“Lord, thank you that my baby made it safely and if you want me to come now, I trust you know best.  But do I really have to die in a scene from the Three Stooges?”

At the age of thirty-three I had just had my fifth Caesarian Section when my uterus tore and blood was hiding the source of the hemorrhaging. I literally felt like life was draining out of me. Then hearing the crunch of scurrying feet on broken glass, I figured someone had knocked the IV pole over in the panic. I could see the frightened looks on the dozen or so observing medical students as my normally soft-spoken doctor shouted for milk to show where the blood was coming from. Then the heavy metal bar holding the sheet that blocked my view of the surgery got knocked over onto my nose.  

I remember thinking “Oh well, according to mom my birth was a Three Stooges act too.” The Doctor had still been on his way as the top of my head came into view and the intern tried to stop me from coming out. Mom yelled “No!” and kicked him solidly in his face. As he grabbed his nose, Mom pushed, and I popped out as one nurse caught me while another staunched the blood spouting from the intern’s nose.

Well obviously, I didn’t die either time. However, the Three Stooges act has been a recurring theme throughout my eighty-seven years. Fortunately, the Love of God expressed in Jesus exploded into my life when I was thirty.

I got my first clue that nobody had a monopoly on God when I was a first grader in a Catholic school and worriedly told my Methodist mother that Sister Rose said that only Catholics got to go to heaven. My mother bent down to eye level with me and informed me emphatically, “You and your dad are going to get into heaven on my Methodist prayers.” 

Methodist or not, Mom was our very involved room mother and became good friends with Sister Rose. So, when Sister Rose laughingly told her that when she had scolded some of the boys for fighting, telling them that she knew all our parents and none of them would fight, I had piped up, “Mine do. I saw my mother throw her shoe at my father.”  Mom just laughed and said, “Yes, I did, but it was my soft silk bedroom slipper and not nearly as hard as those chalk board erasers she says you throw at the boys when they misbehave.” I think they called it a draw.

Though she didn’t go to church with us, Mom was very supportive of our Catholicism in every way except one.  Back when it was supposed to be a mortal sin to eat meat on Fridays, she served us bacon for breakfast every Friday morning. When dad demurred, she insisted emphatically that it was a worse sin to waste food than to eat meat on Fridays. I don’t know about Dad, but I happily bought into her logic.

At that time, we were renting the third floor of a private home in St. Louis, Missouri. It had a wonderful yard with good climbing trees and even sidewalks for roller skating. There was a washing machine in the basement. I helped to carry the wash up and down the three flights sometimes. But the basement was dark with yard tools and furniture stored there, so I was strictly forbidden to go into it alone. But one day after school I had been having so much fun outside that I waited too late to climb all the stairs to use our bathroom. I was desperate enough to brave the dark forbidden basement to pee in the drain there. To my great relief I managed it undetected. Unfortunately, that night when saying my prayers, I remembered that I was scheduled to make my first confession early the next morning. I panicked. It was going to be totally humiliating to confess what I had done.  I considered just saying “I went in the basement.”  The nice young priest might settle for that, but what did God expect?

After a sleepless night, I nervously waited my turn and when I got inside the dark confessional, I blurted out, “Bless me father, for I have sinned. I peed down the drain in the basement.”  There was no response.  Would I have to say a whole rosary as penance? Finally, after what sounded like a coughing fit, he said in a strangled voice, “Say three Hail Marys and don’t do it again.”  I got out as fast as I could, but when I was saying my three Hail Marys, I couldn’t help wondering, if there was a book with all the sins and their appropriate penances, would peeing down a drain in the basement be in it?

Reflecting on it years later, I was pretty sure that my confession (hopefully nameless) had become a story to be passed down to new priests for decades.

My life story is about my journey from making a religion my God and throwing God and Jesus out when my religion, totally controlled by men who didn’t marry or have children, told me I had to die having babies. Then after years of ignoring the issue of God, finally several years of searching and Christian friends brought me into a relationship with God through His Love fleshed out in Jesus.

Mine is also a history of a personality made vulnerable to wounding by responding to life from emotion first rather than logic and that rebelled against a world full of many rules that made no sense. It is also about the journey through the self-centeredness that comes from feeling inadequate, but that with grace from a Loving God visibly active in amazing ways, includes healing and spiritual growth.

REBIRTH

I hunger to be born again./ To take my hurts and failures/and mulch them into new beginnings./ To turn them into fertile fields/of understanding and compassion./ To experience once more the greening out/ of the frozen landscapes in my life/ and gain a rich new Spring perspective/ that builds on leaves and logs of yesteryears/ to bring forth the ripe good fruit of Love.

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