A CALL TO RETURN

In 1967 I was in the fifth grade living on the Mississippi Gulf Coast with my family. My dad had been transferred there for his job two years before from Massachusetts, and I was having a difficult time adjusting. We’d found a Catholic church nearby to attend that also had an elementary school.

From my religious instruction, I learned that “venial” sins were minor and could be erased from my soul by weekly confession and communion. But somehow I didn’t understand that the more serious sins – mortal – also could be forgiven. Touching the communion host, a thin round white wafer that the priest placed into your mouth, was viewed as a mortal sin. To Catholics, the host didn’t just represent the body of Christ but was the actual flesh of Jesus Christ.

In August a tornado leveled our church. While it was being rebuilt, we held Mass in the elementary school cafeteria. After receiving communion one Sunday, I returned to my place, kneeled to say my prayers, and then began singing the communion hymn. To my horror, several pieces of the host flew out of my mouth and onto the back of the chair in front of me! I froze, terrified. The flesh of Jesus Christ on a metal chair!Since it was a mortal sin to touch the host, I did the only thing I could think of: I bent over and licked the pieces of host off the chair. I didn’t get them all, and in a panic I swept up the rest with my hand and popped it into my mouth.

It is difficult to describe to a non-Catholic the finality I felt with that gesture. The doors of heaven closed to me forever in that one split second. It seemed as if every light in the world had been extinguished, and there remained only complete blackness. I told no one. The deed was done, and the mortification too great. When later I left home to go to college, I essentially left the church and never looked back. An impenetrable shield surrounded me. Faith and trust were pretty much nonexistent.

It wasn’t until the mid-1990s that, as an adult, I related that story in a class at a very special church in Washington, D.C. By then I knew that my errant deed wouldn’t land me in hell. But the feelings of betrayal and hostility, borne from the many years of rigid religious instruction that emphasized a vengeful, fearsome God, remained.

In the fall of 2002, I took the first Alpha class at The Church of the Good Shepherd. At the end of the last tape, we were urged to break with the past and begin anew. “That’s a really wonderful idea,” I thought. “How do I do it?” I wanted to begin again but didn’t have a clue where to start. It seemed to me to be an essential but impossible step. I later read a book by Philip Yancey, What’s So Amazing About Grace?“The gospel of grace begins and ends with forgiveness,” writes Yancey. Forgiveness is necessary if one is to heal and move on.

Last April I went to communion for the first time in 21 years. I was able to forgive people in my past and move on. Perhaps I have been forgiven, too, not for the so-called sins of my Catholic childhood, but for all of the “ungrace,” as Yancey calls it, in my life. I realized that I had been absent from God’s life for those 21 years but that God had not been absent from mine. I realized that I had been, and continue to be, protected and guided every step of the way by a very loving God. Last April, I heard a call to return, a call that has changed my life in wonderful ways and for which I am very grateful. Last April, through the grace of God, I began anew.

— Laurie Juliana

Courtesy of The Church of the Good Shepherd United Methodist