Blog Archives
The Spiritual Journey of a Liberal, Born Again, Spirit Filled Christian
Despite living most of my life in the South, I am a liberal in pretty much every way there is to be liberal. My father was an award-winning investigating newspaperman fighting injustice from early on. On the Saint Louis Star Times, he took on the largest arms manufacturer during World War II by exposing their selling defective ammunition that blew up in our own soldier’s rifles. He won several Journalism awards, but then he ended up in the army having to use their bullets.
In the early 1950’s in Houston, Texas with Dad still at the paper on an election night, our doorbell rang in the wee hours and I started down the stairs thinking maybe dad had forgotten his key. About halfway down, there was a loud boom at the front door sending me running back up the stairs. We called Dad, he called the police, and they called the FBI. The FBI decided that the bomb that left both sharp pieces of slate and confetti packing stuck in our door and the walls of the entry to our apartment was set off because as City Editor of the Houston Post dad had written an editorial supporting a black woman for the school board. It wasn’t even an issue of integrating the schools, just about getting some representation for segregated black schools. I struggled to understand how anyone would want to maim or kill someone they didn’t even know. And for the first time I had a glimpse of the fear black children and their parents live with all their lives.
Later, my father was in the running for the Pulitzer Prize after winning all the other Journalism awards for writing an expose of a pressure group that was secretly getting liberal University of Houston college professors fired.
In the nineteen sixties, I was married and living in Nashville, Tennessee. I started actively working for Civil Rights after one of my college-educated Junior League friends, who worked as a volunteer at our Catholic hospital, bragged at a party that she had refused to carry a “nigger” baby out to the car in front of the baby’s parents, I began tutoring children who couldn’t read in a black elementary school. Then I started interviewing blacks at the NAACP headquarters who were looking for work. I then tried unsuccessfully to find businesses in the white community to hire them. I was working in the NAACP offices the day the buses for the March on Washington stopped there. The sheer hatred for whites by the young SNCC and CORE members in those groups was as strong as white prejudice. I began to fear the threat of a bloody race war.
Martin Luther King spared us that.
As a Catholic from birth, I had four babies in my first five years of marriage. Because I was unable physically to deliver any of my babies without having Caesarian Sections, I was told that I was in danger of dying if I had another child in the next two or three years. Since the church taught that using birth control was a mortal “go to hell” sin, I asked our priest what to do. His response was that many children have had good stepmothers. After much soul searching, I decided that men who had never had wives or children should not be making this kind of decision for women. So, I quit the Catholic Church and because I had unknowingly made religion my God, I threw the “baby out with the bath water” and stopped believing in both Jesus and God.
For several years I lived a fun, but increasingly meaningless “party” life and dulled my unhappiness with alcohol. I had begun a search through classes on philosophy and World Religious at Vanderbilt Divinity School. Then, when my father died at only fifty-two, I intensified my search. After reading the whole bible, I took some introductory classes at other Christian denominations. I even read some of the “God is Dead” literature. But nothing brought any real enlightenment, though the book of Acts made me wistful.
Becoming alarmed about my struggle with feelings of inadequacy as a wife and mother and my need for alcohol to stay functional, I found a counseling group for alcoholics started by a Presbyterian Minister who had been though a similar battle. After a few months I broke down in the group weeping and admitting that I was so overwhelmed by the challenges of my life that I didn’t feel capable of loving anyone, not even my husband and children. Instead of judging me, the people in the group seemed to care and even feel sad for me. The next day as I was vacuuming my living room, I felt freed of self-hate somehow. As I stopped to just savor this new feeling, I had a sense of someone putting their hand on my shoulder in a supportive and loving way. My first instinct was it had to be Jesus, but then I questioned whether I even believed in Jesus. So, I put it in my mental file labeled, “Need more information.”
About that time friends of ours decided Earle would give up his Vice Presidency in his father’s company and sell their house so they could go to work as missionaries for Campus Crusade for Christ. I was shocked, but also a bit jealous that they had found something that mattered enough to give up their safe and very comfortable lifestyle. When they came back to town almost a year later, Judy asked her sister, my best friend Hilde, to host a “Christian Coffee” where several women would tell about the positive changes in their lives since they accepted Jesus as their Savior and Lord, I pitched in to help with it, telling people jokingly that I hadn’t known that our usual coffee get togethers weren’t “Christian,” but the talks would be short and we were going to have great refreshments.
The women’s descriptions of changes in their values and relationships appealed to me, but I still felt unable to make that leap of faith. So, when they led us in saying a prayer accepting Jesus as our Savior and Lord, I didn’t join in. And as the others were hugging and celebrating, I went into the kitchen to wash dishes. After a few moments the woman leading the group came in and asked me if I had said the prayer. I confessed that I had not, because I didn’t believe in Jesus or God. She didn’t blink or hesitate, she just said, “Well, why don’t you say the prayer this way, ‘Jesus, IF you are who you claimed to be, the Son of God and our Savior, take my life and help me to become the person God created me to be.”
I hesitated, but it seemed like a no-lose proposition, so I just nodded and said the prayer that way. She hugged me and congratulated me and I went back to washing the fragile china by hand, wondering how I would recognize an answer.
Suddenly, pure joy began bubbling up inside me. A feeling of being both known and loved in a way I had never experienced before overwhelmed me. I felt so joyous I was afraid I’d explode. Driving home I sang “Jesus loves me” at the top of my lungs with tears of joy streaming down my face.
This is the just the beginning of my journey as a liberal, born again, baptized in the Holy Spirit, Christian. My hope in writing this is that I will be able to flesh out the reality that a spiritual journey can include both liberalism and Jesus as Savior and Lord.
Witnessing a Miraculous Healing
Long ago in my thirties, I was in a Catholic Charismatic (Pentecostal) prayer group that was led by several of the Sisters of Mercy at their convent. I, along with another woman member, Pat, were registered to attend the annual Charismatic Renewal Conference at Notre Dame University. At the prayer meeting two days before the conference, a young woman in her early twenties asked if she could go with us. We had spoken about a priest that led a small group of sisters and nurses in a healing ministry and Dorothy had curvature of the spine with one leg shorter than the other. This caused her to have to wear an ugly built-up shoe, it also sometimes caused her pain, and she feared that when she married and became pregnant it would cause more problems. It was too late to register her and probably too late to get her a room in the dorms, but we told her to bring a sleeping bag and stay in our room.
So, Dorothy set off with us. We were running a little late and I was worried that we would miss the first large session in the gymnasium, which was the presentation on healing. A couple of weird time changes later we arrived just as it was beginning but had to sit almost at the very top of the gymnasium. We were supposed to wait until it cleared afterward to find Pat’s sister, who was coming from Pittsburg. As the gym emptied, I prayed nervously about whether to take Dorothy down to the group with the healing ministry. I finally said, “God, if you want them to pray for Dorothy, please bring them up our aisle, and I’ll ask them to pray for her.” The gym was almost empty, but we had not spotted Pat’s sister, so we were still sitting almost at the top on an aisle. Just then, the priest and the others with the healing ministry started up our exact aisle on their way out. As they came near us, I spoke hesitantly, “Father, would you pray for Dorothy here. She has one leg shorter than the other.” He stopped his group and said, “Of course. Let Dorothy sit in your chair here on the aisle.” So, Dorothy moved into my seat and the several prayer team members and Pat and I put our hands on her shoulders and held her hands, while the priest led us in a gentle quiet prayer asking God for healing in Jesus’ name. No frills, no dramatics. Then he stopped abruptly and asked Dorothy, “Did you feel that? I think your leg jumped.” Dorothy with tears flowing, agreed that it had. He then led us in prayers of thanksgiving, smiled, and went on up the stairs. As we sat stunned into silence, Pat’s sister appeared next to us. Following her out of the gym, we excitedly recounted our experience with a mixture of laughter and tears of joy. Dorothy suddenly stopped and said in amazement, “I’m limping. My built-up shoe is making me lopsided.” So, she took off her shoes and continued on literally ‘leaping and dancing and praising God.’
When we got to our dorm room, my inner Twin to Thomas kicked in. It ‘just so happened’ that Pat was a physical therapist. For the next hour, I kept making Pat measure Dorothy’s legs over and over. Pat kept reassuring me that they truly matched. No doubt about it. But there was still some visible curvature of her spine. When, in the wee hours of the morning, we began to tire, Pat went to the communal dorm bathroom to brush her teeth. There she met an older woman and told her of our experience, ending with the curious fact that Dorothy’s spine was still curved. The woman reassured her by telling her that her own husband’s leg, which had been a whole inch shorter than his other one, had been healed the year before at this conference. She said that the leg grew immediately, but it took six months for the atrophied muscles to develop fully back to normal. We finally all went to sleep exhausted, wonderous, thankful, and at peace.
Over the next several months I, of little faith, looked each time our prayer group met to assure myself that Dorothy was indeed happily wearing sandals, flip flops, or tennis shoes.
And almost ten years later, now married and the mother of two children, Dorothy came to our parish to tell her story to our women’s group. Yes, she was still happily and painlessly wearing sandals.
Addendum
Father Francis in his books and when speaking before leading prayer for healing always told this story, which to me shows the huge difference between him and the TV “Healers.” He was speaking in a city where an old friend lived. The friend invited him to dinner with his family. While there, one of their children had an asthma attack. He had a scary history of serious attacks, so Fr. Francis offered to pray over him. They agreed and he did. A year or so later he was back in the city and again visited his friend. He asked how the boy was. They smiled and said he was doing very well, but that after Fr. Francis had left that night, the child got so much worse, they had to rush him to the ER. At the ER a doctor told them of a new medicine that was helping someone in his family with asthma. They went to their doctor and asked him to prescribe it and it was working beautifully for their child.
An Episcopal woman who had a healing ministry also shared that it was really humbling to do healing prayer ministry when you had allergies and kept sneezing and sniffling the whole time you were speaking and praying for people. God does the healing…..God just uses people and keeps them aware of who is in charge. A chapter on healing that I’ve written recalls praying in a prayer group for a young father on a roller coaster battle with cancer. I, and several others in the group, simultaneously “heard” in our thoughts to trust God and to let him go. So, we prayed a prayer putting him in God’s loving hands trusting in God’s love. Later, we heard he died at that time. Both death and suffering are a reality in this life. This is not heaven, but it is only a blink in comparison to eternity. Early in my spiritual journey, I experienced several healings, but over the years have had to hang onto faith through serious pain and crippling health issues that put me in a wheelchair for several years. And my mother’s dying by inches for fourteen years with Alzheimer’s. It’s a mystery. But it has helped me to know that Jesus has walked this path before me and is with me now as I follow him. And that with grace I can actually grow closer to him and more like him most through the hard times.
The Transforming Joy of Christmas
Joy to the world for Love has come. Let us rejoice and open our hearts to receive it. Come, Lord Jesus, fill our hearts with your love so that we can pass it on.
The Transforming Joy of Christmas is the perfect Love for all of us, that came as a vulnerable human baby. A life that not only offers us the unconditional love that can set us free to grow from needing to loving, but also gives us illustrated instructions on how to do it.
My favorite Christmas Picture with permission of the artist, Morgan Weistling
Licensed by the Greenwich Workshop, Inc.
Raphael, Our Christmas Blessing!
Our Christmas blessing, Raphael now.
Bless all of you for praying for him.
Asking small and large blessings for all of you in these Holy Days.
Humor and Hope
Only when we have experienced humanity in its range and complexity is our humor at its deepest and truest. Redemptive humor is more than the ability to enjoy the isolated humorous situation. It is an attitude toward all of life. Not only is humor a gift of the later years; it is indispensable to hope and healing during that time. Humor recognizes that limitations and failures are not final and unredeemable tragedies. Like a ray of sunshine piercing a dark and overcast sky, humor suggests God’s abiding presence and brightens our human prospects. Humor recognizes the tragedy of the human condition, the finitude which in one way imprisons us. But by laughing at this condition, we declare that it is not final. It can be overcome. Humor is a gentle reminder of the reality of redemption……..Humor is social because the joke is finally on all of us……We are laughing not simply at our own condition but at the shared human condition…………………..A mixture of good and evil is inevitable in this life. Our successes are mixed with failures, our joys contain sadness, love can coexist with hate, health is marred by illness, and possessions are threatened by loss. Excerpt from Winter Grace by Kathleen Fischer.
The rest are my reflections:
Often midlife is the crisis time of recognizing that we have used up as much time as we are likely to have left. So often, it is a time of admitting we have not achieved all we had expected and that there not only may be too little time left, but we may also have to recognize that we do not have all the attributes or resources needed to accomplish our dreams.
There are four roads out of mid-life. 1: Become obsessed and abandon everything and everyone that doesn’t contribute to your goals. 2: Become disillusioned, cynical and angry at life. 3: Choose an addiction to dull the pain. 4: Or adjust our goals to fit a more realistic assessment of our chances to reach them.
Only when we have survived enough of life’s contradictions and made some adjustments to our assumptions can we laugh in the middle of the mix. By then we know that the only thing permanent in this life is change. Often there is a greater freedom to live by our own values and priorities, rather than for an image that pleases others. Hope becomes open ended. We gain a wider perspective for all our limited hopes. And as our lives narrow, we can begin to find true joy in the small things. Happily there are many more small things than large.
Sometimes, as we age we find fulfillment in passing on our hopes and dreams to the next generation, who may be able to take the next step in working toward them. But often, we find more than enough meaning in simple kindness or creating pockets of beauty to be shared with others. Either way, the focus becomes others, instead of our “self.”
Everyday Friends
Today, a cardinal flamed into my winter landscape,
igniting a small sparkler of joy within me.
But just as quickly it flurried off.
Perhaps I moved in my delight?
I felt bereft.
As if someone, a long lost friend
had merely waved and hurried out of sight.
I waited, watching hopefully,
so focused on the loss, that I almost missed
the quieter colored Titmice, with just their touch of blush,
fluttering in blue-grey swirls near-by.
An earnest squirrel chit-chided me
from a scarlet berried dogwood,
where silken vested doves were perched
like rows of mourners full of silent sympathy.
So, letting go of “might have been.”
I began to laugh at madcap chickadees
drag racing to the feeders.
And my heart was filled with the quiet joy of peace
to be surrounded by such friends.
I Pray for Grace
to get it right now that I am old.
to give love and joy, never heartbreak.
to hold all lightly, free to let go.
to seek God’s hand when I suffer.
to forgive others and be forgiven.
to have faith there is some great purpose,
an after- life better than this one.
to while still in dark, believe in light.
and to go with hope into the night.
Moments of Wonder
An illusion haunts us, that a long duration, as a year, a decade, a century, is valuable. But an old French sentence says, “God works in moments.” We ask for long life, but ’tis deep life or grand moments that signify. Let the measure of Time be spiritual, not mechanical. Life is unnecessarily long. Moments of insight, of fine personal relation, a smile, a glance–what ample borrowers of eternity they are!
Ralph Waldo Emerson.
Laughter: Carbonated Grace 