Coming Down the Home Stretch

Coming into the last month of the RCIA process, now. It's becoming surprisingly moving.

I'd thought of the process as (to steal a computer term) "background processing." Not unimportant, but not a focal part of my spiritual or parish experience. I've long since made an internal commitment to St. Gabriel's parish and to the Roman Catholic church and moved beyond that.

Sure, it'll be nice when I'm allowed to take communion. I miss it.

But I'm already participating in parish life, already a lay reader and can see deeper involvement coming. And I'm still not all that sure how much difference human-imposed labels and processes will make in my spiritual life and development. But it's a "gotta-do", so I quibble not.

More focal to me is the more immediate growth and healing that I need to find in the aftermath of (technically) divorce and more specifically, family breakup. Living alone is alien to me, and soul-destroying by nature. It was tolerable when it was "something we both have to go through."

But now it's not; now it's only me. I'm blindsided by the caliber of the pain that invokes. As when driving down an unfamiliar country road in a first class gullywasher, I cannot see where I am going, and it's frightening. Does my life not have a direction? Yes, it does, and it's not windblown and accidental. Where I am going now, at least for the time being, is of my own choice. And yet that doesn't mean it's "what I want to do": I've become one of those people for whom what they choose as a life path, dearest to their heart, simply isn't on the menu. Not one of the available choices.

So choice becomes about "what's the best of what's left" on a good day, or "the least worst of all the bad choices" on a bad one.

There are all sorts of statements about "growth experience", "what God has in store for you" and so forth that I can throw about as well as the next guy. All sound very facile just now. That doesn't mean they aren't true; it just means that they are of no use whatsoever to someone in the stage I'm at right here and now.

I have come this far the last year and a half or so by:

• suppressing pain (knowing that it would only tolerate being suppressed, unexpressed, for just so long)
• using anger as fuel to provide and focus energy to function
  
• hanging on to Mary just as tight as I can--often with my eyes closed--and trusting her to lead me where I need to be

The first is failing, as I knew it would, but I'm still trying to duck the pain that is part of healing. The second is gone, except for the flares that are an inevitable part of the pain-and-healing process.

The third is still there. Still working.

Dios te salve, María; llena eres de gracia.
(Dame de tu gracia, madre.)
el Señor es contigo.
(También conmigo, por favor.)
Bendita tú eres entre todas las mujeres,
(Bendita sea mi madre.)
y bendito es el fruto de tu vientre, Jesús.
(Bendíceme, Jesús.)

Santa María, Madre de Dios,
(y mi madre, también)
ruega por nosotros pecadores,
(ayudame en mis dolores)
ahora y en la hora de nuestra muerte.
(siempre y en la vida eterna yo oro, madre.)

Y todo el mundo dicen, juntos:
Amén.