10.02.07
Decision by Mrs. Gerry Di Gesu
About ten years ago I served for a number of years as a Eucharistic Minister for my Catholic parish in New Jersey. This is a lay person who is allowed to distribute communion alongside the priest during mass and who can bring communion to someone who is ill at home or in the hospital. I felt proud and considered it an honor and privilege but there was always an underlying unease, a discomfort in this role.
Ever since I was a child I considered God my best friend and talked to Him daily. But as much as I loved the ritual of weekly mass and the feeling of belonging to a parish community, the older I got the more I questioned the rules of the church and the authority of the Pope. Too many rules seemed to be church rules – not God’s rules – and had nothing to do with being a good person and kind to others.
I struggled with these feelings many years as I went to mass each Sunday with my family, became active in my parish and participated in a three year course to become a lay minister. Ritual, tradition and the friendships formed through a wide variety of church activities helped fill a need and a void through many passages of my life.
And then came one particular Easter Sunday. I stood at the altar with the other Eucharistic Ministers, waiting to share communion and looked into the faces of the people who packed the church. I felt like a hypocrite and a cheat. How could I distribute communion to them when I knew that increasingly I disagreed with more church rules and laws.
I distributed communion to the long lines of parishioners and was almost finished when the Superintendent of Schools stood in front of me. Since I was an employee of the school system, he was in fact my boss even though we had no daily contact. I had known him for years on a personal level and through those years had come to distrust and dislike almost everything about him, especially his priorities as far as teachers and students were concerned.
I stared at him as he stood before me. The words and the realization “Gerry who are you to judge him or anyone else. How do you know what pain this man has inside him and what makes him who he is. God loves him as he loves you.” I felt chastised and unworthy standing in front of the altar. My hand was shaking as I handed the host to him.
I returned to the pew where my family waited and knelt for final prayers. I tried to pray but couldn’t quiet my pounding heart and racing mind. I had never felt so humbled yet at the same time felt a complete sense of freedom.
God is still my best friend and I try to find Him in everyone I meet each day. My faith is strong and I feel at peace with God. But I have never gone back to mass.
Comment from MPJ: There is not a clear pattern here of moving through the stages - this person states at the outset that she had always considered God her best friend, ever since childhood, which makes her sound more like a Stage Four to start. But the gradual rejection of the church’s rules, and realizing they were mostly made up by man and did not serve God in any way tends suggest at that point she was starting to reject the Stage Two parts of her religion. And even when she walked away from the church per se, it sounds like she sort of skipped right over a real Stage Three - except that the sense of freedom she mentions does seem to be typical of Stage Threes as they cast aside the stricutres of their original religion. The last paragraph about trying to find God in everyone she meets sounds like Stage Four belief to me.
Judy Beckman said,
November 21, 2007 at 6:20 pm
Sometimes the “box” becomes more and more uncomfortable as we grow in our relationship with God, and it cannot hold us anymore. We find our spirituality in relationship with God and people. Truth sets us free, and we are free indeed!