BY GRETCHEN GUNDRUM
We’re all just walking each other home.
I
love that quote from the Persian poet Rumi: “We’re all just walking each other home.” Home. Back to our origins. To the Great Mystery. To God. At the ripe old age of nine, I read a child’s version of St. Thérèse of Lisieux’s autobiography. Highly impressionable and full of hubris, I decided that because I wanted to be a saint, God was calling me to become a nun. Being a nun meant being perfect. Being perfect meant being a saint. That seed grew in me although I never confided in anyone about my certainty. During high school, my religion teacher, Fr. Dorenbusch, asked to meet with me. He thought maybe I had a religious vocation and wondered if I had ever thought about it. Indeed, Father, I had, and planned to enter the Sisters of St. Joseph of Bourg after graduation. “Well,” he said, “live a normal high school life, date, and then see if the desire is still there.” I thought, “Why bother to date if I’m going to the convent?” Besides, guys weren’t beating down my door to ask me out. I didn’t want the confusion of having to reconsider my path. God’s path for me. The day I left Cincinnati for the novitiate in New Orleans, I spent the morning at the cemetery and the afternoon at a funeral parlor—my last day with my family—honoring the deaths of an aunt and great uncle. The novitiate years were filled with study, prayer, chores, new friendships, and lots of doubt. One day, during spiritual reading, my novice mistress read these words from D’Arcy and Kennedy’s book The Genius of the Apostolate: “God’s will is not something static and fixed that lies outside us. It’s the truth that lies within us.” In that moment I faced the fact that my truth was that I didn’t want to be there. But it would take a couple more years before I dared to act
-Rumi
on it. My dad’s sudden death of a heart attack at 43 was a catalyst. He had not wanted me to enter the convent. He said, “You’re not giving marriage a fair chance as a way of life that brings people to holiness. Marriage is very difficult if you do it right.” And yet, he was proud of me and supportive. When he died, the floor fell beneath me. God felt absent. Why did I not feel consoled when I was supposedly one of God’s good friends? Why didn’t I have some sense that my dad was in heaven? My faith was shaken. When the time came to make first vows, I couldn’t say yes, so I had to say no. I went through a period of false guilt, wondering if I had let God down. When I’d start to get neurotic about it, I’d remember the words of my spiritual director Sr. Jane: “God does not will for us to be unhappy. If you’re unhappy, something needs to be looked at.” It took a whole lot more courage to leave than it did to stay. And leaving was a free decision. Entering was not. I finished college no longer as Sr. Gretchen, just Gretchen, and began my high school teaching career. I fell in love. Got dumped. Met a guy on the rebound and thought there were important signs: Our first date was on the feast of St. Joseph, which was my parents’ wedding anniversary; my confirmation name was Josephine; and his middle name was Anthony. I had been praying to St. Joseph and St. Anthony to meet someone. I married a man I knew three months and then repented at leisure what I did in haste. There was domestic abuse in that relationship. So much for unreflective, superstitious faith! It took a while in therapy for me to understand how my emotional vulnerability led me into such a mistake. For the second time in my life, I had a public failure to face. I felt betrayed by God. Hadn’t I been trying to do everything right? I wept long and hard. I pursued an annulment
after nineteen weeks of wedded un-bliss, nine of which were spent in marriage therapy. The annulment took two years, my documents languishing in some canon lawyer’s inbox. After that, I was gun-shy and moved to the West Coast where I got a big job at a health care corporation. I dated but was scared to death of making another mistake. Fell in love again and got dumped again. I was afraid of my own judgement. Back into therapy—for years. And what did I work on the most? My concept of God! The old God of my childhood, my pre-Vatican II, hypervigilant, play-it-safe, black-and-white, rule-enforcing, harsh, judgmental god. A false god. “He” had to die. I hadn’t yet learned to act on what I wanted. Didn’t St. Ignatius say somewhere that the desires of our hearts are God’s desires for us too? It took a while to sort out the confusion. I was learning that God was full of surprises. The things I thought I should do were not life-giving. The mistakes I made turned out to be gifts—liberating me from worn-out notions, replacing my hubris with humility and compassion. When I finally met my husband, a recovering alcoholic with eight years of solid sobriety and a deep spirituality, my mother was worried. This couldn’t be good. He wasn’t Catholic. He was nineteen years older than me. He was divorced. He had four grown children. It was going to be complicated. It was also going to be life-giving. How grateful I am now for the richness of our 28 years together. Sometimes it was a struggle—two strong-willed people had to learn to bend and become a team. It wasn’t perfect. But it was human. And holy. I got to help walk him home. It was a privilege. And a grace. Amen. Gretchen Gundrum is a psychologist and spiritual director in Seattle. She also serves on the editorial board for A Matter of Spirit. A M AT T E R O F S P I R IT
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Photo © Geordanna Cordero, unsplash
A Journey Toward God