Praise the Lord

[Editors’ note: Kate Fontana is a 2019 awardee of the Lucile Murray Durkin Scholarship for women and non-binary persons discerning priestly ordination. This is the second in a series of reflections from our 2019 awardees on how the scholarship impacted their journey over the academic year. Read the first reflection here.]

Feeling into this last year, I see a tree which, after many seasons of thickening trunk and deepening roots, now pushes its inner resources up and out, sprouting branches and sweet fruits. I feel sturdy and slow-moving, generative, well resourced and consequently able to be a resource for others.  What a wild year.

Thanks to the Lucile Murray Durkin scholarship, I returned to the Seattle School of Theology and Psychology last fall and enrolled into a Clinical Pastoral Education program at Harborview Medical Center in Seattle in January.  The CPE program is a 30+ hour/week unpaid internship, and would not have been possible without the financial assistance from the Lucille Durken scholarship.  HMC was the site of one of the first COVID-19 deaths in the U.S.  The following is a snapshot into a formative moment that I think portrays where this time has taken me.  I am tremendously grateful to the Women’s Ordination Conference for the support in pursuing my pastoral vocation: to be an advocate for justice, peace, and healing; and where that is not possible, to bear holy witness with and for our aching world.

***

It is the week before I will withdraw from my spiritual care internship at Harborview in March, in the early weeks of the COVID epidemic.  I have been called to sit with a family who lost a loved one to COVID-related complications.  I do not know much about the patient, just that their death was sudden, the impact on surviving family immediate and severe.  

Anxieties pulse through my body and mind when I get the call.  As I sit with the family amidst their palpable shock and raw grief, I feel utterly useless.  The thought of offering words of comfort feels dishonest and cruel.  I am also aware of my own fear of proximity to the virus, and am not very proud of the way that I avoid physical touch.  I ask permission to say some prayers aloud, and then I just sit beside the family and weep.  

After what feels like forever I realize I am clenching my belly and my jaw.  My breath is high in my chest, and my senses narrow on the family beside me and my own sense of awkward inadequacy.  This noticing brings me back.  I soften.  I wiggle my toes.  I feel for my belly from the inside.  My senses relax and I hear an inner voice say words that take me completely by surprise:

My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my savior…for you have looked with mercy on my lowliness and your name will be forever exalted…

Mary’s song, the Magnificat, Mary’s prophetic poem she sings to her cousin, Elizabeth, during the early months of their synchronistic pregnancies.  Though I have what I would call an insecure attachment to the Bible as a whole, this passage is a favorite.  I almost laugh aloud at the inappropriateness: words of praise at this time of such inexplicable devastation.

But as I sit and feel my breath expand and my body soften with Mary’s words, I remember another absurd moment of unexpected praise of the Holy: this one coming from my mother.

Devoted and clean-mouthed Catholic that she was/is, one of my distinct memories of my mother from our childhood was that her expletive of choice was: “PRAISE THE LORD!”  Now, you really have to hear it in context.  Imagine you’ve just dropped a crock-pot of spaghetti sauce on the carpet (that actually happened) and rather than your casual foul-letter words, what you hear is a long and loud “Oooooohhhhh….PRAISE THE LORD!!!”  Somehow in a moment of frustration or agony, she had trained herself towards the absurd paradoxical practice of praising her lord.  

I catch the paradox now, sitting with this grieving family.  What else can we do in times like these but rage a mocking praise at our god?  It is the same strange devotional defiance and mood swings of Job and the Psalmists, or the individuating child who cannot put words to the agonizing simultaneity of excruciating love and tormenting hatred felt towards their parent.  It is the insane repetitive rhythm of saying the name of the Divine, Hari Krishna, Hari Krishna, Hari Hari, Krishna Krishna, from life and into death.  It’s the blessing-curse of “Jesus Christ!” spoken in fury, desperation, or pain.

Praise the Lord.  Praise the Lord.  My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord.  Ram Ram Sita Ram.

I can’t say that my presence makes any difference to this family.  Their loved one is still dead.  Their hearts are still gutted.  Their grief is still a gaping wound.  I am sure I am not the most remarkable part of this experience.  I do not share my Magnificat insight with them.  But I sit there awhile, trying to stay soft in my body and wide in my senses and evoking of the Holy One/ness who is both intimately amidst and unfathomably more than the acuteness of our bodily suffering.  The Holy One/ness that is holding the fabric of the cosmos together, when by all other measures it is falling apart.