Ten was a particularly hard year.
For some reason, that year the isolation of our small mountain town seemed especially severe. The snow had piled so high on our unplowed road we had to park the car on the highway and slog uphill through thigh-high snow to reach the cold, yellow house under the towering pines. Life echoed the weather as the emotional issues of growing up in a single-parent, barely-eking-out-a-living family raged.
Late one night, when it was so cold the thermometer barely registered and the snow squeaked when you walked on it, I was alone at home. My family was in the nearest big town — an hour away — as they were every Monday, and I felt the weight of my loneliness.
“Why do you abandon me, God?” I raged. “WHY? If you are so powerful and able to be everywhere at once, why aren’t you here? Why can’t you just walk up to my front door and come on in? Why do I always have to be ALONE? Why can’t you put on a body and come to me right here in this room?”
Of course, I heard no answer, and in my ten-year-old manner of handling complex emotion, I poured myself a tumbler full of orange soda and scuttled to my room to hide under the blankets with my drink, a book and a plate full of saltine crackers and confectioners sugar.
Time and circumstance passed, and I forgot.
I went away to school, married, became Catholic and started a family on the other side of the country. I rarely came back to the cold, yellow house. It stood empty.
Then one fall, I learned of a community of priests just over the border in Canada who wanted a vacation in the mountains. “They can stay at the yellow house,” I thought, grateful it would be used. I told them where to find the key.
The last day of the priests’ vacation, my eight-year-old son and I flew in to do the post-visit cleaning. It had rained every day of their vacation, and even the view from the picture window in the living room was obscured by mist and damp fog. Wet collected and fell from the pines in melancholy drips.
They invited us to assist at Mass before they left. We knelt on the flattened, greying acrylic carpet and began the Mass on the altar that was otherwise a microwave counter, under which we once stored the saltine crackers and orange soda. My son was the lector.
For a moment it was cute, the makeshift sanctuary, the stilted readings. And then suddenly, it was holy, because HE was there. In an instant, I remembered the long-forgotten lonely rage. I saw in my mind’s eye, the ten-year-old girl, desperate for Christ to come to her in this very place. A holy ordinary place. Today, he had come. He had heard me, put on a body, and come. And I received him there.
Then, I wept. Inside my grown-up, red, city-blazer with coordinated slacks and impractical shoes, the self-assured mother of a growing brood, the well-established wife and community leader, I was still the little girl who desperately needed Christ to come.
And he had not abandoned me.
