This Grotto

I'm waiting for the clock to tick so that I can leave for Spiritual Direction. I'm meeting with a new person today, recommended by a dear friend who has the same sort of spiritual troubledness as I, a similar functional/dysfunctional relationship with this Church who holds both our vocations. I asked him, "can she handle my angst?" and he said "she can." So here I go. I met with another SD who came at his recommendation, for many years- really, on and off, for over ten years. At some points, we met twice a month, sometimes every six weeks, sometimes not for months or a year at a time, because it is my way that I don't go when things are good, or, in the case of my Dark Year, very bad. Mary blew my mind in our first visit, when I told her how ambivalent I was about even being there- I had this decision to make (I guess you could say I still have this decision to make...) of whether or not to stay in this Church... and I thought, if she's Catholic, s

My pastor and I had a rare talk about theology recently. You'd think it would not be rare, to have such talks between a pastoral associate and the pastor with whom she associates. But it is rather rare. We talk about, basically, policy- about how to do things, whether to do things, when to do things, how to handle stuff. But it's more an unspoken feeling around in the dark that happens between us, theologically- we look for evidence in each other's words and actions to confirm or disprove that the other's theology is in line with ours. Maybe this goes way back to a time when people were persecuted for believing, for following Jesus- having to trace the fish symbol in the dirt as they met others to show without saying out loud that they were Christians, using sign language to check the relative safety of a conversation. Now that I think of it, things haven't changed that much, and it might be handy to have a symbol to trace, rather than real-time, face-to-face spyin