Soul-Searching

“What do you girls have to say for yourselves?” My best friend and I stood speechless as Mrs. L., our eighth grade religious education instructor who had recently prepared us for confirmation, probed us with interrogating eyes. I could hear the seconds tick away on the wall clock in the audio visual room of the Catholic school we attended.

“Do you realize what you’ve done?” Mrs. L tapped her lip with her index finger as she waited for our response.

My mind rushed back to earlier that afternoon. Raindrops pounded the roof and dribbled down the classroom windows. My friend’s eyes popped as she read the hand-written limericks I’d copied onto loose-leaf paper. Sensing the gym teacher, a big and tall man on hall duty that afternoon approaching her seat, she quickly jammed the papers into her desk. He pulled the papers out with his large hands and studied them. Was he disgusted? Amused? I couldn’t tell. He casually stuffed the papers into his pocket and strolled out.

Later that afternoon, Mrs. L. stood before us and shook her head. “Well, it looks like you girls have a lot of soul-searching to do…”

I remember my friend rolled her eyes and exploded into laughter after Mrs. L. walked out. I laughed too, but I didn’t feel like laughing. I didn’t feel much of anything, except confusion mingled with a mounting sense of guilt, but I wasn’t sure why. I thought the limericks, albeit sexual in language, were harmless rhymes. No big deal. Mrs. L. is just overreacting. She’s just doing her job as a teacher, especially a religious education teacher in a Catholic grade school.

For years I couldn’t understand why the limericks were wrong to read and spread around between friends, but at the same time I couldn’t just dismiss Mrs. L.’s reproach as the rantings of a strict Catholic grade school teacher. Through the years, I haven’t been able to shrug off the weight of Mrs. L.’s most poignant, compound word from the incident: soul-searching.

When I think of soul-searching, I think of Saint Augustine and his Confessions and other saints throughout the ages who had conversion experiences, “spiritual aha moments” where suddenly the words of pious parents and/or uptight Catholic school teachers makes sense, that moment when we first feel the presence of God in our lives, the moment when we first realize that God is asking us to follow Him, to trust what we are feeling. Until I personally experienced the grace of God in my life a year and a half ago, about thirty years after the limericks occurrence, Mrs L.’s reaction had never made sense to me.

I clearly remember the afternoon l first felt God’s grace. I was feeding my mom who suffered from late-stage dementia. It wasn’t unusual to take two to three hours to feed her one meal, as she could only safely swallow very small amounts of food. I’d pass the time on YouTube watching music videos and other secular media. This particular afternoon I noticed the acronym NDE (near death experience) on the right side of my computer screen. I’d seen the letters daily for some time now, always deciding I was too busy to click on it, but that day was different. I felt drawn to that side of the computer screen. Something I can’t fully explain deep within me prompted me to click on one of the videos. Soon, I was watching video after video of personal testimonies of people who claimed their souls had left their bodies where they encountered Christ and/or Satan and, after a short period of (earthly) time, had re-entered their physical bodies to live longer (and, most importantly--better lives).

At this time in my life I wasn’t particularly religious. I’d been attending Mass only on Christmas. Further, I’d also become quite irritated with two of my close friends and had decided that I didn’t really need any friends and didn’t care if I ever interacted with them again. These near death experience testimonies somehow led me to videos regarding the visions of an obscure Polish nun who lived in the early part of the twentieth century by the name of Maria Faustina Kowalska, now Saint Faustina, the Apostle of Divine Mercy.

Almost instantly one common theme emerged for me from all the near death experience videos I viewed and mystics like St. Faustina: Forgiveness, the importance of letting go of any hard feelings towards anyone while we’re still alive. Before viewing these videos, I had no intention of picking up the phone and calling my friends who I’d decided to lose contact with. It wasn’t until I viewed St. Faustina’s visions of heaven, purgatory, and hell, that I stopped in my tracks and decided to listen to the Lord speaking through her. It wasn’t as easy to listen and believe ordinary people speaking of dying and returning to life. Maybe they never really saw or spoke to Christ, even for a moment; they’re just speaking from an altered state of consciousness. St. Faustina, on the other hand, is a canonized saint. Miracles have been credited to her intercession. If these unknown people are speaking of similar experiences then, I thought, there’s something real here, something not to be ignored.

From that day on, I watched more of YouTube, but stopped watching secular videos and would only watch and listen to Catholic media. I first discovered the acclaimed writer, speaker, and theologian from the Archdiocese of Chicago, Father Robert Barron, on YouTube. I watched almost every one of his many engaging videos about faith and the culture. I listened to homilies of priests both here in the United States and even abroad wherein I absorbed a variety of information on all aspects of the Church, everything from the sacrament of Confession to exorcism. I also learned about atheistic communism and its link to feminism and the breakdown of the family and how this all fits into the message of Our Lady of Fatima and Our Lady’s request for the conversion of Russia to her Immaculate Heart in order to restore world peace, something that many argue has never properly been done. Maybe this is why ISIS now exists in the world. I also watched countless videos and films about different saints. It was the homilies I listened to regarding Confession, though, that brought me to the confessional on a regular basis.

Prior to my YouTube catechism, I had only been to Confession once back in the fourth grade. I decided I needed to go. A lot had happened since then, the limericks incident in eighth grade being only the beginning in a thirty-five year old list of offenses that was growing longer by the day. My first return to Confession, though, wasn’t complete. I knew I needed to go again. This time, confessing everything I could remember, a lot of which was uncomfortable, a lot of which I knew must be said, especially after everything I’d recently learned. It was this second return to the confessional in thirty-five years in which I experienced God’s grace most profoundly.

After making my penance of three Hail Marys, I strolled through the church foyer wherein I noticed the most delightful floral scent, combined with a feeling of peace I’d never felt before, one that seemed to engulf my whole being, one that seemed to flow from not inside of me but from outside of my being. I whipped my head around looking for an air freshener or fresh flowers. Unable to identify a physical reason for the mysterious scent, I proceeded to walk out, without giving the experience much more thought.

It wasn’t until later that evening that I thought what I smelled may be a divine sign of sorts, maybe the presence of the Blessed Mother herself since I mentioned her and Fatima during Confession and my penance was three Hail Marys, or maybe St. Faustina, since I’d begun saying the Divine Mercy Chaplet daily, and she is the reason I returned to Mass. Or maybe I imagined the whole thing. I could speculate all I want, I was never going to know for certain the origin of the scent, so I placed the thought in the back of my mind--until something similar happened again. Only this time, I didn’t smell anything.

Shortly after having noticed the scent, I had a Mass said for the Holy Souls in purgatory, another devotion I developed from watching Catholic media. I’d learned that the Blessed Mother visits the souls in purgatory regularly and provides relief and refreshment to them. The first Mass I had said for purging souls was on All Saints Day, 2013. I remember feeling at ease during the whole Mass, similar to how I felt when I first noticed the mysterious scent, but I didn’t smell anything out of the ordinary like before. My cousin came to visit me after I got home from Mass. We were in my car, enroute to a restaurant, when she asked me what kind of perfume I was wearing, that she had never smelled anything like it before. I told her I wasn’t wearing any perfume. She, too, experienced a feeling of deep relaxation while smelling the scent.

Other signs would appear but not on a regular basis and at the most unexpected times. The last year of my mom’s life I said the Chaplet of Divine Mercy daily around 2:40 p.m. rather than 3:00 p.m., the hour of Mercy, because I tended to my mom around 3:00 p.m., and I didn’t want to miss saying the chaplet. She took her last breath around 2:38 p.m. on October 8, 2014, a beautiful sunny day. I distinctly recall the sun suddenly hiding behind clouds at the moment of her death and then emerging again once she had passed on. The rest of the day remained cloudless as well as the day of her funeral. I also said the rosary for her daily. October is the month of the rosary. On the day of her funeral, my sister’s kids noticed that a glass sculpture of Christ that they have at home was oily to the touch and dried blood tears had streamed down Christ’s face.

I remind myself daily that I could either chalk these events up to coincidence or divine intervention. I choose to attribute them to the latter. My mom had regularly said novenas and other prayers for me and my siblings decades earlier. I used to walk in on her as she held a rosary between her fingers. She would place her finger on her lips instructing me to be quiet as my voice would interrupt her concentration. I believe that her persistent prayers for me throughout my life are the reason I came across near death experience videos that day I was feeding her. Like St. Augustine, the time had come for me to have a change of heart, to come to the Lord on my own accord after years of my mom’s prayers. Throughout my life, whenever I had a problem, my mom would tell me “just pray.” She never offered any other words of comfort to me and, foolishly, I resented her for not knowing the right words, for not being able to make everything instantly alright.

I had always thought I believed in God. I now realize it was just blind faith, inherited belief. I believed because my parents believed and so did their parents and so on. Before my conversion, I never had a personal relationship with God; I never felt his presence; I never felt a connection to Him in any way, shape or form. I never believed in the power of prayers like my mom did, and because of that, I had suffered for so many years when all I had to do was say rosaries and chaplets, and I had believed that things like dirty little limericks were harmless fun, no big deal.

I knew even as an eighth grader that the rhymes were written to entertain and that whenever sex is the butt of a joke it’s offensive to God, but I never really understood why, especially if it was only language, only words, and I had no intention of becoming sexually active myself. It wasn’t until my conversion experience that I understood what glorifying God (the objective of any true believer) really means. Mocking sexuality, which is a gift from God, does not glorify God in the least. In fact, it’s downright disrespectful to Him and His purpose for sexuality. Most importantly, prior to my conversion, having fun, no matter how innocuous the offense may appear on the surface, trumped giving God glory. It wasn’t until I made a conscious choice to stop for a moment and listen to God that day while feeding my mom that God’s grace could pour freely into my life. For me to label Mrs. L.’s anger as over the top and prudish in order to justify my transgression is to dismiss God’s will in favor of my own, the very definition of sin.