I must confess, I haven’t been to communion in a long time. To be exact, since the runt died on the morning of October 29, 2007. For some time after he passed, I didn’t hear mass. I waged a boycott of sorts. Going to Sunday Mass is a celebration and I just didn’t have the energy to celebrate. I was grieving, what/ why would I celebrate? Mama respected my need to do things my way, didn’t judge, and didn’t insist on anything. Maybe she just kept on praying that I would find my way back, as in the Parable of the Prodigal Son. And I did, eventually, after grappling with the chokehold of grief on me.
I’m not sure when I started going back to church and Sunday Mass. But for many Sundays, I was just in church sitting, not necessarily praying, not even listening, but always trying not to think. Of course, my mind often wandered. How our chapel needed repairs. How many of our neighbors had passed on too just like Papa and chose to hold their wakes there. How the runt’s friends have grown. At mass, in deep grief, I often thought about our many discussions in Fr. Francis Reilly, SJ’s philosophy class in 1993. About how hard it is to reconcile a loving God with vile diseases and human suffering. About evil and a loving God. About going through a rational inquiry to prove God’s existence. Fr. Reilly gave me a B+ in that class but fast forward to 2008, the B+ really meant nothing. I asked the same questions that we tried to answer in Fr. Reilly’s class all over again. However, this time, I couldn’t answer many of these questions with certainty, unlike in my philosophy orals. I was changed by my grief experience. And it hurt that God was awfully quiet. And I couldn’t ask Fr. Reilly who had joined the company of the saints by then, like Papa and runt.
It’s been almost nine years since Papa’s passing, eight since the runt’s, and things have somehow gotten better. God is still a quiet God, just as Fr. Reilly had depicted Him. I know that God exists even in the saddest of events, despite the evil and suffering in the world. I think He’s there in the stillness, in prayers offered by a contrite heart, in good and sincere intentions, in efforts big and small to make the world a better place. I think God loves (and is amused) by the hoopla, fanfare, and noise, but prefers solitude. Fr. Reilly and I could always be wrong though. 🙂
writingthatcouldbeunderstood 