Let’s Say That I Prayed

Let’s say that I’ve been praying.

Let’s say that I can’t be 100% sure that there’s a God at all, but I want there to be one, and I hope there is one, and I hope that that God is a God of Justice.

Let’s say that I’ve chosen to believe in justice to the very hilt, and I’ve decided that that means a God of Justice can’t be very angry with a person who’s been severely hurt by a church, whether it’s the church God founded or one God didn’t intend at all or maybe just a truly ungodly sect in the Church He founded. So I’ve been telling that God how I feel.

Let’s say that every day I’ve been praying, “God the Father of Heaven, Creator of the world, I am trying to forgive you for creating me. Please don’t hurt me. God the Son, Redeemer of the World, I am trying to forgive you for being the reason I’m in pain. Please don’t hurt me. God the Holy Ghost, I am so afraid of you I don’t know what to say.”

Let’s say God hears me and doesn’t seem to object. He isn’t speaking in His own defense right now either; He’s just listening. He hasn’t sent a lightning bolt yet. So I keep talking.

Let’s say I tried to go to Mass last Sunday, and I spent a little time in the foyer listening until the panic started, and then I spent the rest of the liturgy outside on the porch, leaning on the window. There’s a picture of the Virgin Mary on the front door of that church, and every single time somebody opened the door, it looked like the Virgin Mary was walking toward me, and I cringed away.

I went on another hike the other day. Let’s say God was with me as I hiked around the lake. He might not have been, but let’s say He was. I choose to imagine that when I stopped to take a photo of the blue heron and the heron spread her wings and flew off low across the water, that was a gift from Him to make me feel loved. I choose to believe that when the blue jay dipped low across my path it happened because God remembered how much I love corvids. I will work with the hypothesis that when I looked up and saw a light-colored hawk circling overhead with a flock of black turkey vultures, that was a sign. It felt like it was.

I sat in a shelter house a ways down the path, where the rocks all around were muffled in thick green moss, and pretended I was in Rivendell again. I tried to picture myself as that svelte Tolkein elf I’ve been pretending to be since I was twelve, and God the Father sitting across the picnic bench in front of me, looking like Elrond.  I told him all of my troubles and how betrayed I felt while he held my hand.

I hope it was really God.

That night, the night before Saint Francis’s feast day, I tried to pray again, and I prayed with Saint Francis.

Maybe I was just a pathetic lonely woman who’s been duped by a cult, talking to myself in bed before I fell asleep, but I tried to talk to Saint Francis. I told him I don’t know why I’m still speaking to him, after all that’s been done in this terrible town in his name. Couldn’t he get control of his children?

I imagined him saying “I don’t know them,” and it made me feel better.

I started to imagine that he and I were in that basement  from my silly nightmare with the dying hart. It’s less lonely to be in that place when you have a saint with you. He and I squeezed through the bars and went to try the sinks– this time there was a little water, and I gave the hart a drink.

Let’s say that, at that point, something occurred to me.

I’m not saying that God spoke. It was probably my imagination.

But let’s imagine that He spoke.

Let’s imagine that He reminded me of all that I’ve learned about the heresy I call American Christianity. Let’s say that He reminded me, “not everyone who says to me, Lord, Lord, will enter the Kingdom of Heaven.”  Talking about Jesus a lot, going into paroxysms when they play the Praise and Worship music, having a Saint Francis bird bath and a lawn statue of Our Lady of Grace, having a good time at Mass, these are not marks of sanctity. Sanctity is something else entirely. Sanctity doesn’t look like the outward appearance of sanctity. Mike Scanlan and his cronies had the outward appearance of sanctity down to a science, after all, and they were monsters. Sanctity looks more like day-to-day life, with God in it.

Let’s say that I remembered the saying of another great saint: “To come to what you do not enjoy now, you have to go where you do not enjoy. To reach what you do not know, you have to go through where you do not know. To reach possession of what you do not have, you have to go through where you have nothing now. To reach what you are not, you have to go through where you are not now.”

Going through a place of not knowing might well be part of the process. It might be something that’s supposed to happen.

If I am ever going to be Christian, really Christian, not an American Christian and not a member of the cult known as the Charismatic Renewal but a follower of Christ, I’m going to have to do things entirely differently than I was taught. I don’t know what the result will look like.

Maybe it’s not wrong that I am where I am right now.

Maybe this is the only way I can get to anywhere else.

Mary Pezzulo is the author of Meditations on the Way of the Cross and Stumbling into Grace: How We Meet God in Tiny Works of Mercy.
Steel Magnificat operates almost entirely on tips. To tip the author, visit our donate page.