Life

God disguised as our life

It was Paula D’Arcy who wrote, God comes to us disguised as our life.

Paula D’Arcy wrote those words after a drunk driver killed her husband and one-year-old child, when Paula was just 27, and three months pregnant.

Frederick Buechner echoes a similar insight. He suggests living a spiritual life is to ‘listen to (our) life’.

I share a story from my life, in which I tried to listen to my life.

In 1981, I accompanied a group of young people on a pilgrimage to an Eucharistic Congress in Lourdes, France. In the preceding months, I sensed I might experience spiritual healing during the pilgrimage.

The previous couple of years had been difficult for me. I sensed I needed healing.

In 1979, during my first country parish appointment that lasted only eight months, several traumatic things happened.

First, I had a serious car accident while driving on a country gravel road. The back-right tyre of my vehicle blew out and the car rolled three times.

I survived with only minor injuries.

I was fortunate that the only police officer in a hundred kilometres passed by fifteen minutes later.

Second, I was helping set up a women’s refuge. An anonymous person left a phone message saying there was a contract out on my life.

In speaking to the police, they said they could do nothing until something happened!

I felt very vulnerable, as I often drove along isolated country roads.

Third, I became embroiled in a murder suicide that left three young children orphaned.

Fourth, I contracted a viral illness that incapacitated me for over nine months.

I am grateful to the Mercy sisters who lived nearby. They took me in and looked after me during the acute phase of my illness before I went to the hospital.

The accumulated trauma scarred me. I needed inner healing.

Before departing for France on the pilgrimage, the organisers considered cancelling the trip. A gunman had wounded Pope John Paul II, who was due to lead the main celebrations at the Congress in Lourdes.

Upon arriving in Lourdes, we discovered our prearranged accommodation had fallen through. Later, we found a place to stay.

Mindful of seeking healing during the pilgrimage, I walked to the nearby grotto where the Marian apparitions had occurred.

I wondered, is this where I shall find spiritual healing?

The day was wet and freezing.

When I arrived, it surprised me to find the grotto was a rocky cave on the side of a hill.

The grotto looked shabby. Black soot caked the walls from thousands of burnt candles of pilgrims over the years.

I found no healing here.

A day later, our pilgrimage group walked to the Lourdes baths, famous for miraculous healings.

I wondered, is this where I shall find spiritual healing?

Nothing happened to me.

In fact, the water was so icy that, instead of being healed in the miraculous waters, I caught a nasty cold.

The next day, I attended an outdoor English-speaking liturgy in a nearby field. Thousands of people were present, and I wondered, is this where I shall experience healing?

An African cardinal, who was representing the pope at the Congress, was the main celebrant and an American bishop was preaching.

During the liturgy, we had intermittent soft rain, and the ground became boggy. What I hoped would be a significant spiritual moment did not happen.

While the preacher was speaking, the African cardinal, who had not turned off his lapel microphone, fell fast asleep.

He snored right through the sermon.

To make things worse, he was wearing a high Roman mitre. Every time his head nodded a few centimetres, because of its height, the top of his mitre resembled a flag flapping in the breeze.

After the liturgy, while walking back to my lodgings, I was wondering; what is happening?

Where is God in this dismal turn of events?

In coming to Lourdes, to this special Marian shrine, I thought I would have a significant spiritual encounter; it was not happening.

To make things worse, the road back to my lodgings was boggy and for those of you who know me well, I hate getting mud on my shoes.

Then, walking further along, I experienced a quiet, gentle presence come over me, a healing stillness that touched the core of my being.

In the following months, I reflected on these events.

I realised I was seeking to find my spirituality amidst the extraordinary events of life.

My spiritual healing happened in the ordinariness of my life while walking along a muddy road.

This reminds me of a saying by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, ‘We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience’.

Life is not a dichotomy, nor are we dualist. We do not have two lives, spiritual and real-world.

God comes to us disguised as our life. To live a spiritual life is to listen to our life.

The ripple effect of mental illness

The only time the police ever asked me to identify a dead body, I identified two deceased people laid out in a regional costal hospital morgue. A man drove himself and his wife off a wharf into the sea where they drowned.

Days before, the man turned up unannounced at the presbytery, where I was an assistant parish priest. He complained his wrist watch was speaking to him. I invited him to come inside.

He became agitated. The walls were speaking to him. He threatened self-harm. While trying to calm him, I telephoned the police.

The police escorted him to the local hospital emergency department. The doctor assessed him and sent the man for a three-day involuntary psychiatric assessment to a major hospital in a neighbouring city.

Within a day of being admitted, the hospital released him. His wife picked him up from the hospital to bring him home. You know how the tragic story ends.

Later, after I identified the deceased couple, I accompanied the police to inform the couple’s relatives of their deaths. I still remember their shock and dismay.

One relative who worked in a bakery, she collapsed against the glass display shelves on hearing the tragic news. The woman’s falling brought the shelves and assorted bread crashing to the floor.

I then went to tell the couple’s children. They were staying with relatives while the wife went to pick up her husband from the hospital.

I knew it was important to tell the children their parents were dead, knowing how they heard the tragic news would stay with them for life.

Telling the children their parents had died was one of the hardest things I have ever done.

The man’s mental illness contributed to the couple’s death. The ripple effect of this tragedy scared their children and their extended family and friends.

Even when our best efforts to turn back the tide of tragedy are unsuccessful, take the risk of reaching out to support those living in the shadow of mental illness. Your first step might be to ask, “How are you today?”

The not so grieving widow

“Thank God the bastard’s dead!”, the not-so grieving widow snapped back after I offered my sympathy.

I had assumed she was grieving. I came to her home to arrange the funeral of her deceased 42-year-old husband, the father of her six kids.

“Tell me about him.” I asked.

Her years of pain poured out. He was a violent alcoholic whose drinking resulted in him dying young. To live with him was pure hell. She felt trapped in a marriage, unable to escape.

His death freed her from years of systematic abuse. She did not need my sympathy; the marriage had died years ago. In fact, she felt relieved. Her horror story now ended.

This gave me an insight into how we deal with loss and grief. I expected the not-so grieving widow to grieve according to the recognised five stages of death and dying: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance.

While they are tools to help frame and name how we might grieve, not everyone goes through all of them or in a prescribed order.

These five stages can sketch grief‘s terrain, better equipping us to cope with loss.

Often grieving people report more stages. Our grief is as unique as we are.

We can never understand grief only as a five-stage process that arranges mixed emotions into well-ordered packages.

These five stages point to the loss many people journey through but there is no normal response to loss as there is no typical loss.