It’s been awhile since I wrote something that asked to be shared. I never stopped writing, but some shameful reluctance held a veil over me and this platform. The nagging desire to speak my words with this virtual humanity has never gone away, but now, I don’t know who my silence is serving. Keeping my life to myself is only keeping me alone.
The first half of this year has mostly been a pressure-cooker.
I waited never-ending months to hear admissions decisions from medical schools and compulsively refreshed my email box at least a hundred times a day. Friends, family, and coworkers incessantly asked me, in good faith, “Where are you going to medical school?” I still choose to respond in polite non-answers. I have grown so tired of the inevitable decision, their questions, my empty responses. It doesn’t matter to me anymore.
I could’ve written a newsletter to you three months ago when I got into a medical school that I loved. I knew I could’ve, should’ve or even wanted to, but something in me understood that that wasn’t what really mattered.
The stress of my future academic life compounds with a persistent uncertainty that I will even be happy pursuing medicine. I’ve felt a dual-calling to both physical and spiritual healing for most of my life, but now it seems the only time I feel truly safe is sitting in a church. Reading theologians like Ilia Delio and Thomas Merton at the end of a long work day feels like some kind of natural valium. I want to chase these feelings with my whole life and have no idea how this fits into a career as a doctor. The dissonance between opposite services to humanity, spirit and flesh, continues to add unresolved weight to my practical plans.
In February, I decided to go to Italy.
After googling for less than 10 minutes, I messaged a few Franciscan priests in Pennsylvania and inquired about their advertised two-week pilgrimage through Rome and Assisi. Soon after, I paid my dues to join about 20 like-minded Catholics, all over the age of 55 and whom I had never met, for a purposeful retreat of prayer and contemplation.
Regardless of impulsivity or intentionality, I needed God and I needed silence, detachment and space. I had to return back to center. My life in Boston was successful and joyous and fulfilling, but I felt like I couldn’t breathe anymore.
I returned from Italy on Sunday, May 14. There are many things to share from the pilgrimage itself, and maybe I will; at least a dozen pages have already been written. But I’ve learned with the practice of newsletters that pressure to consolidate my work into neat intellectualized revelations only amounts to guilty blank pages.
Before I left a few weeks ago, I wrote a short letter to myself on the last page of a full notebook.
I wrote it at work as a distraction from my “real” responsibilities. It speaks for itself.
Dear Abby,
Or dear God, dear whatever is listening. Today on April 28 it’s Friday and Meister Eckhart’s wisdom of - only God/Love has the authority/power/omnipotence to name who you are (1) - has been circling my brain like a boy running around the Altar of God. This morning walking twice around the reservoir I thought to be completely detached from the decision of medical school. To let go completely and know that no institution, no education or degree even, has the power to name who I am. I will be with the living and then I will be with the dying. Next time when someone asks me where I am going to medical school I will say “I’m going with the dying.” I'm going to Feldberg 8 [oncology unit] and will feel my heart suddenly bubble as water pools in my eyes again, just like the last time I stood there in those PPE-gowned hallways.
I guess this is to say I’m done with silence and I’d like to choose to take up my hands to something new. Right now that holding is in my pen, tomorrow it may be a life. Opening my camera on accident this morning while crossing the left side of Dean Rd I was surprised by the glow of the sun around my head. How my face looks fuller and squishier from that angle and I love it for that and everything else. I look beautiful and happy from down below.
This year, I promised myself to do something new with my hands, to allow discovery to find me and that conviction that has always been present in my body to find a new place to show its face. It will always have the same name in this dimension, as long as God allows it. With the closing of this notebook I want to thank you and these very hands for having the bravery to make known what would otherwise be lost to memory. Thank you for the decision to skip across lines of matter and choose a space to become. As life begins to feel different I will return to the words of Meister Eckhart and Thomas Merton’s resounding consolidation - that by not giving me what I thought I wanted, God granted me something greater than I could have ever imagined (2). And that imagination - whether it begins in this realm or I've yet to realize it in the next - that is the vision of the Spirit. Through these evolutionary, sacramental gifts of ritual and becoming - my spirit-soul-body will ground itself in space and expand, inward and outward, according to the tides of calling. That whatever time or space reveals, it will lead to a more perfect union. For this I haven’t found the right language of gratitude but I pray to allow my life to be the testament for that. Lord make me an instrument.
Thank you for being here and joining in this communion. I don’t have everything figured out now, and that’s ok. I am grateful and pleased to be sharing this life with you: this life that is not shame, fear, nor silence, just plain truth.
More to come, in time.
Abby
“Don’t get stopped where something has the authority to name who you are, because that only love has the authority to name who you are.”
Finley, James, host. “Meister Eckhart, Session 1.” Turning to the Mystics. Transcript: https://cac.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/TTTM_Transcript_ME_S1.pdf
From MERTON, T. (2002). Sign of jonas. HARPER ONE., I can’t find the page number for the life of me.