The View Up Here: A Season of Goodbyes

I have no good excuse for not writing here. Reasons, yes, but laziness combined with a certain obsession with re-watching the Battlestar Galactica reboot from the mid 2000s really took up a lot of time that could've been spent elsewhere.

So why the BSG binging? I'd been hankering to see it again, and after listening to some of the soundtrack on YouTube, I decided to dive in. What did I glean the 2nd time around? I didn't dislike the ending as much as I did the first time. I still have some issues with plot holes you could fly a, well, a battlestar through, and it still made no sense why Cavill would off himself at the end. But seeing the mixed human-Cylon settlers on "new Earth" decide to start over made sense to me, and it resonated on a personal level. How many of us want a "do-over" in our lives, or at least in some situation in our lives?

The good news is this: we DO get to start fresh. Because when you reconcile with God, the sins and mistakes of the past are forgotten. This is harder for us humans to accept than for God to accomplish! We will spend a life time beating ourselves up for mistakes upon mistakes, sin upon sin. That's not what God calls us to do. God wants our love, pure and simple.

What happens when you do something selfish that hurts a loved one? You apologize and promise not to do it again. And if that person loves you, you are forgiven, and then what? You continue deepening the relationship. Now, we're human, and it's not always as easy as all that (so many scenarios), so it's an imperfect analogy for how God wants to be with us. We hurt God by distancing ourselves from Him - we do our own thing instead of what God calls us to, which is holiness. Then we realize it, we say we're sorry with the INTENT not to do it again (even though we may end up repeating it over and over), and God forgives us every time, because all God wants is for us to receive His Love and live in union with Him. That means we get to start fresh every time we realize we've sinned against God and our fellow human beings.

God brought this home to me in a very real, personal and powerful way recently. In June, I finally returned to New York State after having been gone for 3.5 years. I had many wonderful experiences during my trip, but one of the highlights was walking into the church I had attended as a young person with my mother - St. Casimir's. I haven't been in that church for probably 25 years. I sang in choir when I attended that parish, and I spent every holy day, every Sunday there. Yet at that time, my heart was very hardened to what God was calling me to. But here I was, in June, walking in the doors... and it was a visceral experience of those many many years disappearing, melting. It was as if I'd just walked out of the church the night before and was walking back in the next morning.

God was showing me that the years I spent apart from Him, doing my own thing, being selfish, committing atrocious sins against him and others, were gone... they literally do not exist. They don't exist in time, and they don't exist in God's heart. I wept throughout most of Mass that morning (it was a Tuesday). Do you know what I saw all around me, that I'd never given a second glance toward when I was a teen ager? The Sacred Heart of Jesus. Emblazoned, in stained glass, in statuary... I was and am so humbled that our God so full of love would not only welcome me but rejoice in me, as imperfect and goofball as I am. Praised be the Good God!

In response to this and several other experiences I had while being back home (including seeing my cousin be ordained a priest in the Diocese of Rochester), I have felt and am answering the call to move back to New York State. Not Ithaca, for that is a place I would never want to live in again (winters = I AM GOING TO DIE). As I prepare to move back to New York, I am facing the season of goodbyes.

I'm not a huge fan of Utah, let's just get that straight. But I have found beauty and friendship in ways that I was not expecting. I am sorrowful to say good bye to the monks at Our Lady of the Holy Trinity Abbey, to my spiritual director, Fr. Dass, to friends in my parish and at work in the Diocese of Salt Lake. This past week, our next door neighbors moved away to a temporary housing unit before moving to Dubai. In May, we said goodbye to Archbishop Wester, who was appointed archbishop of the Santa Fe archdiocese. In early June, I said goodbye to my hair! Yes, it was time to chop chop - and so relieved that I did when the temps soared to 113 degrees in a very early heatwave.

At the end of this month, I will say goodbye to the lovely people I live with, and to the menagerie here. Especially poignant will be my farewell to Ellie the Cat who has become my snuggle buddy and a very healing presence. I will say goodbye to the mountains. And I'll say goodbye to the life I've lived here. This hasn't been an easy life here, but the depth of healing and formation that have been accomplished through Jesus has been truly staggering.

I have one more week at the cemetery job, then I'm going to visit L.A. for a week and say goodbye to the West Coast. That will be sad, but I know I'm headed to the next important phase of my discernment and my life lived in Christ. More on discernment in my next post, which I promise will not be 3 months away.