Forgiving God A daughter's illness

...But this meditation was not quite what I needed...

...Recently, she was said to have Asperger's syndrome, which suffices for insurance purposes and at least has something to do with who she really is...

...When I got home I found a mailed plea for funds from a shrine of Saint Jude...

...Justice required not only that I face my own inadequacies and acknowledge their roots in what I am and who I was before she was born...

...That the state of my soul had much to do with Allison came as a surprise to no one but me...

...But I did need forgiveness for the absurdity of my response to the anger I knew I was not wrong to feel...

...The exercise forced me to reassess what I thought I knew quite well-Allison's place in the story my life has to tell...

...In addition, I had to face the fact that the peace of mind I needed to get through most days meant that I had to construct a lid I could drop, almost at will, over the welter of emotions her plight brings me to...

...and when I wondered why, I found myself murmuring, "Because I trust in Thee, I have faith in Allison...

...God is in charge, and it is his business to prevent, assuage-at least give meaning to our pain...

...I saw that God was acting in not particularly mysterious ways, and sent a contribution with a plea for prayers for my impossible case...

...It was too Job-like...

...And-always having acted on the principle that awareness of ignorance is the beginning of wisdom-we left our financial affairs with tiaa-cref...

...I needed to see his wisdom and his power touching me and Allison, no matter how small we are in the scheme of things...

...For some two and a half years we have been the awestruck grandparents of our happily married younger daughter's beautiful little girl...

...But we have an older daughter, Allison, who has been emotionally disturbed since she was three...

...I was not asking him to forgive the anger...

...To mother my elder child and live fruitfully for the rest of my life, I had to stop playing God...

...She has been called-depending upon whether the assessor is blind or merely seriously myopic-schizophrenic, autistic, brain-damaged, manic-depressive, retarded, chemically unbalanced, dyslexic, or merely badly parented...

...I discovered within myself another deadly sin I needed to tame...

...That battle offered little that is comic...

...When I confessed that I had wallowed in original sin for years, my confessor laughed with me, and then we moved to the next step...

...I had to grieve for the Allison I would never have, so that I could accept the Allison who is mine and free myself from the guilt in which my godlike illusions ensnared me, because they meant that whatever she suffered, she suffered because of me...

...She has grown instead into what sometimes seems to be a monster...

...But that night I slept-and on a few other nights, too...

...After the session I caught myself thinking, "I'll never give up...

...I'll see to it she's healed, whether she wants to be or not...

...Mine is a fragile faith, a prove-it trust...

...This rage required time and insight, but what my analyst wanted me most to realize was that the real object of my anger was God, and she was right...

...What came about in the analytic sessions that followed my epiphany was a period in which I wallowed in anger-anger at my father, my mother, my aunts, my brother, my husband, my friends, my enemies, Ralph Nader, editors who reject my manuscripts, the Bush family-just for starters...

...I went again to confession because if God is to forgive me, I must forgive him...

...One night I was unable to sleep, as I often am...

...for our humility, we are now blessed with a pension that provides us with a considerably larger income than we ever before enjoyed-even when both of us were working...

...O Lord, accept the challenge...

...The psychic breakthrough began comically...

...The Psalms give eloquent and angry testimony of God's awareness of his creatures' taste for indignation, and of how rarely it is righteous...

...Don't let us down...

...She was a longed-for, beautiful, bright child-difficult in some ways, but on the whole a delight, and she offered the promise of being even more delightful as she grew...

...My analyst was trying, as she had earlier, to persuade me that Allison was not going to get "well"-whatever that term may mean when one speaks of an illness as nebulous as hers...

...I have realized that if Allison suffered, as I did, from my indulgence in pseudo-godliness, she does need one consequence of that delusion...

...After we thrashed out this melange of theology and childishness, my confessor asked me to say three Our Fathers for my penance, meditating on "Thy Kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in Heaven," considering the vastness, the order of which I was a part...

...Aware of how incongruous my nagging depression is, given all that is good in my life, this year I began an exploration of my psyche, with a Freudian analyst, and of my soul, with a perceptive confessor...

...Monica Harte is a pseudonym for a New York writer...

...I started to laugh, astonished to find myself so proud of playing God...

...Twice I managed to miss Mass on Sunday, which, of course, hurt not God, but me...

...It could be said either that Allison is undiagnosable or that she suffers from an overdose of diagnoses...

...I needed to grieve, as I had grieved belatedly for my mother who had died when I was much too young to mourn, a grieving I had to experience before I could forgive her for abandoning me, accept what she had been to me, and thus become enough of an adult to bear and mother my own children...

...I did not need to think about how much wiser, how much more powerful God is than I am...

...She needs not just my love, which she has, but my faith that she can become what God has in mind for her-not I. He cannot intend that she live in misery, in institutions where she finds little reason to use her intelligence or her talents, or to cherish and care for herself...