Sharing Our Testimony
I have the knee-jerk Catholic reticence against ever speaking in public about my religion. Sometimes the stories feel more like pious boasts than humble confessions. Sometimes during particularly vulnerable testimony sharings, I find myself getting stuck on the paradox of how non-Catholic Christians who so vehemently reject the notion of confession in private to a priest, have no problem with public confession in front of a hundred or so strangers. But by far the greatest qualms I feel when the testimonies start flowing is the Catholic sense that God doesn’t in one moment suddenly enter into a life, but rather is present in that life all along.
I hear often from Evangelicals that they are saved “by grace alone.” And yet the testimonies always climax with the moment in which, devoid of grace, an individual opens his or her heart to it, and then begins a relationship with God. It always feels like the individual’s decision is where the power is, and that grace needs that decision before it can save. As a Catholic, I have been bred to acknowledge God’s grace present all along. Coaxing, distracting, redeeming, dancing with the soul in a journey that ebbs and flows, deepens or distances as any relationship between persons.
Still, there is an undeniable energy that comes from hearing someone’s “testimony.” As Catholics, we could stand to share with one another, the story of how God has revealed Himself to us through the years, and how we have responded to His revelation. Our Evangelical brothers and sisters could also benefit from our stories, which pick up where most of their stories end…at least in the telling. That is, the standard Evangelical testimony ends with the acceptance of salvation. Catholic testimonies instead, pick up from there and talk about the ups and downs of the journey of sanctification. Stories of growing in holiness are the testimonies that we Catholics, if we could get over ourselves, could share as a bridge and a grace for those in our house, and for those in those other folds where the Lord reigns.
A Story without a Beginning
Oh dear Jesus, I love You,
Do You really love me too?
My first conscious spiritual milestone was finally being tall enough to rest my elbows on the top of my mattress. Up to that point, bed-time prayers had been a matter of leaning against the white framed bed, small hands folded together, eyes not quite high enough to be distracted by what little there was to see in the dim light of my room. My sister and I would breathe out, Oh dear Jesus, our noses rubbing against the rough quilt, our footsie pajamas providing only a thin cushion between hard wood floors and little knees.
God only knows how many times my mother and father slowly recited that prayer-poem at the bedsides of four little daughters over the years, but we learned it as we learned to speak and absorbed from it a basic theology that formed the framework of our spiritual lives.
As an adult, I wince at the potential psychological hazards of teaching a small child to question the Lord, “Do You really love me too?” But when I recite the prayer aloud even today I am conscious of the habit formed decades ago with Mommy and Daddy of pausing slightly after this opening question. This was me giving God a chance to answer. This was me learning that prayer was not speech making, but conversation.
Make me always meek and mild,
Let me be Your own dear child.
Meeting the Lord for me has been a story without a beginning. Hopefully, it is a story that will have no end. So, my testimony is essentially all middle. Like many Christians raised in devout homes, there was never a moment when God and the things of God haven’t been a part of my life. At times in the foreground and other times in the background, I never met God the way I never “met” my parents.
Noah was never just a guy in a boat, but was always God’s providential zookeeper. More than just a first century politician, Pilate was always a tragic stooge, dismissing the Truth that would have made him brave. I don’t remember anyone ever explaining to me that the little lamb in the Good Shepherd statue on my bureau was allegorically me. I understood that it was, and absorbed the spiritual realities it implied the same way one catches any other elements of a family resemblance. Not by trying. Just by being around.
Not having had a dramatic moment of going from “no Jesus” to knowing Jesus, I always feel a little sheepish when Christians start in with their personal death-to-life epics. Mine isn’t the highly cinematic story of being rescued by the intervening Hand of Christ on desperate, storm-tossed waves. I haven’t been greeted by the Sun of God after a pivotal dark night of the soul – although I’ve definitely weathered several rainy Tuesday afternoons with the help of Jesus “the Just Warm Enough Ember.” My life with God feels more like a roadtrip than a three-act play. There are passings-by and deepenings, and God meting out peace to me like stepping-stones across a changeable river.
But being God’s middle child doesn’t make my salvation history less miraculous than someone who moved radically from darkness into the light. A human being persevering through a lifetime of anything is astounding, and in a society where the inability to commit is endemic, simple fidelity is a kind of quiet heroism. And heroism is impossible without grace.
Back to the prayer, I admit to not exactly knowing what being meek meant although I prayed for it every night for at least a decade. Meekly, I trusted that if Mommy and Daddy thought I needed it, then I did. I admit to a brief moment of crisis later in life when a shepherd I met told me that sheep were the meekest, stupidest, and smelliest animals God even made. Triplets are usually united by a common theme. What had I been praying for?
A Spiritual Milestone
Teach me how to work and play,
And my daily prayers to say.
In my early teens, I had an extra study period three times a week while the rest of my class covered the literature book I had done the year before at another school. Me waiting around for my classmates to catch up was the nuns’ idea of applied Christian meekness, I presume. I asked my mother what I should do with the free time and she offered, somewhat dryly as I recall, “Why don’t you say your rosary?”
I remember this as a spiritual milestone, because it was the first time I really thought of spending “extra” time with God, with only my left hand around to know what the rest of me was doing.
It was really an absurd suggestion. The nightly family rosary was agony for me as a young person. When my friends asked me how long it took, I told them, “at least two hours ever night” – when in fact, it only took about twenty minutes, twenty-five if my baby sister, always searching for a stage, got extra melodramatic reciting her decade. But once Mom made the suggestion, it was out there, and the idea of frittering away my free study without making a visit to the school chapel began to fill me with good ol’ motivational Catholic guilt.
How “sheeplike” I must have looked from the Tabernacle’s perspective. A thirteen year old girl in Catholic school plaid, with thick glasses and a ponytail, writhing around swinging my rosary beads, trying to stay focussed for a few consecutive minutes, on the pivotal events in salvation history. Jesus in the Stable. Jesus in the Temple. Kneeling down, sitting up, swinging my head around, counting the squares on the paneled ceiling. Jesus in the Garden. Jesus on the Cross. Looking at my watch. Sitting in the one seat that couldn’t be seen from the hall just in case one of my friends should walk by. Jesus cooking fish on the shore. Jesus rising from a mountaintop.
I was definitely a failure as a mystic. I was mostly half-hearted, distracted, bored and from the omnipotent Deity point of view, posturally irreverent. But I have moved forward from that time with the certainty that just being there touched the heart of God. I wasn’t good at praying, but I was there straining to connect, and it seems to me now in adulthood, that God is mostly untroubled at 11 am on school days by praying adolescents, or by anyone for that matter. I was the only one asking for grace at that time, and not having any other offers, God sent a shower. It was a spring shower that would bear fruit years later. But I’ve never doubted the transforming connection that happened in those weird moments of the best solitude I could muster. I always left the Chapel glad that I had come. It was an unearthly gladness that I have since identified as the peace that only God can give.
Then, dear Jesus, when I die,
Let me come to Thee on high.
Death in New England isn’t an event. It’s just another part of the year, another phase in the ongoing progress of creation. Everything dies every year all around us Yankees, giving us all an inculcated sense that in a few short years, we too will become fertilizer for the living. Cemeteries are smack in the center of every small town: crowded gray and green places with fascinating, sometimes lavish, monuments definitely meant to attract attention. I contrast this with the death-denying, slab-spotted “resting place” valleys that can be found in remote areas in Southern California. The distinct spiritual advantage of growing up Yankee is getting used to death as part of the process of life – the ever-rotating seasons and the ever-present graveyards – without being scandalized by it.
To say that my journey with God is a story that’s all middle, doesn’t mean that there haven’t been deaths, just that there haven’t been endings. Being Christian as opposed to being spiritually unconnected is the difference between being a mulch pile and a garbage dump. Through grace, all of the garbage that believers generate through our weakness and fears and fallings-short gets reconstituted into something glorious. Paraphrasing Corrie Ten Boom, “There is no human sin so big, that God’s creativity isn’t able to turn it into something redemptive.”
One of my closest friends in high school became an alcoholic and was eventually recruited at an AA meeting by an older lesbian. Disgusted and impatient, I totally botched the opportunity to be Christ in the world by telling my friend I never wanted to see her again. It was the death of our friendship, but it resurrected in me as a desire to become a person of patience and a better vessel of grace for those who might need me.
I am continually falling in and out of love with people and each of these leads to some deaths, which then become the seeds of resurrection. Being in love has given me the energy to die to my own preferences and displace them with someone else’s. Being in love has taken me through the valley of the darkness of jealousy, which has led to seeking the constancy of God’s love. Loving leads to the deaths of rejection and disappointment and misunderstanding and frustration. Resurrected, I have come to understand these as schools of depth and insight, and humor and compassion.
I was a nun for nine and a half years before leaving just before my final vows. People always ask me why I left. For a while, this struck me as an impudent question about a private matter and I would loftily reply, “Do you ask people whose marriages have broken up why they got a divorce?” I’ve come to realize, however, that a religious vocation is not a private matter. It very much belongs to the People of God who have prayed for vocations, paid for the education and training of vocations, and who have the perk of being in the Family of God and of expecting to be served by these vocations.
Anyway, leaving the convent was a death. I lost my religious family, my sense of identity and my dream for myself – my conviction about what a successful life for me would look like. This death was resurrected into my becoming a uniquely prepared apostle to work in the world of Hollywood. I feel like my nine years of semi-contemplative life makes me part of the Church’s Navy Seals. I’ve had more meditation on the Scriptures, more spiritual direction and more practice in professional self-donation than most lay people can even imagine. Everything that was planted in me during those highly focused years is now there for God to use on the frontlines in the mission field of the popular culture.
Needing God to Exist
Amen.
Without necessarily stepping outside the framework of Christianity, even us middle children will have moments in which fundamental faith decisions are made. I never trudged through the mire of Savior depravation, but I have still had a few pivotal moments when I had to add my “Amen” to the chorus of believers who, having received God’s revelation, decided to accept it as a personal message and not just a psychological coping device.
I come from a family that trusts in books. We all innately believe that competency – if not artistry – can be acquired in nearly everything, if only one buckles down and studies a method from a good book. Consequently, my spiritual journey has ebbed and flowed pretty much according to the books that I was reading. In high school, I met the Lord of long-suffering faith in Hinds' Feet in High Places. In college, I met the God who calls us into relationship with one another in A Severe Mercy. One Christmas early in my twenties was all about God and Identity thanks to Lewis’ Till We Have Faces. Brideshead Revisited drove home “that Catholic thing,” and Henry IV convinced me that all human systems would eventually lead to sinful compromise. Graham Greene, and Dorothy Sayres and G.K. Chesterton and Emily Dickinson all welcomed me into their community of serious believers who never took their own reasoning powers too seriously.
The flipside of trusting in books is resisting a good argument from a book that reflects an ungodly worldview. I remember that it was a combination of Rene Descartes and Immanuel Kant that sent me spiritually reeling for about ten minutes when I was seventeen. Right out of the blue, I experienced the burden of not being able to claim mathematical certainty about God. Later, I would recognize that there is a certainty of faith that is not greater or less than mathematical certainty, but just different. But this came years later. At that moment of realizing I would never really be able to “prove” that God exists, I first experienced the suffering of fundamental insecurity. Doestoevsky said that, “If there is no immortality, everything is permissible.” For a few seconds it occurred to me that every value I clung to was up for grabs. I had never before heard the dreadful echo of banishment from eternal hopes.
Staggering outside my college classroom, I looked into the late afternoon sky and dallied for a few seconds with unbelief. “What if You aren’t there looking down at me?” More than thinking about it, I felt the chaos of a life without a Loving Mind somewhere in the mix and I knew I wasn’t of the stuff that could endure that kind of existence. Maybe it was cowardice, but I remember consciously shaking off the doubts and just refusing to go there in my thoughts. I turned to a passing classmate who remembers the moment to this day as evidence that I am slightly unhinged, and said, “I need for God to exist. I choose to believe because any other kind of life would be impossible for me.”
It was a quick moment. But I have returned to this act of “Amen” several times when I felt the murky waters of doubt washing around my toes. When I feel these moments I tell myself, “Ah, I’ve been over this,” and I choose to believe again.
Barbara Nicolosi teaches screenwriting to aspiring Catholic writers at the acclaimed Act One: Writing for Hollywood. You may email her at Actone2000@aol.com.
