Letter from Madeleine Rebullida

In this piece, letter writer Madeleine Rebullida describes her journey of finding a place to belong in the Church as a woman. And in the spirit of our mission of illustrating the many different ways women are living out the feminine genius today, Madeleine captures the essence of the “feminine mission” with her profound words: “I see you, I know this thing you are in. Let me walk with you. Je te protègerai. I will protect you.”

Dear Catholic Sisters,

I have failed. Over and over again I have failed myself. I have failed in my faith. I have lost sight of my purpose and strayed so far off my intended path that I feared I may never find my way back again. I have survived family alcoholism, mental illness, abuse, and dysfunction. I survived the daily violence of combat in Afghanistan and Iraq. I have been a witness to the shock of sudden death and been present at the moment of a prolonged death. Sometimes I feel like I say goodbye much more than I say hello. I have wanted to give up when the struggle of living with my own traumatic stress became just so very, very painful.

Sometimes, I feel like an imposter in my faith. My obedience sometimes ebbs and flows – and this period of spiritual instability always corresponds to my literal and metaphorical distance from the Eucharist. I use the excuses of the world to allow a veil to come between my heart and the merciful gaze of Christ. I’m busy with work, with managing a household, volunteering, being a wife, a friend, a daughter, a sister, a step-mother. So many activities and commitments and chores and always that little voice in my head gets louder and louder the further I drift, telling me, you need to be all things to all people at all times. It fills me with doubt.

I am not a convert to Catholicism, but I am a late bloomer. I was born into an extended family of resolute Catholics, but an immediate family with much more love than spirituality. Regardless, the beauty and ritual of Catholic life fascinated me from childhood. I was baptized at twelve, but as I desired to explore and reinvent myself, I quickly found myself at odds with what I perceived as a lack of freedom of individuality within the Church. It was not until I returned to a Catholic university after my time in the Army and entered into RCIA that I was finally welcomed home to the Church at 36 years old. Later that year, I went on pilgrimage to Poland for World Youth Day and had many transformative encounters with Christ, with Mary, with Saints and with my brothers and sisters in faith from around the world.

I carry the joy of that trip inside me and when that feeling of doubt, failure, and anxiety begins to take hold I walk back in my mind to a moment – there are so many – when the veil between Christ’s mercy and my heart was lifted. The lightness and hope and strength that come from accepting mercy and love in its purest form is indescribably joyful. In my worst moments of anxiety and fear, I know that I can open my hands to the sky and ask for mercy, and it will be granted to me, just as it will to all who ask. I have come to know the Church through her protection of the common good and dignity of all human persons, and I – through Holy communion – am an extension of that mission.

My entire life I have been perceived as strong and brave. I like this. My heroes are Saint Joan of Arc, Wonder Woman, Queen Boudica, Dorothy Day, Florence Nightingale and my grandmothers. My strength is a Holy gift that I will never take for granted. The struggles that we face are not the generators of our strength, they are proof that we are uniquely made to survive these trials. I think about my grandmothers and how they struggled and thrived through the lean years of the Depression and decades of cultural disinterest in the equal rights of women. Or how Servant of God, Dorothy Day’s life of heroic virtue landed her in jail numerous times, with her last sentence served at age seventy-five. There are my own struggles to reflect on - I spent the many months of my deployments living as a woman who had already accepted her death. I then had to survive that nearly impossible transition from the walking dead to a living, breathing woman. Certainly, my grandmothers and I are proud of our stories of survival but importantly, we must recognize that the survival is not for us alone – the survival is so that we might live on to help others to survive.

It was during my time at World Youth Day in 2016 that Rev. Jacques Hamel was martyred by knife-wielding extremists who stormed the cathedral of St.-Étienne-du-Rouvray in Normandy and slit his throat in front of his parishioners. The day that this happened it was raining in Kraków and I was standing with a group of hungry pilgrims waiting in line to eat dinner. The news of his murder was broadcast from tiny TVs just barely visible inside the restaurant. Through the rain-streaked windows, we could see fellow pilgrims in shock, some weeping, forks in their laps unable to finish their meals. I looked for the French, easily visible by their matching stylish red, white and blue couture. I could imagine the sorrow and confusion they must be feeling. I empathized with their desire to immediately return to France to comfort and grieve with their homeland.

Quietly, from somewhere in the crowd outside, one of the Americans began to sing, “rain down, rain down, rain down your love on your people” and as the chorus grew a young man appeared from around the corner of the building, his fashionable red, white and blue attire wilted by the rain. He held a cigarette in his hand and looked at us. I remember his eyes. This was a look I had seen before, a long time ago and very far away after an IED detonated and killed a member of our patrol. Anguish, rage, fear, hopelessness. The French pilgrim stared into our group and commanded us, “Sing for me. I am f**king French, sing for me!” His voice rattled with pain. In that moment, I reached back into my vault of survival and prayed and sang – locking eyes as if to say, “I see you, I know this thing you are in. Let me walk with you. Je te protègerai. I will protect you.”

The divine mission of the feminine identity is rooted in survival, a survival created by and for the purpose of making us strong enough to love and protect the dignity of all human persons, including ourselves. If you fail, falter and grieve, you are human, and the gift of your humanity is that, through His suffering, we can be redeemed – and be made just a little stronger – to continue our mission.