My Lenten Love Affair

I vividly remember the Good Friday when I first experienced the haunting reality of that day. I was 12, and per my mom's annual tradition, she stayed home from work and we kids stayed home from school. Being old enough to understand what the Passion was, but not yet old enough to have seen the film that bore its name, I remember wandering through that day in a foggy, grey area of subconscious sorrow and intellectual consternation, having no idea why that day felt so heavy. I was always told it was of grave importance, but I'd never felt it like this before.

I knew that Christ had died (it wasn't until years later that I knew He'd died for me, as though He'd come only for me), but the earth's soil lapping up His blood, the ground splitting open in rage, and the skies weeping down their protest hadn't yet touched the dark, ignorant caverns of my soul's eye. My heart was still encased in deep, impenetrable ice, and I didn't know it yet.

There was one errand we had to take that day that couldn't wait until Saturday; parking at the bank, I stood by the car while my mom ran inside, and I watched with eerie awareness the swirling black and gray clouds in foreboding towers above me. Having not yet noted the time, I jumped in surprise when the clock tower nearby rang out the noon hour with deep, booming gongs, and a deathly chill ran through me. I may not have understood its potency yet, but even I knew that noon was the hour He hung by strained tendons and screaming joints to the wood of His Cross. 

Looking back at it now, I like to think that the Spirit of God, that haunting shadow of the breath of creation, swirling eagerly around me as those clouds swirled in the sky, and knocking with a small but precise blow to the walls of my ice fortress, let me know of His presence and of my presence with Him. I was thinking about Him in a way that acknowledged Him as a person and not as a thought. This was the start of my love story with God. 

The first time I'd ever spent in Perpetual Adoration, I was a sobbing wreck. The priest exposed Him in the monstrance, and all I could think of, kneeling on that hard retreat house floor, was that my Savior, the one who'd laid a Hand upon my life at 16 and shook away the fetters of evil that threatened to destroy me, was there, right in front me. Nevermind that earlier that night I had literally consumed Him (that still hits me in incomprehensible waves to the point I nearly pass out at Mass); I could kneel before Him and talk to Him and sob my little heart out because the Man I fell in love with decided to sit with me for the evening and all I had to do was raise my eyes and drink in His visage in front of me.

The joy that experience impressed on me can't be understated. Finding out I could love as deeply as I'd always longed to and yet never have to worry about ever outloving Him was simply too much for me. I journaled and sang and wept, and felt freer in those two hours than I had ever felt in my entire life. 

My soul tasted the sweet cream of the richness of God's life, and I wanted in. My conversion may have been six months previous, but that night felt more like the night that I really knew I loved Him and I wanted to be at His side, forever. 

It would be years before I knew could be a layperson and love Christ that much. All my life, all I had ever been told is that good girls love God, love the Church, and become nuns. The ones who aren't called become mothers, and that's okay, I suppose. They've got to do something to fill up the void in their time here, right?

That wasn't good enough for me. I wanted Christ. All of Him. And as far as I could see it, becoming a nun was my only option. But I was utterly captivated by the world around me, in its color, its passion, its rank and disgusting rows of horrendous sinners, sinners with my face, my eyes, my hands, mirrors of my own fault in them. I was in awe of those women who found their footfall on the path toward the convent, but I knew that wasn't my path.

For ten years, I fought and tore and screamed at this love Christ had bloomed within me, to the point that I felt as though the waiting for an eternity that seemed just as far away would literally kill me. But in all of my searchings, and all of my wanderings, I never realized how complicated I was making it all out to be.

I was in love, and in great denial.

When you first fall in love with Christ, it is a thrill. It is a wonder. It is the heartbeat of electricity pulsing through your veins with the remains of the lightning strike that gave your blind eyes sight after eons of deathly, dark loneliness. It is intoxicating, this freedom. This drinking of the cup of Life. You know, even as you drown happily in this ecstasy, that this isn't going to last, or that if it does, it won't stay the same. It is the same with anything true, living, organic: it must grow and change in order to stay alive.

Time passes, and you still love Christ, but you are weeping a lot more. The knocks of life hit much harder than they had before, and you beg Him to tell you what you'd done to merit such punishment. He promises to not let you fall, yet your heart is so much more vulnerable to the Fall of the Earth around you, the grubby hands that smack you and then make you apologize for it, the smiles that slip poison into your drink and hand it to you with eager words, the lips that kiss you and call you friend while holding a knife to your throat. You still love Christ. You only know you do because the thought of leaving Him, or of changing your mind and running head first into those pleasures that gave you such escape or numbing or forgetfulness, sicken your blood. Guess He is changing you for the better. Even if it hurts like Hell. (Yes, that H is capitalized on purpose).

There are pockets later, periods of all-too-short time when you feel elations only His hand could bring into your life. You are caught in a whirlwind of beauty and awareness and tragic, terrifying sorrow that you wouldn't trade for all the artificial pleasure in the world.

Until you are back in the pitch, clawing at the walls of the vacuum closing in around you, threatening to tear you apart limb from limb until you are nearly pushed to the brink, to that point when you would beg the Lord to remove Himself from you, to get rid of the hands sucking the air from your lungs in a terrible violation.

This continues for ages, making the few short mortal years that pass by feel like thousands, the aching emptiness of a soul separated from Christ the worst conceivable torture you never knew could exist, and much less would exist at the very hand of the Man Who saved you.

But, you keep going. You find spaces to breathe in between the bouts of dire darkness because you realize you are getting stronger. The battles increase in their rage and veracity just as you do, but you find the endurance to wade through them abounding far more than it had before. You find an even keel in moments of horrific agony or anxiety where you are able to sit in His presence, drink in Him as you had before, but with a greater appreciation for the gift beyond the consolation it gives.

You see Him and feel Him everywhere, to the point that even the pain you feel and experience, and you see and understand in other people, is blinding in its light because He is in it, bleeding and crying and screaming with them.

You find the strength to say, "Thank You for suffering with me," even when He feels a million miles away, and you're angry at Him for being so distant.

And you find an even greater strength to allow Him to reply, "Always."

This year is coming up on ten years since my conversion, the day on the mortal calendar when I can smile and weep and sigh, thanking Him for being there even when I didn't want Him to be, for loving the unlovable in me. And this Lent, I needed to remind myself it isn't about what I do to show my love for God; it is about loving God.

Loving Him, the utterly impassable, unmistakable, terribly terrifying and awe-striking God-Man Who thought it an adventure of unimaginable humility to dwell inside my dank insides. My Lenten love affair, the terribly addictive and renewing tonic that pounds through my veins so readily this time of year.

It hurts like Hell, this Love.

And I wouldn't change it for the world.