Falling in Love
When people ask me how I met my husband, Matthias, I tell them that we met online. I was looking for a roommate to share my two-bedroom condominium with and he had just arrived from Germany to do a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard, and needed a place to live. I remember opening the door when he came to see the condo. The moment I saw him, I thought, “He’s the one!” I had interviewed at least two dozen people and even offered to rent the room to a few, but it simply hadn’t worked out. I had the strongest feeling that this man would be the perfect roommate. And he was.
Matthias and I got along from the start and talked for hours. We soon found that we had some important things in common, including being raised Catholic. At the same time, our experiences of Catholicism were very different. Matthias grew up in Bavaria among mostly Catholic people and the Church was an integral part of family and community life. He served as an altar boy for many years and was very involved in his church youth group growing up. Throughout the liturgical year, the music, the ritual, and the teachings not only spoke to him, they formed a part of him. By contrast, I grew up far from my extended Italian family. As a child in Melbourne, Australia, I was surrounded by mostly Protestant people and I felt no affinity or connection with Catholic life. As a teenager in Montreal, Canada, I attended an English Protestant high school and had little to do with the large French-speaking Catholic community in the city. I didn’t enjoy Mass and stopped attending church as soon as I could.
As I became friends with Matthias and understood the importance of Catholic life to him, I offered to go with him to a Catholic church in Boston that apparently had a German priest and offered Mass in German. Considering my aversion to attending Mass, it’s remarkable not only that I had this idea, but that it felt right to me. Looking back, I realize that this was the beginning of falling in love with Matthias. One Sunday, not long after Matthias moved in, we went to Mass at the church with the alleged German priest only to discover that he had moved out of the area and that the Mass was said in English. Nonetheless, I found that I really enjoyed going to church with Matthias, and so we began going to Mass regularly, exploring the Catholic churches in our area. Eventually, we found our Catholic home in Boston, St. Anthony’s Shrine on Arch Street.
At St. Anthony’s, I learned to find the message of love conveyed in the liturgy. The Franciscan Friars who celebrated Mass made this easy. They taught and demonstrated love both during the Mass and in their many ministries, including their amazing music ministry. Theirs is an accepting and inclusive community in which all are welcome. Those years of attending Mass with Matthias at St. Anthony’s Shrine in Boston were an absolute delight.
A few years after we met, Matthias and I got married, and a few years after that, his work took us to Denver, Colorado. Leaving St. Anthony’s was both sad and difficult, made more so by the trouble we had finding our Catholic home in Denver. By this time, I had begun reading A Course in Miracles and doing the daily Workbook Lessons. The Course has as its goal nothing less than to change the way its students think about themselves, everyone else, and everything in the world and beyond. Its mind training program is found in all its components, Text, Workbook, Manual for Teachers, and its two supplements (i.e., the pamphlet, Psychotherapy: Purpose, Process, Practice, and the pamphlet, Song of Prayer). Its message is that each of us can forgive absolutely anything and return to peace.
Early in my time in Denver, I came to recognize that one of my “forgiveness opportunities” was going to church. It seemed to me that many of the Masses we attended had a strong focus on a message of sin and being unworthy. I felt frustrated and sometimes really angry. It took many attempts to let go of the expectation of hearing a loving message in the Mass, and as I learned to let that go, I found that I could hear it again when it showed up. Perhaps that’s because Matthias and I did a better of job over time of finding churches to attend. Be that as it may, I do think that ‘hearing the love’ became easier as I practiced forgiving and letting go of anything in the Mass that I found upsetting or that didn’t seem loving. To do that successfully, I had to learn not to take the liturgy so seriously. What helped with doing this was growing in awareness of the Love that is behind absolutely everything. I’ll say more about this Love in future posts.