As Theresa grew, got stronger, and started sleeping through the night I remember a tremendous feeling of well-being coming over me. I liked who I was becoming as a father. I felt as though I was growing up and becoming a man. Even though the fear that I had felt early on with her was unpleasant, it had left it's mark on me and I had to admit I was much better for it. I remember going back to confession at the Church where I had experienced some of the earlier conversion graces. I had Theresa with me at the time since my wife was occupied somewhere else and as I went in to the confessional face to face I saw one of the priests who had ministered to me earlier in my conversion. He smiled at recognizing me and asked "Who is this?" nodding to Theresa. I made my confession as she crawled all over my lap sticking her fingers in my ears, nose, mouth and anything else she could reach. At the end the priest asked me "How are you?". Pride over my daughter welled up in my heart and I said "I'm the richest man in the world." He smiled.
July 2003 was a hot month. I was nearing the end of my first really big construction project at work, a job I had put together conceptually myself, with newborn Theresa sleeping on my knee, and was now following straight through to the end. Theresa had been experiencing a rash on her body for a few weeks and just seemed out of sorts. One night I had a vivid dream. I was standing before a dark mist that was swirling. It was cool (I remember feeling that in the dream). Suddenly Theresa's little baby hand came out of the mist and reached into my mouth (she would often do this in real life to comfort herself if I was up feeding her in the night). In my dream I said "Don't even say that" even though nothing had been said to me. About a week later, Theresa Rose had a very tough day. She spent the day in mom's arms whimpering. We thought she was have a really bad spell of teething. Around 3 PM I got a call from my wife "You need to come home. Something's not right here." I heard fear in her voice. I drove home in a panic praying the Chaplet of Divine Mercy (more on that later). "For the sake of His sorrowful passion, have mercy on us and on the whole world" I prayed as I drove as fast as I could down the city streets barely stopping at intersections.
When I arrived at the house and walked in the door, Theresa had just started having a seizure. She had a glassy look on her face, her right arm was rigid and she was grunting. My wife and I ran out of the house in a panic. We jumped back into the car and I drove as fast as I could to Children's Hospital. It took forever to get there. I wish I could forget the sound of Theresa grunting in the back seat. When we arrived at the hospital, there was, by some miracle, no one in the E.R. We went directly in. Nurses ran all over around us, and a doctor came and stood still near us at the bedside. She was simultaneously directing about ten people, talking to us and examing Theresa. She was in control, an oasis of rationality in the midst of confusion. I trusted she could handle the situation. I was riding an emotional rollercoaster so fast. I would get so worked up I would lose my train of thought and become momentarily confused and then it snap back into my mind "She's sick, she's dying!" and I would rachet back up again. At one point the doctor said, "We have to move her to another room with better equipment" and away we went. The pastor from our Church arrived just as we boarded the elevator. He blessed Theresa. I saw tears well up in the doctor's eyes as the elevator doors closed. I thought "What the hell is happening?"
They separated us from Theresa as she went into the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit and we went into a family waiting area. I had been on the phone intermittently through the process and our support structure was fully mobilized. It was incredible. People showed up in minutes at the hospital. A minister and counselor from the hospital sat with us asking all sorts of questions to keep our minds occupied. We sensed what they were doing. After hours (literally) a team of doctors came in to talk to us. "Theresa has leukemia" they said. "What!?!" my wife said out loud. I couldn't understand. Epilepsy I expected, leukemia, no. "She's had a major brain injury akin to a stroke. She is fighting for her life".
The experience of next going into the Peds ICU was one of walking on egg-shells. I saw her little body laying on a hospital bed with a tube down her throat and so many other tubes sticking into her body that I later suggested to my friend that if he was coming down, he shouldn't bring his daughter because it might freak her out to see it. The main doctor in the room with Theresa had been working feverishly (he was literally sweating) to stabilize her and he had suceeded. My wife then gave an exhibition of what I have later come to know as "the feminine genius". She went over to Theresa and in a positive-sounding motherly voice said "It's okay Theresa, Mommy and Daddy are here, you're going to be okay" and gently caressed and kissed her. I put my arm around my wife to support her. I had no words.
There followed three days of Theresa fighting for her life in the hospital. As fate (providence) would have it, Fr. Joseph was home for Rome when this all happened. He was looking forward to meeting her. He did this at the hospital. He had the presence of mind to suggest that she receive the sacrament of confirmation. As providence would also have it, the only other person in the room at the time (besides us) was Theresa's God-father who volunteered to be her confirmation sponsor - I later read that this is the preferred thing. Fr. Joseph asked what confirmation name we wanted. We weren't able to come up with anything. He mentioned that it was the feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel. I said "How about Carmella?" sort of half-kidding. Carmella it was. Over the next three days people streamed continuously to the hospital. We were never without support. An internet website for Theresa was started. We received word of people praying for her literally on the other side of the planet.
In the end, it became clear that Theresa was dying. Her body began to systematically fail. It was an inevitable process and we couldn't stop it. We made a decision with the doctor to accept this reality. Around 1:00 AM they began the process of taking her off life support. The surgeon who had been working on her lungs kept her alive with a manual rescusitator as they disconnected the tubes. Numerous nurses offerred to relieve him. He refused. Finally, they brought her to us. I said, "Give her to her mother" and they did. When we had her back, I began to sob viscerally, saying "Oh no, oh no, oh no..." under my breath. I wrapped my arms around my wife and my dying daughter. I protected them as she died. I needed to do that so bad. Just before she died at 1:16 A.M. on July 20th, 2003, a wave of calm blew over my soul and I sang "Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi..." It was the last thing I said to her.
My memory of the time that followed consists largely of visual images, curiously absent from sound: Fr. Joseph incensing her casket at the funeral, shaking holy water over her grave, the image of my wife kneeling in front of her casket. The only sounds I remember were the sound of the latches on her casket clicking as they closed the lid for the final time and I realized I wouldn't see her face again until THAT day. And, as I stood over her grave and watched them lower her in another thought went through my mind... "Death, where is your sting?" It was made known to my heart without a doubt that Theresa Rose Clyde will rise again.
Tuesday, March 18, 2008
Monday, March 17, 2008
My Spiritual Autobiography - Part VI
It's worth it to pause for a moment and remind myself that the purpose of telling this whole tale is to give glory to God, and this entry is probably the one that deals with the part of my life that most does that.
It likely goes without saying that the birth of my daughter Theresa Rose was an experience that changed who I was. In my case, the most operative aspect of that change was about letting go of control of my life. It started with the birth itself. During that first pregnancy, we did all of the usual "first pregnancy stuff" - we went to birth classes (my wife was interested in a natural childbirth experience), read books, shopped at Babies 'R Us (even giving serious consideration to things like an electric "wipe warmer") and mapped out a birth plan that would make NASA proud.
And then it came time for the birth. My wife had read in serveral books that "getting out and walking" is a good way to help labor progress. As a red-shirt father, I didn't have the experience to recognize that my wife's background of having run over twelve marathons skewed her perspective of what it meant to "get out and walk". I am actually not exaggerating when I say that we walked nearly 10 miles with my wife in labor. It was as if we were of a mindset that we could just "walk the baby out". Here it was a clear case of the two of us unwittingly believing that the birth of a child is under the control of the parents. The net effect of all of this walking was that we spent our energy too fast and didn't have the stamina to make it the thirty-nine (yes, "39") hours we would wind up in labor (including two, yes two, two-hour periods of pushing separated by a two-hour "rest" with contractions still going on). I can honestly say I have never been so tired in my life, to say nothing of where my wife was at. I had been coached in the natural child-birth classes, to "be strong" when the woman asks for pain medication - "when she is asking for pain medication, it means the baby is almost there, take her one contraction at a time" is what the book said. But seeing my wife, a Division I athlete, shaking and begging for pain meds like a heroine addict, brought home the verse from Genesis "in pain you shall bear children" in a different way.
In the end, Theresa was in a funny position and wasn't coming out. We were going to a C-section, something my wife wanted to avoid more than anything else. In my delerium of fatigue, as they took her from me to prep for surgery, I had what I can only explain as a supernatural experience. I was sitting on a chair outside the surgery suite and I started feeling very sorry for myself. I was thinking things like, "nothing went as planned" and "we're never doing this again". I was sobbing, trying not to let anyone see. Suddenly, a thought filled my entire mind: "YOUR KID IS HERE IN SEVEN MINUTES, YOU NEED TO BE ON-LINE RIGHT NOW". I write it in all-caps to convey some sense of the forcefulness with which the thought took over my entire thinking. I wouldn't say that I heard a "voice" per se, but without anyone saying anything to me (I was alone in the room at the time), my thinking did a 180-degree turn and the fatigue and self-pity cleared themselves from my mind. I was on my feet with a feeling like I used to get just before I ran down the field on a opening kickoff in football. A short while (7 minutes?) later, they came and got me. I went into the surgery room and met the girl who was to change the course of my entire life. From my vantage behind the curtain, I saw them lift her up and when my eyes fell upon her for the first time, it was as if I had tunnel vision and the sound completely cut out from my ears.
I carried her (floated?) from the surgery room to the nursery. The nurse put her down in the baby warmer in just a diaper. She looked so small and vulnerable that I instinctively put my hands over her like a blanket. The nurse came back and showed me that I wasn't helping since I was blocking the warmer. What followed next was another lesson in life not being under my control. The doctor who had done the initial examination of Theresa had noticed that she had a cleft palate (like a cleft lip, but inside the mouth - not visible from the outside). She didn't mention this to me but left to organize a team of doctors who then converged on the situation. They were talking to me, by myself (my wife still recovering from surgery), in the nursery, using language I could barely understand in the condition I was in. One doctor actually said to me "We think your daughter has an excellent chance of survival". If this was meant to console me, it instead had the exact opposite effect, I was scared to death. There was talk of a genetic screen, CAT scan, other tests. By the time my wife got to the room and the pain meds were wearing off, we had learned that Theresa was born with Pierre-Robin Syndrome, a rare condition where in the childs lower jaw grows small, causing the tongue to grow up into the roof of the mouth, resulting in a cleft palate. The scariest part of the whole thing was that she was "apnic", meaning she had difficulty breathing because of the position of her tongue in her mouth. She spent the first week of her life in a special care nursery, hooked up to an oxygen sensor and a heart rate monitor. She had to be laid on her side and supervised continuously - on several occasions we could see her blood oxygen content get to such a level that the machine would flash red. We would rush over and re-adjust her so her tongue wasn't blocking her airway. Breast-feeding, something my wife had looked forward to, was out of the question.
At the end of the weeklong stay in the hospital, we were visited by an apnea counselor and told we would be sent home with a breathing monitor. This is a device that the child wears through the night that will alarm if they stop breathing (I don't remember exactly how it worked). The bottom line is that the device will make a sound (literally) more obnoxious than a fire alarm if the baby stops breathing. The problem is, the device has plenty of "false alarms". After the first few times we awoke with a noise that might as well have said "Your baby is dying, your baby is dying" we learned to hate this device more than I thought I could hate an inanimate object. The doctors told us that Theresa would "grow out" of her apnea and for me that couldn't come fast enough. I was a novice at sleep deprivation and was having a baptism by fire. I couldn't believe how my wife was able to go on two hour intervals seemingly forever, when I wasn't even safe to drive the car anymore.
In time, Theresa did grow out of her apnea. She gained weight slowly but steadily and ate solids at the normal time. The breathing monitor went aways. She was a beautiful child, and in the light of three more I have been blessed with since, she was unique. She was somehow "introspective". She didn't giggle and gave smiles somewhat sparingly. She seldom cried and was long-suffering. When I try to describe her personality, people have sometimes suggested she may have been autistic, but that doesn't fit (there were plenty of specialist doctors of all sorts looking at her and none ever suggested this). She wasn't a mommy's girl or a daddy's girl, as some of our later kids have clearly been. She was always just watching, seemingly fascinated with everything and anything that was going on. One of my favorite memories of her was when I would sometimes come home from work and she would be upstairs with my wife in the bedroom. I had this particular song I would sing, an exultant medieval version of the "Agnus Dei" (Lamb of God) antiphon from the mass that I had heard on a chant CD my wife had gotten me for my birthday. As my wife would tell it, when Theresa heard my voice as I started to sing "Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi... (Lamb of God, Who takes away the sins of the world...), she would light up with a smile that can only be described as "electric" and she would bounce up and down waving her little arms as I came up the stairs to grab her and hug and kiss her. I never got tired of it.
It likely goes without saying that the birth of my daughter Theresa Rose was an experience that changed who I was. In my case, the most operative aspect of that change was about letting go of control of my life. It started with the birth itself. During that first pregnancy, we did all of the usual "first pregnancy stuff" - we went to birth classes (my wife was interested in a natural childbirth experience), read books, shopped at Babies 'R Us (even giving serious consideration to things like an electric "wipe warmer") and mapped out a birth plan that would make NASA proud.
And then it came time for the birth. My wife had read in serveral books that "getting out and walking" is a good way to help labor progress. As a red-shirt father, I didn't have the experience to recognize that my wife's background of having run over twelve marathons skewed her perspective of what it meant to "get out and walk". I am actually not exaggerating when I say that we walked nearly 10 miles with my wife in labor. It was as if we were of a mindset that we could just "walk the baby out". Here it was a clear case of the two of us unwittingly believing that the birth of a child is under the control of the parents. The net effect of all of this walking was that we spent our energy too fast and didn't have the stamina to make it the thirty-nine (yes, "39") hours we would wind up in labor (including two, yes two, two-hour periods of pushing separated by a two-hour "rest" with contractions still going on). I can honestly say I have never been so tired in my life, to say nothing of where my wife was at. I had been coached in the natural child-birth classes, to "be strong" when the woman asks for pain medication - "when she is asking for pain medication, it means the baby is almost there, take her one contraction at a time" is what the book said. But seeing my wife, a Division I athlete, shaking and begging for pain meds like a heroine addict, brought home the verse from Genesis "in pain you shall bear children" in a different way.
In the end, Theresa was in a funny position and wasn't coming out. We were going to a C-section, something my wife wanted to avoid more than anything else. In my delerium of fatigue, as they took her from me to prep for surgery, I had what I can only explain as a supernatural experience. I was sitting on a chair outside the surgery suite and I started feeling very sorry for myself. I was thinking things like, "nothing went as planned" and "we're never doing this again". I was sobbing, trying not to let anyone see. Suddenly, a thought filled my entire mind: "YOUR KID IS HERE IN SEVEN MINUTES, YOU NEED TO BE ON-LINE RIGHT NOW". I write it in all-caps to convey some sense of the forcefulness with which the thought took over my entire thinking. I wouldn't say that I heard a "voice" per se, but without anyone saying anything to me (I was alone in the room at the time), my thinking did a 180-degree turn and the fatigue and self-pity cleared themselves from my mind. I was on my feet with a feeling like I used to get just before I ran down the field on a opening kickoff in football. A short while (7 minutes?) later, they came and got me. I went into the surgery room and met the girl who was to change the course of my entire life. From my vantage behind the curtain, I saw them lift her up and when my eyes fell upon her for the first time, it was as if I had tunnel vision and the sound completely cut out from my ears.
I carried her (floated?) from the surgery room to the nursery. The nurse put her down in the baby warmer in just a diaper. She looked so small and vulnerable that I instinctively put my hands over her like a blanket. The nurse came back and showed me that I wasn't helping since I was blocking the warmer. What followed next was another lesson in life not being under my control. The doctor who had done the initial examination of Theresa had noticed that she had a cleft palate (like a cleft lip, but inside the mouth - not visible from the outside). She didn't mention this to me but left to organize a team of doctors who then converged on the situation. They were talking to me, by myself (my wife still recovering from surgery), in the nursery, using language I could barely understand in the condition I was in. One doctor actually said to me "We think your daughter has an excellent chance of survival". If this was meant to console me, it instead had the exact opposite effect, I was scared to death. There was talk of a genetic screen, CAT scan, other tests. By the time my wife got to the room and the pain meds were wearing off, we had learned that Theresa was born with Pierre-Robin Syndrome, a rare condition where in the childs lower jaw grows small, causing the tongue to grow up into the roof of the mouth, resulting in a cleft palate. The scariest part of the whole thing was that she was "apnic", meaning she had difficulty breathing because of the position of her tongue in her mouth. She spent the first week of her life in a special care nursery, hooked up to an oxygen sensor and a heart rate monitor. She had to be laid on her side and supervised continuously - on several occasions we could see her blood oxygen content get to such a level that the machine would flash red. We would rush over and re-adjust her so her tongue wasn't blocking her airway. Breast-feeding, something my wife had looked forward to, was out of the question.
At the end of the weeklong stay in the hospital, we were visited by an apnea counselor and told we would be sent home with a breathing monitor. This is a device that the child wears through the night that will alarm if they stop breathing (I don't remember exactly how it worked). The bottom line is that the device will make a sound (literally) more obnoxious than a fire alarm if the baby stops breathing. The problem is, the device has plenty of "false alarms". After the first few times we awoke with a noise that might as well have said "Your baby is dying, your baby is dying" we learned to hate this device more than I thought I could hate an inanimate object. The doctors told us that Theresa would "grow out" of her apnea and for me that couldn't come fast enough. I was a novice at sleep deprivation and was having a baptism by fire. I couldn't believe how my wife was able to go on two hour intervals seemingly forever, when I wasn't even safe to drive the car anymore.
In time, Theresa did grow out of her apnea. She gained weight slowly but steadily and ate solids at the normal time. The breathing monitor went aways. She was a beautiful child, and in the light of three more I have been blessed with since, she was unique. She was somehow "introspective". She didn't giggle and gave smiles somewhat sparingly. She seldom cried and was long-suffering. When I try to describe her personality, people have sometimes suggested she may have been autistic, but that doesn't fit (there were plenty of specialist doctors of all sorts looking at her and none ever suggested this). She wasn't a mommy's girl or a daddy's girl, as some of our later kids have clearly been. She was always just watching, seemingly fascinated with everything and anything that was going on. One of my favorite memories of her was when I would sometimes come home from work and she would be upstairs with my wife in the bedroom. I had this particular song I would sing, an exultant medieval version of the "Agnus Dei" (Lamb of God) antiphon from the mass that I had heard on a chant CD my wife had gotten me for my birthday. As my wife would tell it, when Theresa heard my voice as I started to sing "Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi... (Lamb of God, Who takes away the sins of the world...), she would light up with a smile that can only be described as "electric" and she would bounce up and down waving her little arms as I came up the stairs to grab her and hug and kiss her. I never got tired of it.
Thursday, March 13, 2008
My Spiritual Autobiography - Part V
This series is running longer than I thought it would - I guess there is more to this story than I initially realized!
When I returned from Israel I had a strong sense of wanting to "do something" for the Lord. My focus shifted from trying to break with vices to trying to do something for the kingdom. I call this the beginning of the "vocational" part of my life in the sense that it seemed that God was calling me to serve him. And this is where I expect the remainder of the my life to be lived out.
As a Roman Catholic, when one comes to the realization that God may be calling them to serve Him there is always a question of discernment. Is this a call to religious life (priest, monk, etc.) or a call to marriage? I was blessed, in particular, in the young adults group by being able to talk to a lot of people who viewed marriage as a vocation. Too often it seemed to me that the "popular" Catholic wisdom was more of an "either/or" mindset. Either you have a vocation or you get married. But the people I was hanging out with spoke differently. They viewed it more as "both/and" - as in both the priesthood and the married life as vocations. The difference is only in scope. The priestly vocation is broad - you come into contact with many lives. The marriage vocation is more narrow - your primary focus is on your family.
I had a lot of people telling me that I should be a priest. In retrospect, this is a funny thing to say - if I have trouble discerning my own vocation, how can I discern someone elses? In the end I made my decision based on pride. I mean I looked into my heart and recognized that I was very proud (not in a good way) and that this was a weakness. I reasoned that the authority and respect given to priests was something that would be very difficult for me to handle - I would constantly be tempted to pride. I reasoned that the better place for me was in marriage - it's tough to get into too much trouble pride-wise changing diapers. I'm not saying this is the best way to discern you vocation, or even that I was right in my thinking, I'm just relating what I actually did at the time.
Things moved fast at that point. At one young adults group meeting shortly thereafter a woman caught my eye and I thought "Boy, she's a tall, good looking woman". I initially thought she was dating someone else, so I didn't give it much of a second thought. Turns out I was wrong. We cleared up the confusion and began dating. This was a woman about whom I really felt she was like bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh. In particular, I perceived in her a certain "poverty of spirit" that I had been looking for without even knowing it. We dated for six months and I proposed marriage in the chapel of Our Lady of Good Counsel in the crypt church at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception (whew!) in Washington D.C. She said yes! And on May 5th, 2001 she walked down the aisle at Nativity of Our Lord Church in St. Paul to take my arm. As I "waited in the wings" just before her big trip down the aisle, my friend Dan led all of the groomsmen in prayer. The prayer of Mary, the mother of Jesus came silently to my heart, "My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord, and my Spirit rejoices in God my savior, for the Mighty One has done great things for me and holy is His name." In his homily during the wedding mass, Fr. Joseph reminded us that "This is the day the Lord has made, let us rejoice and be glad" hearkening back to a song we sang at the beginning of each day while on pilgrimmage in Israel. As we made our way from the church to the reception hall, I remember having a sense of awe of where God had taken me in what was a relatively short period of time. A special memory from the reception came near the end when Cathy, I and our families got out on the dance floor together for the song "We are Family" - a lot of loose threads were tied together in that moment.
The first year of marriage passed quickly. In June Fr. Joseph was sent to Rome to study. That fall came the infamous September 11th terrorist attack. The day or two before, Cathy and I had just taken a pregnancy test and the result was positive. As I stared in disbelief at the TV screens watching the towers fall in New York City, I also received a telephone call from Cathy - we were miscarrying. I was emotionally numb. Nobody expects to miscarry.
In January we made a trip of a lifetime to Rome to see Fr. Joseph. The trip was full of many sights and experiences. The highlight was when we got to meet Pope John Paul II. Waiting in the large auditorium for him to arrive was something like the experience I had when I got to see Michael Jordan play at the NBA All-Star game when it was here in Minneapolis. At one point they draw a huge curtain closed at the back of the hall and you realize that the next guy through that curtain is the Vicar of Jesus Christ on this earth. The "servant of the servants of the Lord". The most photographed human being in the history of the race. We stood in a long line to recieve his Apostolic blessing and had all of five seconds in front of him. I said "We love you Holy Father. Thank you for your ministry." He nodded his head, gave us the blessing and we were gone. What none of us knew at the time was that his blessing extended to one more person - Baby Clyde #2 - all of about six weeks old in the womb.
When I returned from Israel I had a strong sense of wanting to "do something" for the Lord. My focus shifted from trying to break with vices to trying to do something for the kingdom. I call this the beginning of the "vocational" part of my life in the sense that it seemed that God was calling me to serve him. And this is where I expect the remainder of the my life to be lived out.
As a Roman Catholic, when one comes to the realization that God may be calling them to serve Him there is always a question of discernment. Is this a call to religious life (priest, monk, etc.) or a call to marriage? I was blessed, in particular, in the young adults group by being able to talk to a lot of people who viewed marriage as a vocation. Too often it seemed to me that the "popular" Catholic wisdom was more of an "either/or" mindset. Either you have a vocation or you get married. But the people I was hanging out with spoke differently. They viewed it more as "both/and" - as in both the priesthood and the married life as vocations. The difference is only in scope. The priestly vocation is broad - you come into contact with many lives. The marriage vocation is more narrow - your primary focus is on your family.
I had a lot of people telling me that I should be a priest. In retrospect, this is a funny thing to say - if I have trouble discerning my own vocation, how can I discern someone elses? In the end I made my decision based on pride. I mean I looked into my heart and recognized that I was very proud (not in a good way) and that this was a weakness. I reasoned that the authority and respect given to priests was something that would be very difficult for me to handle - I would constantly be tempted to pride. I reasoned that the better place for me was in marriage - it's tough to get into too much trouble pride-wise changing diapers. I'm not saying this is the best way to discern you vocation, or even that I was right in my thinking, I'm just relating what I actually did at the time.
Things moved fast at that point. At one young adults group meeting shortly thereafter a woman caught my eye and I thought "Boy, she's a tall, good looking woman". I initially thought she was dating someone else, so I didn't give it much of a second thought. Turns out I was wrong. We cleared up the confusion and began dating. This was a woman about whom I really felt she was like bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh. In particular, I perceived in her a certain "poverty of spirit" that I had been looking for without even knowing it. We dated for six months and I proposed marriage in the chapel of Our Lady of Good Counsel in the crypt church at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception (whew!) in Washington D.C. She said yes! And on May 5th, 2001 she walked down the aisle at Nativity of Our Lord Church in St. Paul to take my arm. As I "waited in the wings" just before her big trip down the aisle, my friend Dan led all of the groomsmen in prayer. The prayer of Mary, the mother of Jesus came silently to my heart, "My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord, and my Spirit rejoices in God my savior, for the Mighty One has done great things for me and holy is His name." In his homily during the wedding mass, Fr. Joseph reminded us that "This is the day the Lord has made, let us rejoice and be glad" hearkening back to a song we sang at the beginning of each day while on pilgrimmage in Israel. As we made our way from the church to the reception hall, I remember having a sense of awe of where God had taken me in what was a relatively short period of time. A special memory from the reception came near the end when Cathy, I and our families got out on the dance floor together for the song "We are Family" - a lot of loose threads were tied together in that moment.
The first year of marriage passed quickly. In June Fr. Joseph was sent to Rome to study. That fall came the infamous September 11th terrorist attack. The day or two before, Cathy and I had just taken a pregnancy test and the result was positive. As I stared in disbelief at the TV screens watching the towers fall in New York City, I also received a telephone call from Cathy - we were miscarrying. I was emotionally numb. Nobody expects to miscarry.
In January we made a trip of a lifetime to Rome to see Fr. Joseph. The trip was full of many sights and experiences. The highlight was when we got to meet Pope John Paul II. Waiting in the large auditorium for him to arrive was something like the experience I had when I got to see Michael Jordan play at the NBA All-Star game when it was here in Minneapolis. At one point they draw a huge curtain closed at the back of the hall and you realize that the next guy through that curtain is the Vicar of Jesus Christ on this earth. The "servant of the servants of the Lord". The most photographed human being in the history of the race. We stood in a long line to recieve his Apostolic blessing and had all of five seconds in front of him. I said "We love you Holy Father. Thank you for your ministry." He nodded his head, gave us the blessing and we were gone. What none of us knew at the time was that his blessing extended to one more person - Baby Clyde #2 - all of about six weeks old in the womb.
Monday, March 10, 2008
My Spiritual Autobiography - Part IV
The young adults group I had joined began to factor more and more into the equation. At these meetings, I ran into people who were having experiences similar to mine. My life seems to be a progression of waking up to the world outside of myself - it never occurred to me that there might be people my age who were where I was at. I remember in particular a conversation I had with a guy my age who "went off" on all the things he was learning and the changes he was trying to make in his life and when he was done I was just quiet. He had said everything I wanted to say.
Book studies were the primary format for the young adults group in the beginning. One book that stands out in my mind was called "A Plea for Purity". I used to pride myself on the wide range of books I had read and how it took a fair amount to impress me. But this book was radical in a way I wasn't used to. It had phrases in it like "the chastity of Christ" and "receive your sexuality as a gift from God". Reading it was something like the experience of driving on a brand new road through an area you are already familiar with. All the same points of interest are there, but you are seeing them from a totally different angle. The book brought home to me a point that I still hold today - namely that sexuality is essentially religious and the sexual act is a religious act. I remember making a remark that if chastity is so important, I might never go to the beach again. There was nervous laughter in the room when I said this, followed by silence.
At about this same time, a particular priest entered my life who did (and still does) hold a special place in my heart. I'll call him Fr. Joseph. As with many great beginnings, there was no fanfare. He simply shook my hand and introduced himself as he and I were in the sacristy before mass (in my zeal to be involved in anything Catholic at the time, I had volunteered to be an Acolyte - basically an adult version of an altar server). What struck me about Fr. Joseph wasn't what he was saying, or his personal charisma or his singing voice. What struck me, in the very first mass I served with him, was his body language. The teaching of the Catholic Church has always been and will always be that the Eucharist IS the body, blood, soul and divinity of Jesus Christ, "Truly Present", just as much as He ever was on this earth. This was something I had known implicitly from my earliest days. But when Fr. Joseph said mass something was different; his whole demeanor changed. I watched him like a hawk. This was a guy who really saw Jesus Christ in that consecrated bread and wine and for whom that reality was the central motivator of his life. As I stood right there watching him do what Catholic priests have done for 2000 years, I had an experience that was something like how I felt years later at the birth of my first child. My mental focus was drawn to a pinpoint as a huge reality sank into my heart and mind. I was blown away.
My spiritual journey greatly accelerated in the months that followed. I was interested in any and all things pertaining to Christ. My exposure to information was so rapid that I could call this period an "illuminative" phase, but for the fact that the primary aspect was still purgation from vices. Knowledge didn't set me free from these things, grace did.
The Year 2000 was a watershed in my life. Fr. Joseph had organized a young adults pilgrimage to "The Holy Land" (Israel) and many of my new friends from the group were planning on going. They invited me. It was fairly expensive and something rather outside of my comfort zone. But they pressed me. As fate (or providence?) would have it, in the days of the ".com" economic boom, my stocks had (temporarily) doubled in value. In the absence a financial obstacle, I opted not to let comfort hold me back. I cashed out and signed on.
The trip to Israel was surreal. I floated in a boat on the sea of Galilee, sat in Capernam, climbed to the top of Mount Tabor. I remember riding in the tour bus and seeing a road sign with three arrows pointing in three different directions - Nazareth, Bethlehem and Meggido. Where else can you see stuff like this? The trip to Israel was a closing out of the purgative phase of my life. There are too many details to mention them all, but I'll share two. The first occurred at the "Knights Palace" in Jerusalem - a history-laden structure built at the time of the crusades and now serving as a hotel for pilgrims. In the course of our travels, many on the pilgrimage group were greatly affected by the things they were seeing, some visibly so. Fr. Joseph was faithful in offering privately the sacrament of reconciliation at the end of each day for anyone who needed to get things off of their chest. One night it was my turn. Now, confession is typically a time-constrained sacrament. There are people waiting behind you in line. But, this was different. I made a general confession of everything I could possibly remember. I took my time. There were things that I had remembered between other confessions and simply forgot to mention when I went. I got them all off of my chest. I articulated things from my past that were almost painful to say. Fr. Joseph listened faithfully for a long time and then said the words of absolution: "By virtue of the authority vested in me by the Church, I absolve you of your sins in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit". We sat there quietly. It was late. There were no more sins to confess. Before I left I said "I don't know what God wants for me, but I know I'm here to serve the Lord." Fr. Joseph nodded. The chains of vice were broken.
It was shortly thereafter that I had the opportunity to assist at a mass at the site of Calvary, as in THE PLACE where Jesus was actually crucified. The church at the site is a Greek Orthodox Church, 1000 years old (literally), and extremely ornate, even by Catholic standards. Being in that building established in my mind a historical continuity with Christians through the centuries. Christ's church has been fighting faithfully for thousands of years. When Fr. Joseph started the mass in that chapel, people we weren't even associated with flocked in to be part - there were Mother-Theresa-look-alike nuns, monks with long beards, local Arab Christians. None of them could speak English but they all knew what was going on. I saw in their faces something I had never seen before: the faith for them was a given, there was not question. And they had all paid a price, in the course of their lives, for their faith in Jesus Christ. I recognized, in stark contrast, that my faith, to this point, had cost me nothing. The thought entered my heart - you've been part of the problem for long enough, it's time to be part of the solution.
Book studies were the primary format for the young adults group in the beginning. One book that stands out in my mind was called "A Plea for Purity". I used to pride myself on the wide range of books I had read and how it took a fair amount to impress me. But this book was radical in a way I wasn't used to. It had phrases in it like "the chastity of Christ" and "receive your sexuality as a gift from God". Reading it was something like the experience of driving on a brand new road through an area you are already familiar with. All the same points of interest are there, but you are seeing them from a totally different angle. The book brought home to me a point that I still hold today - namely that sexuality is essentially religious and the sexual act is a religious act. I remember making a remark that if chastity is so important, I might never go to the beach again. There was nervous laughter in the room when I said this, followed by silence.
At about this same time, a particular priest entered my life who did (and still does) hold a special place in my heart. I'll call him Fr. Joseph. As with many great beginnings, there was no fanfare. He simply shook my hand and introduced himself as he and I were in the sacristy before mass (in my zeal to be involved in anything Catholic at the time, I had volunteered to be an Acolyte - basically an adult version of an altar server). What struck me about Fr. Joseph wasn't what he was saying, or his personal charisma or his singing voice. What struck me, in the very first mass I served with him, was his body language. The teaching of the Catholic Church has always been and will always be that the Eucharist IS the body, blood, soul and divinity of Jesus Christ, "Truly Present", just as much as He ever was on this earth. This was something I had known implicitly from my earliest days. But when Fr. Joseph said mass something was different; his whole demeanor changed. I watched him like a hawk. This was a guy who really saw Jesus Christ in that consecrated bread and wine and for whom that reality was the central motivator of his life. As I stood right there watching him do what Catholic priests have done for 2000 years, I had an experience that was something like how I felt years later at the birth of my first child. My mental focus was drawn to a pinpoint as a huge reality sank into my heart and mind. I was blown away.
My spiritual journey greatly accelerated in the months that followed. I was interested in any and all things pertaining to Christ. My exposure to information was so rapid that I could call this period an "illuminative" phase, but for the fact that the primary aspect was still purgation from vices. Knowledge didn't set me free from these things, grace did.
The Year 2000 was a watershed in my life. Fr. Joseph had organized a young adults pilgrimage to "The Holy Land" (Israel) and many of my new friends from the group were planning on going. They invited me. It was fairly expensive and something rather outside of my comfort zone. But they pressed me. As fate (or providence?) would have it, in the days of the ".com" economic boom, my stocks had (temporarily) doubled in value. In the absence a financial obstacle, I opted not to let comfort hold me back. I cashed out and signed on.
The trip to Israel was surreal. I floated in a boat on the sea of Galilee, sat in Capernam, climbed to the top of Mount Tabor. I remember riding in the tour bus and seeing a road sign with three arrows pointing in three different directions - Nazareth, Bethlehem and Meggido. Where else can you see stuff like this? The trip to Israel was a closing out of the purgative phase of my life. There are too many details to mention them all, but I'll share two. The first occurred at the "Knights Palace" in Jerusalem - a history-laden structure built at the time of the crusades and now serving as a hotel for pilgrims. In the course of our travels, many on the pilgrimage group were greatly affected by the things they were seeing, some visibly so. Fr. Joseph was faithful in offering privately the sacrament of reconciliation at the end of each day for anyone who needed to get things off of their chest. One night it was my turn. Now, confession is typically a time-constrained sacrament. There are people waiting behind you in line. But, this was different. I made a general confession of everything I could possibly remember. I took my time. There were things that I had remembered between other confessions and simply forgot to mention when I went. I got them all off of my chest. I articulated things from my past that were almost painful to say. Fr. Joseph listened faithfully for a long time and then said the words of absolution: "By virtue of the authority vested in me by the Church, I absolve you of your sins in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit". We sat there quietly. It was late. There were no more sins to confess. Before I left I said "I don't know what God wants for me, but I know I'm here to serve the Lord." Fr. Joseph nodded. The chains of vice were broken.
It was shortly thereafter that I had the opportunity to assist at a mass at the site of Calvary, as in THE PLACE where Jesus was actually crucified. The church at the site is a Greek Orthodox Church, 1000 years old (literally), and extremely ornate, even by Catholic standards. Being in that building established in my mind a historical continuity with Christians through the centuries. Christ's church has been fighting faithfully for thousands of years. When Fr. Joseph started the mass in that chapel, people we weren't even associated with flocked in to be part - there were Mother-Theresa-look-alike nuns, monks with long beards, local Arab Christians. None of them could speak English but they all knew what was going on. I saw in their faces something I had never seen before: the faith for them was a given, there was not question. And they had all paid a price, in the course of their lives, for their faith in Jesus Christ. I recognized, in stark contrast, that my faith, to this point, had cost me nothing. The thought entered my heart - you've been part of the problem for long enough, it's time to be part of the solution.
Monday, March 3, 2008
My Spiritual Autobiography - Part III
The "purgative phase" is a term I use to describe the part of my spiritual life where I got serious about bringing my actions in line with my beliefs. My initial motivation was somewhat self-centered. My pursuit of vices had slowly made me, for lack of a better term, miserable, and I wanted to change. I was in what some might call a "seeker" mode. I was definitely seeking something better than what my life had become at that time.
The early part of this phase was schizophrenic in nature. I got back to attending mass every Sunday, but I was still prey to the usual vices on Friday and Saturday night. I was carrying around a lot of guilt because the discrepancy between who I claimed to be and who I actually was kept getting clearer and clearer.
I remember, in particular, a homily I heard during this time about the inconsistency we modern Americans have in our lives. The gist of the homily was that Americans are willing to spend untold hours on physical fitness, sweating on treadmills or stationary bikes that go nowhere, but we will only spend one hour a week on one day of the week on our spiritual lives. The point was that it shouldn't surprise us if the spiritual results we see are analogous to the physicial results we would see if we spent one hour a week on fitness. That really resonated with me. I decided to try praying on my own. A priest I admired recommended that I make it the first thing I do when I get up in the morning to make sure that it happens. I took his advice. My early attempts at prayer are a little funny to recall. I would sit on my couch first thing in the morning with my eyes closed and my eyebrows furrowed, as if I was trying to stare holes in my eyelids. I don't know what I expected to happen - maybe an out-of-body experience. I found the old rosary my mom had given me when I graduated high school. One Lent I resolved to pray it every morning and I did.
But my struggles with vice continued. I was perplexed. What happened next was a little unexpected.
At the time, I was a Barnes & Noble "junkie". What this means is that I used to go to Barnes & Noble and shop for books on Saturday or Sunday afternoons and sometimes both. On the surface this might appear somewhat normal. In truth, I was avoiding boredom. In some instances the books I had bought the week before would still be sitting in the bag at home while I was out shopping again the following Saturday. I was generally interested in books about unusual topics - I'm a sucker for books with formulaic titles like "Ancient Anomalies", "Great Achievements of the Mesopotamian River Basin", "The Complete Works of Emmanual Kant". They all looked good on my shelf. Gradually, I migrated toward Catholic books. There was one book, in particular, that stands out in my memory. It was called "The Call of the Ages" and it was a summary of all the recorded miraculous appearances (called "apparitions") of the Blessed Virgin Mary. I was fascinated because, first, I didn't know these things were going on and second, because they seemed like a "status report" that God was giving the world. And the picture they painted was that mankind was continuing to drift further and further away from God and that this had very serious consequences. The urgency of the messages made an impact on me. I remember sitting in a coffee shop reading the book and looking up from time to time at the people around me and thinking "Does anybody know about this stuff?". (Mind you, my point here is not to argue for or against Marian apparitions, rather only to convey the effect the book actually had on me at the time.)
It was about at the same point that I had a life-changing experience in the confessional. More backstory... The Sacrament of Reconciliation was something I loathed because of the natural embarrassment I had over my vices. Curiously enough, and against a stereotype I have heard a lot, my experiences in the confessional had all been very smooth. I never once had a priest say anything harsh to me in regard to what I was confessing. In fact, in general the priests would make no specific comment about my confession in any way and would simply give me the usual small penance. On one occasion I even had a priest ask me why I thought some of the things I was confessing were "sins". It was weird that I couldn't really articulate why, but I knew they were. But this particular time the priest did something a little different. After I made my confession, he simply and sincerely said to me, "Do you know that these things are mortal sins?". I was silent. After a few seconds I just said "I do now". His question initiated a paradigm shift in my thinking. These vices I was struggling with weren't just bad habits that I should try to give up. They were things that were "killing" my spiritual life (hence the term "mortal"). Ultimately, I realized, they had the potential to kill me, forever.
It was in the days following that I resolved that it was better to die fighting against these vices, than live with them. I went back to the priest who had asked me the question and received good practical spiritual advice - take it one day at a time, come back the following week and see what you actually have to confess. He also suggested that I look at the circumstances that would lead to falling into vice and try to change these. I took that advice too. It was at that time that I realized that the crowd that I was hanging around with socially wasn't interested in making a change. And their influence on me was more powerful than my intention to change. I came to see that these relationships, unfortunately, had to go until I was stronger in my direction. Video games were another issue. While they weren't vices per se, I could spend days (literally an entire day - sun up to sun down) playing a game. And I noticed that the games increased my overall level of boredom, which was then followed by greater temptations to vice. I got rid of the television. At first it was just the cable television. I will always remember the look on the woman's face when I drove to the cable company with my converter box in hand and said I was returning it. She asked why. I said it was too good. She asked me to explain. I told her there were too many interesting programs on and that I couldn't handle it. She told me she would just mark the "other" box as the "reason for return" on the receipt. Finally, I weaned off of the television altogether. I stopped listening to coarse talk radio in the morning. I noticed that the show contributed to the foulness of my language. The silence was challenging. I tried listening to MPR. Someone mentioned that they prayed the Rosary in the car. That seemed like a great fit. It was, is, and will be.
With all these things being driven out of my life, I recognized the need for things to fill up the void. I volunteered at a homless shelter and started attending a "young adults" group. I found that these things provided a much needed, spiritual "shot-in-the-arm" mid-week. In retrospect, these things helped me to take my focus off of the bad things about myself that I was struggling with and instead focus on the good things that I could do. I learned that it isn't possible to help someone else without being helped yourself in the process. I started to gain ground spiritually. The vices were losing their grip.
The early part of this phase was schizophrenic in nature. I got back to attending mass every Sunday, but I was still prey to the usual vices on Friday and Saturday night. I was carrying around a lot of guilt because the discrepancy between who I claimed to be and who I actually was kept getting clearer and clearer.
I remember, in particular, a homily I heard during this time about the inconsistency we modern Americans have in our lives. The gist of the homily was that Americans are willing to spend untold hours on physical fitness, sweating on treadmills or stationary bikes that go nowhere, but we will only spend one hour a week on one day of the week on our spiritual lives. The point was that it shouldn't surprise us if the spiritual results we see are analogous to the physicial results we would see if we spent one hour a week on fitness. That really resonated with me. I decided to try praying on my own. A priest I admired recommended that I make it the first thing I do when I get up in the morning to make sure that it happens. I took his advice. My early attempts at prayer are a little funny to recall. I would sit on my couch first thing in the morning with my eyes closed and my eyebrows furrowed, as if I was trying to stare holes in my eyelids. I don't know what I expected to happen - maybe an out-of-body experience. I found the old rosary my mom had given me when I graduated high school. One Lent I resolved to pray it every morning and I did.
But my struggles with vice continued. I was perplexed. What happened next was a little unexpected.
At the time, I was a Barnes & Noble "junkie". What this means is that I used to go to Barnes & Noble and shop for books on Saturday or Sunday afternoons and sometimes both. On the surface this might appear somewhat normal. In truth, I was avoiding boredom. In some instances the books I had bought the week before would still be sitting in the bag at home while I was out shopping again the following Saturday. I was generally interested in books about unusual topics - I'm a sucker for books with formulaic titles like "Ancient Anomalies", "Great Achievements of the Mesopotamian River Basin", "The Complete Works of Emmanual Kant". They all looked good on my shelf. Gradually, I migrated toward Catholic books. There was one book, in particular, that stands out in my memory. It was called "The Call of the Ages" and it was a summary of all the recorded miraculous appearances (called "apparitions") of the Blessed Virgin Mary. I was fascinated because, first, I didn't know these things were going on and second, because they seemed like a "status report" that God was giving the world. And the picture they painted was that mankind was continuing to drift further and further away from God and that this had very serious consequences. The urgency of the messages made an impact on me. I remember sitting in a coffee shop reading the book and looking up from time to time at the people around me and thinking "Does anybody know about this stuff?". (Mind you, my point here is not to argue for or against Marian apparitions, rather only to convey the effect the book actually had on me at the time.)
It was about at the same point that I had a life-changing experience in the confessional. More backstory... The Sacrament of Reconciliation was something I loathed because of the natural embarrassment I had over my vices. Curiously enough, and against a stereotype I have heard a lot, my experiences in the confessional had all been very smooth. I never once had a priest say anything harsh to me in regard to what I was confessing. In fact, in general the priests would make no specific comment about my confession in any way and would simply give me the usual small penance. On one occasion I even had a priest ask me why I thought some of the things I was confessing were "sins". It was weird that I couldn't really articulate why, but I knew they were. But this particular time the priest did something a little different. After I made my confession, he simply and sincerely said to me, "Do you know that these things are mortal sins?". I was silent. After a few seconds I just said "I do now". His question initiated a paradigm shift in my thinking. These vices I was struggling with weren't just bad habits that I should try to give up. They were things that were "killing" my spiritual life (hence the term "mortal"). Ultimately, I realized, they had the potential to kill me, forever.
It was in the days following that I resolved that it was better to die fighting against these vices, than live with them. I went back to the priest who had asked me the question and received good practical spiritual advice - take it one day at a time, come back the following week and see what you actually have to confess. He also suggested that I look at the circumstances that would lead to falling into vice and try to change these. I took that advice too. It was at that time that I realized that the crowd that I was hanging around with socially wasn't interested in making a change. And their influence on me was more powerful than my intention to change. I came to see that these relationships, unfortunately, had to go until I was stronger in my direction. Video games were another issue. While they weren't vices per se, I could spend days (literally an entire day - sun up to sun down) playing a game. And I noticed that the games increased my overall level of boredom, which was then followed by greater temptations to vice. I got rid of the television. At first it was just the cable television. I will always remember the look on the woman's face when I drove to the cable company with my converter box in hand and said I was returning it. She asked why. I said it was too good. She asked me to explain. I told her there were too many interesting programs on and that I couldn't handle it. She told me she would just mark the "other" box as the "reason for return" on the receipt. Finally, I weaned off of the television altogether. I stopped listening to coarse talk radio in the morning. I noticed that the show contributed to the foulness of my language. The silence was challenging. I tried listening to MPR. Someone mentioned that they prayed the Rosary in the car. That seemed like a great fit. It was, is, and will be.
With all these things being driven out of my life, I recognized the need for things to fill up the void. I volunteered at a homless shelter and started attending a "young adults" group. I found that these things provided a much needed, spiritual "shot-in-the-arm" mid-week. In retrospect, these things helped me to take my focus off of the bad things about myself that I was struggling with and instead focus on the good things that I could do. I learned that it isn't possible to help someone else without being helped yourself in the process. I started to gain ground spiritually. The vices were losing their grip.
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