beautiful.

My sister’s first college choir concert was held this past Sunday evening at 8pm in the Our Lady of Victory Chapel at St. Kate’s. This chapel happens to be one of my favorite places. It is so peaceful. I love it there. I have only been to mass there once, and as I am not Catholic nor do I plan to become Catholic, I doubt I’ll ever go again. BUT I love to just “be” in this space.

Seriously.

The concert was lovely. It was a candlelight affair to celebrate the first Sunday of Advent. My grandparents and parents attended as well. While we were waiting for the show to begin, my grandma showed us the bulletin and inserts she saved from a funeral she went in the week prior to that night. A girl named Nikki, who is the granddaughter of a family friend, finally died of cancer the day after Thanksgiving this year. I say “finally” because she had been battling illness since her birth. She was 13 when she died. She was born with a rare heart abnormality which resulted in numerous surgeries even just days after she was born. As she grew and began to recover, she was diagnosed with a rare stomach cancer and when she finally started to recover from that she began to suffer from chemo-induced leukemia which eventually took her life. I have never actually met this girl, but she’s been in my thoughts for a number of years. I have chatted with her on her Caring Bridge webpage, even wrote her a poem which her family fashioned into a background image for the webpage.

Finding out that she had died made me sad…sad for her family, although I know they had been watching her suffer for years and may have found some peace in her finally being able to rest and be pain-free. But the whole experience was just so…emotional. I found myself overcome with THAT feeling….that feeling which I call inescapable or unfathomable love. Sitting in the pew of a church reading a speech that Nikki once gave to her church congregation, I couldn’t contain myself. I cried. I cried from a really deep part of myself. I don’t cry easily, and so when it rains…it pours. And I love it. I feel so very connected and whole in these moments when I am so filled with love that I feel like I simply might burst.

Faith is a beautiful thing. Nikki had it, and this has allowed her family to be at peace with her death. Even in times when her family couldn’t hold on to their faith (I mean, it is not difficult to see how the terminal illness of a child, one’s own child, could be a deal-breaker for a person of any religious persuasion) but somehow Nikki held on for them. Maybe because she couldn’t let go, even if she wanted to. This is how I feel about my faith. Even in times when I question so many things (which is most of the time) I simply cannot let go of my faith….or perhaps it is more accurate to say that it will not let go of me.

This is why I have never lost my faith—it has never lost me. God is faithful, always. That is reassuring, freeing and damn comforting.

I had a beautiful experience in that church on Sunday night. Songs of hope occupying the seemingly colossal expanse of the chapel, a building established and maintained by strong, compassionate women. To the Sisters—thank you for your vision, and thank you for giving us not only an excellent college, but a place to keep our hearts. Coeur de Catherine is the name of the central building on campus. But for me, the whole campus, well the whole place and the idea of the place—the Sisters who had a vision of creating an environment in which women would be empowered to lead and influence and made it come to life against all odds, the dedicated faculty and staff who keep it ticking, and most importantly the strong, enlightened and powerful women who occupy the classrooms—is my heart.

Thank God.

I love you.