I stood in the void and begged God to show me what was real.
I had been in Madonna House six years, stationed at our poustinia house in Gravelbourg, Saskatchewan, when my mother was diagnosed with a rapidly spreading cancer. I returned home to be with her and my father during the last few months of her life.
The Nazareth life of simple, everyday service that I’d learned in the Apostolate gave me the tools to care for her lovingly and simply, to stand with her in faith, and to support my father and sister.
Only days after my mother’s death in August 1977, we discovered that my father himself was terminally ill with an advanced stomach cancer. He died six weeks later. Both he and my mother were fifty-eight years old.
My family was Jewish. Neither of my parents had a strong personal faith, but we had a sense of belonging to a people and a religious practice similar to the proverbial “Christmas-and-Easter-Catholics.” I was the only Christian in the family, baptized at Madonna House at age twenty-two after a long search for God and the meaning of my life.
During the months of my parents’ illness and its aftermath, I found myself immersed once more in the Jewish suburb and world where I’d grown up. As an adolescent, I’d chafed at its narrowness; now I was fascinated by the rich ethnicity.
After my father’s death, while my sister and I were arranging to sell our family home, I took advantage of the opportunity to attend synagogue services, enrol in night courses, and participate in a Saturday morning Torah discussion group.
I continued to go to Mass at a nearby parish and take part in the local Catholic charismatic prayer group. This busy religious schedule was a buffer against the loss I was not yet ready to confront directly.
I expected that once I returned to Gravelbourg, I would simply take up the life I had left five months earlier. To my bewilderment, I found myself a stranger in what suddenly felt like a totally foreign world.
What has happened to me? I wondered confusedly. What have these eight years since my baptism been about? Did I don a new set of clothes and call it conversion? Was that all my Christianity consisted of?
It was as if my former self had died with my parents.
I clung to faith in the one God, but I was no longer sure of anything else. I grieved my parents. I could not touch the reality of the resurrection and refused to cheapen it by painting pictures of paradise in my imagination.
Week after week I went to the poustinia, and week after week I cried all the tears I had been unable to shed during the weeks at home. When I could weep no more, I began to write, pouring onto paper all the pain, the doubts, the questions that were in my heart. Then, when I was empty and naked, I stood in the void and begged God to show me what was real.
Slowly, over the course of that year, he began to answer me.
One day I asked him, “Why can I not just live in the full, rich, simple, and loving way that is the essence of Judaism?” In my heart I heard, “That is what I too wanted at the beginning. But the world I created was invaded by sin. That is why I sent my Son and why you must now cling to him for your life.”
Opening the Scriptures, I read, When the Spirit of Truth comes, he will lead you into all truth (Jn 16:13), and I have told you this so that you can find peace in me (Jn 16:32).
On Good Friday, as I listened to the reading of the Passion, I felt as if I stood at the edge of the crowd, having believed in this Man, but no longer understanding anything. At Easter I begged God, “Help me to believe my parents are with you. Show me what this means.”
“Put yourself in my hands, Miriam,” he said. “Trust me.” His words were more real than my own emotional turbulence, deeper than grief, deeper than my questions. He did not give me answers, but he said, “Trust me.”
I wrote in my journal:
“My conversion to Christianity was not from Judaism, but from secular humanism. Now that I have begun to recognize in Judaism my deepest roots, how do I claim this tradition, while remaining true to what God has been saying to me these past nine years? The answers, I think, have to be found in the experience of my weakness, sinfulness, and need of a saviour.
“The wound of my parents’ deaths cannot be transformed into some easy image of an afterlife. I am only now beginning to have a sense that all is not ended for them; that despite the pain and suffering that filled their lives and overwhelmed them in their last years, they were not ultimately defeated. Their courage and love and real goodness have an enduring significance. This, for now, is my intimation of resurrection.”
As I lay in bed one night in mid-July, an image of my mother came into my mind. It wasn’t a dream, or even an “experience.” The image took form in my drifting consciousness, and I let my imagination build on it.
The picture was very clear and very tender. My mother was well, her face freed of the tension of illness. Her voice was full of love and concern as she told me not to mourn her or my father. “Honey, you don’t have to worry about us. We want you to live your own life.”
I knew this was what she had always wanted for my sister and me. It was as if she were telling me to let go of her and my father, telling me that I must not build my life on their illnesses and deaths but on the truths I had experienced. It was time to leave father, mother, brother and sister, and come, follow me (cf. Mt 19: 21, 29).
My father had had multiple sclerosis for many years and, by the time he died, was completely dependent on a wheelchair or electric scooter. Shortly before the first anniversary of my mother’s death, I suddenly had an image of him walking. It was as if he were alive and healed — he was alive and healed.
Jewish tradition prescribes eleven months of mourning before one lets go of the past and moves on. I had not sought to let go of mourning, but it was as if the page had been turned. It was as simple, as delicate, and as tangible as that. It had nothing to do with me but with the faithfulness of the God who said, I will not leave you orphans (Jn 14:18).
Christ is risen! Truly he is risen!
