February 20, 2012

The thought that a person is actually suffering from a mental illness is not one that I entertain too readily and so it was almost a full minute before I rose from the presider's chair in my priestly vestments and faced off with a woman making her way straight toward me down the center aisle of church in the silence after communion. I had seen her quietly stand up just as everyone sat down for the thanksgiving, walk through the iron gate marking the enclosure at the back of church and start down the aisle. Turns out, she was not making her way toward me, but to the lectern in front of the presbytery steps where, having arrived, she turned, faced the abbot and community and, in a delicate, dreamy voice began: “I have a message for all the monks . . .” Dom Brendan, with commendable composure and grace, eased out of his stall to her left, joined her at the lectern and, placing one hand in the middle of her back and the other beneath her elbow, as though about to ask her to dance, invited her to accompany him to the sacristy. Looking a little bewildered, the woman allowed herself to be escorted from church. Later the monks were murmuring about a neighbor suffering from schizophrenia who had not taken her meds. She had explained to the abbot in the sacristy, she wished to thank the monks for their prayers on behalf of a relative who had recently died. But none of this quite explained what I saw watching that woman make her way down the aisle. I didn't question that she had a mental illness. This is common knowledge. But something about the exquisite manner in which she had waited till the quiet moment of thanksgiving at the end of mass and how with such an air of dignity she had carried herself as she moved toward the sanctuary, right down the center of the church with all those startled eyes fixed on her, like a bride on her wedding day. Or maybe it was that famous painting by Titian that came to me at that moment, the one where Mary, as a little girl, with a hundred curious eyes watching her, ascends a giant stair, at the top of which a priest stands. I know this: what I witnessed was not only the symptoms of a mental illness. What God showed me was a human soul momentarily divested of its socially acceptable mannerisms and allowed to shine out with that innate dignity and grace which all our socially trained behaviors somehow fail to express; that grace which is the soul's inheritance direct from the God who is Light and Goodness, and Strength.