Carrie Tomko

...is the author of a little-known Catholic blog Still Running Off at the Keyboard. Very much a traditionalist at heart, there was a bit of original thinking to her writings, much of which I found in my inbox. You see, she was better known to some of us in the Catholic blogosphere as a commenter and correspondent. Her wit has an edge to it, her cynicism a ray of hope.

Yesterday, our Pertinacious Papist brought to our attention that she is suffering from cancer. He also observes a deep melancholy that appears to have crept into her life, as manifest in her writings on the state of the Church today.

I can still remember my father's discovery that he had multiple sclerosis. I was a sophomore in high school at the time. In the several years that followed, he went from struggling to accept his limitations, to anger and despair, to quiet resignation. There was occasional discord in the household, and the discontent of a man previously accustomed to being master of his surroundings, only having to surrender to the inevitable. It also took its toll on my mother, who over the course of several years, had to face the prospect of a twilight in their years together, that would be quite different than that for which she had hoped. But through grace and perseverance, they have prevailed. They are cared for, in their own home, by devoted children. They have their lawn mowed and flower gardens tended by equally devoted grandsons. Last month, they held their first great-grandchild. On the fourteenth of this month, they will quietly celebrate their fifty-fifth wedding anniversary.

Lately, I have been reading Shadowlands, namely the script to the stage play by William Nicholson, about the lives together of writer C S Lewis and Helen Joy Davidman. The play opens with Lewis delivering a lecture to his audience:

"God creates us free, free to be selfish, but He adds a mechanism that will penetrate our selfishness and wake us up to the presence of others in the world, and that mechanism is called suffering. To put it in another way, pain is God's megaphone to rouse a deaf world. Why must it be pain? Why can't He wake us more gently, with violins or laughter? Because the dream from which we must be awakened is the dream that all is well.

"Now that is the most dangerous illusion of them all. Self-sufficiency is the enemy of salvation. If you are self-sufficient, you have no need of God. If you have no need of God, you do not seek Him. If you do not seek Him, you will not find Him.

"God loves us, so He makes us the gift of suffering. Through suffering, we release our hold on the toys of this world, and know our true good lies in another world.

"We're like blocks of stone, out of which the sculptor carves the forms of men. The blows of His chisel, which hurt us so much, are what make us perfect. The suffering of this world is not the failure of God's love for us; it is that love in action.

"For believe me, this world that seems to us so substantial is no more than the shadowlands. Real life has not begun yet."

(Excerpt from Shadowlands, by William Nicholson, 1990, Penguin Books USA, New York City.)

We must become the good we expect in the world, and in the Church as well. As a communion of souls on our way to Heaven, we occasionally pause to lift up the fallen, and their spirits as well, that they may press on. We might wish the same for ourselves. To that end, our sister Carrie gets this week's highly-esteemed Tip of the Black Hat, as will be remembered in the prayers of her fellow-parishioners of "Saint Blog's Parish" in the days to come.

Viva Cristo Rey.
.