Sunday on Emmaus Road

I was going to try to go back to regular Sunday Mass attendance after Easter, but I couldn’t.

Divine Mercy Sunday was a disaster. The panic attack made me unwell for days afterward.

This past Sunday, I didn’t even try.

I went to bed Saturday night with my usual Saturday night anxiety. I woke up feeling sick to my stomach at the thought of Mass, cringing from Mass the way a dog who’s been kicked cringes from his master’s shoes. So I decided to throw in the towel.

As I woke up and showered, I had pleasant plans. Instead of staying in bed on Sunday, why not do something comforting for a change?  Holly once told me I should pray in a garden because that’s what Jesus did.  I could go to the Community Garden, or somewhere out in nature. The borrowed car isn’t sturdy enough to take the freeway out to the Wildflower Reserve, but I could go to Beatty park or Union Cemetery and have a walk there. I could smell the wildflowers and listen to the birds. The cemetery is right behind the grocery store, and it’s the prettiest place in town.  I could even peel off a few dollars from our tiny budget and buy a Starbucks coffee to take there and pretend it was a picnic.

But as I drove, all I could think of was my mother reminding me that it’s a mortal sin to miss Mass. If you’re too sick to go to Mass, you’re too sick to have any fun. You have to stay in bed. Sunday is for Mass, or bed.

I got to the Kroger parking lot, but it didn’t feel right to treat myself to coffee or even food. Food is for good girls who do as they ought. Don’t take the children’s food and feed it to the dogs. I am a dog.

In the borrowed car, in the lot beside the cemetery, I stopped and had a long cry.

What kind of god institutes a Church like this?

Unless, of course, God didn’t.

I drove home and cried some more, in the backyard, yanking weeds in the strawberry patch. Jimmy had been by to mow the lawn again, but he couldn’t reach the edges of the concrete planters and the sidewalks. I pulled the crabgrass and dandelions out from between the cracks, taproot after hairy grass root, over and over again, reveling in the fact that I was not in bed. I was working on Sunday. I was doing something valuable that I liked on a Sunday. I was making the world a more tolerable place, on a Sunday, rather than being tortured.

And then the pain of not eating caught up with me, and I went to bed.

I can’t do what I’m supposed to do, and I can’t have fun either.

I was given to believe you have to persevere in the face of every difficulty, without stopping, until God brings you home and rewards you for your martyrdom. No matter how much it hurts, stay the course. Every Sunday. Every holy day of obligation. Every Friday abstinence. Every Ash Wednesday fast. Every Rosary. Get in line for the confessional after Friday benediction. Don’t go to bed without examining your conscience. Don’t falter. Don’t blink. Hold fast or God will damn you for letting go. And I have failed at that, which means I am going to hell. I don’t want to go to hell, but at this moment in my deconstruction, Heaven doesn’t sound nice either. Heaven is where the Communion of Saints are. If the Communion of Saints is anything like their fan club on earth, they don’t want me and I don’t want them.

I wish there was a third option, and not purgatory either. I wish there was a place I could go to speak to Jesus privately without his mother and the saints throwing stones. I would take out my clipboard and interrogate him on everything that’s ever happened to me and to those hurt worse than I was, and what he thought about it, and exactly what he was planning to do to make it right. Maybe we could make peace.

At some point, out of curiosity, I googled the Gospel readings.

Of course it was the reading of the disciples on the Road to Emmaus, and how they met the Lord. The Lord explained everything that had happened, and then they recognized him in the breaking of the bread.

Those disciples weren’t doing what they were supposed to do. They were supposed to be hiding in the upper room with the eleven, but they weren’t. They were traumatized and horrified, watching the brutal lynching of Jesus, and then they walked away. They walked away from the other disciples. They walked away from the Holy City.

Jesus didn’t damn them for walking away.

Jesus walked with them.

He told them everything that had happened, and why things went the way that they did. I don’t see that He gave the same detailed explanation to the people who stayed in Jerusalem, but He was careful with these two. He scolded them a little, but He didn’t call them a worse name than “foolish.” By contrast, Simon Peter got called Satan for telling Christ not to prophesy His crucifixion. These two runaways got the whole of Scripture revealed.

And then Jesus stayed with them into the night. It wasn’t a brief visit like the one to the apostles in the upper room. It was a long one.

He fed them. He didn’t eat a piece of fish in front of them to show them that He wasn’t a ghost; that’s what he did for the good apostles in Jerusalem. For these bad disciples who didn’t do what they should, He sat with them and fed them. He broke the bread and gave it to them, and they recognized him. They did nothing to earn it. They didn’t go to confession. They didn’t fulfill their Sunday obligation. They didn’t pray the Rosary. They asked Him to stay, and He went and broke the bread and gave it to them, just as He’d done at the Last Supper.

Does that mean He gave them Holy Communion?

That’s what it looks like to me.

He went and found the two who left, and gave them Holy Communion before they’d said they were sorry.

Reading this, I thought once again that perhaps Jesus isn’t who I feared He was.

Maybe the rules and regulations and terror of punishment I was taught are not God’s will, but a few powerful people attempting to hold God hostage. Maybe God just wants me to eat.

“All right,” I prayed, my only prayer that Sunday. “Come to me, right where I am. Appear to me here instead of where I should be. Feed me and explain yourself. I’m waiting.”

I made myself breakfast at six o’clock at night.  Michael walked to Mass by himself. Adrienne watched her Minecraft Youtube videos on one end of the sofa while I played Dungeons and Dragons online with my friends on the other. It was peaceful.

I don’t know what I’m going to do next.

But I do feel a little better.

Mary Pezzulo is the author of Meditations on the Way of the Cross, The Sorrows and Joys of Mary, and Stumbling into Grace: How We Meet God in Tiny Works of Mercy.