Women Protect

Growing up, most of my Catholic experiences were with groups of people who looked like me and talked like me. I attended Spanish masses often, my youth groups were mostly Hispanic, and the Catholic school I attended was a mostly Hispanic and Black Community.

Today we face a pandemic. We are faced with so much uncertainty and suffering. I don’t know how our family finances, or our children’s education will be affected, or who will live or die in the next month. I don’t even know if my daughter will get to have her first communion this spring. We do not know what God’s doing. It’s easy for me to doubt God’s goodness.

For a long time, I truly believed that I was broken, even though I’ve heard over and over again that “the Lord makes the brokenhearted whole.” It took many years to finally acknowledge my childhood trauma, and it took months of panic and anxiety attacks, vivid flashbacks, and hiding it away to finally face it.

When I graduated from college, I moved home with no job and no plans. I knew that I wanted to do a year of service but I didn’t know what exactly that meant for me. I applied to a service program and was given the choice between several different service sites working with all different populations.

I knelt in the last pew of the little adoration chapel, reflecting on my Wednesday workday and trying to motivate myself to pray the Rosary when a middle-aged Hispanic woman entered. She shuffled past me, dropped to her knees in front of the monstrance and lifted her hands.

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.

I still felt clueless about successfully coping with anxiety but I was steadily on the road to recovery. I was still depressed and still suicidal but, as I held my nephew, I realized the many successes of choosing life again and again that had brought me to this moment of meeting him. So I whispered a soft “Thank you” to him because deep down I knew I wanted to live for God and I’d been searching for a meaningful way of doing so.

I remember sitting in the crowded pub at my university, tears filling my eyes and anxiety welling up in my chest. I was nearing the end of my senior year of college and after months of searching LinkedIn, filling out job applications, and preparing for interviews, I was swimming in a sea of rejection emails and phone calls.

Nothing about life is certain. No amount of planning, organizing, preparing or dreaming will guarantee our desired outcome. I’m constantly reminded to loosen my grip and, like the song says, “let Jesus take the wheel.”

You have the strength to question any relationship or situation that makes you even the slightest bit uncomfortable. In the words of Edith Stein, ‘Do not accept anything as the truth if it lacks love. And do not accept anything as love which lacks truth.’ We are called to relationships built on truth in the same way that truth calls us to Him.

The potential pain of disappointment should not smother the hope for those things that God places on our hearts.

“I just don’t think I’ll ever be happy.” Saying these words out loud to my spiritual director changed my life, and I want to reach out to you with some hope if you’ve ever found yourself in a similar situation.

(Photo by Jennifer Burk) My eating disorder took hold of my life. I was so drained and numb, like a walking zombie. I was just trying to get by, and I only prayed when I was laying in bed with no energy to move. I had been to a few on-campus counselors while I was in college, who tried to tell me to “just eat” or just believe that my body was a temple of the Holy Spirit. That was the last thing I could believe.

At the age of 32, this is my best handwriting. Close to ten years ago, four other Catholic campus missionaries and I were T-boned by a Mack Truck while driving to an end-of-the-semester retreat. I don’t remember a single day from the month that followed.

God had invited me to this specific place at this specific time. He had uniquely situated me to build bridges and instead I had built a wall around myself.

I cannot remember a time before anxiety. When I was young, everything had to be just right, and I always had to be in control. As I grew older, the prevailing worry was homework - had I done it perfectly? What if I’d missed something? And then more diabolical fears crept in - and I do mean diabolical in the truest sense of the word. I spent years wrestling with crushing, exhausting, terrifying guilt in my spiritual life.

The intricate design of the female reproductive system whether healthy or unhealthy evoked a sense of sheer awe and splendor. Ladies, we are fearfully and wonderfully made created in the beautiful image and likeness of God.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve wanted to be less Asian. Less foreign. Less other. So, I hid.  I hid any trace of culture. My senior year of high school, I realized that I hid and ignored my ethnicity so well, that I forgot I was even intentionally hiding it. It became a way of life.

“My mom worked as a banker in Mexico, and we lived a stable life, along with the help and support from family members. Throughout the years, my mom experienced a lot of fear and trauma... Her last experience where she got held at gunpoint, was the last straw…”

“I loved my faith then, and I love it now. I love Truth. But I struggled to reconcile my boldness with the quiet, docile picture of Mary that every song at church seemed to paint. I thought that’s all the Church envisioned for women.”

“Every human being has gifts, insight, and presence that are needed by the rest of us; some of us are in a position to have our offerings valued by the world, and some of us are not. That doesn’t mean some have less to offer—it means we have to create a world that elevates the voices of those who have been silenced…”