A life without the sacraments

By Susan Brinkmann
CS&T Correspondent

No one noticed the anxious young woman who got off the train at Suburban Station in the middle of a spring morning in Philadelphia. She was supposed to meet a man in town, even though somewhere, deep down inside, she knew this relationship was all wrong. He wasn’t an evil man, but he was bad enough and had issues with the law.
“My mother didn’t like the man,” Nancy said (not her real name). “She was afraid for me, but she didn’t say anything. So I left the house around 8 a.m. to take the train downtown, and the closer I got the more frightened I became. It came to a point when I wondered, ‘Should I even be near this guy?’” Nancy lived with her mother and an aunt and uncle in a North Philadelphia neighborhood. About her father, she “had no clue.” Her siblings were scattered among relatives, because her mother was unable to support them. Raised Catholic, she went to church every Sunday and holy days, and was a member of the Miraculous Medal Sodality.
“I did all the things cradle-Catholics do, until my early teens, when I got involved with someone. That’s when the Church went out the door,” she said.
She started to live a kind of double-life. “My family knew me as one person and my friends knew me as another. I still went to church every Sunday and every holiday and holy day, but I was in a sinful relationship. One lasted for a long time, then after that there were two others.”
Throughout these years, Nancy continued to go to church and, for a while, was even receiving Communion. “I had no clue. I only knew that God was up there somewhere. He didn’t have a face. He didn’t have a name, outside of ‘God.’’”
But she was definitely searching in that round-about way so many of us do. In search of the kind of guidance only God can give, she turned instead to horoscopes and tarot cards, and even began reading books about various cults. “I didn’t necessarily get involved in them, but I was on the periphery. I just wanted to know about them. This is what I thought faith was — intellectual knowledge.”
At some point, she became aware of an inner-feeling of discomfort that was strong enough to convince her to stop receiving Communion. “I had a deep-seated conviction of wrong. I just felt in my heart that I couldn’t receive Communion anymore. It was the Holy Spirit, but at the time, I had no idea who the Holy Spirit was.”
He was whispering to her, trying to protect her from making things even worse for herself by receiving sacrilegious Communions. She knew what sin was, even though — on an intellectual level — she convinced herself it was okay. Still, deep inside, she knew better.
Then came the day of decision, when she was supposed to meet this man downtown. “The week or two before this, I was in such turmoil. ... I was going to marry this person, but you know how it is when you’re in a relationship with someone you think you love. Nothing anyone can say about them makes a difference ... even when you know what they’re saying is probably true. You just don’t want to see it.”
Uncertainty finally got the better of her. When she got off the train, instead of going to meet the man, she walked all around the city. “I walked until I was exhausted, then decided to go home. There was a great deal of soul-searching, and many tears. I knew that if I stepped over the line that day, I would never return.”
He was dragging her down into a world of immorality and vice, and somehow she knew that this day wasn’t only about her and him: “It was about deciding between heaven and hell. It was as simple and direct as that.”
It was a turning point in her life. “The next day, I knew something had changed, that I had changed.” Cutting off the relationship was giving her a chance to breathe, to think things through, to get hold of herself.
“The first thing on my list was to go to confession, but I was too ashamed to go to my parish priest. I worked downtown so I decided to go to St. John the Evangelist. When I walked into that confessional, I was so terrified I was sweating. Just the fact that I had to say what my life had been like for the last 10 years terrified and embarrassed me. What was the priest going to say? Was I going to be banished off the face of the earth? I hadn’t been to confession in years.”
Kneeling inside the dark box, she unloaded her soul, and told the priest everything. Every once in a while, when she told him something particularly bad, she thought she heard him catch his breath. But then came the time for absolution.
A gentle, loving voice whispered through the screen. “God loves you and has been waiting a long time for you to do this.”
She was stunned. “Until that moment, I had no idea that God doesn’t look at even the worst sinner with eyes of condemnation. He looks at you with such love that no matter what you’ve done, it just melts away in His Presence.”
When she came out of the confessional, she said, “I felt like I was floating three feet off the ground. I never even realized there were other people around me.” Grace had never felt so good.
“It was like taking a warm bath right after climbing out of a pile of garbage. It was the beginning of a brand new life. ...,” she said. “It’s hard to express how awesome that was. I don’t think anyone who hasn’t been on the other side can understand where I’m coming from.”
Her outlook changed completely:“Intellectually, emotionally, physically. I thought I was happy before, but really what I was doing was like running in cement.”
As a lukewarm Catholic, she had spent years sitting uninvolved and uninterested in the pew every Sunday.
“I didn’t have a shot in the dark about who God is. Most of us cradle-Catholics are marvelous, wonderful, God-fearing people, but we don’t want to come out of our box,” she said. “We’re afraid of what He might ask us to become, and the devil knows it — so that’s the button he pushes.”
But there’s hope.
“The devil might know what buttons to push, but God’s got the control panel,” Nancy said. “So just go ahead and take the first step. No matter where you are in life, there comes a moment when you’ve got to start taking God seriously or you’re never going to have a clue about yourself, your life, or God.”
And never mind those fears about what He’ll expect you to do, she says. There’s just one thing any one of us will find out, after running away from God for so many years — how long He’s been waiting to welcome us home.

Contact Susan Brinkmann at fiat723@aol.com or (215) 965-4615