Promises: the Prologue

An excerpt from my memoir (with Sean Parker Dennison and Sufjan Stevens)

From "How to Survive the Apocalypse" by Sean Parker Dennison

First, learn to listen.
Not only for enemies around
corners in hidden places,
but for faint footsteps
of hope and the whisper of resistance.
Hone your skills, aim your
heart toward kindness and
stockpile second chances.
Under the weight of destruction,
we will need the strong shelter
of forgiveness and the deeper wells
that give the sweet water of welcome:
"We have a place for you."

---

In the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous there is a list of promises. If an addict is devoted to their recovery the promises come true. Freedom, happiness, serenity, peace. We will suddenly realize that God is doing for us what we could not do for ourselves. When I got sober, I worked the program and waited for my blessings.

Four years later I was struggling with a newborn baby who was sick with jaundice and colic. He cried all day and night as my husband William tried to comfort us both. When William was at work, I drove around in circles so our baby would nap in the back of the car. At night William handled things. I slept and prayed and wished I could somehow escape without abandoning my child. More than anything I wanted those promises to come true. My obsession with alcohol and drugs was its own kind of wailing infant. I’d nursed it faithfully all those four years. I began to wonder why I ever got sober in the first place. Being stoned into oblivion sounded like a much better deal.

In the middle of the night I listened to Pema Chodron’s The Places that Scare You while I sat in a rocking chair knitting a shawl. “Openness,” she said, “doesn’t come from resisting our fears but from getting to know them well.” My fears suffocated me. They were a fog of angry ghosts. I knew them well and found no relief in the knowing.

And I was afraid of everything. Over the years I’d been diagnosed with obsessive compulsive disorder, substance use disorder, clinical depression, generalized anxiety, complex PTSD, and now postpartum depression. I was supposed to be making gratitude lists and praying to my higher power, keeping my side of the street clean and letting go of resentments. I was supposed to go to meetings. There were ways to feel better. But I wasn’t doing any of those things, or seeing my therapist, and I felt enormous guilt at my own failures. I had this suspicion that the promises had come true. I was just too broken to see it.

There is a photograph of me taken at St Peter's Catholic Church, South Beloit, Illinois in 1986. It is the image I hold of myself of the before times. In it I am eight years old wearing a white dress, white gloves, and a white veil. It was my first communion, a holy meal when a young Catholic receives the sacrament of the Eucharist for the first time. This is the eating of the wafer of bread. But it’s not just a wafer. Catholics believe in transubstantiation where the bread has been transformed through the blessing of a priest into the literal body of Jesus Christ.

This is a big deal. And it was for me, to ingest something holy, something perfect, a piece of God that would become a part of me. It would work inside me to make me holy, to make me perfect. In the picture my head is bowed, my white gloved hands held straight in prayer. A perfect picture of an angelic girl.

But I had a secret which can’t be seen in the photograph. I already had my first communion months earlier in the musty screened-in porch on my grandmother’s farm in the tiny town of Roscoe, Illinois. Every year our family friend Father Paddy would drive two hours north from Chicago to say a Station Mass, an old Irish tradition where mass is held in the home. My family lived in a house next to my grandma’s, across a creek bridge and along a path through a cornfield. When Father Paddy came to town it felt like our entire homestead was blessed.

The bread of that first communion was not a stale, thin wafer. It was a sizeable square chunk of sweet wholemeal made earlier that day in my grandmother's kitchen. It was still warm. The bread was passed to me on a large white platter, the kind with tiny green blossoms painted on the rim. Just the usual dinnerware, nothing fancy. I held the plate gently. I’d never been this close to Jesus before. And there was everyone sitting on the porch: my aunts and uncles and cousins, my parents and my brother, my grandma, Father Paddy. My heart grew so large with joy I felt it in my throat. God was here amongst the lawn furniture and fishing gear and stacks of old wood. And I couldn’t help myself. I took a piece of bread and ate it. The body of Christ was delicious. No Eucharist since has tasted quite so good. 

Later I confessed to my mother that I’d taken the bread when I wasn’t supposed to, that I’d ruined the holy sacrament, that I’d even had a sip of the wine. She laughed. To my mother, Catholicism wasn’t about the church or dogma or doctrine. It was family. It was tradition. It was home.

“I won’t tell if you won’t,” she said.

This is how I ended up, twenty years later, in perpetual adoration.

Perpetual adoration is when the blessed wafer, that holy Eucharist, is taken out of its locked tabernacle and displayed. It is placed in glass in the center of a monstrance, a golden vessel with a sun exploding in light atop a large crucifix. Once Jesus’ body is exposed in this way it can't be left alone. It needs constant prayers, a bodyguard, a babysitter. It needs perpetual adoration.

One of the nights that my baby cried without ceasing I resolved to go and face God, have it out with him and demand an answer. Is this what I got sober for? Seriously? The local Catholic church was open for perpetual adoration every Saturday night for twenty-four hours. I wanted to know if he was still there, the Jesus of my childhood, the one I’d found in that sweet wholemeal.

“I’m going to church.” I told my husband. It was 1 a.m.

“Try not to burst into flames when you walk through the door.” He said. It was a risk I was willing to take.

It had been years since I’d entered a sanctuary. It smelled the same, incense and beeswax and dusty hymnals. It smelled like my grandma. On pure instinct my right hand reached out for holy water and I blessed myself. The water didn’t sizzle when it hit my skin, so I kept going.

The pews and the altar were dark, but candlelight burned in a far-right corner chapel. Several people sat in the chapel pews with their heads bowed. On an altar table high in front of them sat the golden monstrance. A pagan tribute to the sun god. A shining relic of an age long dead. But somehow here it was, still alive. And the people still worshipped at it.

On the edge of the chapel candles flickered with prayers of the devoted. The candle flames danced as if breathing the prayers themselves. I didn’t bring any money for the offering, but I lit two candles anyway. One for me and one for my cousin Lea. Over the years I lit a candle for Lea in every church I ever entered. She had disappeared for the last time three years earlier. She had been in recovery, too.

At the end of each pew were a stack of hymnals. I grabbed one and sat down but before opening it I tested myself to see what I remembered. I confess to almighty God and to you my brothers and sisters… but I couldn’t remember the rest. Our Father who art in heaven… but this one was old and tired. It tripped through my mind without any sense of meaning.

In one giant rush of knowing my favorite prayer came to my mind.

Hail Holy Queen, Mother of Mercy. Our life, our sweetness, and our hope. To you do we cry poor banished children of Eve. To you do we send up our sighs, mourning and weeping in this valley of tears. Turn then oh most gracious advocate. Thine eyes of mercy toward us. And after this our exile show unto us the blessed fruit of your womb Jesus.

The fruit of your womb. Don’t kid me, Mary. I knew the truth. The fruit of my womb was home in the arms of my husband, screaming his head off. 

“You’re an asshole,” I said to my baby earlier that day. “You’re a fucking asshole.” Later I held him in my arms. “I love you, I love you, I am so sorry.” I sobbed as I rocked him to sleep. “I’m the asshole. I’m the fucking asshole.”

The wooden pew creaked beneath me as I shook with weeping. I covered my face with my hands and swallowed my sobs until they exploded in hiccups. I was a poor banished child of Eve. I was mourning and weeping in a valley of tears. I was in exile.

For the next hour my prayer was nothing but tears. I cried to Jesus, Mary, to the saints. I cried to my grandmother. I sat there in that echoing empty church begging to stay sober, not kill myself, and not kill my baby. Turn thine eyes of mercy toward us. Whose eyes, I wondered. What mercy?

When I finally caught my breath, I made the sign of the cross, but I couldn’t bring myself to leave. I couldn’t yet face the despair that would meet me at home. In another part of the sanctuary was a large statue of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. He stared at me, one hand on his heart and one reaching out. I stood beneath him and got as close as I could. His heart was in flames, pierced with barbed thorns and bleeding. This is the image of Jesus where his heart is so filled with compassion for humanity that it is literally bursting out of his chest.

I imagined the sort of compassion that makes you feel like your heart is about to burst, a heart that is raw and naked, its emotions exposed to the world.  And a clarity of thought came to me, a near vision. Jesus had colic. I could see him screaming in the manger, in the mess and the muck, in the dirt and pain of real life in a real body. It’s hard to be human. And Jesus must’ve hated being a baby. We are born sensitive, exposed, helpless, our souls incarnated into these tender bodies. All these years all I wanted was for it to stop. My own heart had burst long ago, for the drugs and the mistakes, the heartbreak and regret, my friends lost to overdoses, my family lost to trauma. It had burst for Lea and never healed. And I imagined my crying uncomfortable unhappy little baby and felt my guts ache with empathy. I realized his heart was bursting, too. 

I didn’t believe I could be healed. I was a lost cause. I’d given it four years and was the addict who still suffered. But I sat in the church that dark morning filled with compassion. I looked at the candles flickering, each one a prayer. I looked at the Jesus wafer encased in gold and exploding in sunlight. It occurred to me that inside everyone is a sacred heart, a holy flame, a spark of the divine. Inside everyone a prayer they cannot name. We were all being called to something, by something. Maybe following this call would be my pathway out of despair. Maybe I could still be saved.