With Friends Like These . . .

    Here’s the kind of year I’m having: I’m in the uncomfortable position of being not holy enough for my religious friends and too holy for my non-religious friends. I have always lived with the suspicion that I don’t really fit in anywhere, that I am a perpetually awkward human. The only comfort is that my husband is pretty much the same way. So as misfits, we’re a good fit.

    Several of my pastors over the years can attest to the fact that I have sometimes displeased my fellow parishioners, and that my removal from whatever ministry I was a part of at the time was urgently advised. For my more traditional (their word of choice) Catholic acquaintances, I am too Vatican-II; Vatican-II-with-an-attitude. Although I love her with all my heart, I sometimes disagree with Mother Church, which gets me in trouble. I will never be a good enough Catholic to be accepted by some of my Catholic peers.

    Now, according to one of my dearest friends for over two decades, I have become too religious, brainwashed by what she calls the 'Catholic cult'. She has long been my goddess-worshipping friend, a feminist, environmentally-conscious, peace-loving hippie. We have always managed to respect each other’s belief systems without trying to convert each other, and still enjoy our friendship. Or so I thought. She recently told me that all my God-stuff has become too much for her to stand. I am, she says, ridiculous.

    The ironic thing is that she has confronted me with my supposed God-overload during a year in which I have been mostly absent from my parish, due in part to local politics and largely to my constant weekend traveling during my dad’s recent illness and death. I have actually been far less church-y than I have been for a long time. It has been a year of loss: my dad, my job security and financial stability, my faith community, my last child off to college, and now my old friend. The feeling of loss is pervasive, and seemingly exponential in its spread.

    I think of Jesus saying, I imagine in a sad way, that he “has nowhere to lay his head” (Lk 9:58), and although my small suffering does not even approach the magnitude of his, I think I know what he meant. I feel a little homeless in spirit, a little lost. But I am touched to my core just by realizing that Jesus knows my sorrow, in a visceral, incarnational way. And I know that, despite my degree of holiness, in this year of loss and grieving, Jesus has surrounded me with exactly the friends I need.