Meeting my Mother, again
CARMODY, JOHN
Meeting my Mother, again JOHN CARMODY It was a slow Sunday afternoon when a local priest whom I admired as a genuine pastor ambled into my room. The good father delivered himself of a few...
...For once, the church did not point to itself but was transparent to God...
...My dying would sadden and diminish it...
...John Carmody is the author of Cancer and Faith: Reflections on Living with a Terminal Illness (1994), from which this article is excerpted with the permission of Twenty-Third Publications, Mystic, Connecticut 06355...
...And, above all, blessings on you, Mother Church, for showing me, if only for a little while, that your maternity is more than rhetorical...
...And it dismissed the past history, the tubby clerics, the mutual antagonism and disappointment of mother and child, as irrelevant...
...Blessings on all the Christians through the centuries who have molded the sacrament of the sick...
...I realized, on my hospital pallet, that "Mother Church" had not been my mother for a long time...
...Indeed, it has lodged itself among the half-dozen most moving religious experiences of my entire life...
...I still can't get over the power in this feeling or perception of mattering, of being an irreplaceable individual...
...I know that on that Sunday afternoon I was susceptible to a great range of feelings...
...I mattered...
...For once it was a community of prayer, offering the praise and petition that have always been its primary reason to be...
...And, for what seemed to me the first time, I, little John, weak John, competent John, mixed-up John, strong John, very sick John had a name in this community...
...More importantly, though, I felt, by a wondrous grace, that this was the first time in my effective memory that the church, in the representative figure of one of its priests (who, at a still deeper level of representation, stood for Christ), was praying for me individually, by name, to deal with painful circumstances, suffering, and needs uniquely my own...
...We are your family, your brothers and sisters, mortal and sinful like you, sure one day to need anointing ourselves...
...I know that terminal illness can throw people for emotional as well as physical loops...
...Although it began almost shamefully casually, this anointing proved to be the most moving moment in my month's stay in the hospital...
...When I was ordained a priest, I knew my future would be hopelessly tangled, because I had lost faith in the church's rules about celibacy...
...I laughed and reported that spiritual ministrations had been minimal...
...It knew about my muscle spasms and dismal prognosis...
...For once, I mattered...
...Forget that asshole...
...30 THE LAST WORD...
...Irritated, but not surprised, he asked if I would like to be anointed...
...Come close, into our embrace...
...In both cases, though, I assumed that I had time, that things would sort themselves out, that the wilderness could prove habitable, the desert could bear fruit...
...Become part of the communion of saints as we intercede for you with God...
...I truly felt taken to the bosom of a holy family that cared for me...
...Lying in my narrow hospital bed, feeling the oil of gladness and healing, I knew I had little time...
...We are not clerics, bureaucrats, bloodless functionaries...
...Blessings on that good priest who wandered in because of the radar good priests develop...
...But I also know, with far greater certainty, that my anointing that day was the most sacramental experience I've had in a long time, the most healing and edifying...
...Through the twenty-odd years of estrangement my typical response, usually thrown imaginatively toward the tubby clergy claiming to represent Mother Church, was a simple Italian hand gesture, bawdy and amused...
...With no thought, I said yes...
...Something maternal really did appear...
...Where the bishop of Wichita had told me and my wife not to come to live in his diocese, because we would not be welcome, the church at prayer in my anointing said, "Welcome home...
...It loved me despite my many manifest failings and my worst secret sins...
...Where the Roman authorities, in granting my dispensation from priestly celibacy to marry, had told me to move five hundred miles away, not to teach theology, and not to worry about my illegitimate children because the dispensation automatically legitimated them (in fact, my wife and I have no children), the church at prayer in my anointing said, "We ask God, who is wholly good, to strengthen your body and spirit, for we love you and care about you, as God does infinitely more...
...The good father delivered himself of a few stories, his equivalent of small talk, and then asked what priests had been visiting me...
...So we went through a spare, adapted version of the church's ancient ritual that asks God's help for the seriously sick—begs divine support and comfort for both body and spirit...
...Anointing was a very different business...
...My pain grieved it...
...When I took religious vows as a Jesuit, I thought my future would run as straight as a pair of railroad tracks...
...Even writing this description of what must have been at most ten minutes of unpretentious prayer moistens my eyes, as the anointing itself did in abundance...
...Psychologically (not theologically), Mother Church shouted that I was a big, big disappointment...
Vol. 121 • March 1994 • No. 5
