The graveyard at Kinsale Union workhouse I remember my mother, before she died, warning me to fill out the list of the dead each November. And so every year I faithfully sit down and think of those I have known, those who have died in the last year and those who have passed my path in life. It can be a wonderful exercise in thinking of the many people I have been blessed to meet. It is easy to include the names of those I remember those I have loved and those whose memories I cherish.
Struggle
But there is always the struggle to include those I have not good memories of or those whom I now know had dark secrets that only came to light with their deaths. I truly struggle to include them. Generally, I simply don’t include them but put at the end of my list, “all those who have died and are in need of God’s mercy” without including them by name. I wonder if this is a cop out on my part.
Forgiveness is easy to apply to oneself but it isn’t easy to show to everyone, even God’s forgiveness. I find myself asking myself, or maybe God, how could you forgive this person who has caused so much harm and hurt. I know that Jesus says that his way for my happiness and healing is to forgive. But it isn’t easy to forgive when the hurt and memories are still so alive in one’s heart and mind.
Healing
The first step I have discovered is for me to ask the Lord’s healing in my life. I ask him to allow his love for me to give me the liberty to move on to another place. One has to acknowledge the hurt but one also has to ask for the help of God in accepting healing for oneself. One has to ask the Lord to help you to break free from the hurt and the harm. We can allow those who have hurt us to continue to have power in our lives and keep us imprisoned in our pasts. Only the Lord can set us free and part of this freedom is giving us the grace to forgive.
You can’t force yourself to forgive it is a healing. This year as I wrote out my list of the dead I was also asking the Lord for healing for myself. To be honest with you, even this year there were a few names I have not been able to add, just yet. I pray with God’s help I will get to that place where I will be able to add their names to my November List.
Purgatory
The struggle I go through each November, is like Purgatory, a place where healing has to take place and one is finally healed of the wounds of this life and we are set free to move to a place of peace and true reconciliation.
Death of a very dear friend
During the week I attend the funeral of a very dear friend, Sr Paula Marty George OP of our Dominican enclosed monastery in Drogheda. She was born in England and baptised into the Anglican Communion, the only child of her parents. After art college in the 1950s she entered the Anglican Sisters of the Society of St Margaret. She was a wonderful artist and teacher and as such she taught art in their schools in England and South Africa. In the late 1970s while attending a Catholic Mass she had a profound experience of the Lord as truly present in the Most Blessed Sacrament. Shortly after this experienced she was received into full communion with the Catholic Church. But she remained deeply religious and she entered the Dominican Sisters of the Bushy Heath Congregation in London.
On the death of her beloved mother she entered our enclosed monastery in Drogheda and made her solemn profession in 1993. She was a most beautiful soul, gentle and kind but with the courage of a martyr, she followed her Lord from her beloved Anglican communion, to the Catholic Church, from England to Ireland and from the active religious life to the enclosure.
Her journey has shown me that we don’t have to reject our past as we move on, until her dying days she was a proud English lady with a love and respect for the Anglican Communion.