My mom called me first thing this morning: “Elizabeth, did you call me last night?”
No mom.
“Are you sure?”
Maybe I did a butt dial. What’s going on mom?
“I just woke up, and am still sitting in bed. I was calling you back because you called me in the middle of the night to tell me the pope had died, but I guess I must have dreamed that.”
Mom, he did just die. This morning in Italy, just about 5 hours ago. I’m sorry. He was a good man and we loved him.
“You didn’t call me in the middle of the night to tell me?”
No Mom. I didn’t know how to tell you.
My mom has always been psychic. The women in my family have been attuned to each other’s big moments for as long as I can remember. We usually dream of each other’s pregnancies, or puke empathic morning sickness even before the pregnant one knows or tells a soul.
We dream of things that are just like normal conversations and occurrences, then wake up needing to confirm if they are real or not, so we don’t sound crazy.
But to each other, this is normal stuff.
You know what I mean by real: things reported on the common news.
When I came downstairs this morning, my daughter, also in our fold of knowing said to me, “the pope died.” I immediately felt sad and we looked at each other. He has the same birthday as her. We saw this in each others eyes. Sad. Nothing more to say. She had seen the news on her phone.
Pope Francis was a good, good man, embodying love, speaking from love, and holding others of power near the power of love, even within his role as authority of the Catholic Faith.
Pope Francis kept the love more powerful than power. To me this is one of the many gifts he’s left us this day after Easter.
Refugees were important to him, because, he said they were important to Jesus. I feel he’s right. Those with shifting homes, migrants, those taking care of each other and their families the shadows of society… they matter and are closest to the heart of humanity.
Pope Francis never held back a blessing from anyone, even if the church said some marriages didn’t count, that some things were not tradition. He loved and blessed, while he slowly and gently opened doors to more and more love, more and more acceptance, more and more inclusion. If he could live another generation, I’m sure he have opened up the church even more.
Loads of acceptance, little judgement. I felt like I knew him. I wish I had.
Chosen and Lapsed Catholic
I was never confirmed into the Catholic faith. Instead I snuck around the seventh grade nights I should have been at church classes, roaming the streets of my small town, smoking cigarettes and finding boy friends. My mom was Hindu then, but would have killed me for being out after dark. I could get hit by a car after all.
“Poor visibility,” she’d say.
I had chosen to be Catholic a few years earlier. After hearing that some of my 3rd grade classmates were doing ritualistic things inside an envelope of music, incense and special phone booths, then eating magical wafers, I knew I needed in.
I set about getting baptized. I asked my Aunt BahBah (really, Barbara, but her last name was Lamb, so you can hear the lovely pun), and a spirited, fairy-tale-reading Episcopal priest named John Swanson1 to be my godparents.
They agreed, and I was baptized in a Catholic church that year, quickly followed by first confession, first communion and later, the confirmation classes I never attended.
I didn’t participate much in the Catholic Church after I received first communion, but have appreciated that link to ritual, baptism, and to Jesus ever since. I’ve doubted many of the followers, some of those professing faith, but I loved the spirit of a person who would devote himself to one of the most tested displays of compassion and love for humanity ever.
About a year after my entry into the Catholic fold, my mom found a guru and made me attend Siddha Yoga meditation intensives in Boston and South Fallsburg, New York with her. There there were smelly vegetarian foods and young, long-haired people smiling excessively during silent lunch lines, and incense and chanting. I’d usually fall asleep against a wall, and pretty much just wait it out until Sunday night.
Monday Morning
There are so many things I’d like to write to you this sad, and also lovely Monday, but I guess I’ll just say this: if you are one who sees and feels and knows things, if you are one who chooses your religion daily, and understands the complicated and mysterious ways of life, I hope you can tune in.
And I hope you can send good energy to a person who managed something quite extraordinary: to keep his heart open about him even though he was tossed up the chain of command of a powerful institution. He died the day after Easter. Yeah, right after the anniversary of the ‘big story’ was done. Resurrection happened, now time for us to carry on.
God Bless Pope Francis. God Bless You.
FOOTNOTES
- My godfather John Swanson was an extraordinary and unconventional priest who guided many people through spiritual awakenings. He moved about his faith in many places and in different monastic settings and churches.
In later life, he founded the Order of Julian of Norwich. Julian was a female saint living in the 1300’s who was credited as being one of the first holy women theologians who wrote.
FROM WIKIPEDIA: Pope Benedict XVI discussed the life and teaching of Julian, stating: “Julian of Norwich understood the central message for spiritual life: God is love and it is only if one opens oneself to this love, totally and with total trust, and lets it become one’s sole guide in life, that all things are transfigured, true peace and true joy found and one is able to radiate it.” He concluded: “‘And all will be well,’ ‘all manner of things shall be well’
Pope Francis also mentions her in his encyclical letter Dilexit nos as one of a number of “holy women” who have “spoken of resting in the heart of the Lord as the source of life and interior peace”.[87]
More information about John Swanson can be found here, and his books can be found here. ↩︎
