So I began going regularly to his Masses, and to confession there, too. Little by little, in the confessional, I found myself speaking about my moments of silent prayer. “It’s more than a conversation with God,” I heard myself say, the sticky filaments snapping one after the next as the new woman inside me awoke, stretched, and stood up. “Not that I feel I am God—I’m not crazy, Father, and I don’t think I’m conceited—but that God really is alive in me. The only thing is, that word—God—it doesn’t fit anymore and hasn’t for a long time. I grew up thinking of God as a big man in the sky or Jesus on the cross, but this God is more a kind of loving energy, and I feel it not just in myself but in everything and everyone. Does that sound ridiculous?”
At first Father Welch didn’t offer any opinion. He didn’t ask many questions about my prayer life, the way Father Alberto had, and didn’t seem particularly curious or helpful. After two or three conversations in the confessional, though, he invited me to meet with him in his office. We sat there in the small, cluttered upstairs room, and he asked what my upbringing had been like, which people I’d been close to, exactly what happened to me in prayer, how that had changed over the years, what I thought was the origin of those moments and visions. He asked if I’d ever been in therapy, and I said that I had not. He asked if there was any mental illness in my family, and I said that other than my father’s love of gambling at the dog track and my grandmother’s somewhat compulsive cleanliness, I didn’t think so. He laughed at that, and from then on the conversations were easier for both of us.
Every Thursday afternoon I met with him in his office and we talked about the same things I’d discussed with Father Alberto—though in a slightly more intellectual way. The lives of various saints, their experiences and challenges, the ways one’s own ego, mental difficulties, or stress could cause one to have the kinds of experiences I was having. We talked about temptations to be wary of—feeling special, superior, judging others, even wanting the experiences to go on and on instead of accepting them as precious gifts, given according to God’s timing and purpose.
“In your case,” he said, “it’s highly unlikely that these moments are caused by stress, unless you were particularly stressed out as a four-year-old. The issue about becoming a priest, though, is a little bit different. I’ve had a few people in my counseling sessions who’ve spoken about a prayer life that was somewhat similar to yours, but no one had the experiences with as much intensity, and no one had them over such a long time, and none of the women felt they were being called to the priesthood. I don’t sense any kind of ulterior motive here. You certainly don’t seem like the kind of person who wants attention. You don’t seem particularly angry at the Church or anything or anyone else—with the possible exception of your monsignor. The only question, as far as I can see, is how to act on this. How long to wait for God to give you that answer.”
I sat there listening. I had come to trust him, and although I didn’t feel as close to him as I’d once felt to Father Alberto—he was more formal, better educated, less warm—I took his advice seriously. “Tell me,” I said, when he’d finished, “how do I pursue it? Where do I go? I feel like if I don’t do something, I’ll really lose my mind, or my faith, or both.”
He sat there and looked at his hands for a few seconds. I can see now that it would have been very easy for him to have left it at “Well, let’s just go along as we’ve been going and wait to see where God leads you.” That would have gotten him off the hook with me and kept him out of trouble with his superiors. But Father Welch was braver than that. After a moment he said, “I was in seminary with our present archbishop, did I tell you? Seve Menendez. I think the next logical place to go would be to him. He’s the supreme liturgical authority in these parts, and I can’t think of anyone who’d be a better person to speak with at this point. You realize, I’m sure, that the chances of anything very satisfying coming out of it are practically zero.”
“By now, I’ve figured that out, Father, yes.”
“The Church, when it changes, changes at a glacial pace. Maybe in a hundred years, or three hundred years, we’ll see married priests or female Roman Catholic priests. Maybe. There is a group of women who’ve been ordained or who consider themselves ordained. I respect them, but they haven’t been acknowledged by the Vatican, of course, and it seems to me that what you’re after isn’t so much personal satisfaction as a change in the Church at large. Before we go any farther, I have to caution you that this could end up in a way you neither expect nor want.”
I told him what I’d told Monsignor Ferraponte: that I really had no desire to stand up in front of a congregation, to visit the sick and have dinner at people’s homes. “I’m more private than that,” I said. “But over these past few months I’ve come to understand that if I just hear these messages and do nothing, I’ll get so twisted up inside that I’ll end up being a person I don’t want to be. At this point, I’ll try anything you recommend.”
“I think I can arrange a meeting with Menendez,” he said. “I won’t tell him in much detail what it’s about. He’s a very…I don’t want to say cagey man, but he keeps his cards close to his vest, as the saying goes. It may be that Monsignor Ferraponte has alerted him to your situation and the two of them see it the same way and he won’t let you make an appointment, or he’ll use the meeting as an opportunity to give you a lecture of some sort. But let’s try it anyway. Let me contact his office. I’d offer to go with you, but that would make it seem like I’m sponsoring you or leading you, and I’m not. I’m happy to have you use my name, but I think the actual meeting with him, face-to-face, is something you should do on your own.”
I thanked him, and as he was seeing me to the door he said, “You know where this could lead, don’t you?”
“Probably to my getting in trouble.”
“I mean geographically. Unless Menendez completely shoots down the idea, I think the next place you’ll be going is Rome.”
I stood there and stared at him. We were almost exactly the same height, our eyes probably three feet apart.
“You look shocked,” he said, smiling one of his rare smiles.
“Father, I’ve never been to Canada. I’ve been to New York City once in my life, to Maine once. Going to Rome, for me, would be like going into space. How would I get there? What would I do there?”
“I don’t know, frankly,” he said. “But my guess would be, if the archbishop senses, as I do, that there’s a legitimacy to your prayer life, and if he is, as I suspect him to be, the kind of man who doesn’t like to make difficult decisions, then I would think he’ll try to pass you up the ladder, to a cardinal in Rome, perhaps, or a cardinal’s assistant. He could just as easily tell you to go home and mind your own business. I mention the Rome option only so you’ll be ready.”
ON THE SUBWAY RIDE BACK to Revere that day I tried and failed miserably to picture myself anywhere near Vatican City, in any cardinal’s assistant’s office, for any reason. Even the idea of going to see the archbishop had made me start to fret from the minute I’d heard his name spoken. I wondered if this would end up being a kind of ongoing torment, a penance for the sin of my presumptuousness, my spiritual egotism: I’d be sent from one office to the next for a series of humiliations.
It was late by then, but instead of going directly back to Tapley Avenue, I went by St. Anthony’s, still the home of my heart. Matilda let me in, and I sat in a pew about halfway up on the left side, where I usually sat, and I looked up at the mural of Jesus floating there among the people who loved him, and I thought that the quality I’d neglected to attribute to him was courage. Kindness, compassion, assertiveness, wisdom, godliness, yes, always, but, on the human level, the pure bravery of doing what he did was something I hadn’t really given enough thought to before. It seemed to me that the most important quality we could have on Earth besides kindness to others was courage. The tremendous courage required of someone like Mary, pregnant, unmarried, too young, who said, when she discover
ed she would bear a holy child, “Let it be done to me according to Thy will.”
I vowed then that I would make Mary my patron, my supporter. I would let her move me where I needed to be moved. If that meant meeting the archbishop and having him mock me, I ought to be able to have the courage to deal with that. I would pray to her in particular from that moment on. I would ask her to give me the strength to face my humiliations and failures. And I would let God take me where He decided I should go.
CHAPTER FIVE
In the last year of nursing school the ratio of classroom to hands-on work flips fairly drastically and we spend most of our time in “clinicals,” making the transition from theory to practice. It’s one thing to know that the liver cleans toxins from the blood and then passes it on to the kidneys for further cleansing; it’s something else entirely to care for a patient who’s dying of kidney failure. It’s interesting to read about the role of the placenta in a pregnancy, but that’s like a small, hummed tune next to the painful, messy, glorious symphony of an actual birth.
My classmates and I were rotated through various parts of the hospital—Med-Surg, Ob-Gyn, Pediatrics, Psych, and so on, partly to give us a broad base of experience, and partly so we could make an educated decision about where we eventually wanted to specialize.
It was during those last months of training that I discovered I could affect people’s health by touching them. Not every patient, not every time, but it began to happen fairly often, and I began to be able to tell when it was happening. Sometimes it wasn’t a matter of actually healing or curing them as much as lessening their discomfort, and it’s possible some of that came from the simple power of one human body touching another.
But in moments of complete honesty I knew it was more than that. I also knew it had been going on long before nursing school. When I’d touched my grandmother in her last weeks, when I’d put my hand on Father Alberto after his accident, there had been the feeling of something passing from me to them, a spark, a line of love with a silent force to it. This was difficult for me. On the one hand, I knew it was common for people, when they’re very ill, to respond to the voice or touch or presence of a person they love. Any nurse has stories of patients awakening from a coma long enough to say good-bye to a spouse or child. On the other hand, especially as I spent more and more time in the hospital, I saw—beyond any denying—that I could often change a patient’s condition just by laying a hand on him or her.
I tried to hide it, naturally. It’s a precarious time, the last half of the last year of nursing school. You’re trying to soak up and hold as much information as you can, you’re under constant scrutiny, already thinking about taking the Boards and applying to the hospital of your choice. The competition is stiff (though there is a particularly strong sense of camaraderie among nursing students). So the very last thing you need is to give any sign that you’re flaky, unstable, even overly emotional. The people who will decide your fate—mostly senior nurses, but certain physicians and professors as well—are watching you for any signs that you won’t be able to handle the real trials of the profession: the long hours, the life-or-death decisions, the blood and guts and smells and complaints, the everyday, unspectacular, quietly efficient care that can make the difference between a patient walking out of the hospital unassisted and sinking deeper into his or her troubles. Does Piantedosi regularly check the charts? Does she wash her hands enough, even when she’s under pressure to get to the next patient? Can she insert a catheter into a man who’s afraid and upset? Can she keep her focus through a four-hour intestinal operation?
Those are the kinds of things that decide your fate, not, Can she cut someone’s pain in half by placing a hand on his shoulder?
So I never mentioned it to anyone—friend, superior, or coworker. I tried to deny it at first, even to myself. But then I understood how selfish that was, and I kept hearing Father Alberto chastising me about false modesty, and I started to let the healing energy move through me without so much resistance. One of my patients was an older man suffering from late-stage emphysema. He had an almost unbearable amount of trouble breathing, probably a week to live. Patients always have quirks, and his quirk was that he liked to lie there with one leg outside the sheet. I’d go in, and if there was no one else in the room, I’d put my hand on his right leg and I’d notice immediately that his vital signs would change. His breathing was still labored, but less so; his heartbeat dropped from the high 100s to something closer to normal.
It wasn’t as though I could stand there beside his bed for a whole shift, touching him, and it wasn’t as though I could go around from room to room, fondling patients who were in pain. Sometimes I wanted to. It’s one of the hardest aspects of a nurse’s life—being around so much suffering and not always being able to completely take it away. There were days when I had an urge to grab a nurse-supervisor by the arm, drag her into a room where someone was suffering, and say, “Watch this.” But I suspected that the response would be something like “No, you watch this” as I was banned from the hospital and thrown out of school. I suspected, too, that if there was even the smallest element of egotism involved, the tiniest bit of showing off, then whatever healing magic God was sending through me would immediately be extinguished.
So I did what I could, surreptitiously putting my hands on the patients who seemed to need it most, never when there was anyone else nearby. Some patients noticed. One woman—she’d been in a car accident and had a broken collarbone and a broken pelvis—said, “Whenever you touch me my pain is less.” I smiled, made a neutral remark, and was especially glad when she improved enough to go to a rehab unit.
It was in that time that my last surviving aunt, my father’s sister, Chiara, fell ill. She’d suffered from kidney disease for many years, but at that point in her life she had to be hospitalized. It would turn out that she would die during the six months of my clinicals, and I would be able to see her in Mass General while I was working there and help her a bit. When she started to suffer, like most patients with kidney disease, she had horrible shooting pains in her legs, so every night before I went home I’d spend half an hour in her room, massaging her calves and feet, making sure she had anything she wanted in the way of food and drink and blankets and medication. My father had always been very close to her, and he took to spending hours in the room with her, too, sometimes talking but more often just sitting there with his hands folded in his lap, watching her, watching me whenever I came in. There was something almost boyish about him in those last weeks of her life, as if he were remembering the days when the two of them had been very young, marching through the town square in uniform, starting the school day with a pledge to Mussolini that my father still partly remembered: “Nice, Corsica, Malta, all these belong to the great Italia.…” My father was, as the saying goes, not good with death, and I could feel the fear coming off him in waves; he’d seen his wife and mother-in-law die; he didn’t want to be left alone again. Sometimes, if the timing was right, we’d leave the hospital together and ride back to Revere in his car, and if he said anything on those rides, it would never be about his sister’s illness. “Do we have the milk?” he’d ask. “Do you want me to start the tomatoes now, inside, or wait?”
Two or three times Aunt Chiara said something like “Cynthia, you’ve almost taken the pain completely away.” But if my father noticed, he never mentioned it to me. He thought, I’m sure, that his sister was just trying to make me feel useful and appreciated. She’d been raised as an Old World Italian girl, unfailingly pleasant, polite, kind, thoughtful, considerate, always putting others’ needs ahead of her own. We’d had a good relationship, but I’d always felt I couldn’t get as close to her as I wanted to, that she was surrounded by a soft cushion of niceness and it kept her from being completely real with me.
In my aunt’s last days I massaged her legs as often as I could, and it seemed to bring her real comfort. I wasn’t there at the moment of her death, and I regret that. It seems to happen that way
so often. I was with her and with her and with her, my father was with her, and then he was exhausted and left to go home and I stayed. It was midnight; I knew she was failing. I took a short nap. It was two a.m. Finally I stepped out and walked down to the cafeteria to get myself a cup of coffee, and when I came back to the room she had died.
My father’s reaction surprised me. He was a different kind of Old World soul than his sister. He was on the gruff side, as I’ve said, often distant and aloof, a man’s man. He’d always worked with men, he gambled with men, he bowled with men, he was good to me but not particularly affectionate, and really, after I turned eight or nine we never had much in the way of a substantive conversation. Certainly, despite the Italian American stereotype, he was never a man who showed a great deal of emotion, but after Aunt Chiara died, he had periods of being almost inconsolable. He spent those days watching television or pacing the back yard, buried in grief. I’d come home from work and find him with tears on his face, standing at the stove. He wasn’t cooking anything, he wasn’t even making tea, just standing there, crying.
One night that spring, tired from the long day and the loud subway ride, I spent half an hour in St. Anthony’s and then went home, intending to make my father supper, and found him sitting in the living room. That wasn’t so unusual. But the TV was turned off and it was getting dark and he was sitting there with his hands on the arms of the chair, staring out the window. When I stepped through the door, he looked at me, and it was as if he were seeing me for the first time. Familiarity breeds contempt, people say, but I think it’s truer that familiarity breeds taking for granted. When you live with people day in and day out for years, you become so accustomed to them that you can stop seeing them. You half look at them, you stop listening. And I think what had happened with my father was that his sister’s passing had made him understand that he’d been doing that with me for probably my whole adult life.
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