Only The Good

While working at Ditter's,  I had Monday and every other Sunday off work.  On the first Monday of the month, I had a standing appointment with a Benedictine priest in a small town several towns away.  "Only the Good Die Young" seemed to always play on the radio on my drive to Mt. Angel.  Mt. Angel shared a similar German-Catholic background as did my home town of Sublimity.  Mt. Angel had taken it up a notch or two and was home to both a Benedictine Abbey and a Benedictine convent.  (One for men and one for women respectively.)  The Abbey educated many of the secular priests for the local archdiocese.

I was still very young when my parents first took us there on a Sunday drive.  High atop a small hill, with buildings that resembled castles, it captured the imagination of a little girl who still believed in fairy tales.   A long and gently curving road cut through a forest of tall pine trees before arriving at the top.  Even then, I thought the drive up the hill was like a journey.  It hinted of medieval quest.  At the top, the Grail, a peaceful oasis, a land set apart.  It captured my imagination and my desire to remain forever innocent.

Hit by a lot of changes in a short time, I found solace in monthly meetings with Fr. B.  Kind and gentle with a ready laugh our meetings were a combo of spiritual direction, counseling and laughter.  I always left feeling better about myself than when I arrived.  It felt like a healing place.  These talks with Fr. B. did more than make me feel better, they also renewed an interest in theology.  Twelve years of Catholic school had helped lay a good foundation.  Theology became more than a cerebral exercise and more an affair of the heart.  I smile to think of what type of theologian I might have become.  I suspect someone on the lines of Teihard de Chardin.  The "divination of the cosmos" always had great appeal to me.  Maybe that appeal had its basis in my use of dried cow pies as toys when still a tot.  God's little "ripple effect" through all creation.  (For the curious, more about Teilhard de Chardin can be found here:  http://www.teilharddechardin.org/  )

What I didn't know then and what I know now only after a lot of experience is that I was desperately looking to religion, my faith, to fix what I thought was terribly wrong with me.  It was a mystical bandage of sorts slapped over a hidden cancer underneath.  Hidden cancers have a nasty way of becoming big problems later on and this was not an exception.

While there were bright spots in these years before the convent, depression often held my in its cold and deadly grasp.  It tainted my world.  It had threatened my life only to be foiled at the last minute by something that seemed close to divine.  There seemed no way to exorcise the depression that I too often denied.  I layered denial and good behavior on top of it while deep within it flooded me with its poison.  I turned to God, to religion for a fix.  That in itself is neither good or bad.  We all bring our baggage, our weaknesses, our sins to the altar.

The problems begin when we deny they exist, when we engage in behaviors desperate to hide the weakness within.  It is this weakness, these sins that we must freely place upon the altar.  The good we do is often tainted by desire for recognition, fame, the desire to be loved.  The only things that are truly ours alone, that beg to be offered to a higher power for their wretched worth so once acknowledged and sacrificed, their ashes can become the fertile ground for growth.  This is the place where weakness makes us strong.  To make this sacrifice requires that we walk to the altar with eyes and arms wide open.  Before God, we stand with only our weakness, our frailty to offer Him.  Goodness already belongs to Him.  We simply have to learn how to get out of the way of this goodness.

When I heard, "Only the Good Die Young, " blasting out of the radio, I didn't hear singer's argument to Virginia to get her to have sex with him.  (An old argument by the way.  See Andrew Marvell's "To a Coy Mistress" .) http://www.luminarium.org/sevenlit/marvell/coy.htm    I heard "Only the Good Die Young."  The dark part of me wanted that to be true.  I stumbled through life with a psychic armload of broken glass.  Everywhere I went I left a trail of blood.  It felt like the road to atonement.  On this road I walked into a convent and created my own perfect nightmare, exquisitely tailored to result in the maximum of inner torment.  The dark part of me secretly aspired to die good and young.  Since ending my own physical life was wrong, then offering myself on the pyre called, "goodness" seemed the best way to end my life without killing my body.  I had so much to learn.