Excerpt:
...that describes/explains at least some of my current upheaval, and it is all around something with which we are all semi-obsessed, but hardly ever actually talk about: money.
What I'm seeing is most of us so do not want to be horrible consumers and greed-infected Wall Streeters that we can go to another, in its way equally unhealthy, extreme. We can take Christ's message that "as ye do unto the least of these, so ye do unto me" to mean that we should choose our own martyrdom and insist upon being one of "the least of these"--in the wrong way--ourselves. We all bring massive childhood baggage about money, holiness, success, fear, loyalty to our families of origin with us into adulthood. And we have very little guidance--not from our families, not from our schools, definitely not from our culture--as to how to manage money, earn money, think about money, relate to money. Thus many of us--okay, I--have shame around money, secrecy around money, a love-hate conflict with money, and an almost neurotic fear when it comes to money: of having too little; of having too much.
I could have gone along in my living-on-1500-dollars-a-month, no-health-insurance, no-vacations, no-separate-accounts-for-personal-and business way indefinitely, but reality jarred something loose and so, way WAY against my better judgment, will, and personal desire, I'm devoting a lot of energy and time to seeking help in this area.
It's going to be a long--in fact, life-long--haul. All my ideas about my spirituality, my progress, God's will for me are being upended. I feel very lost.
...This morning I was cleaning my desk and I came across a little card a friend sent me years ago. It's a quote from Dorothy Day: "I always had a sense of being followed, of being desired, a sense of hope and expectation." I thought, Well I haven't. I've had a sense of abandonment and failure and pulsating, electric fear. I threw the card in the wastebasket and started crying.
And then I went to Mass.
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