An Open Letter to my Mother

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The mother that I love, in the Names of Sweet Jesus and Kind Mary

This post is updated.  As far as I know my brother has not read it yet to my mother, nor has he even acknowledged receiving it, though I sent it directly through his cell phone, and asked him to read it to her.

Dear Mom,

I know you discount my dreams, as if you are afraid what I see in them might be true.  But I have only dreamed beautiful things regarding what God has in store for this family, for all you and the rest of us have gone through.

God never points an accusatory finger at anyone, and neither do I.

And besides, every thing I’ve dreamed about and thought was from God (though I might not have understood it at the time) proved to be true.  That is why people think I am so smart, when in reality (I believe) I have been simply hearing the silent voices of what I know, or who I knew, but forgot, all along.

As for Larry he doesn’t believe so much in dreams.

He told me he only believes God can use science to work a miracle, as if God came from science, and not the other way around.

So strange.

I believe in true science, but believe God doesn’t have to use it’s laws.  He can go beyond any law He authored in the first place.

As a Catholic, I believe God allows Mary, our Guardian Angels as well as our favorite saints, saintly relatives like Dad that we were so close to, to speak to us in our dreams.

Did God not send an angel to Joseph so he would not fear taking Mary as his wife?

After we are dead are not relationships and love for each other and God all we have?

Is this not the Love of which Heaven is made?

St Joseph knew he was having a different kind of dream.  So did the man that I intend to marry. Saint Joseph knew which parts of his dreaming were true, even though he could not necessarily interpret correctly, or perhaps understand all that his dreams contained, that Mary was Immaculate and how therefore only she alone could bear Jesus Christ.

I am certainly not immaculate, and I am certainly not infallible.

But nonetheless God uses little people like me and you, as well as all imperfect sinners, whether we like it or not. Especially children who suffered a lot. Because as children we are all made innocent, and cannot be guilty of our abusers sins, regardless of who our biological mothers or fathers are.

Therefore I want you to know I had a dream about you and dad last night, as if he wanted me to ask you about it, to see if you would remember, what I cannot. I cannot read your mind or your life, just because I have interesting dreams. But I think in the dream I was inside your tummy, not born yet.

Dad said to you (or to me)  “Do you remember coming around the back of this house?”

I saw the house in my dream that you and Dad were at.  It looked like behind Saint Peter’s rectory but only older, more beautiful, covered with ivy and perhaps a back porch and stone walls. You and I, as if you were pregnant with me at the time, were walking through a passage way between this house and the other building (which at Saint Peter’s, was the church.)

He said “Is this longer than a room for two nights?”

“It’s under the mat.  It’s always under the mat.”

“An angel put it there.”

“We will fix this.”

“We were trying to figure it out before we knew where the key was.”

At this part in my dream I awoke as if I heard a gunshot.

But it was just a bird that flew into my window (apparently) where I sleep in the bedroom, in which Babci died. Imagine that.

Babci had told me about a dream she had in that bed, shortly before she died in it, and I have had dreams about Babci as well now, that have proved to be miraculously significant. I know now that one of them was in St Ann’s Monastery in Scranton, because when I returned there only recently I was surprised to recognize it as the backdrop of my long ago “Babci Dream.”

I believe she is a saint in heaven, helping us both.

But anyway, before Babci died, she told me she dreamed she was in heaven looking down at her family and all of us getting there.  She saw many of us.  But in particular she saw you, Mom.  She said that you had to go as if in a maze round and round to find your way there, and there were numerous obstacles to overcome,  but you kept fighting so hard and running around really fast going up and over or around all obstacles in this maze to overcome them.

She was sure that you made it to heaven, but not because you “bought” your way into heaven, or had a “special mandate”. You have said these things repeatedly, such bunk someone must have brainwashed you with, in front of Anna and I and other honest witnesses,  in your disassociative state.  As your own mother, my Babci predicted it, you will make it to Heaven only because you are such a stubborn little fighter who would never give up on love, despite your mistakes.

We all love you so much, and we are all praying for you to get well enough to come home. I want to live with you again and spend days with you in peace and joy.

Anyway, I had been startled awake from this dream about you and dad, so I got up to look out the window to look to see if I could find the bird that had hit the window laying on the porch roof top below me, to account for the sound I had heard, that had reminded me of a gunshot, when I was sleeping.

But of course the sound had not been a gunshot.  I knew that when I woke up.  It had been more of a soft, little thump anyway.

So I went back to sleep, and started dreaming again.

A woman screamed.

Someone said “arrest him!”

She fled.

Someone, a man said  “his wife.”

There had been something about paramedics coming.

Then a female voice said as if it was you, “Judy, he was a child again. Judy he was just a boy.  The gunman.”

(Previously in another dream, someone said they framed John Gunman. )

I was then a baby on a table in this dream, not in an army hospital but maybe a Catholic one,  because you had said “Not in the Army Hospital, Never, John!”

He speaks Spanish, the priest.

This time I was awoken again, but by a much louder sound, almost as loud as a gunshot this time, and I awoke shaking.  But of course I had just been frightened. This sound was so loud, such a very loud thump. It must have been the sound of a very large bird hitting another window, or animals in the attic, but again, it was the sound of something falling.

I could see how someone asleep would mistake such a sound for a gunshot, or a real gunshot would sound like that. Perhaps you had a traumatic incident before I was born that you thought was a gunshot but it was not.  I remember in real life as a child Dad disagreed with you on this matter.

These sounds, I hate to say it,  kind of reminded me of the sound a baby would make, if she fell off a tall table (God forbid)or someone pushed her, smashing her face on the floor, next to her mother.

I think the time I was around five and I did fall out of bed, when I rolled around a lot, it reminded me in my subconscious of how something like this happened to me as a baby. I have heard Dad saved my life and the doctors did something they didn’t think was possible.  But  I started having nightmares another time.

It was after that night I awoke flat on my back in my bed, with my nose broken and blood squirting out everywhere. I was around five at the time.  I see you at the foot of my bed in a dissociation state as if you had been hypnotized and I remember saying “I’m sorry mommy!” as if you told me I was responsible for the other baby’s death.

I started  having nightmares that I was responsible for killing another baby or child, as if someone had told me that was true, that this baby’s death was my fault.

But I was so young.  It couldn’t be true.  You and Daddy invited a priest over who told me it couldn’t be true.  I was only five or so.

Do you remember that?

And I asked you if there were really bad people in the world.

You said no Judy, because you wanted me not to be so scared. You were your regular loving self again.  You did tell the truth because you added “Because God made everyone innocent.”

But anyhow, I woke up from this recent dream about you and Dad at that old stone house,  and I remembered how you and Dad along time ago, used to talk about an incident in a house or an apartment, and a gun man where someone was framed, but you and Daddy disagreed about the details.

I think people are framed by corrupt authorities everywhere, but especially in the church.

I think someone was framed in a Catholic Hospital, Mom, the one where I was born.

You see dreams are sometimes symbolic of what happens in real life.

I had one awhile back that really frightened me.

I saw you lying on a table as if in satanic black mass as if hypnotized (thinking it was a traditional mass)  but you were beautiful and innocent.

As I remember it, you took me alone once to a so called traditional mass, where scary black robed figures moved back and forth really fast behind a table,  only I knew they were not real priests but bad men, and you told me this was just the same as the masses we usually went to. Then I blacked out or went to sleep, as if hypnotized.

I think this happened while we were in Germany.  I remember being told somehow I would have to die for you or something like that.  I got scared.  I knew they would hypnotize me, or something like that.  So I asked Jesus in my head to send me someone to remind me of what really happened, because I didn’t trust these people. And He promised He would. I do not know if this part really happened, or if I am remembering something only symbolic.

I do remember being happy as if in Heaven, but coming back to life because I loved you, and knowing then the whole story of how God was going to use Mary to save all the little people, like me.

But in my nightmares a man (a priest in a black robe) hovers over me about to stab me with a knife.

I ask God “Is he killing me?”

No, he is killing “the other little girl” and the bad priest is her father.

I think God is referring to the other little girl I saw in another dream, the one with the blonde hair that I was giving a voice to recently (she was trying to talk, trying to be heard, in the dream she is about five, but I am not sure.  This could be another little girl I know who has seen severe trauma.)

If you are confused at this point do not worry, it is not your fault.  Evil and it’s subsequent trauma is extremely confusing, like trying to find one’s way out of a maze.  There are many aspects to my own life that I have yet to understand.  I am hoping you can provide the missing links for me and I can provide them to you, and we can expose who and how people have lied to us about each other.

Because you are right.  In your heart you always loved me.

I had asked in my dream Jesus or Mary, who did this to my mother.

And I heard a man, a man named Jim Timlin. He was a diocesan priest in Scranton a long time ago.  Perhaps you went to confession to him about nine months before I was born, when Dad was overseas or something.

Mom, I know this is all very scary and confusing.

But it is only natural that little babies retain what happened in their hearts and souls when they were very young, even just born, or not.

Especially if they almost die and see heaven, or catch a glimpse of it.

Because they are innocent and therefore closest to God then. Aborted children need to be acknowledged, and honored and grieved, though I am certain they make it to Heaven.  The acknowledgement of them is for us, so that we can be healed.  It is only what’s right, so do not ever let any man of the cloth tell you differently. We all have a right to live the life God gave us, and so do you.

I do not even know if you really had an abortion, though that’s what was implied to me.  Because the psychologists who treated you for schizophrenia also worked for Project Rachel, specializing in complex schizophrenia resulting from severe post abortion syndrome, and post abortive women who then go on to abuse a live birth child.

Perhaps Timlin lied and said you aborted his child (anonymously) to advance his career and Project Rachel, when in reality he tried to kill me after I was born, to hide the evidence of his sin.  Perhaps he tried to induce miscarriage,  imposed his guilt on you, and suppressed your trauma and grief when your children were attacked.  I do not know for sure yet.

But I suspect a bad priest encouraged your miscarriage and rewrote your psychiatric history to advance his own career even to become Bishop, even promoting Project Rachel under false pretenses.  He retired recently and I think all this has started coming out since then.

I heard Oppenheimer found out what they did to you, knew you were now delusional because of it, and used you for money to advance his own career, trying to scandalized DeVillers, Dad’s trusted priest friend,  and an innocent business woman like me instead.

They should all be arrested, not you! Who told you I “had you arrested”?  That is not true.  I was trying to get you help and the police came to take you to their office where the hearing had to be held, but they refused to hear any evidence to get you help and told me to leave you dead on the floor, or wait until you gave me a visible stab wound, before calling 911 again.

That is why people are telling you you are sound “in mind and body” and can administer your own medicine, even as you give thousands away to bad men like Oppenheimer and Smallwood Dad’s property,  even while state officials are telling me to “leave you dead on the floor” or “wait until you have a visible stab wound” (which of course I would never do) because “they have an interest” in Dad’s estate.

Confusing, I know.

Just know that I am not calling you crazy or stupid or accusing you of anything.

Anyone would be traumatized over these events.

I am calling you traumatized, like I have been, although to a much lesser degree. Most people will not understand what happened to our family because they haven’t been born into political families or those so intricately connected to the Church, criminal investigations, or the exposing of  false priests.

But as for me, I will always love you and Larry no matter what. I accuse you, the real mother I love, of nothing.  I loved you even when you accused me of causing your heart attack by serving you “tainted chicken” even though I was the one  who called 911, saved your life, got you your operation, and arranged professional care, and slept by your side night after night at the expense of my own health, business and welfare to watch over you.

Who may I ask would suggest I am the one not to be trusted or would lie to you, if not the devil himself?

Then I heard this melody in my dream.  It was so strange as it just came to me, as if Dad was singing it to you, to cheer you:

There’s an American road to the Country Club
There’s a Comedy Club
There’s a Claim
And for those broke but for some reason
Not broken
Christmas Morn life begins
Just the same

So I hope that is a sign I can bring you home for Christmas.

Love, Judy
May Mary Immaculate, pray for us!

PS  The reason I have asked Larry to read you these letters is because I think you hear your own tone of voice in my voice, whenever I try to speak to you.  This triggers you to get angry at me,  because your own inner critic is always accusing you falsely of things, those voices that perhaps you hear, unlike me, out loud.

Jack and the Beanstalk & Other Tall Tales

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This morning when I woke up and went out to tend my plants, I noticed that autumn had already taken over my little garden.  The basil which had provided me with so much summer caprese was now forgotten and yellow.  I had to trim it down in hopes it would provide me a sequel.  A cucumber plant had wasted cucumbers languishing in wet earth while engaging a tomato plant with its tendrils to take over my back porch. I realized with a start that it would invade my home, if I didn’t cut it down soon.

Images of Jack and the Beanstalk had been vaguely passing through my mind each time I glanced out the back door, and I felt personally responsible for the tomato plant which the unfruitful cucumber had compromised.

As a child, I never liked the story of Jack and the Beanstalk.  I mean, what kind of child takes his mother’s poor cow and sells her for some “magic beans” from a wandering magic bean selling guru?  As well, there is so much death and destruction and chopping down of beanstalks towards the end of that tale, I think I figured as a child, the tale was best avoided in its entirely.  If it meant something, it meant something very dark and foreboding.

Now I think not.  I mean, it does mean something very dark and foreboding, but it is better not avoided, because if you don’t tend to it, it could slip into your house via the back door with the tiniest of tendrils.  It is like a thief in the night that one time you forgot to lock up, an unpaid debt, smoking or drinking just a little bit too much, Trump’s untended taxes, or my own untended health concerns, because I worry too much about “helping others”.

I think the tale (like most fairy tales) is a classic parable of good verses evil, and it has a rather unpleasant but necessary Catholic flavor to it.

The  Mystery of our Redemption is disturbing, especially to good men. It crucifies good men. As a woman, even just referring to this Mystery  or defending it has rendered me “disturbing”.  I “disturb” others with what I have to say in its defense,  and men assume I must be “disturbed” to so boldly and bluntly honor the Mystery (and so like a disobedient woman) refuse to apologize for doing so,  when the exact opposite is true.

You see, it’s easier for mankind that way.  No vines to chop down.

Jack’s mother is a prototype for Mary, the mother of God.  Jack is made innocent, in the Image of her Son.  She warns him to trust no man, only her Son.  But Jack is just like every man who means well, but doesn’t listen to a good mother.  He thinks he knows better.  After all, he’s a man.

The bean salesman is quite charismatic and charming, and there is truth to what he says.  He is symbolic of every new age visionary, every yoga or meditation instructor, every anonymous man named David selling an eight  point plan to find one’s true vocation, or that trip to Medjugorje people take, even though just authority refuses to approve, because it points to preternatural phenomena.

The beans do not represent timeless Catholic truths as in the three stages of the spiritual life, or the writings of Saint Francis de Sales on vocations. In fact they contradict these things.  But the beans do have some life in them and will really grow. The devil is not an idiot. There are some duds in there to be sure, with a virus that will poison the entire plant, but the beans will grow and astonish others with their wonders. There will be some authentic fruit on this tree.  As if beanstalks and wandering gurus could take us to high heaven, or to our castles in the sky.

When Jack returns home after visiting the giant’s house, his mother scolds him for not taking her warning against putting trust in man seriously.

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However, she does give him credit for the good he has brought out of climbing the beanstalk, those goods which the giant had confiscated, which had really belonged to her husband in the first place.

See, I did good, Mom.

But who is the giant, this sleeping giant, that Jack has not yet awoken?

It used to bother me as a child, how Jack was so careless, playing around near a big sleeping giant, as if this huge elephant in the room posed no real danger to him. It reminds me of how people, impressed by the benevolence and authority of a cult leader, feel they own him loyalty and love.   It dawns on me the giant does not represent an obvious threat to our well being, and that is why Jack isn’t really afraid of him.

The giant represents a worse threat, because it is a  hidden one. The giant represents those that we dearly love, yet those who threaten our physical, mental or spiritual life. We do not notice they are a threat, because they say so many truths, do so much good, and they point to many truths hidden in their kingdom.  They actually do give us some of these truths. We will not realize who they really are, or what demons possess them, until we wake them up, confront them with the reality that they have stolen God’s goods, and twisted a hideous vine growing nowhere into their own image.

They wake up only when you are charitable enough to them to tell them the truth (our moral obligation)  to put God before them.

Fee-fi-fo-fum,   I smell the blood of an Englishman,   Be he alive, or be he dead   I’ll have his bones to grind my bread  represents betrayal by those we love the most, because we have defended God’s truth. It is one of the most painful sorrows there is, this side of Heaven.  Does not Peter deny Christ three times? Does not the giant say the fee fi fo fum thing to Jack three times in the tale, like Peter to Jesus?

The giant is what lives inside my own mother that I love so dearly, my loving mother’s pathology, that caused her to bludgeon me in the face as a little girl.

The giant is the abusive parent, spouse or narcissistic best friend who you find out not only betrayed you, but is jealous (of your looks, intelligence, empathy, heart, innocence, whatever it is) and lusts after your blood.

The giant is when you find out the one balanced traditional priest whom you trusted has not only broken the seal of your confession and  lied about what you confessed in front of your daughter, but is the very one who spread  your delusional mother’s scandal against you and has disbarred you from socializing with your remaining friends at the Church for the “common good”.

The giant is when you take the time to help a man  whom you think has potential to be a real man,  by both discreetly slipping him the key to expose David Clayton’s evil intent and the key to stop dancing in Beyonce’s shadow, and he instead ignores both key and you, like you’re the ones without potential.  He treats the vine that threatens his spiritual well being like just another obnoxious GIF on his Facebook timeline.

By this point, you are devastated by all those whom you thought meant well, that you found out did not.  But you are even devastated by those who would still give their very lives for you,  and all of your friends, family, acquaintances and the very authorities and powers that be, because you finally realize not only can’t these people and systems  save you, but that they were not designed to save you.

Only God can.

I think of my own dating life, and how, even though the view-o-meter on Match.com flipped over at 15,000 views, I could still not find a man among them who could tolerate me loving God more than him.

The worst part of all is the ones you love the most have hurt you the most.

This is why Christ wept in the garden. And even as you embrace this cross, the very Mystery of your personal Redemption, you feel  that if the very people you love would turn on you, betray you, even prove of hostile intent, and if your sins of omission have betrayed them, than surely God has abandoned you as well.

But God has not.

He has been in your little home all along, your little house, or oratory if you will,  with your mother Mary.  She is standing on your front porch.  She does not try to sneak in through the back.  She is shouting out to you, out in the open, just waiting for you to come home.  If you are a man like Jack,  God might even use an infinitely much lesser woman, simply to remind you of the maternal.  I think of simple minded little Saint Bernadette, who dug in the mud until she got it all over herself, and people felt sorry and were embarrassed, for her. It’s like Bernadette had no sense of self worth, but the opposite is true.  It is those of us who are afraid to stop being “polite” and get dirty for a greater good that have too much pride.  God allows us to make even a public spectacle of ourselves until more important people will start paying attention. Mary does not creep in through the back door by deception like a noxious vine, and she will never fail to provide the water of Grace. Because Christ is her Son, in whose very Image you were made.

Suddenly, the painful paradoxical truth is exposed, like a pruned, scrawny little sapling that looks dead, but will fruit nonetheless true freedom, peace and joy. You see it all now, after hearing it so many times.  What you need is to totally let go and place your trust only in God.

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This means not only having faith that God is there, but much harder, believing that God is good, because only He alone sees you and loves you exactly as you are.  He does not accuse you of anything or show you false empathy. He will give you everything good you ask of Him, and even more. He was just waiting for you to acknowledge His generosity.

It is as if Mary has been pushing away tendrils attached to your hideous strength of love of man over God all along. But when you return to her, when you behold her standing bravely right there on your front porch, waiting next to Him in Whose Heart you were kept safe all along, it is you who must chop the hideous beanstalk down, or the giant will get into your home and devour your very heart.

For if you do not chop down the vine, if you do not embrace the Mystery, your heart will harden, and you will become the giant monster. You see it all in a flash, what would happen; the unacknowledged and suppressed grief turned into anger, the anger into hatred for all of mankind, but especially intolerance for the small and vulnerable, the weak or feminine, like the sound of a crying baby, just making a disturbance.  It is you who will become jealous of those that can still express sorrow, or feel any human empathy.

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The chopping down of the beanstalk is most terrifying right before it sets you free.

It will be painful, like a crucifixion, often accompanied with a feeling of toxic shame for having been so gullible in the first place.   Don’t fall for this.  Toxic shame is just a trick of the devil. Every man is deceivable, except one without the effects of original sin.  Imagine that, that the one undeceivable, unbrainwashable mere man was not a man after all, but a mere woman. Are men ashamed that God chose a woman, to become Man? Are men ashamed that God ordered them to behold His Mother? Though we all bear the effects of sin and are not God, we were all (man and woman alike) made equally innocent, because we were made in His very Image.

For those who prey on people of good will, prey on this very innocence and empathy.  They prey on you because you still have compassion for others. They are jealous of this.  It is this they seek to devour and destroy with sterile rubrics and lies like “If you sorrow over loss or show emotion it really means you are resentful.” It will feel like the severing of your own blood line when you cut down this vine,  because often it is. True Godly courage is a blind faith and trust that you are really a child of God first and foremost, and that this more real relationship will support you.

It is the no contact policy I have with my own sociopath mother that I still love.

It is the restraining order a woman with Stockholm Syndrome finally places against an abusive spouse that she thought she was madly in love with.

It is the giving up of a man I deeply loved to whom I was engaged, because he would compromise my faith.

It is the giving back of the engagement ring.

It is the moment you stop pretending your best friendship with someone is “brotherly” love when he feigns “empathy” for you in a private email to another man,  because his works were critiqued by a mere woman and yours were not,  or worse,  when he makes you complicit in his evil.

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It is the moment you face down an abusive priest, stop allowing you and your daughter to be falsely scandalized, and instead shout truth from the mountain tops.

People who are deluded by the devil, whether do to sickness or culpability, need hard lessons to learn truth, as do we,  and to be placed in God’s hands, not our own which have become soiled with earth.  Until they consent to being unraveled by God through Mary, they are a danger not only to us, but to themselves.

For none of us are God, and none of us can play God to save another’s soul.  We can only contribute to another’s salvation by offering something up, and sometimes it is our very connection to those that we continue to love, that we must offer up to God to help save them. Because we love them like ourselves.  But we love God more.

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Dare we think cast not your pearls before swine does not apply to us, because we are special, and our own magic beans will do the trick?  Or do we twist the meaning of this command into a loophole to neglect publicly defending God’s Truth, neglect cauterizing a leak?

That Jack is a boy, and not a girl, is significant.

Women reflect God’s mercy, are more empathetic, and are therefore called to forgive, but set boundaries against the men who have broken their hearts.  Men have a greater obligation to reflect God’s justice, in serving women.   The masculine has an obligation to sacrifice to protect his good mother, from the evil giant who has confiscated her goods.

That is how a boy becomes a man.

If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple.

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“Mother! mother! bring me an axe, bring me an axe.” And his mother came rushing out with the axe in her hand, but when she came to the beanstalk she stood stock still with fright for there she saw the ogre just coming down below the clouds.

I remember the day I left my ex husband. I had no car, and was trapped in the house with my young son and baby daughter.  I called my father, who showed up in his car to get me almost instantaneously, as if he had been waiting there all along.  I paused for a moment, turned around, and went back in the house to get the diaper bag.

When we were safely in the car my father scolded me.  “Next time you are in a situation like that Baby,  be ready.  Never, ever turn around for anything.  A diaper bag is not as important as your life and the lives of your children. Your husband could be keeping a gun. “

I asked my father, but you don’t think he really has a gun, or would shoot someone if he did, do you?

“That’s not the point.  I’m your father.  I love you.  I’ve been in situations like this before.  I do not trust that man with my daughter’s life.”

We drove off.

But Jack jumped down and got hold of the axe and gave a chop at the beanstalk which cut it half in two. The ogre felt the beanstalk shake and quiver so he stopped to see what was the matter. Then Jack gave another chop with the axe, and the beanstalk was cut in two and began to topple over. Then the ogre fell down and broke his crown, and the beanstalk came toppling after.

Imagine that. The beanstalk is down, but what a mess it is.  At first glance it looks like it has destroyed everything, the giant creature lying dead in your very back yard, like a hideously enormous chrysanthemum.

And Jack finally gives up.

Jack is finally grounded, just like a tiny pebble of sand who finally realizes who he is, and Who God Is.

His soul had always been properly intimate only with God.

Jack finally realizes he cannot trust man, over God.

Because there are no men left.

He is all alone.

So Jack starts weeping.

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Jack finally lets go entirely and lets God, because he has no other choice.

Jack cannot pull himself up by his own bootstraps.

He is finally safe at home, whether this symbolizes Heaven…

or Heaven on earth.

In all versions of the story, the mother and Jack get rich off the goods that really belonged to them in the first place.  In one, Jack remains with his mother.  In another, he marries a princess.  We do not know the end of our story, but we do know God will repay in abundance, with our heart’s most intimate, and fondest desire.

And they all lived happily ever after.

I include the following music video in this piece because my father loved country music. The words remind me of what my father said to me, and what God the Father would say to each and every one of us, without exception.

A Phone Call from Father Sabatino

Feast of Saints  Michael, Raphael & Gabriel

Phone calls are funny things.

I have a love/hate relationship with my phone.

I have often waited by it, hoping certain persons will call, who don’t.  I have often avoided it, too overwhelmed with things more urgent to even address the accumulation of voice mails, building up like some kind of virus that in the end will get me anyway, if ignored.

I am gradually learning that we cannot avoid what we fear, but even more importantly, these things we fear mostly are something for which we should not be afraid in the first place.  Anxiety is a lie.  Early this morning (too early, as I lingered in bed dreamily, listening to the rain) my cell phone startled me by ringing. So I reminded myself of that and picked up.

I had just gone public with my  critique of David Clayton who spoke at the illustrious Institute of Catholic Culture a few weeks ago, and was waiting for Satan to rear his ugly head and make his first punitive attack against me.

Attack 1.

The voice was amiable at first.

It was the newly ordained Father Hezekias  Sabatino Carnazzo, founder and head of the Institute of Catholic Culture.  (Congratulations on your ordination to the Priesthood, Father Carnazzo.  Don’t think I’m the last test you will have to face.)

Anyhow, as I was saying, Father spoke amiably at first with a voice sounding both calm, reasonable, and well… young.

But I am an oldster at fifty, so I guess everyone is starting to sound young to me.  He said it had come to his attention that a very disturbing “email” had been sent out, and asked if the sender could have been me?

I didn’t know about a disturbing email, except what artist/writer David Clayton had sent me, after he spoke at Carnazzo’s Institute.  I did know that last night, or early this morning I forget which, I had sent several links out to my latest blog post, Our Lady of Perpetual Help, The Meaning-heister and Men who Wear Hosen.

My post was  about a disturbing subject, David Clayton, and his plans to sell more books on his new “Catholic” method of eradicating the feminine presence (Mary) and the masculine (the cross) in homes across the world.  His methods smacked of brainwashing with intent to teach people to dangerously suppress all negative emotions. But I am flummoxed why Carnazzo would think my post was disturbing.

After all, I even gave it a humorous title.  Perhaps he didn’t get it.  (Hosen does not have to mean stockings Father.  My intentions were to mean pants, as in “Men who wear the pants in the family”. Don’t be so creepy minded. )

Father Carnazzo wrongly guessed my intentions repeatedly as we spoke on the phone.

He acknowledged that it was him who personally invited David Clayton to speak.  He wanted to know how I had gotten the email addresses of those who attended his event, to whom I sent my link.  I explained that I had signed up on the email list myself, and received all their email addresses when Clayton sent out his first email.  Clayton was inviting people to sign up to receive emails about his new 8 Point Plan in finding one’s vocation in life.

Startled at the subtly subversive creed he was preaching, I had signed up for the “8 Point Plan”, curious about the bunk that Clayton, with explicit permission of Father Carnazzo, was selling attendees.

I certainly did not lift or copy emails from the sign up sheet, though I sensed a certain disappointment in Father that he could not pin me down for that.

Perhaps I’m imagining things.

Anyhow, I explained to Father how I got the email addresses from David Clayton himself, all of them.  When he sent his first two attachments of subtle psychological brainwashing my way, he had attached all the email addresses himself.

Everyone who has been there knows the people who attend the Institute of Catholic Culture are by and large the faithful devout.  I care about these people.  I have learned from life’s experiences that not warning people of danger, under guise of adherence to some man-made “social custom of politeness” for which there is no true jurisdiction, is the grossest unkindness there is.  Even among Thomistic psychologists there is the ethical principle of  duty to warn.  This applies to every man, woman and child we come in contact with.

David Clayton knows there is a hidden Mystery behinds icons (and it is not the icons that are in themselves powerful) because he an icon artist.  His writings deny this Mystery, and attribute God-like power to man, the artist.

Father Carnazzo  knows Charity and the Rules of the Universe made by God are superior to the Disordered Shut up and Play Nice Censorship Rules that man imposes, when he has something to hide, because he is a priest.  A priest has absolutely no jurisdiction to ask me not to email someone, or command me to break the laws of charity in any way.

The little children of Mary talk to one another, Father Carnazzo, whether that is disturbing to you or not.

If we were protected by you, not Mary and her Son,  to protect us from scandal, you would not have invited your friend or whatever he is to you to speak there in the first place. We were not protected by you, nor are we bound by you.

But, Father insisted, Clayton did not “intend” for me to email everyone with a link to the critique I wrote against him, nor did he “intend” for people to get each other’s email addresses.  Man’s intentions must come first. Therefore, he said, he would ban me from The Institute of Catholic Culture should I not cease and desist. He said he “knows who I am.”

After all, he said,  they had been kind enough to feed me with “free food.”  That made me laugh.  Obviously he did not know me well enough to realize I owned my own coffee house.

Father simply could not understand why I wouldn’t promise complicity in a cover up job, or any part in hiding disturbing, but obvious and necessary information from the very people who attend his Institute, for the sake of a man who appears to have evil intentions against them.

Like I told Father Carnazzo, it would be fine if he banned me from the Institute of Catholic Culture.  My salvation does not rest upon The Institute of Catholic Culture, or any of the other so-called Catholic institutions that have disbarred me simply for stating truth out loud.   And though his phone call is disturbing in so much as it suggests even the ICC, with all the good it does do, is compromised with deadlock players…

I am still laughing to myself over his comment about the  “free food”.

Doesn’t he know, that the truth is free as well, and there are no laws that bind it?

Yes, false accusations, false imposition of guilt and responsibility, unrealistic demands, empty threats and promises, are usually just a sign, that someone has something to hide.

IF I speak with the tongues of men, and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal.   1 Corinthians 13:1

free-food

The Presence of Someone

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I have often pondered misogyny, man’s resentment towards the feminine, whether it be rooted in maternal neglect, the trauma of divorce, or the frightening power of so called radical feminists, those women who resent man. I have wondered if beholding Mary, the only sinless woman, is the only possible solution for hurting men.

I think it’s significant that Hope Himself rested in the arms of a woman.

My own resentments have not been against mankind.

They have been against those very institutions who claim to be set up to help those who suffer, but under whose auspices I know one will only find grief. This past week I went seeking help from a therapist referred to me by Project Rachel.

Afterwards I realized this woman was like looking at Mary for me.

Through this one woman I saw the natural, simple, and honest compassion that was supposed to be intrinsic to the profession of psychology all along.

I was there with regard to the abortion my mother had around fifty years ago.

At one point I tried to express to her the urgency I felt at finding out the details about my aborted sibling.  Twins do not run in my family genes that I know, but I have even started to wonder if I am a twin survivor.

This therapist liked to ask why.  Why do you think this or that is important to you?  Can we unpack that?

That sort of thing.

As I got in the car I thought how it’s like someone recently reminded me I lost something, a long time ago.  Now I’m trying to see the person connected to that  grief.  I not only have been carrying around my mother’s suppressed grief and imposed guilt my whole life, as her live birth, but also carrying around a personal loss.  I’ve been subconsciously aware of this  my whole life, but can’t see the face to whom the feelings are connected.

Now I know I need and have a right to see that little face, identify my own grief, to move forward.

I have two dogs that I love very much.

I remember the day my daughter and I went to the pound to adopt them.  They were two, almost full grown pups  kept in a cage together. They were of the same mother, a beagle, the last two of her litter.  They were keeping the puppies in a separate cage from the mother at this point. When I asked why the shelter employee explained that the mother had turned against these last two remaining pups as they got older, and  was starting to attack them. So my daughter and I went and sat down in a back room and they brought to us the first of the sisters we selected to see.

This first was very happy, jumpy and springy, with a splash of white coloring that made me imagine her half Springer Spaniel, if you will.  We knew immediately this one was meant to be our own.  But we wanted to see her sister dog as well.  When they brought her litter mate in, this second one immediately belly flopped with the greatest humility, so we knew we could not leave the remaining sibling behind.

We had to get them both.

It would have been too sad to just leave one behind.

Originally these pups had been named Mary and Grace, but we changed the name of the first dog to Cookie, and the second to Kiwi.

Kiwi looks different than Cookie, as if she had a different father who was part German Shepherd.  They say that can actually happen within the same litter.  The coloring on Kiwi’s face, her marks if you will,  make her look like she is perpetually a bit sad or concerned about something.

I’ve grown to love both dogs with an intensity that frightens me sometimes. I know they will probably die before I do.  But in the meantime, now that my children are grown, I take much joy, comfort and delight in them.  It is no silly, meaningless feminine contrivance for me to consider them great gifts from God.  It is gratitude. Dogs are woman’s best friend.

Cookie is the funny one, always getting into trouble, but with a child like innocence that makes me quick to forgive, no matter what and from whom, she snitches food off my table.  Cookie repays my overindulgence by sleeping right next to me, by my side in bed.  Between the two of them I worry about Cookie the most, as she would be the one to get lost, hurt, or run off in the woods, never to be seen again.

Last night I had a dream that there were dogs running across a great field, excited and barking, in a great and enormous pack.  A woman approached me and said that she had seen Cookie, but now Cookie was missing.

My heart lurched with sudden understanding and grief.

I started calling out Cookie’s name, running, desperate to spot that splash of white fur that would identify my own. I do not sorrow as much if other people’s dogs get lost or killed, but my heart is very involved in protecting this specific one.

One dog with white came to me obediently when I called to it,  but as it got closer I saw it was not Cookie, and the splash of white I thought I saw seemed to dissolve into brown.  The dog that approached me was becoming full beagle.  The sorrow and despair that I was felt was indescribable.  So I asked the woman, but you saw her, you know Cookie’s alive?

No, said the woman, she just came by my side for a moment.

As if I felt the sensed presence of someone who had gone down in battle.

When I awoke I knew it had just been a horrible nightmare, but my heart wrenched  in resistance.  The familiar warm feeling of Cookie sleeping peacefully beside my legs gave me some relief (I think she even let out a little doggie snore) because it made me know Cookie was safe.

But it is the need to know that Cookie can never be unsafe, like a stubbornness to pre-save her that tortures me.  I know I can never keep her safe from dying. In fact, I know she will some day.

So I know the answer is greater trust in God.

But that will be a part of my life that most likely, I will at least get to see.  I will get to grieve over my lost dog.  My aborted sibling I cannot even see.  I know he or she is safe with God because I have felt that child’s happy presence, but I feel a compulsion to correct the injustice of a death left unacknowledged and forgotten, a grief one cannot even observe.  It is not so much for my own sake, but for the sake of the lost child.

For it is only in this manner that I can pre-save the baby that my mother once lost, undo my mother’s crime for her, and return to her a lost child.

Before it is too late.

cs-lewis-quote-unraveled

Curtains

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What we see depends mainly on what we look for.
–  Anonymous

The curtains are open now, ever since Mom left, and I am alone in the house with the dogs and my daughter, whenever she returns home from college on seasonal breaks.  I hadn’t realized how long the curtains had been closed, blocking, as Mom said, the light that appeared so bright that it could “damage the furniture”.  How funny it is to page through one’s childhood like a book, counting how often one heard the expression “Shut the curtains!” like a fearful warning against the outside world. 

It’s funny how the paranoia that inspired the curtain-shutting, was verbally curtained itself. Mom acted as if it was about protecting furniture… but was it?

Regardless, all the curtains are drawn back or removed in the house now, symbolizing my bold embrace of whatever will happen to me, and the deeper answers, for which I now search.  Woods surround me, so I have little to fear of peeping Toms or invasion of privacy. No one is interested in my privacy anyway, now that Mother’s gone, let alone invading it, but my privacy is like a silent, suffocating tomb that will kill me, if I don’t keep those curtains open.

It’s not that the answers will come all at once, when I pass by a window.

It’s not as if a deer will suddenly alight on my lawn, allow me to follow it on secret pathway into the woods, to direct me to where my secret treasure lies, buried since ancient times, beneath centuries of snow and frozen earth.

But I do know I want to see all those off limit places, experience everything, explore those pathways, do everything that has been purposely withheld from me. If these things had to be purposely withheld from me, I wonder, are they not those that are specifically mine by birthright, to find? For I have lived more than half of my life in a tangled forest of another’s creation.

I was raised in it.

At night I lay awake in bed and look out a huge window, that takes up more than half the expanse of my wall. Most often the trees, the clouds, or the winter fog, will be covering the stars, but on this night I have been startled awake, to see a night sky so clear the stars are twinkling, as they say, in bright and merry profusion.  The light in them reminds me of my father’s eyes, that to me contained the mysteries of life.  It’s so beautiful, this scene, and I’m breathing slower now, resting. I feel as if I have finally stopped running, and have been running for as long as I can remember.

Meditating upon the stars, in some sort of divine and sleepy ecstasy, the stars seem to dance. They speak of beautiful secrets and constant truths that will be there forever, regardless of who notices their light, or who refuses to, hiding behind curtains and paneling of their own, or another’s making. Who knew the stars in the heaven could be so grounding. I am grateful that they were always there, no matter what, even as the ground upon which I walked shifted, like the waters of a turbulent sea.

Suddenly it dawns (to use another celestial expression) that their light shines on everyone –  the same stars, the same truths, regardless of perceived reflection, a person’s locale, even false perceptions, created by the shuttered nature of anyone’s mind.  Suddenly it’s most fitting that the magi were astronomers.

Because the stars never change, in their constancy. Only we, on the earth, do. 

I am a much less fearful person now.

Fearfulness doesn’t have to be genetic. 

And so, these thoughts having comforted me, before I drift back to more restful slumber, I make a very specific mental note to self. 

Never allow your mind to become shuttered, or have curtains imposed upon you against your will, ever again.  I choose the constant over the transitory, the lasting over death, and the real and beautiful, over my own darkened shadows and fears.


Though my soul may set in darkness, it will rise in perfect light; I have loved the stars too fondly, to be fearful of the night.  – Sarah Williams, The Old Astronomer

Daddy’s Baby

daddydaddys-baby-1People are silly who think love and relationships slowly fade away after death, like champagne bubbles popping, or butterflies released into the air.  For those who do not order their lives towards God, they usually pop their own bubbles, or pull their own plugs. However, for people who order their lives towards God, love and relationships are the only lasting reality there is.


My father was very hard working and very ordered.  He served God first, then family and country. 

After a distinguished military career, my father accumulated a basement filled with woodworking equipment in anticipation of his retirement from high up administrative positions in the federal government.  He did not just get one or two of each piece of equipment or power tools, but several of each, of varying degrees of quality, and quantity, as well as an assortment of smaller items stored within cabinets and upon workbenches, neatly categorized and labeled.   After his death, I was amazed at how many brand new pieces of equipment I found in boxes, never even opened, complete with owner’s manuals and even receipts.

My father was a lot like Santa Claus, preparing Santa’s workshop.

 

 

And it’s funny, because he loved Christmas and giving gifts.  As he got older and I was a young mother myself,  he’d induce me to help him go out in single digit weather to string Christmas lights around the front porch, where he lived with my mother still.  It was always me and him, sharing a secret, or hiding a present.  He instructed me in the ways of generosity and anonymous, unlimited self-less gift giving.  He loved surprising people with fruit baskets, and things left in doorways.

He loved secrets.

He loved charity.

That’s how it was done best.

For my mom he’d instruct me to wrap and hide the extravagant gifts he purchased her, and how to sign the tags Love Scrooge, St Nick, Santa Claus, Hum Bug or John. He’d make me go back up into the attic and re-hide them, so she’d “accidentally” discover them when bringing down the Christmas ornaments.

My father had a plan.  He had a vision.  He had a dream.  My father never expected a major stroke would wipe out his language center and render him totally handicapped right after his retirement. He remained that way, a painfully intelligent man, trapped without a voice, for ten years until his ultimate death from lung cancer ten years later.

My father’s tools sat untouched in the basement, for all those long years, accumulating dust.  They sat and they sat and they sat, for years even after my father’s death, and we all became rather unaware of them.  Our lives were very busy and we remained unaware of dust much as we remained unaware that my mother had finally escaped mental health care, and even her own mind.

When I returned to my father’s house and found out what the two neighbors my father had trusted and loved for so long (one on the left, and one ironically on the right) had done to him,  it shook me.  It frightened me.  It disturbed me to the core, that mankind could be so cruel.  For a long time I even felt physically ill, aware that a grief of this magnitude for my father could kill me if I lost faith in God. But then that would have been another injury and betrayal to him, as he never lost his.

My father had a soldier’s heart.  He was not perfect.  But the last Person he’d want to leave behind was Jesus, and I was probably a close second.

Because I was Daddy’s Baby.

To be continued, for this tale is not yet complete.


Night Sweats

mom-and-me-bertchesgaden-dec-1969-001It bothers me that the very people I suspect of keeping something from me that I need to know, tell me to “move on”.  It bothers me when people tell me empathy for myself and for my mother is obsessive.  Is survival obsessive?  But it is true I had become spent, my days a blur of exasperation, looking for answers…

My mother was going to keep her secrets, kill me before I found them out, or she would die trying.  All I had by way of diagnoses for her was scraps of my own memory.  One was the very vivid memory of a female counselor my father introduced me to, twenty years previous, who told me my mother had been treated for schizophrenia.  Schizophrenia.  It didn’t make sense at the time, and that’s why I at first dismissed it.  But the memory was not my imagination.  Schizophrenia was not something I could have cooked up.  And as far as I knew, it did not run in my maternal bloodline.

The friend of my father had shown me a picture of a very maternal looking lady involved in treating Mom, who looked vaguely familiar.

And why had a counselor been trying to talk to me about my mother?

Why had she showed me this woman’s picture?

Of course schizophrenia made more sense now –  my mother’s paranoia, her jealousy, the audio delusions and the splitting from “I’m going to get even with you” vengeance back into sweet little old lady. Sweet Little Old Lady had taken a lot of energy to perform, so she reduced it to public appearances. Mom isolated herself at first from friends, then from family.  My grown children were frightened of her, and avoided her entirely.  My daughter had the healthiest attitude, referring to her grandmother as the “Drama Queen”, though the stress of this period would catch up with her later.

Of course, “Drama Queen”  had been an understatement.

Now that Mom was with my brother, the only family member left she had not disavowed, far away in Connecticut, I scoured the office room back at home, looking for more clues.  I was beginning to spend long nights at my computer with a glass of Merlot, that all too often led to two, or three, or four.  The night sky would start to pale in the window behind the desk, where I sat surrounded by stacks of disordered papers I could never manage to sort through. These “computer nights”  taught me about anosognosia, online support groups, and how people with schizophrenia lack insight to realize that they even have schizophrenia.

These nights taught me about how there was a whole world of suffering family members who could not, because of the broken mental health care system, get help for those that they loved.  It taught me that the more I screamed out “Please help my mother!  She’s psychotic!  She wants to destroy me!” I would be told by the powers that be that I was either 1) crazy for saying so, or 2) uncharitable for not just letting her die.

Finally, computer nights taught me that if I didn’t find answers soon, I was going to become an alcoholic.

There is one thing I know now, that I didn’t know then.  If the truth about my mother was somewhere within me all along, buried in the recesses of my subconscious like a random page in one of my paper stacks, or memories perhaps as old as my childhood, it would not be revealed to me via a frantic search.

Like I said, I didn’t know that then.  But I prayed a lot, and fell asleep exhausted, night after night.

Maybe it was the wine.

But I was getting the impression I was having a repeat nightmare, whenever I finally let my mind and body relax, and go to sleep.

In the past I had dreamed about a real incident from my very early childhood, in which my mother had brought me to church with her.  I don’t remember even my brother being with us.  I had told her something was wrong, desperate, tugging at her sleeve.  This is not a real mass, Mommy. There were priests in back of an altar, moving around so very fast, from side to side.

As an adult I have wondered if this memory is just of an eastern rite liturgy, something of which I should not have been afraid.  But I know it’s a real memory, and I know I had fallen asleep, or dissociated,  during the service, because I was so terrified.

I was a sensitive child.

But now I was having a worse repeat dream of the same genre, only of a much darker and more surreal shade of evil, a night terror if you will.  In the morning the details of the narrative slip through my mind like fine powder through my hands,  lost in the grasping.  I wasn’t even sure I wanted to remember this dream,  because it was so horrible. I was left only with a heavy awareness of the presence of “ black”.

I would wake up in a cold sweat, my heart pounding.

Breathe, or else your heart will start palpitating. Just breathe. You have to stay alive.  Go into the bathroom and drink water.  You are thirsty, dehydrated, from drinking so much. Splash your face with cold water, while you’re in there. Hey wait a minute, didn’t Mom used to use that expression?  Where did she learn that?  You used to laugh, but it is a grounding technique.

Finally, one time, when I awake, frightening images remain with me like snap shots in my mind, as well as fragments of conversation.

An evil man in black, that I ironically pity, like a wizard, or a fake priest.  He’s holding a knife over me, raised up over my head to stab me.

My mother is lying there, somewhere in the background. She is young and beautiful, a pale sweet face in a cloud of dark hair.

She is always innocent.

Why is she letting them do this to me?  Is this man my father?

No, comes the gentle quiet voice to whom I had addressed the question.   That’s the other little girl’s father.

And he’s not killing you, he’s killing her.

I awake this time, my heart pounding.  What other little girl?

Dear God, please tell me, what other little girl?

And the thought that I had felt that they should have taken me instead.

Because, after all, the other little girl was just a baby.

In the morning I am disoriented.  I know my dream means something, yet I cannot believe what it seems to mean.  My mother take part in satanic ritual? That is stretching my own imagination to the limit, to the brink of insanity, is it not?  So once again, I am left all alone in my understanding,  to cry and to grieve, but I don’t even understand for whom I am crying.

Yet, I cannot escape the inner conviction, the inner contradiction,  that my mother, though innocent,  has done something horrible, and she is going to get away with it, the secret buried with her in her grave.

I know it, because somehow I was there.

I am back in bed, furtively saying the St. Michael the Archangel prayer.  I am frightened to the quick. I fumble around with my hands at the little bedside table where I keep a rosary and some prayer cards. I know I must remind myself that it is okay, because God is with me.

For though I should walk in the midst of the shadow of death, I will fear no evils, for thou art with me. Thy rod and thy staff, they have comforted me.

The Wild Audacity of Being Truthful

I recently came across a refrigerator magnet in a friend’s book store and impulse purchased it.  It is a quote in black against a white background, the message simply stating “all good things are wild and free.” It looks great on my refrigerator, a crisp modern font against a kitchen filled with vintage rolling pins, and repainted farm table.

I used to think my life was boring.  Now I see beauty everywhere. Now  I see excitement.  I see mystery.  I see paradox. I see joy.

How did this happen to me?

I see reality now, because I finally realized that my boring, sustained existence was just that – sustained, imposed upon me, a delusion presented by a narcissistic mother with a dark secret she felt a compulsion to hide. Let the curtain go up.  Now let’s reveal the truth.

Life is really not boring.  No one’s is.

Did you ever notice, a faux order and imposed politeness becomes mandatory with those who would abuse their authority to abuse others, to hide their own guilt?  This happens in all venues.  Let us suspect the politician who commits no social faux pas, the clergy man who has never sinned, the ladies who look perfect because they have had umpteenth face lifts and coif their hair, slipping their dainty feet into pointy toed shoe wear.  Perhaps this is because if little children told the simple truth, spoke out of turn, called the vain lady ugly, broke all the china and the man-made norms imposed upon them – to expose reality for what it is –  suddenly there would be a great universal paradigm shift. Suddenly, in a blink of an eye, the guilty would appear guilty, the innocent innocent, the handicapped beautiful and the monstrous people ugly.

Imagine not that there is no heaven, but imagine that. 

It’s a lot harder to imagine, but it’s easy if you try.

We are after all, just little children, all grown up.

Perhaps heaven is just a bold act of charity away.

Sure, one will be threatened with crucifixion upon exposing the crimes of the guilty.  So what.  We’ll go to heaven if we are martyred for truth.  But moreover, suspect that those who are abusive and hypocritical threaten you with nothing more than lies and deception.  That’s because that’s what abusers are made of.  Everything else is a ploy, and discovering this weak spot in the reality of a narcissist is what frees us from their binds.  People who are abducted are more likely to be killed if they do not scream out.

If everyone rejected the false fear of being politically incorrect, shouting and offending others, the false fear of speaking up in a crowd, and cried out instead “the emperor’s not wearing any clothes” evil politicians would fall.  Wrongs would be righted, unborn children wouldn’t be murdered, their surviving siblings wouldn’t be molested or abused, and the innocent suffering souls who have committed no unrepentant sin in their whole entire lives would simply inherit the earth.

It’s as simple as that.

Further more, if we take truth, bold truth, undiluted, and face ourselves with it, as uncomfortably painful as it is sometimes, we can free even ourselves from whatever binds, whatever oppresses, whatever we don’t want to look at because it deceptively frightens us to death.  We might even discover beneath all the heavily curtained windows, the slip covered ottomans, the rows and rows of delicately balanced mediocrity of frightening man-made rules and regulations, there was a deeper order. This order has nothing to do with our inner critic or the sins we have committed.   This is the order  in which we were innocent all along, made not even in our own parent’s image, but in the Image of Someone infinitely more innocent.

I say, imagine that, but imagine it, because it is true.

God is not a mean man with a stick.

Yes, all good things are wild and free.

So free your inner child.

Go break some china.