Would There be an Easter?

Saint Benedict’s Monastery asked us to think about HOPE during Lent. Every Monday, one could receive a sister’s reflections on hope. I purposely did not request an email. I wanted to think about what hope meant to me and how it influenced, or if it did influence, my life.

As a young woman, I admit hope was purely academic, or another word for optimism. Every Lent we went through the Passion, death and Resurrection of Jesus. We knew the ending. No real need for hope. Besides all the ritual, Easter in the convent meant wonderful Easter buns from the convent bakery. Next day was Emmaus and then, Ordinary time. As a postulant, hope was reduced to hoping for good grades in college.

My first real confrontation with hope was when I began to think about leaving the community. It was before the huge exodus in the ’70s. I left the community on July 11, 1963, ALONE. It was the most difficult decision I ever made. I didn’t want to leave, but knew I had to leave. When the day came, I was sequestered in a room so none of my classmates making final vows would be distracted. One final talk with my Junior Mistress who repeated the story of the young man who asked Christ what more he could do, and Jesus told him, “Give up what you have and come follow me.” I was left to reflect on those words.

The next morning, I could not leave until my class was under the pall, “dying to the world.” I could leave when I heard the bell toll. If my family didn’t make it in time, I was to go across the street and wait at Linneman’s so no one would see me leave. It was MY passion and taste of death. Would there be an Easter?

The thing was, my family didn’t want an ex-nun. I was homeless. One of the sisters arranged for me to live with her family and that was the beginning of HOPE for me.

There were many times I experienced the evolution of HOPE during these decades since I left the community. Each experience from nearly dying giving birth to twins, to moving from coast to coast leaving friends each time as my spouse moved up the academic ladder to presidency of a college, losing my identity and name becoming only the “president’s wife.” Through the horror of rape and keeping the secret, the agony of divorce, and being homeless again. We lived in the President’s House. I was the one who had to leave.

Somehow, HOPE sprung up in a different form each time but was always connected to that first experience of leaving the community, finding something cradled in a spark of wordless new.

UNTIL…

In my 60s, about to be married, I found the love of my life—dead at his computer. I was caught in a silent terror and fear. God became my target for the anger that raged inside.

It was storming; only the kind of storm you get in Tennessee when it seems like the end of the world. That storm did not even begin to match the storm in me. I went outside. I didn’t care. Maybe I’d be struck by lightning. Running into the woods, I kept running to the creek and shouting at God: “I have done everything you wanted … EVERYTHING—I’m done with you!”

Exhausted from the storm, I had no idea how long I was crumpled on the ground. It had stopped raining. I needed to get back to the house.

As I walked up the hill, I began to walk in color. I was startled. I was walking right into a rainbow. Yes, I looked at my arms and poked around and I was changing color with the rainbow. Stunned, I remembered.

Okay, God … I get it.

Pat Pickett, OblSB

Photo by Pat Pickett.