“In my deepest wounds, I saw Your Glory, and it dazzled me.” - Saint Augustine
Thomas Cole, The Pilgrim of the Cross at the End of His Journey (study for series, The Cross and the World), ca. 1846-1848, oil on canvas, 12 x 18 in. (30.4 x 45.8 cm.), Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase, 1965.10
The morning of July 1, 2018, I woke up on a pullout sofa bed in an apartment in Rome. I was at the end of my rope. I officially stopped trying to believe that love existed the night before. I was on a crazy and disappointing trip that started in Medjugorje where three of the five of us had gotten food poisoning and one friend need hospitalization for a few days in Bosnia. Another friend who was mildly sick and had visited the area multiple times before stayed behind with her while I went with the other friends to Rome as scheduled. We got there and by the next morning one of the girls decided she needed to go to the emergency room for meds and fluids. I was spared the illness because I was fasting, a recommendation made by my spiritual director. The other friend spared of sickness has food sensitivities so hadn’t eaten the same things our sick friends had a few days earlier.
The scheduled events in Rome did not go as planned either; it was just one thing after another. My heart was over trying to make myself believe all that I had just spent the last six years trying to learn. In 2012, I had first heard St. John Paul II’s teaching on marriage and the family and it nearly caused me to drive off the road. I was listening to the radio when a show came on and a priest taught about relationships and marriage. My heart had been guarded since I was little—as long as I can remember. Growing up in a divorced family, I didn’t much believe in fairytales or Prince Charming or anything like that. Life could be hard, so you had to pull yourself up by your boot straps and do it yourself. Many subsequent disappointments led me to believe I could not really trust most people and to rely on myself, not others, for what I needed, including emotional things. But that gnawing desire deep in my heart to be loved more deeply and to love more deeply would never really go away. I pushed it so far down that I didn’t even remember when or where I started protecting against it. I just never let anyone in. To be sure, I eventually let myself “fall in love,” so I dated and was in a few serious relationships. But I never could really commit to them or them to me. I couldn’t open up that part of me and didn’t expect to be loved anyway after so many disappointments growing up. I was cynical and competitive. I opted to find happiness myself by going to grad school, finding a good job, and supporting myself as much as I could. I had bought a house, a new car, and was onto my residency when the man I was seriously dating got diagnosed with cancer and things began to change. I felt more anxious than usual and uncomfortably vulnerable because I was not able to fix this problem myself by just working harder.
I was born and raised Catholic, received all my sacraments, but didn’t really know my faith. I thought if I prayed enough and went to mass more, maybe I could “earn” healing for my boyfriend. That’s when I started listening to Catholic radio and heard the priest preaching all these things about marriage and family that I had never heard before. My eyes were opened for the first time to a story that seemed more believable than the fairytales but still somewhat unbelievable based on my lived experience with my family of origin and even friends and other relatives. I never saw what this priest was preaching about. Where were these happily married couples? People at church didn’t really seem all that joyful. Was it all just an ideal? In time, my boyfriend did recover (thanks be to God), but we eventually broke up because we still didn’t want the same things. This was devastating on many levels.
Over the next seven years, I would dive deep into trying to understand with my intellect what the Catholic Church teaches about marriage and family and what happens when so much of it goes wrong. I felt afresh the wounds of abandonment, rejection, disappointment, unforgiveness, emotionally immature parents, self-reliance, anxiety, fear and distrust, just to name a few. This is what I like to refer to as the “haunted” world I lived in. My heart was under the spell of an enemy who did not want me seeing the truth of the world, God, and the real good that was in my family and friends. The enemy did not want me to see or believe in the “enchanted” – but real – sacramental world that was made by the Father, for the Son, through the power of the Holy Spirit. The world I was an heir to. And boy was he good at tempting me to doubt God. I doubted everything, so God got thrown in the “dock”, too. I was prosecutor and defense attorney and it was exhausting.
After all the academic learning, retreats, conferences, volunteering with youth groups and even counseling, I found myself in Rome, my friends succumbing to food poisoning, asking God why he didn’t want me. What I felt in that moment was that the deep wounds of my heart could not be intellectualized. I needed to believe I was really loved. I didn’t “feel his love for me,” like somehow I thought I should. I hadn’t had any big experience of my senses that others talked about, and I felt once again left out. I felt like he had given everyone else love for him. He cured so many in the Gospels and even did miracles and supernatural things I had seen with my own eyes. Why was he not healing my heart?! Why could I not shake this?! What was I doing wrong? I was trying so hard. I knew the doctrine, and by this point I prayed daily and went to mass almost daily, etc., etc. But after so many difficulties and deep desolation on that trip, I gave up trying to convince myself of his love for me. I texted a good friend that I was finished. I didn’t believe this love was for me like it was for others (like my family life) and I had to just be okay with that. I was too broken and wounded to know this kind of love. My heart must have just been dead there. I told my friend I would continue to go to mass because I knew all this was true at the intellectual level and I didn’t want to go to hell. But I was so sorely disappointed. All that work, which usually pays off in this world with degrees, promotions, and movements up the ladder, had led me that far but not enough it seemed. I gave up.
After that text I went to bed, on the pull out sofa in Rome, and woke up to a gentle text from my dear friend. He described to me, or rather gave me “a proof,” of all the love in the world that existed for me particularly. He used our “useless” friendship as one example, to quote Aristotle, who says the most virtuous friendships are not of utility or pleasures simply, but are deeper and more profoundly related to loving and seeking after God and loving the other person for who they are and wanting their good. He made the analogy to the friendship Christ wants with me as well. To be clear, this friend had been with me on this journey for a few years at that point and had heard most of this from me before and he had said most of what he texted before. But this time we both knew it was different because I was throwing in the towel, not just complaining. I had learned the St. Ignatius rules for discernment of spirits and he sternly reminded me that desolation follows consolation and that I had a choice. The time was now to look head on at the lies that had haunted me almost my whole life and tell them all to go to hell, and that in fact I did believe in love, evidence by all he had just written and more. I was happiest and most myself when I allowed myself to be loved and when I loved. The pilgrimage I had been on was an analogy for my life and I could see it for what it was in truth, or not.
I was at a crossroads. My heart ached for this love to be true, I wanted so badly to believe it was for me, but I was so scared what that might mean. How silly! My life had changed 180 degrees over those seven years, so what the heck was I waiting for? What was I scared of? I was scared that God would change his mind, like I thought love did when my parents divorced when I just a baby. I was scared he wouldn’t always be there for me and would let me down, that he wouldn’t take care of me, that he would use me like other men had in my life (not my father). I was afraid it was all smoke and mirrors and my heart would be broken like so many other times in my life. I just couldn’t bear being let down again. But I wanted to believe more than anything else in my life. My heart was so tired of protecting itself against all things, it was so sterile. I wanted life! And ... I surrendered. In that moment I let Jesus be for me all he claims to be. I agreed with the truth of Love, that it exists and is for me. And everything changed. I renounced the lies and could “see” them bounce off my heart! There was relief! I didn’t DO anything, I just surrendered and stopped trying to do anything! He rushed in to all the places. I was not overcome with emotion; instead, I was lighter than a feather. I felt free for the first time in my life. And I couldn’t free myself, I had to be rescued!
Friends, the Lord gives us wonderful people in our lives all along the way to reveal himself to us and who we are to ourselves even. Until I accepted this human love, even though imperfect and not guaranteed to not let me down, until I did that I could not receive perfect Love himself.
God is Love, and he uses us earthen vessels to minister to one another and through one another. I chose to believe in my friend’s love me, at the deepest level, which opened the door for me to receive God’s perfect, faithful love for me! I allowed myself to fall in love completely with Him who is Love Incarnate! With that surrender, prayer changed, mass changed, everything changed. I could begin to see the love my parents, family, and friends were trying to offer me and how hard hearted I’d been towards them. I had to repent of so many of my sins against God and the hearts of others by not receiving the love they could give or times I would even make them prove it, out of fear of being deceived. All understandable based on the specific wounds of the divorce, two houses/families, and not really knowing a father’s deep abiding love. But now it is all different. My friend loved me in my woundedness through his woundedness and His Glory was revealed.
Glory can be revealed and shine through our wounds, too, so others can see what is for them, Infinite Love and Life! In my wounds, I see how much closer I can be to the Father, the special graces He grants to those with the unique wounds resulting from being a child of divorce. I can be even closer with Jesus, Mary, and the Holy Spirit in my wounded places. He has dazzled me with His love and these areas of woundedness have become the places out of which I love others, instead of protecting myself from them. I invite you to let yourself surrender to the all-faithful, all-encompassing hands of True Love. The love you’ve always longed for that no human person could ever fully reveal to us, and that’s okay. They’ve only meant ever to point to Him, ultimately. Let us acknowledge the haunted world we live in that tries to tempt us to doubt so we must stay alert. But we also must live in the truth of the enchanted sacramental world, the world where Jesus Christ is King. The world sings of his goodness! We are heirs and have a mission to help him get his world back, to reveal the beauty, goodness and truth of God and creation. Let us not be haunted by our deepest wounds but let the healing salve of being a child of God, loved perfectly by Him and loved in this world by our family and friends, reveal God’s Glory and be dazzled by this amazing love story that is to be shared. He is FOR you, too.
Intercessory Prayer
Breathe in me, O Holy Spirit,
That my thoughts may all be holy.
Act in me, O Holy Spirit,
That my work, too, may be holy.
Draw my heart, O Holy Spirit,
That I love but what is holy.
Strengthen me, O Holy Spirit,
To defend all that is holy.
Guard me, then, O Holy Spirit,
That I always may be holy.
Call upon the Holy Spirit and ask Him to fill you with His life.
St. Augustine of Hippo, pray for children of divorce and separation.
(St. Augustine’s prayer to the Holy Spirit was found online in the Hallow site here.)
About the author
Megan is a graduate of the JPII Institute for Studies on Marriage and Family, with a focus in bioethics. Currently she resides in the greater DC area and works as a specialty veterinarian while helping out with young adult and women's ministry in her free time.
Reflection Questions for Small Groups or Individuals
What resonated with you about Megan’s story? Was anything mentioned that connected with an experience in your life?
Have you encountered St. John Paul II’s teaching on marriage and the family? If so, what was your reaction to it initially, and how has it changed over time?
Do you have a friend you can text when you feel “finished” or “at the end of [your] rope?” What is it about them that attracts you and that you know you can turn to them in the hour of your need?