I’m Coming Back Home

I’m coming back home. 

It’s still in the early days but, man, does it feel good to be back. 

I don’t even know what to attribute this new page to. Everyone’s prayers. Bl. Carlo Acutis and St. Therese playing tag-team in the last week; all those roses from St. Therese… with her name on them! A fellow consecrated virgin “in training” (we started our discernment two months apart and she’s also ahead of me in the formal process). The Holy Spirit using everyone and everything… the list can go on and on. The important thing is that I’m coming out of that spiritual desert I’d been trying to survive in.

I first noticed it about two weeks ago but only told my spiritual director about it since I’ve been sharing everything I’ve wrestled with in recent months. Even if I don’t tell anyone else, he gets all the good and bad because he’s helping guide me through this discernment process and it’s so important that he helps me figure out if I’m truly called to the vocation of consecrated virginity lived in the world. But this blog post isn’t about that. It’s about the journey I’ve had these past couple of months. 

I’ve already written about how difficult it’s been. It was the most spiritually arduous thing I’ve had to go through since my reversion in 2006. I saw habitual sins I thought I’d seen the last of in 2008 pop up once again. I found myself reliving a lot of things I’d dealt with pre-reversion. For the first time in over 15 years, I found myself re-living some of the desires and aspirations that the world was offering me prior to me choosing my current path. 

It almost seemed like God was saying, “this is your last chance to live and experience this before you make a life-long commitment. This is what the world offers you. You can be ‘happy’ and you can feel ‘joy’ but it’s all fleeting. You will always be left feeling empty at the end of the day.” I jokingly told my SD it felt like a “Catholic rumspringa” — a last chance to experience things away from the Church before committing myself to it. (side note for those not familiar with what Rumspringa is: in a nutshell, it’s when Amish youth are allowed to live in our modern world so they can decide whether to be baptized in their church or stay out in the world.) 

But the thing is that I was never really away from the Church. I didn’t *feel* it — I didn’t feel close to God, I I didn’t want to pray, and I felt completely numb to everything faith-related — but I kept going. I kept praying. I kept my promises as a Benedictine Oblate. I slipped in other areas of my life but I kept these things even when I was sleep deprived or feeling so sick that I just wanted to sleep through my regular hours. 

It wasn’t until I was coming out that I realized that I was showing my love for God by staying faithful to the promises I’d already made. I’ve already written some of this in the previous blog post so I won’t repeat all of it. Let’s just say that I’m grateful for that journey because it showed me that I could do it — stay as faithful as I can and even make that life-long commitment if Archbishop Gómez agrees that God is calling me to this vocation. 

And that’s saying a lot since those close know I’m incredibly indecisive and am often nervous of committing to something so permanent because I’m afraid of messing up or choosing wrong. But, by doing that, I wasn’t trusting God. It’s not about what *I* can do on my own but what God can do in and through me; what I can do with the graces He gives me. 

There have been three major things that have also helped:

• the daily Mass
• the chaplet of Divine Mercy
• being completely honest and vulnerable with my SD

I’ve unfortunately not been able to get to daily Mass but that doesn’t mean I’m not getting my daily Mass dose. I watch it streaming every day. I figured that simply because I can’t get to one (yet!) doesn’t mean I have to be completely devoid of it. I have my hour (or longer on Sundays) carved out to myself. Even if my neighbors are being their usually noisy selves, I can see enjoy the Mass and sing the hymns. Even if I can’t receive the Eucharist, I can still receive spiritual communion. And this is where my fellow “CV in training” comes in. 

I saw how on fire and in love with Christ she is. It is very inspiring to see. While the temptation for jealousy and comparison was (and is) there, my mind didn’t go there. Instead, I was reminded of how I was in that same position pre-pandemic / pre-health crises. I went to my last daily Mass the Friday before Los Angeles went into lockdown. I was attending daily Mass at least 3x per week (if not more). I went even when I wasn’t feeling my best; when I was already showing signs of an adrenal insufficiency, which I didn’t know about at the time. If it wasn’t for the lockdowns, my emergency gallbladder surgery two months later, the adrenal crises that could’ve been fatal that summer, and the eventual loss of my eyesight, I think I would’ve kept up my routine. 

When I reached that realization, I had a moment of desperation. I wrestled with the idea of playing the bargaining game with God. You know, “If you restore my eyesight, I promise I will try to…” That’s such a dangerous game to play and I’m glad the Holy Spirit was there to remind me not to go there. So, I decided to do the next best thing and stream the daily Mass. I haven’t missed a single one in the last week or so and the changes are very noticeable in that tiny period of time. 

As much as I would’ve loved to have stayed on the path I was on, I still truly believe that I was meant to go through it to grow from it. If I hadn’t walked, stumbled through, cried through, crawled through the desert, i wouldn’t be where I am now. I needed to mature in my spiritual life while being reminded of the good parts of myself that I’d lost over the years. And I’m not even fully there yet. I have a lot of work to do, but I’m going at a slower pace than normal because rushing rarely leads to anything good.

So, that’s where I am right now. I’m coming back home. I’m taking it one day at a time. If I stumble, I seek God’s hand to stand up once again. I’ll keep moving forward. 

Anyway, I just wanted to share that. 

As I mentioned on social media a few weeks ago, I’m taking a short break from writing articles due to my eyesight getting worse lately. That doesn’t mean I’m not working — I’m still busy with my fourth novel — but at least I don’t have the worries of a weekly deadline or pushing myself too much when I know I need to rest. I hope to return to writing in a couple of weeks, once I get an update on how my vision has progressed? regressed, or stalled. You can bet I’m doing frequent novenas to Bl. Carlo in the meantime. 

I hope y’all are doing well and that you’ll be ready for Lent next week (!!!). 

As always, thanks for reading and God bless!