the woman at the well

~~~THIS PAGE IS DEDICATED TO MY BELOVED OLDER SISTER,
DEBRA ANN THERESE,
B. JUNE 20, 1956 - D. FEBRUARY 16, 2008,
MAY SHE REST IN PEACE, AND MAY PERPETUAL LIGHT SHINE UPON HER~~~
Our hearts were made for You, O Lord,
and they are restless until they rest in You.  --St. Augustine
most of this is super yucky for me to think about, though i brought much of it on myself! i suppose i should begin here, so it all makes sense:
southside bethlehem, pennsylvania.
see the Bethlehem Steel?  the men on the north side wore suits to the steel; the men on the southside wore hardhats to the steel.  i was born and raised here, on the southside.
they tell us girls "marry a steelworker because they make good money".
my grandfather, my dad, my mom, my uncles, my brother-in-law and even i worked at the Bethlehem Steel at one time or another.  we did not make good money.
eventually, the steel closed down.
my mom, my sisters and i spent a lot of time in lines.  at the welfare office...
...at the medical clinic...  and waiting for fat bags of flour and long, orange blocks of "government cheese"  (it's actually pretty good)...
...and also at the state-run liquor store.
except for a relative's singular attempt to strangle me when i was a toddler (i remember my mom shouting, "stop it-- you'll kill her!" as my baby shoes dangled in the air),
things were sort of okay until
one night he took me for a ride in our station wagon, bought me my favorite candy in the whole world, coconut strips,
then hid me under some blankets on the floor of the car and took me, alone with him, to a drive-in movie theatre like this one: he always preferred the very violent type of porn.  i was four years old and it scared the hell out of me, and i acted it out on them: i hated ken's guts.
i first heard about God at the age of five years, in a church that looked like this.  i cried every friday when the nuns made us go because their singing was spooky and they made God seem so far away.  they didn't mean to, though.  honest.
the nuns insisted that Jesus loved me very, very much.
same with her.  i began to love our Lord and His Blessed Mother, and i spoke with them often.  His Mom became my Mom.  it was cool.
pretty soon, my big sister was taken away by CPS to live in a foster home.
we shared a bed.  i missed her.  where was God?
i was in the first grade and already overwhelmed by my town, my church and my insane family.
the kindly nuns taught me how to read and to write.  my first poem was about an elephant, riding a carousel, who could play his trunk like a trumpet.
thankfully, there was plenty of polka dancing at my polish catholic baba's house.  the grown ups drank Pabst Blue Ribbon beer and Pink Cadillac jug wine.
every holiday, baba's kitchen table was wrapped in vinyl lace, and dotted with molded glass bowls from the dimestore, piled high with "jordan almonds".  she'd mix A-Treat soda in with the jug wine for my cousins and me.
baba had a shrine to the Blessed Mother set up in the room i slept in.  the smiling Virgin always made me feel loved and safe.
to this day, the rich folks live here on the north side, and even have trees and stuff!
but third generation polish-americans like me and african-americans too still live here on the southside where CPS takes big sisters from warm beds.
...soon things were even worse at home.
at my confirmation in the fourth grade, i took st. bernadette as my patron saint.  she, too, had a crappy home life, poor grades, and didn't even know her Catechism; yet, they said Our Lady appeared to her.
here she is.  isn't she pretty?  i was going to become a nun and fly away
to heaven.
my relative flew away to the big house.
i became a teenager, and soon left what little faith i'd had behind.
the beginning of junior year, our principal, sr. xavier, encouraged my english teacher to permit me to take her creative writing class, which was normally reserved for seniors.
soon, my new high school english teacher sent some of my written stuff in to a contest, and i won a full scholarship to a summertime fine arts program held here, bucknell university: there i met tim ellis, who also had won the contest.  (they had selected only twelve students from all of pennsylvania for poetry!)  tim and i got to study poetry every day under deb burnham!  tim minored in sculpture, and i in photography.  this was by far The Best Thing that Had ever Happened to Me; but when summer ended, so did the wonderful program.
back in bethlehem, one night i was walking home with a boyfriend over this bridge, "the hill-to-hill bridge," terribly missing tim ellis and our teachers. i had just passed the fritch clock,
when one of the gangs began to follow me.  three blocks from my house they grabbed me and did icky things (the boy i was with did nothing to stop them), and, when i finally escaped, they threw a 2X4 at me that they found in the street.  it cut my leg pretty badly.  they chased me until i heard a familiar voice urging, "knock it off-- she's cool!"  i realized it was one of my childhood playmates, grown up and gone bad.
boy howdy, i wished every one of them horrible deaths.  even in the hottest shower i could stand i could not seem to wash their greasy hands off me.
later, i attempted to run over the boyfriend who was with me that night.
it's 1985.  i'm reading and writing a lot and here i am in a graveyard.  i'm the first female singer/songwriter for a punk band in my town.  we totally and completely suck.  i start getting fan mail from far away places like belgium and yugoslavia.  i wish i could travel there and say, "hey man, thanks for writing."
i was one of the first members of my family to graduate high school. i enrolled at the local community college, then transferred to a bigger school.  i kept writing.  soon my english professor wanted me to transfer here (princeton).  my friend neville drove me to the campus.  neville was a hippie.  we looked around.
i was so freaked out by princeton, i left school altogether and did this instead.  my agent was an older man who looked a lot like charles bronson.  he said, "you're not like the other girls... what are you, some college kid writing a paper or something?"  it sounds like maybe i'm making that part up but he really said that.  he bought me pizza and never tried anything.  i read vonnegut between sets and quit because they expected me to smile.
my relative came home from jail, killed my cat,
and offered to get me into prostitution.  i considered it... but as you can imagine, the idea ultimately turned me into a raging feminist.
simultaneously, i had become increasingly violent, especially toward men.  (my relative's taking out insurance on me and then trying to shove an entire bottle of prescription sleeping pills down my throat did not help.)
i soon swore off the opposite gender altogether and also had kind of a nervous breakdown...
i don't believe the two were related.
in spite of myself, i fell in love with the sculptor and musician, tim ellis.  who could resist him?  now tim ellis was all grown up and had a brilliant one-man show of his sculptures at the metropol in pittsburgh.  oooooh, i fell hard.
     
tim ellis liked john lurie, steamed artichokes with butter, and egon schiele.
and me.
we moved to pittsburgh, pennsylvania.  another steel town.
we lived behind one of these streets, above a bar, in an alley on another southside.  our landlord was really scary.  tim's studio was only a few blocks away, in a magical warehouse with an ancient freight elevator.  i always wanted to rollerskate in there, but i never got the chance.
by this time i rocked back and forth and sometimes i could not hear you.  i couldn't even take care of myself, let alone be in love with tim ellis.  this made me sad.
so i tried to do myself in.  the emergency room guy molested me.  i ended up in an insane asylum.
but tim ellis sneaked in and busted me out!  he left his van running outside.  i guess i was his muse or something.
soon after that, our landlord tried to kill us.   there was a dead bird smashed against the wall when we moved in, so we didn't mind leaving.
we crashed with friends in manhattan and in a warehouse in brooklyn where tim's buddy from art school had his loft.
i worked in greenwich village at canal jeans.  they gave employees a free vegetarian lunch everyday because the owner was a militant vegan.  or something.
we soon wore this out.
come on, do you blame them?
"California, Here We Come!"
at first we lived in our van.  but i learned how to type and got myself a swell job in downtown los angeles, right here.  my building was the shorter of the shiny ones in the middle, "One California Plaza".  see it?
can you see it?
here's a real pretty picture of my building.  isn't it shiny?  i had to kind of dress up to get in there, and i could see the ocean from my 48th floor office.  but after all that hard work-- and "good money"-- i found no peace.
tim ellis began sculpting for the film industry, and showing his own work downtown.  he was selected as one of the ten most popular artists in the county of los angeles.  they put his studio on a tour of up-and-coming artists' studios.  i should have helped him clean up the place, but i was hiding under the bed.
here it's 1991, i think.  we got a band together.  first we played parties; then, hollywood dives.  finally we got into the hollywood clubs on the "sunset strip", even the legendary whiskey-a-go-go (nope, we NEVER "paid-to-play"!)
but still, peace eluded us...  i was completely cuckoo, in love with tim but promiscuous and confused about my sexuality, and so depressed i would have made sylvia plath seem like the-life-of-the-party.  tim ellis may not have been stark raving mad like me, but he had his own stuff, you know.  i mean, everyone does.  but you'll have to ask him about that, okay?
so anyhow we were fighting.
a lot.
that's when we eloped here, the graceland wedding chapel in las vegas (smack between a seedy motel and a pawn shop), where you can be married by an elvis impersonator if you want to,
like this lucky couple!  but back then, elvis was twenty extra clams, so we were married sans the king on september 28, 1991.
anyhow, i thought getting married would make me "straighter," but once we got back to los angeles, i messed up everything!
see?
while all this was going on, my hives were getting worse. oh yeah, i forgot to tell you i broke out in violent hives almost every night, beginning all the way back when i was around... eighteen? nineteen?  i dunno.
those awful hives kept me up all hours of the night!
i'd scratch with a fork sometimes until i bled!
through the years, i tried everything imaginable to get some relief:
 western medicine  lotions and creams  meditation
smudge sticks
 yoga classes  eastern medicine/acupuncture  moxibustion
laying around the house with stones on my chakras and listening to guys like these:
as a last resort, i even tried drinking good old warm milk before retiring...
...but that didn't work either.
things were falling apart at my fancy job, too.  one afternoon, my boss found me sobbing uncontrollably under my desk.
he phoned tim ellis...
...and i ended up back in the looney bin!
only this time around, with my sweet medical benefits, it was a pretty swell joint, with good eats, too.  they didn't make me worse, but they sure couldn't make me better, either.
my boss had mercifully told everyone i had "the flu"
and they soon welcomed me back at work with flowers.
then tim ellis and i made plans to separate.
so i asked for a transfer to our san francisco headquarters.  i reasoned things would have to look better up there, like maybe the persistent fog would soften all the sharp edges.  deep down i knew i was really moving, though, in order to end my life.  tim ellis knew this, too.  i began to pack my things.  neither of us said a word.
~~~and now, a brief intermission~~~
while we pause, here, for your viewing pleasure, are several of the myriad gods i had tried over the years:
 Pan, Diana  Krishna  Gayatri  Allah  Buddha
Osiris, Nephtys
there were many, many more.  not one of them ever answered.
~~~and now, back to our story~~~
before leaving los angeles, i remembered a Christmas card a guy down the hall had given me.  it was rather "Jesus-ey," and i was curious.  even though it was now summertime, i kept thinking about this card, and wondering what this fellow believed...
Jesus.  Jesus?!?  i mean, people have done bizarre things because of that name!
The Crusades,
The Inquisition,
The Salem Witch Trials,
profound idiocy,
smarmy television evangelism,
and, quite possibly worst of all, "Precious Moments" figurines.
so i asked this fellow at my office-- rich was his name-- about that Christmas card, and he invited me to lunch to talk about it.
doh!  what was i thinking?!?
we met downstairs, here, at the cal plaza watercourt.  we sat just to the right and back of this photo, and i ordered a gourmet tuna salad sandwich.
my sandwich was yummy, but i was incredibly uncomfortable dining with ned-flanders-in-the-flesh.  i hoped nobody i knew would see us!  (yeah, i was kind of a big jerk back then.)  after some polite small talk-- very small talk-- rich shared a pamphlet about Christianity with me, and finally invited me to "ask Jesus" to be "the Lord" of my life!
i was way.
beyond.
freaked.
out.
i told him, "no, thank you; you're making me rather uncomfortable."
with that, rich leaned in, lowered his voice, and stated, "donna, right now satan is fighting for your soul!"
next he gave me a Bible to take home. well, it was just the New Testament. at that time i didn't remember there was an Old one, too.
i read Luke and became intrigued when Jesus said:
"The Spirit of the Lord is upon Me, because He has anointed Me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent Me to proclaim release to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord."   (Luke 4:18-19, RSV Catholic Edition)
myspace tells me i'm running out of room here!
to make a looooooong story short, i pulled a knife on several unfortunate people, a drummer we fired sent thugs after us, i started a barroom brawl, we were chased by street thugs in the NYC subway, we were held up at gunpoint in hollywood by a gang with stockings over their heads-- just like in the movies!-- and, after we found The Truth, tim and i, in our zeal, accidentally joined a sect of the amish!
no kidding.
well, i at least hope i showed you God's power to completely transform a massively screwed-up life, while also sparing you the gory details.
so, do i elaborate on the home-mummified, miscarried baby incident? do i tell you my relative wouldn't go to my high school graduation because i wouldn't ____________ (insert grossly immoral something i won't print)"?!? and all the other uber creepy stuff?
i dunno...
all i know for certain is this: "Jesus Christ, and Him crucified." (1 Cor. 2:2)
well, to summarize just for now, in september of 1994, through a series of miracles-- i don't know what else to call them--  tim ellis and i met the risen Christ and began to experience true peace for the first time in our lives.  He even took away those crazy hives when i called out to Him!
"In my anguish I cried to the Lord, and He answered by setting me free."
(Psalm 118:5, NIV)
and, get this: i'm no longer crazy!  and God somehow freed me from promiscuity and homosexuality fourteen years ago, and beautifully healed our marriage, too-- and blessed us with a growing family, two by birth and two by adoption (so far... Tim's vasectomy reversal surgery was 7/21/08-- which happened to fall in the same week as the 40th anniversary of Pope Paul VI's prophetic encyclical, HUMANAE VITAE !
:-)
God has also helped me to forgive and to love everyone who hurt me, and to ask forgiveness of those whom i've hurt! don't get me wrong, i am not even close to "perfect"-- but i have the grace of the Sacraments to help me to become the person He created me to be!
the Holy Scriptures say: "Don't copy the behavior and customs of this world, but let God transform you into a new person by changing the way you think. Then you will know what God wants you to do, and you will know how good and pleasing and perfect His will really is." (Romans 12:2, NLT)
the Catechism says: "God, infinitely perfect and blessed in himself, in a plan of sheer goodness freely created man to make him share in his own blessed life. For this reason, at every time and in every place, God draws close to man. He calls man to seek him, to know him, to love him with all his strength. He calls together all men, scattered and divided by sin, into the unity of his family, the Church. To accomplish this, when the fullness of time had come, God sent his Son as Redeemer and Savior. In his Son and through him, he invited men to become, in the Holy Spirit, his adopted children and thus heirs of his blessed life." (Catechism of the Catholic Church, paragraph I.1.)
Christ offers the gift of Himself to anyone and everyone.  the Scriptures say that He is not far from any of us (Acts 17:27)!  that's so cool.
here's the thing.  people-- you and me-- "miss the mark," which means we sin.  that's why we all need Jesus!
well, because churches are made up of us sinners, church may let you down, at one time or another.  perhaps it already has.
(since my dramatic conversion, i've personally encountered every denomination except this one.)
and christians themselves will let you down, sooner or later.  much as i don't want to, i will probably blow it with you, if i haven't already.
(me, back in the confessional... again!)
but Jesus, Yeshua, Hay-SOOS-- or however you prefer to call on His beautiful name-- well He will never, ever let you down.
as i grew in my faith, i also came to understand that following Christ could not be limited to a one-time "decision," as some denominations teach, though one certainly has to begin somewhere.  i learned that the Gospel is about much more than a "get out of Hell free card"-- but has more to do with our restoration and transformation, and, really, learning how to love, which is a lifetime process.
yes, we who have been Baptized have been brought from death to life (Rom. 10:9-13)-- but that is only the beginning!  Christ also came to heal us of our sin and self-obsession, daily. ("... by His wounds we are healed." Isaiah 53:5)
Jesus said, "If anyone would come after Me, he must deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow Me." (Luke 9:23) this beautiful lifelong journey is called the process of "sanctification" (in eastern christianity, "theosis"), though-- let's just say-- dying to Self ain't always so pretty!
but take courage; here's a Scripture promise to those who have been Baptized into Christ:
But we all, with unveiled face, beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from glory to glory, just as by the Spirit of the Lord. (2 Corinthians 3:18)
Jesus is REAL, my friends, He is alive, and He loves you like crazy!  so much so, that He died for you.
check out this online booklet: Pillar of Fire, Pillar of Truth.
for my Christian Evangelical, Fundamentalist and Emergent brothers and sisters:   Are you born again by "water and the Spirit"?
cool Catholic "television ads" here:   Catholics Come Home
if you are or were Catholic, or would like to learn about Catholicism, check this out as well:   God's Love for You
if you would like to explore conversion to Catholicism, here ya go:   How To Become a Catholic
if you feel you may have a vocation to consecrated life, try these two links:
  Test Your Call
  Institute on Religious Life
Eternal God, in whom mercy is endless, and the treasury of compassion inexhaustible, look kindly upon us, and increase Your mercy in us, that in difficult moments, we might not despair, nor become despondent, but with great confidence, submit ourselves to Your holy will, which is Love and Mercy Itself.  Amen.
--Diary of St. Faustina (950)