Carol Luebering

   Good Friday, 2008 

   God so loved the world, Scripture says, that God gave the only Son. I've always thought that those words must strike a chill in any parent's heart—especially on this day. Jack and I have an only son. We wouldn't knowingly give him--or any of our daughters—to unkind people.

    But once I had an only daughter, and I didn't want to give her to anyone at all. I was 18 and unmarried. Back in the 50's, young women in my situation were expected to disappear for a discreet period of time, give the baby up for adoption sight unseen and then get on with their lives as though nothing had happened. But I wanted to keep my baby. I dug in my heels and refused to sign the release until finally the desperate social worker suggested that I go see her. So I did.

    For maybe an hour I held her and rocked her and fed her. And I cried—a lot!--because I saw her as someone who was no just longer a part of me, but a separate little person who needed much more than I could hope to give her, starting with a daddy. And I knew what I had to do. I signed the release forms the next day.

    I did "get on with my life." I went back to college; I met and married Jack and gave birth to three daughters and that only son. And I buried the unhappy teenager I had been so deeply that over the next 35 years I only told three people that she had ever existed--first Jack, of course. Nobody got any details. And I made it clear to all three that I never wanted to talk about it again.

    As I said, Jack and I have three daughters and one son. I also have a number of "other daughters," now middle-aged women to whom I have been so close for so long that some children know me as Grandma Carol. The first were neighborhood kids whom I taught to sew when our kids were small because I was the only mom on the street who could. Later, when I went to work as a book editor at St. Anthony Messenger Press, I became the "staff mom" to the young women there.

    When my parish established an assortment of groups to minister to people's needs, I signed up for the bereavement committee because I was familiar with the then newly revised funeral rite. We expected to plan funerals for parishioners who had completed long lives, but our initiation was brutal. The first funerals we planned were for a forty-year-old man who dropped dead, leaving a wife with two young children and a business to run; a baby doomed to a short life by a fatal birth defect and one of my first "other daughters" who was killed in a traffic accident.

    At the time we knew nothing about grief. (In the early 70's hardly anyone did!) We soon learned that the support which carries people through a funeral disappears just as they're beginning to absorb the reality of their loss. We began to keep in touch over the long season of mourning. We discovered that people really struggle with tasks the dead once handled, and enlisted the help they needed. I wrote a book about our experience as a guide for other parishes, and I started writing other things directed to grieving people or to the folks who minister to them.

    Then one afternoon I got a phone call from a young woman who was in such obvious emotional distress that learning why she was calling took a few minutes. Finally she blurted out, "I think I'm your daughter." She was calling from a nearby pay phone, and a few minutes later I was holding her in my arms again while tears streamed down both our faces.

    When she left, all the painful feelings I had buried years earlier swept over me. I did what I have done since childhood to sort things out: I bled what was churning inside me onto paper. And when I read it over, I thought it might speak to what the bishops were calling the "pastoral aspect" of the abortion issue. So I tweaked it a bit, offering my "credentials" to challenge people's attitudes toward unwed mothers, toward women struggling in poverty, even asking them to examine their relationships with their own daughters. I carried it to work with me, more than a bit uneasy about baring my shameful history, and submitted it as a potential article for Saint Anthony Messenger magazine.

    As it circulated through the magazine staff, a wonderful thing happened. One by one, each of those dear people came into my office with arms wide open. They gave that troubled teen inside me so many hugs that I could finally embrace her, too--could finally accept her as truly part of myself.

    I will always be grateful for the healing I found in my coworkers' embraces. A hug is an amazing thing. No other human gesture is so affirming to give or to receive under any circumstances. The first thing every human child learns in the moments after birth is that human arms are comforting when you are cold and frightened. And, of course, we never grow too old to welcome a hug when life goes wrong.

    But right now I'm thinking of a gesture that, in the words of an old spiritual, "causes me to tremble, tremble, tremble": God's only Son "opened his arms on the cross," as one liturgical prayer puts it. He stretched them wide enough to embrace each and every one of us in all our woundedness, in all our sinfulness, in all our sorrow.

    God's only Son understands that heartbroken people are most at ease in the company of someone whose heart has also been pierced. He knows that our sinfulness is healed not by our shame, but by God's generous forgiveness. He embraces us so that we can learn to embrace ourselves, to accept those parts of us we'd rather bury.

    For what I came to realize, thanks to my coworkers' hugs, was that the unhappy teenager I had hidden for so many years had always been an important part of me. Giving up that baby left a hole in my heart that ached to hold another daughter, and another, and another…. The pain of the loss I could never acknowledge was surely what drew me into involvement with grieving people. The best parts of me are, it seems formed from scar tissue.

    I suspect that's true of all of us. The pain we have known is what enables us to empathize with others who are hurting. The guilt and shame we carry is what helps us deal more gently with other people's flaws.

    So on this wondrous evening, Jesus invites us lean into his outstretched arms. There we can begin to see ourselves as he does: strongest and most loving in those broken places his healing love has touched.