True Confessions of an old tired woman...

whose interested anyway?
but it's my blog and I'll ramble if I want to...
Where to start?
Why I am writing this…
I was born and raised a Catholic. Graduated from St. Agnes High School in Rochester NY (class of 1970) with an award for Excellence in Theology. Fell away from the faith. Fell away hard. Was “born again” in 1979, married a Catholic hating Christian. Now, many years later I am living in Farmington, NM. My husband (an licensed minister with Open Bible Standard Churches) drives a propane truck across the Navajo Reservation and the only radio station he picks up is Catholic. We’ve been listening to it a lot actually, and watching EWTN as well. And I heard about your organization on the Radio, my confirmation name is Bernadette, and I guess you could say, I’m feeling compelled to write. In all honesty, I can’t believe I am even remotely considering going back to the Catholic Church. Perhaps the compulsion is a result of my great aunts prayer. It was her prayers which brought me safely into this world. And although we have been out of touch since I moved away from Rochester, I just found out that on November 18th she celebrated her 100th birthday at the St. Joseph Mother House. Aunt Gertrude has been a nun, a sister of St. Joseph for most of her life, being brought up in a Catholic orphanage and taking vows in her teens.
I guess I’ll start with her. My mother converted to Catholicism when she was 14. She married my father just after she turned 17, an Italian/German Catholic. They were much too young to get married. My mom got pregnant right away, but was told at 7 months that I was going to be still born due to the RH factor in her blood. They suggested terminating the pregnancy because if I were to begin to decompose within her womb it would kill her.
My father’s aunt, Sr. Theresa Clair, counseled my mother not to let them take me, and called her friends together in the convent to pray for me. I was born, without complications on February 11, 1952 and was named Mary Ellen. I was born a month before my mother’s 18 birthday. As I said, my parents were way to young to get married, my mother was a stubborn woman and my father had a hot temper. By the time I was 4 years old, their marriage was over and I was living with my paternal grandparents who raised me Catholic and saw to it that I received a Parochial education.
Unlike some of my “born again” counter parts, I have no horror stories about Catholic schools, no negative Catholic memories. I have always been grateful for the fine education I received, and for the foundation of faith that was laid.
Upon graduating from high school (remember the award for Excellence in Theology), I attended a community college, remained active in my church, joined the Newman Society at school, and in 1972 I married a young man who had been adopted into a Catholic family and also educated in Catholic Schools. We were married in a Catholic Church.
But shortly after the wedding the emotional and sexual abuse began. He forced me to watch hard core pornography, and in the four years that we were married, he actually “made love” to me less than 10 times, preferring unnatural sex. I decided to leave him, hoping that once I was gone, he would come to his senses and we would be able to work things out. Although I had stopped going to church, I had not stopped praying, and I decided to go to a friend of ours, a priest, whose name I don’t recall, pastor at Holy something church in Charlotte, NY I think. I told my husband I was going. He was already living with and sleeping with a friend of mine, but he said he’d go with me. We sat in Father’s office and I spilled out my heart. Then I was asked to go into the other room so Father and my husband could talk. After that, I was called back in and Father told me that he had wanted to talk to him privately because he surmised that I was exaggerating and he wanted to hear his side of the story. After having my whole story confirmed, the priest asked me why I had stayed with him for so long. I said it was because I had vowed to stay, for better or for worse, until death do us part. He said that I would have no trouble getting an annulment from the Church and he would begin the proceedings as soon as I said. But I said not to bother, that I’d never get married again anyway, and that I felt God was letting me down because the Bible, Jesus says, that whatever we asked according to His will he would give us, and I wanted our marriage restored not annulled. When I walked out of that office, I walked away from the Church too, feeling angry and rejected by God.
And the down hill spiral began, faster and faster I fell.
God hated divorce. Even if I found a decent man, it would still, according to Scripture be adultery. A piece of paper wouldn’t change that. Prayer didn’t work.
But I was always a very spiritual person, so I started looking for truth, enlightenment in other places. This “good” little Catholic girl sought after false gods and goddesses, took mind altering drugs as if they were sacraments, and allowed herself to be talked into murdering her unborn child because it wasn’t a convenient time. You can’t kill a living soul, I was told, we’re simply asking it to go back and wait until we are ready. I knew it was a sin, I hated myself for doing it, I remember sitting on the edge of the procedure table feeling as if every angel in heaven was trying to pull me out of the room. I remember hearing the doctor saying at the end, “from the pieces of the fetus we found…”
In 1979, I was alone and meditating. I had been disillusioned by all the other paths I tried to follow. I had encountered a group of followers of Wicca who were, I told them, “just as hypocritical as any Christian I’ve ever met.” But I was so alone and so hungry for the truth. I called out to the light from a single candle, “I don’t even know your name” and I heard the answer, deep in my soul, all around me in my solitude. “What do you mean you don’t know my name? I am Jesus. The same Jesus you prayed to as a little girl, and I’ve been waiting all this time for you to come home.”
I came back to Jesus. But I couldn’t go back to the Church. As I think about it, there are 3 main reasons I didn’t just go find a priest. The first was Mary. When I was in my early teens, my mother’s second husband was a Charismatic, Catholic Hating, Alcoholic who showed me in the Bible where we were only supposed to have one intercessor, and equated the worship of Mary and the Saints to the worship of false gods and goddesses. I did bring up the question to my religious instructors but didn’t quite understand their answer. It seemed to me then that it was definitely anti Biblical. After all I had been through, I didn’t want to deal with the question of Mary and the Saints. Besides I had a ton of mortal sins under my belt, and going back to Roman Catholicism was going to be awfully complicated. I had tried once, before the abortion, before leaving Rochester, to go to confession. I went to a church where no one knew me, and I watched for the youngest looking priest. After my confession, he gave me a short lecture about how I was damned to hell and if I had died before going to confession I would have surely skipped purgatory and gone strait to hell. Then he told me to say 5 Hail Mary’s and 5 Our Fathers and all would be forgiven. It seemed like nonsense to me. Like saying some magic words over and over again would break a curse. The idea of Mary and Confession and the burden of a failed marriage, kept me out of the Church. At the time I had two Christian friends, neither Catholic. And shortly after my encounter with Jesus, I met the man who is currently my husband. As I stated earlier, he used to be seriously anti-Catholic, thinking of the church as the Great Harlot of Revelation. So I became an Evangelical, Bible studying, Born Again Christian. I felt closer to Jesus than I had ever felt before. I was active in the church. Gosh this letter is getting too long.
Bless you, whoever you are, if you are sticking to this. Perhaps this is being written just for my own welfare. But it is Sunday morning, and I haven’t even had my first cup of coffee, and I need to get ready for Church…I’m gonna take a break. But it won’t seem that way to you dear reader, whoever you are…maybe I’ll just post this on my blog. Then my “Christian” readers will start to pray for me that I don’t continue with this foolish idea of returning to the Catholic church. Hummm, I wonder, whose prayers are stronger. Because I’m pretty sure that good old aunt Gertrude is still praying for me.