I was standing in the vestible of the sanctuary at Immaculate Conception Church. I was annoyed, as is often the case; my blood was pounding in my neck and I was waging an inner war, to offer up the mental suffering and not to be angry at my three-year-old. I had just lost a battle on the inside to anger and on the outside to her will-pushings, and swatted her on the backside. I was going into combat mode, and the Holy Sacrifice about to commence beyond the green padded doors was suddenly in the background, like memory of a green meadow.
Quite suddenly, a woman was beside me, and the battle lifted. She could barely talk; I could see the open hole in her tracheal tube , like a gaping fissure, underneath a clear plastic bandage, all packaged neatly and bravely under the buttoned-up collar of a purple silk blouse. As she gasped and whispered, making my own throat feel sore, I tried to pick out the strong Irish brogue to which I’d been accustomed.
She used to sit behind us in Mass, always alone, but not fearful: a wide-shouldered, rough-toothed, kind-eyed, straight-forward lady. She was the one who said of my little one, “She keeps you running, eh?” And I remember turning round, expecting to see an expression of disdain and annoyance, but instead to find myself folded in life-hardened, but kind peat-green eyes, full of humor. She made me laugh. She made the three-year-old more precious, even if just a tiny bit.
Now here she was, making the tears stream down my face, as her story of surgeries and months in the hospital gushed out. “I wanted to tell you,” she said, and I wondered why-at least, my mind idly wondered, while that deeper part of me, the part which doesn’t use words, understood perfectly. “I almost died three times”, she said. “And I’ll tell you, too, that I saw myself, I was on the cross.” And she put her wide, now bony shoulders forward a bit, and her arms straight out either side. Her purple blouse rippled in response. “ Jesus was holding me, his arms around me; and I could look down and see Mary. ‘See’, says Jesus, ‘you are suffering for Me’.” And she looked up again, and I, with that strange fright of visions, said in a hurry, in order to come back to earth, “ So, you were dreaming?”
She looked at me with those iron eyes. “No, I was in a coma.”
There was something in me that I’m not sure I understand. I felt strange, the strangeness of an Other. Yet I doubted her story, I felt that condescension in me, the kind that says, “oh wow” and “I’m sorry” and then moves on to the next person-that fear of the ‘weird’ the ‘self-deluded’. But I couldn’t turn away, there was something else in me that didn’t care about the strangeness; besides, I was out of energy to respond to the insistence of inhibitions. The tears streamed down my face, because she was in the hospital, suffering on the cross, alone in a coma, and alone in so many other ways. Were there flowers at her bedside? “Oh,” she said, “I hope I didn’t make you cry; because, God is so good. He is so merciful.”
And I and she looked at each other, distant acquaintances, and we conversed without words. So I knew that she came to me, to somehow tell me not to be so angry at my little daughter, that she’d suffered for me in the hospital in a way, and that this was such a great and noble act only because God accepted it- and this meant that He was merciful to her. He accepted her suffering, He was good and kind because her suffering was useful to Him. It wasn’t wasted, or just left as a punishment for her sins: it was transformed. She told me in her humility that none of us escape suffering, because we all deserve it. But God, in His mercy, deigns to use it- for others, even the angry and struggling mother in the vestibule. And I wonder now: are those daily battles, even the ones with three-year-olds, are they such temptations; is my anger and resentment offensive enough to God that they required all this lady’s suffering? “Surely not!” I say, but after all, who am I to be angry? Am I not putting myself in a Judge’s place? Am I not saying, “I don’t like this situation, Lord, You must have put me in the wrong place!” Am I not committing type of sin that Adam and Eve committed?
Who knows how much suffering is required to expiate one act of petty rebellion? Our Lady understood. If I understand, too, how can I stand to sin? Yet, if I also understand my weaknesses, how can I even stand on my feet? Yet as I remember the Irish lady’s eyes, I saw love there. And I remember, too, in that place without words, how, when we are truly immersed in Love, we want to suffer for the beloved. It is a fire, a self-immolation for the sake of the lover: that eros from which is born courage and the forgetting of self. So, perhaps, I, like the choir of angels St. Thomas Aquinas elucidates, the angels who are made solely to receive love, I receive her offering- or rather, I receive the mercy God deigns to give me, out of the Irish lady’s gift of herself.
So let me rejoice with my Irish lady, let me rejoice in God’s mercy to her and to me, let me let the rejoicing stand side by side with the sobered sinner in me, the one who is learning the enormity of each offense. Let me love the traitor in me, the part I keep asking to be burned away. Let me love in truth, let me have clear sight and have the courage to see myself as God sees me, and then let me repent truly and have the gift then not to see myself at all, only You. Like my Irish lady, who is being transformed into You, grant me freedom from fear. And freedom to love. It is a gift. Words are so heavy: no part of me completely understands the economy of love and suffering, but the part without words understands better- like Job, who just put his arms out, threw back his head, and did worship to the Whirlwind- and it ravished him.
