Who's Adoring Who?

Part 9 of My Conversion Story

“This is true for every Christian: faith is first and foremost a personal, intimate encounter with Jesus. It is having an experience of his closeness, friendship, and love. It is in this way that we learn to know him ever better, to love him and to follow him more and more. May this happen to each one of us!”  - Pope Benedict XVI

By the time I was nineteen, I had attempted suicide three times. Honestly I think there was a couple of other weak attempts but they were such grand failures they barely warrant a mention here. The first attempt I actually count occurred around the time I was ten or eleven years old. I had intended to overdose on Midol of all things. I think I took about eight tablets? I took them in a tear ridden state just before bed. I intended that I wouldn't wake up and thus be able to escape the fear and desperation I felt. As I had been reading books on new age topics and paganism and such, I had begun developing a belief in reincarnation. I did not have a good understanding of it at that age. All I took from it then was that I could leave this life and start over in another one. Still, as I said... I failed miserably. No one even knew I had tried anything.

I had two much more serious attempts a few years later. The final time I attempted suicide, I was about eighteen. I was living a short distance from the sea and, again, in a tear ridden state, I began walking to the beach. As I walked I took sleeping pills, a few at a time until I had ingested enough to cause me to pass out apparently. A stranger found me and called an ambulance. I had made it to a rocky area of Pacific Grove, California called, ‘Lovers Point.’ I do not remember getting to the rocks. I only know that at one point I was walking to the sea, the next moment I was waking up in the hospital. I suffered through a few days of hallucinating until finally I was stable enough to leave.

The attempt between the ones mentioned above occurred when I was sixteen and it almost worked. There was a lot I was going through at the time. Things that I won't mention here but it all culminated in me feeling that I would never feel happiness or worth again. At the time I felt as though my heart was in a continuous state of breaking into a million pieces. It physically hurt even. I didn't have an ability to see that with the passage of time, I might feel differently. The desperation was so strong it felt permanent. I felt worthless and despised. I felt shame for just existing. I felt shame for hurt done to me and for hurt I had caused others. I felt unloved, unwanted and alone. I felt undeserving of anything good and so very far from repair.

So, I really went for it this time, I very seriously overdosed on extra strength Tylenol with codeine. At a certain point when my parents knew I had attempted this my mother took me to the emergency room. It was there we found out my liver was shutting down and I was not expected to live. I was transferred two hours away to a hospital in San Francisco. I spent a few weeks there fighting for my life, the same one I had wanted free of so badly. Eventually, without any discernible reason, I began to get well. When I was finally stable enough to be released I was sent to a psychiatric ward near my home. I spent several days there getting therapy and learning coping mechanisms. I also began my first anti depressant medication then.

The next few months would continue on a rocky path as I wound up jumping from the frying pan of one treacherous situation into the fire of another and then continued with both of them for several years. What that looked like in practice, without going into too many sensitive details was that I had moved out of my parents home just before turning seventeen. I moved in with a boyfriend into a room in a house we shared with drug addicts. There was nothing ideal about that situation. Yet that awful old house felt like freedom to me at the time. We lived there for a few months until, surprise - surprise, it wound up being condemned and we were evicted.

That reality from my youth could serve as a metaphor for the way in which I coped with existing in this world. Leaving one bad situation for another to shelter in a dilapidated illusion of freedom, identity and love. As I journeyed through my life I basically followed the same pattern. Coping with these ebbs and flows took the form of periodic use of anti depressants but mostly involved my utilizing whatever healing spell or assorted new age and occult practice I discovered. That could be, using herbal remedies or a type of crystal healing from some witchcraft book I’d found to performing full moon rituals for healing on a nearby beach.

In all the pagan and witchcraft practices I tried, there would be some glimmer of power that had me feel triumphant and in control… for awhile. The idea as espoused by many of these ideologies, that I was somehow a Goddess incarnate was addictive. It made me feel powerful, self reliant and so in control of my destiny no one could ever hurt me. At least that is how things would seem for a time. Standing beneath the full moon with the ocean waves crashing before me as I invoked a Goddess of some sort would have me trembling with excitement. I would see ‘energy outlines’ around my hands and energy streaming from my athame or wand as I cast a circle in the middle of the beach. I would feel the energy pour out of me as I directed it to whatever magickal endeavor I attempted. Just to clarify, as fantastical as these things sound, I was not on illegal drugs of any kind at any point in my life. That was a vice I was gratefully spared from thanks be to God. However it is that I was able to feel and see such things, who can say for sure? I do know they were not from God though.

As empowering as these magickal practices could all seem, the effects of them wouldn’t last long. Within days I would be having nightmares, waking up at 3am and so full of despair and maddening thoughts all I would want to do was isolate myself. Frequent crying and suicidal ideation was a constant visitor throughout my life as well. And yet, full of pride, self righteous indignation I stubbornly stuck with my witchy practices…for nearly forty years no less.

If it seems I have gone on and on about the depth of despair I experienced in varying degrees it is in an attempt to contrast the even greater expanse of Gods love. As I have written, I can look back through my life and see many times when He reached out to me and beckoned me to come to Him. At Midnight Mass I finally felt Him call to me again and I ran to Him and was received lovingly and with so much pure joy that melted away a lifetime of hopelessness and yearning. In that moment I knew I must follow Him and I would happily do so even though I knew not what that really even meant yet.

I was learning more and more through the Becoming Catholic program about what following Him entailed and I was all in. I had learned that prayer was a major part of the Catholic life and that seemed easy enough. The day we had our prayer retreat turned out to be much more profound than I had expected. During our retreat we learned about different types of prayer, among them Eucharistic Adoration. This was new to me. We went up to the church to sit quietly in front of a Monstrance. This is a large object wherein is placed the Eucharist to be displayed for the faithful to pray.

We had learned already in another Becoming Catholic class about the Eucharist and how through transubstantiation it truly is the Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity of Jesus. I accepted this teaching. Part of my conversion moment was that I knew Gods truth was present in the teachings of the Catholic Church and that I could trust that the Eucharist is Jesus. Yet… in this moment of my first experience of Eucharistic Adoration I began to realize that knowing that fact in my head was not the same as knowing that fact in my heart.

As I sat in the church gazing upon the Eucharist, I felt compelled to kneel. I was just open to this experience, to what this actually meant? As I sat and pondered this, and pondered my whirlwind conversion as well, bits and pieces of different experiences began to connect themselves together in my mind. I recalled how the times I had been inside Catholic churches, I just felt different to how I felt in protestant churches or indeed in pagan circles. At the protestant churches I had been in, it felt more like I was attending a get-together of some sort. During pagan rituals, I could feel electrified perhaps but it could also feel more like a game. When I went inside Catholic Churches, I felt the presence of God. At that moment I reflected back to how I had mentioned this in my RCIA interview with the Priest, “I just feel like God is actually in a Catholic Church.”

As I continued to sit in Adoration, mental puzzle pieces were connecting together and the realization of the Real Presence began to sink in. I found myself having to look away from the Eucharist occasionally as my eyes were tearing up and I was becoming increasingly overwhelmed by not only WHO I knelt before but also the vastness of His love for me. I realized that He had been with me my whole existence not just when I acknowledged Him. In essence, my whole life had been a sort of, ‘Road to Emmaus.’

‘This is why!’ I thought to myself. This is why I can feel God here, because He IS here in the Eucharist. I continued kneeling there, fully alive in His love for me, tearfully and truly adoring Him with all my heart. I realized too that He was adoring me in return.