In Which I Laugh at the Concept of Having a Comfort Zone

At School of Community on Saturday, we got talking about living in comfort zones. A woman who is new to our gathering asked me if I still experienced today what I had recounted as a past tendency, namely of living in a tiny pin-prick of a comfort zone. "Oh no," I replied. "If anything, this year it has been God's work to completely demolish any comfort zones I've had. I'm never comfortable anymore!"

I've been thinking these last few days just how true my off-hand comment was. I feel like I have been living in the midst of a personal seismic shift this year, and anytime I think it has settled it seems to start up again. Oh, I have comfort all right. It exists in the objective, external order of my life. Husband, family, home, community -- all blessedly stable. We have good health, my husband is employed, and life is good. Perhaps it is precisely because of these things that other aspects of my life have been free to turn over in upheaval.

When I think of the term comfort zone I think of the story of the first meeting of RCIA (Rite of Christian Initiation for Adults) I attended as a catechist in my parish. This would have been in September of 2000. I dearly wanted to be involved in this process, designed for adult converts to the Catholic faith, and in fact it was the reason why we moved to a new parish one year after our marriage. But I sat on our couch, cuddled up in a ball next to my hubby, petrified. I was so nervous about finding the right door to enter (the meetings were held in the pastor's basement, which was like a mini parish hall). I was nervous about meeting all these new people. There I sat with him, probably in tears or close to it. It was all for good reason, too, because I was a lousy catechist that year, if I do say so myself. I was so out of touch with people's needs.

I also think of the first couple School of Community meetings I attended, back in 2006. A couple times I mustered up my courage to actually say something, and once someone sort of talked right over what I said (someone I didn't know then, or now, just to clarify). I felt so flattened that I couldn't bring myself to attend for several months. It was just too hard to try to open myself up at that level to risk my herculean effort going unheard.

And now, there's now.

Something amazing has happened to me. I think it is called Jesus Christ. Oh, I've believed in Jesus and followed Jesus since childhood, truly. But I have come into a completely different experience of His Church, though I've been here a good long time, too. I remember vividly a comment John Michael Talbot made on the pilgrimage I took back in 1993, right after entering the Church. We were at the church of the tomb of Lazarus, where I experienced an incredibly profound grace during Mass. I sobbed so hard I could not contain myself, nor hardly walk. (That's not to say that hard sobbing marks how profound one's experience is, but for me the sobbing was a mark of my heart being penetrated by Something not under my control.) The whole group knew my story of recent conversion. John Michael commented that sometimes an individual enters the Church, but it takes time for the Church to enter the individual. How correct he was. At that moment, I knew that I was going to discover in the Catholic Church that which, until that moment, I had somewhat despaired of finding: true, living Christianity. Truth is one thing. But how does one find the truth being lived?

It doesn't take finding a crowd of already perfect people. Tried finding those. No dice. It takes finding people with hungry hearts, who are willing to live that way, with hunger. People who take the desires of their human heart, longing for God, seriously, and who take the desires of others seriously. It takes knowing that being human means being made for God and being satisfied with nothing but Him.

Communion and Liberation has taught me to see this way. To see everything and everyone this way. And somewhere along the line I have changed. My heart has been thrown open to relationships with people in ways I could not have planned or even wanted a couple of years ago. My vision of reality has taken a huge shift: Reality is God's love! It is Him, His presence here with me. And I know it is reality I must live in and share with others. No more silly dream worlds or Utopian religious ideals. Love is an incredible force which shapes us to be like It by making us more ourselves. The more I become who God made me to be, the more others see not me, but Him.

I don't know if comfort will ever return, or if this is like feeling coming back into an arm that had gone numb, and I've been confusing comfort with numbness all these years. Yeah, I'm guessing that's it. Even if this has been a wild ride, I'm loving every minute of it.