Interfaith Dialogue-and other kaleidoscopic experiences: April 2013

Regretful memories can enchain us to past failures but glorious memories can mustard seed our future. For even our smallest victories over fear have kaleidoscopic potential.

It was a long awaited day. My seven year old granddaughter Carrie and I were looking forward to an exciting high diving performance at our swim club. Carrie was a pinched nose plunger; I a flotation belt swimmer.

The show began. After a brief introduction, a nine year old high diver pirouetted across the board, somersaulted down, arrowed into the water, and earned our awe struck applause. On a 1-10 rating she received a nine. Carrie was riveted.

After the show I started to collect our things, ready to leave, suddenly Carrie ran toward the high diving board. "Oh no!" My overprotective radar directed my hot pursuit, but she beat me to it! I looked up at the silhouette of my only grandchild. The suns radiance enveloped her trembling and mine. I prayed for guidance.

I remember having heard that "God is a God of surprises." Suddenly I called up to Carrie "Don't be afraid...Trust me... You are perfectly safe....I am here...I won't leave you...You are perfectly safe...I'm praying for you."

Carrie pinched her nose and jumped! On a performance scale her jump merited a 2, but on a trust scale I gave her a 10. Her trust in me enabled her leap of faith.

I know now what I did not know then that the Holy Spirit dictated those words and I merely echoed them.

Currently I keep recalling Carrie's "trust test"- her leap of faith. How do I compare my forty year journey through the desert of doubt- my leap of faith from Reform Judaism to Catholicism. For I think of Judiasm and Catholicism as two mountain top religions. My forty year challenge was to take a leap of faith from mount Sinai to the mount of the Beatitudes. But I feared the void between the two and also questioned myself "If I get to the other side and find that I cannot accept some of the Catholic churches faith teachings, I cannot turn back."I did not know at that time that I would forever be a Jewish-Catholic.

During this time I began to think of the passion and the many times Jesus fell, but each time he picked himself up and persevered. Thus I began the begin-again journey.

When we climb the mountain to conversion we are drawn to rest at a ledge called a lookout. Another ledge reminds us not to overlook the challenges ahead. Thus, during my forty year journey to the baptismal fount my climb was steepened by unforeseen events.

I pondered the message of lookout- to beware of a fearful future...but better to look beyond the roadblock toward the path to eternal life with heaven as my prayerful hope and Jesus as my shepherd.

I cannot remember whether our gathering at a local Jewish temple was a community effort to pray together on Thanksgiving day or were we called to attend an interfaith dialogue as members of Immaculate Conception Parish; my Parish after my conversion to Catholicism in 1988. But I do not forget a Jewish woman's challenge to me after I had acknowledged my conversion to Catholicism. As she spoke, her eyes seemed to flicker from anger to sorrow when she said, "How could you do this? How could you leave our people after the Holocaust?" I had never met her before nor since, but her question has never left me. She could not have known that her agonizing question was among others that roadblocked my pathway to the church and to Jesus.

However, I am awed and grateful to know that my Biblical namesake, Ruth, was an ancestor of Jesus and included in the genealogy of Matthew. Whereas the poem "The Hound of Heaven" (Francis Thompson) visualized God as the pursuer and we who flee from Him, I now focus more on my Biblical namesake, Ruth, whose love for her mother-in-law Naomi, led Ruth to beg, "Do not urge me to leave you or turn back from following you; for where you go, I will go, and where you lodge, I will lodge. Your people shall be my people, and your God, my God. Where you die, I will die, and there I will be buried. Thus may the Lord do to me, and worse, if anything but death parts you and me” (Ruth 1: 16-17). I recently received a Catholic prayer card which pictured Biblical saint Ruth, whose lovely entreaty to Naomi is now interpreted to be an entreaty to Jesus. During that period I attended daily mass and felt little fear in the receiving of confession regularly, but perhaps it was only my faith that enabled me to open the door to two policemen who informed me that my son Les was killed in an automobile accident.

It was 1992, four years after my baptism. A week after Les' funeral I went to the cemetery to be with him- alone. Standing next to his grave I leaned down to look at the inscription I had written- "Born to be a father." Suddenly I noticed that my feet were standing on his grave. I became hysterical with grief; my heart cried out "I'm his mother. I always took care of him. I'm not going to let him stay there. I'll dig him out!" Somehow I realized that I was nearing the slippery slope of despair, fearing that I was edging towards madness. Suddenly, as if in benediction, I felt something gently stroking my hair, it was a leafy branch of a nearby weeping willow. A gentle breeze caressed my face.

Then somehow my eyes were drawn heavenward, as if by osmosis, to gaze upon a dove shaped cloud. The peace of that moment reminded me of an image, the feminine presence of God atop the Western Wall in Jerusalem.

Mesmerized, I told myself there has to be more than the suffering of this life. There has to be a heaven.

And I was so sure that there is. I find that Catholic teaching ie. to hope for heaven and the promise of heaven, over weighs the burden of doubts that challenge us; particularly during suffering.

I did not know then what I deeply feel now; that our guardian angel answers our SOS calls. They survey our slippery slopes of despair, and are on-call 24/7 to rescue us when we become overwhelmed with grief. In that celestial setting they report to our blessed Mother, as to our prayerful progress, to that mystical moment of peace when we, with heart mind and prayerful hope, look forward to our eternal lives.

The next day I went to confession. A new priest sat silently as I wept, regarding my concern of the cause of Les' death. The priest, a brilliant lawyer, did not respond with laborious counsel. He simply said, "A mother's tears will carry Les to heaven" (If that be so- heaven must be a very crowded place in deed).

    On that fateful day in 1940 my mother and I held hands tightly as we approached the iron barred doors of Mundelein College. A nun answered the bell dressed in her black habit. I half expected sounds other than human to emerge from under her coif. As a young, Jewish, fresh woman, I had very few Catholic friends and had never spoken to a nun. If the truth be told, I had a mediocre IQ and preferred to study at the University of Chicago. But we lived across the street from Mundelein and those blessed BVM's gave me a job waiting tables and doing dishes in the cafeteria that paid for my total tuition. In time, those wonderful women became role models of grace, intelligence, self-sacrifice, and love. They were to change my life forever.

     The second world war and my future husband's being drafted into the army shortened my time of two year at Mundelein (The class of 1944). I learned while at Mundelein, that women could attain leadership positions in the business world as serving very effectively as volunteers focused on preferential treatment for the poor and disadvantaged.

     Perhaps, I heard the voice of my beloved Sister Mary Esther when in 1983 my friend, Rabbi Harold Kudan, asked me to co-chair with him the creation of an avenue of the righteous, patterned after Yad Veschem in Jerusalem (the memorial of the six million Jews murdered during the Hitler Holocaust). The following articles regarding the roles of the righteous during that satanic horror was to save terrorized Jews. And it was also to help me regain my faith in God.