And To Those In The Tombs

It was one of those days where everything hurts.

The weather was cloudy, sloppy, not a good snow or a cathartic rain storm but a constant chilling drizzle. I’d had a head cold over the weekend and was better now, but not well. Our harassing, abusive neighbor was having an angry day, the kind where she bangs around the side yard and threatens and complains, but not the kind where she does anything I could possibly catch on camera and use to get protection from her.

My anxiety had reached an impossibly high pitch.

It’s been a horrendous year for anxiety already– the situation with the neighbor and the court date, the situation with the news out of Franciscan University. I’m always anxious thanks to PCOS, and right now it’s at its worst.

It cannot be almost Palm Sunday.

Rose had a dental appointment and then soccer practice, so we got in the car and went driving.

Have you ever driven to the next town over, on a gray cloudy day, when you had terrible anxiety?

It feels like being on the run, a fugitive from the law– as if everything you do will turn out to be somehow illegal by a traffic ordinance you do not know. Every car you encounter will turn out to be a police car driven by a cop in a bad mood. Your registration and proof of insurance will have somehow slipped out of the glove compartment and disappeared. It will somehow turn out that your license was suspended without your knowing. The car will somehow explode and horribly maim you. The paramedics will take their time arriving, and then they’ll claim you’re faking your burns for attention. You will die, and then you will go to hell.

I’m used to feeling this way on bad days. I shelved  the terror in a compartment in my mind, along with my worries about cancer, climate change and nuclear war, as people with anxiety do. I don’t know what it’s like to not have an anxiety compartment in your mind. It must be relaxing.

It cannot, it cannot, be almost Palm Sunday.

I took Rose to the dentist, where nothing went wrong. We realized it was too late to go home for dinner and we got fast food on the way, and nothing went wrong. We drove out to the soccer field, where nothing went wrong except that it was cold and she didn’t have her sweatshirt. This was her first ever soccer practice. She hasn’t been able to do extracurricular activities for two years thanks to the pandemic, and she couldn’t play soccer before because we didn’t have a car to drive to practice. She was thrilled to get the chance this year. We had so much fun picking out a pair of bright blue cleats at the beginning of the week. And there she was, scrambling around on the field in her new shoes, learning the game.

There’s no way it can be almost Palm Sunday.

Holy Week used to be my favorite week of the year: all those beautiful, haunting, numinous, reverent liturgies. Now I can’t stand the thought of it, but I also miss it. I’ve been dreading it since Lent started, an much more now.

At the beginning of Lent things were bad enough. I have religious trauma. I often panic in church. We don’t have a community we feel safe in here in Steubenville and we can’t afford to move away anymore than we can fly. Rose never received her First Holy Communion because she panics when strangers fuss over her and can’t stand dresses, so I was trying to find a pastor who would allow her to just quietly make her first confession one Saturday and then get in line for Communion with the grown ups at the vigil Mass that evening, no fuss, no triggering her social phobia, only reverence and grace.  Then the Morrier case closed, and the details of his iniquity became public, and every terrible memory I have of the Charismatic Renewal came rushing back. For the past almost four weeks I’ve panicked in church. I’ve panicked at the thought of church. I’ve panicked trying to say the Divine Office, so we’ve given up what was supposed to be our Lenten penance. And now I’m staring down the barrel of Holy Week.

There is a song and a memory that has been stuck in my head since Ash Wednesday, and it’s making me want to cry.

I keep thinking of that year we tried to find a home in a local Byzantine Catholic church and thought it was working, before it all went wrong and we got bullied out of the parish. Those liturgies were the most beautiful I’d ever attended. I loved everything about them. I was excited that someone was going to Chrismate Rose and start letting her receive the sacraments.

I cannot stop remembering our Easter there, at the Resurrection Matins. Rose had practiced the chants with her Eastern Catholic Formation class. She was so excited. She’s usually so fidgety in church, but that night she was focused. I can hear her little voice next to me, belting out “Christ is risen from the dead! By death he trampled death, and to those in the tombs he granted life!” 

I have been humming that to myself for weeks now.

Christ is risen from the dead! By death He trampled death, and to those in the tombs He granted life! 

I have been remembering for weeks.

I want to be that person again– the person who thought she’d found a home in Christ and was going to be safe. The person who had religious trauma but had no idea how bad things were. The person who had never learned the things that I’ve learned. But I can’t be.

I’ll have to be somebody else.

If anything I’ve believed about Christianity is true, then Christ will find me in that place as well.

Practice ended. Rose came back to the car, soaked, tired, hungry.

I drove her home, still terribly anxious.

And it was night.