokenness; l’Arche taught me that.

People often asked me why I moved to l’Arche, a community where people with and without developmental disabilities live together in the spirit of the Beatitudes (Matthew 5:3-12).

What was the draw for me?

At first, I thought it was because I was already working with people who had disabilities, and this was just a more radical way of living out that mission. (I was trying to find the most radical way to live the Gospel, and this certainly seemed radical.)

As time went on, though, I came to understand my connection with people who had disabilities in a different light.

Jean Vanier, the founder of l’Arche, talked about the rejection people with disabilities can experience. Even at birth, a mother can involuntarily react negatively when told her newborn is disabled. She may change her opinion in time, but that initial reaction can be experienced by the newborn as rejection.

After I left l’Arche, I read How to be an Adult by David Richo, which invited me to discover my original wound. For me, it was rejection.

My mother’s first child was a boy, and she was thrilled. He was the proverbial apple of her eye. The next year, she had a girl—me.

I have often wondered if my mother knew beforehand that she did not want a daughter or if she only realized it when I was born. When the doctor said, “It’s a girl,” did she involuntarily blurt out ugh?

That is something I will never know.

What I have always known, though, is that I was not wanted, that something about me rubbed my mother the wrong way and that from the moment of my birth, she rejected me.

The people who lived in l’Arche seemed to intuitively understand this brokenness in me—much more clearly than I did at the time.

I remember praying in chapel one day and two of the men—both named Ross—entered chapel and sat on either side of me. They bowed their heads and joined me in silent prayer. I had never felt so accepted, so safe. It was as if they, and God, were saying, “We know your hurt, and we accept you as you are.”

In that moment, something cracked inside me. It felt like there had been a glass globe surrounding my wound, and their acceptance shattered the glass.

Their acceptance revealed to me this vulnerable place inside me.

Accepting my vulnerability and embracing my brokenness is what I seek.

What are you seeking? What is your deepest desire?

My wild and precious life

We recently celebrated my mother’s ninety-third birthday. Her mother lived to be ninety-six and one of her brothers died a week shy of his ninety-eighth birthday. We have longevity in my family.

As I pondered my mother’s long life, Mary Oliver’s poem The Summer Day came to mind. It ends by asking,

Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?

After college, when I went into nonprofit work instead of returning to the FBI, my mother was not happy. For eight years, she had been able to say, “My daughter is a secretary in the FBI,” and people understood what that meant. She had been looking forward to saying, “My daughter is an FBI agent,” but that did not happen.

Instead, I got a job recruiting advocates for people who have developmental disabilities. My mother had no idea what that meant. My work defied easy explanation, and she could not imagine how I spent my days. She was baffled.

“Where did you ever get the idea to go into that kind of work?” she asked.

I told her that she had given me the idea by the way she lived.

My mother always made room for one more. When my unmarried uncle got cancer, he moved in with us, and my mother took care of him. When my grandmother needed a place to live after my grandfather died, my mother welcomed her into our home.

She showed me how to greet new neighbors with a prepared meal and to comfort someone in pain by being present and listening. She always has extra food prepared because no one leaves her house empty-handed. “What can I give you?” she asked as I left her house on her birthday.

That is the thing about parenting—so much of it is in the doing rather than the telling. I learned by watching.

When a friend of mine was having twins one summer, I offered to come help harvest her garden. For three days, I picked beans and tomatoes and then canned—quarts upon quarts of veggies to get her family through the winter. Toward the end of my visit, she told me she had been resistant to my coming because others had come offering to help, but they just ended up being more work for her. “You have helped me so much,” she said with gratitude and also a note of incredulity in her voice.

“You don’t know my mother,” I responded, because my mother’s example and her voice in my head would not allow me to be a burden. If you can’t help, stay home, would be my mother’s advice.

When I imagine myself at ninety-three, I hope I can look back and see that I have lived my one wild and precious life with integrity and meaning, helping more than hindering, giving more than I have taken.

Every morning, I pray the Prayer of St. Francis. That is the life I want to live.

Where there is injury, pardon

My pastor gave me a copy of the Prayer of St. Francis when I went to the Sacrament of Reconciliation during Advent, and I have been praying it every day since. The words that jump out at me almost every day are: Where there is injury, pardon.

Why those words? I ask God, and what does injury mean?

I usually think of injuries as resulting from accidents—wounds that need stitches, casts or surgeries. But what kind of injuries need pardon? In St. Francis’ day the word probably had a different connotation.

As I pray these words every day, I ponder injuries. I tried replacing the word injury with other words to see if it makes more sense to me—sin, hurt, harm, betrayal, etc.—what would warrant pardon?

And is pardon synonymous with forgiveness?

Perhaps it was this prayer that predisposed me to ponder forgiveness this Lent.

I struggle with forgiveness for several reasons, and perhaps the biggest is my fear of looking foolish. I can hear my father’s voice in my head discouraging me from being taken advantage of and encouraging me to stand my ground. It was important to him not to look weak and he was slow to forgive those who had crossed him. To him, forgiving equaled vulnerability and weakness.

Vulnerability was not something he valued.

It took me a long time—and a fair amount of prodding by God—to consider vulnerability as something valuable, something desirable.

I once befriended a women who had committed a horrific crime. She was vilified and hated in our community. The newspapers and television media portrayed her as a monster.

But God placed her on my heart, and I could not stop thinking about her—and feeling compassion for her. It was as if God was showing me how God saw her—not the monster she was portrayed in the news, but as a person who, no matter what she had done, was still a child of God.

Not many people knew about my visits to her in prison or of our friendship. Sometimes, the things God asks of me seem outrageous even to me.

This particular friendship has been resurfacing this Lent. She was a woman who needed pardon, forgiveness and acceptance.

Perhaps she has been coming to mind because of all the mass shootings in our country. My friend had a history of mental illness and a record of multiple hospitalizations related to her mental illness. Yet she was able to walk into a store and buy a gun. No questions asked. No thought to why she wanted a gun or what she might do with it. No concerns that she would walk into the mall and open fire.

Or perhaps she has been coming to mind because she taught me so much about vulnerability and forgiveness.

I suppose God has been nudging me toward acknowledging my vulnerability for a long time, teaching me that embracing my own vulnerability puts me on the path to pardon.