My Easter Story

If you had asked me a few years ago what my favorite holiday of the year was, Easter would’ve undoubtedly been at the very bottom of my list. For me, Easter used to just be the holiday that always awkwardly fell on a Sunday and on which it was permissible to eat a basket full of candy and chocolate without fear of receiving judgmental glances. Some years, if the Montana winter had dissipated enough, I donned a pastel colored dress and accompanied my grandmother to church in the early morning. Easter afternoons used to be filled with egg hunts at my parents’ house where I hoped to uncover the golden egg with the money rolled up inside. That’s what Easter used to be for me.

But two years ago, that all changed….

In 2014, I received the greatest gift and blessing of my life when I was baptized into the Catholic Church during the Easter Vigil Mass. In the weeks and months leading up to my baptism I had the real meaning behind Easter explained to me in a new and profound way. But once I experienced first-hand what is perhaps the most beautiful sacrament in the Church, I truly FELT the meaning behind Easter. 

 

Since that glorious evening, Easter is no longer just a holiday for me…or even merely a date of remembrance of Christ’s crucifixion. For me, Easter is the day I was saved and called to the highest purpose of my life. It will forever be a time of year now when I recall the grace and forgiveness I was granted—even though I didn’t deserve it—and was shouldered with a cross and inner light to bear for the good of myself and humanity the rest of my days. 

Last Friday, I was given an incredible opportunity to further extend the light of Christ within to those around me. I was emailed by the musical director of my church to ask if I would give the reflection for the last evening prayer service of Lent. Her words made me tear up because it was the kind of opportunity I always knew I wanted but wasn’t sure I’d ever have. I couldn’t write back quickly enough to tell her I was all in for it. 

Pope Francis called for 2016 to be a Jubilee Year of Mercy, so the overarching theme of the prayer services this year centered on mercy. I thought to myself initially, “my lord, where do I even begin to explain all that I have come to know about mercy.” But as always, after staring at the blank screen for countless minutes and praying for divine intervention, I began typing. Once I did, the words flowed out of me with such a fierce determination that I could not stop them. 

Being a writer I crossed out, deleted, rewrote and hung my head dozens of times in the process of crafting my reflection. Even up until a few hours before I was to deliver it at church, I was still tweaking things. But when I finally walked up to the podium to speak to my brothers and sisters of St. Mary Catholic Community, my words were confident, reflective, and peaceful as they rolled out from my lips.

At the end of the prayer service, I received a round of applause from everyone in the church. It’s rare to hear applause at church so I greatly appreciated it. But what happened in the subsequent minutes though was the real reward. I fully expected people to tell me I had done a good job. But I received far more than that. After the service concluded, several people rushed their way over to me and the first words out of their mouths were “Thank You.” Thank you…..those were certainly words I never expected to hear. I wasn’t even quite sure what to say back to them. But those two little words were the greatest affirmation for me that not only was my story heard and appreciated, but it had changed something in them…..even the older church ladies that I didn’t expect to take anything away from the thoughts of a new and very young Catholic. 

The next day, I had the privilege to serve as a lector during the Palm Sunday service. While processing outside with our palm branches for some readings, an older lady stopped me to tell me how impressed she had been with my reflection the night before. Not only had my speaking abilities shown through to her but my words caused her to pause in her own reflection—a reflection on her own baptism….69 years earlier. Her baptism had taken place decades before but she still seemed to remember it like it was just yesterday. I wondered how long it had been since she’d really thought about that day prior to hearing me speak about my baptism. I wonder if what I had said had called to mind the memory. 

Her last comment to me was, “It must’ve been very hard for you to share that story.” But I smiled and told her “no.” Sharing personal stories about failure, tragedy and transformation are not the difficult part for me. What is difficult is having such stories bottled up inside you…..stories that you believe could transform the lives of others if you were only given the opportunity to share them. 

Sharing my story of coming into the church was a liberating experience for me. I could’ve stood up in front of the church for hours telling them about all the ways God has intervened in my life and saved me. But I was content with my 15 minutes or so. In the two years since my baptism, it was the greatest moment of public ministry for me and further inspired me to continue on the journey I was called to with the waters of rebirth. 

Below is the full text of the reflection I gave on Friday, March 18. I hope that you find something to take away from it. If nothing else, I hope it inspires you to share your own greatest stories with others. They are some of the most powerful scriptures we have after all.

          I’m Lacey Galen and I’m a parishioner and lector here at St. Mary as well as a former RCIA Candidate. When I first received the email from Eileen asking if I would give the reflection for tonight’s service I was incredibly honored. But then when I saw who some of the other speakers were each week listed in the bulletins, I started wondering why on earth she’d chosen me. I knew I was going up against professors from my alma mater at Carroll College and others who seemed to have impressive credentials and backgrounds in religion and spirituality. Then there was me.  With as young as I am and as recently as I’ve joined the church, I wondered what I could possibly have to say to further shape people’s minds on God and particularly his mercy?

            But I believe that each of us has a unique story to share and something to teach about life, God and mercy—even those people who haven’t fully found God yet. And it’s critical that we all share our stories because there is something to be gained from each of them. So while I am no great scholar or expert on Catholicism or God or anything in between, I do have my own story about experiencing God’s mercy first hand in a way that most Christians don’t remember. And I feel very proud to be able to share part of that story with you tonight and how it forever changed me.

            This past fall on September 12th I was blessed to marry a man, right here in this beautiful church, who is not only my best friend but has also been one of the biggest saving graces of my life. Our wedding day was the second time I walked down the aisle of this church in a white gown and pledged my life and all that I am—all the good, bad and broken parts of me—to someone greater than myself. The other occasion came a year and a half earlier on April 19, 2014, when I was baptized into the Catholic Church at 27 years old….right in that font in the back here that we dip our fingers into each time before Mass.

            If you ask most Christians they will tell you they were baptized as infants and have absolutely no memory of the occasion. I feel so sad for those people sometimes because I am now among the blessed few who have full recollection of that actual and profound moment in my life and faith journey when God’s grace and spirit first descended on me.

            I had wanted to be baptized for a long time and over the course of a few years I began recognizing God’s calling in me. But I waited until it felt right….until I knew it was entirely my decision and that it was what God truly wanted for me. I read a quote once that said that “Waiting to come to the Lord when you get your life cleaned up is like waiting to go to the ER when you stop bleeding. He doesn’t love some future version of us; he loves us in our mess.” That quote really sums up a lot of how I reached my decision. 

             Just before approaching Deb here at St. Mary and telling her I wanted to be baptized, I had reached a place of profound shame over the mistakes I’d made in my past and the person I was starting to become as a result of them. I felt broken and lost from many of the struggles and burdens I’d encountered in recent years. While I’d always believed I could fix things on my own, I slowly began to realize that God was the only one who could ultimately heal me and guide me into becoming a better person and living a better life.

            There was no grand epiphany or epic event that finally called me to the church. I just knew one day—all the way to my bones—that it was time. And from the moment I officially spoke the words aloud to Deb that “I want to be baptized,” I grew more reassured of my decision and of God’s calling in me with each passing day.

            Just a few weeks before Easter I underwent my first scrutiny in preparation for the Easter Vigil. One of the first remarks I remember Father Richard saying as I stood up in front of the whole parish was “God has chosen you for baptism.” The moment I heard those words I was struck by the immense truth behind them. God CHOSE ME to be initiated….not the other way around. I had simply been receptive enough to hear his call and trusted him enough to answer it. 

          The night of the Easter Vigil two years ago, will always hold the place in my heart as the best night of my life. When I first stepped into the font, everything and everyone around me disappeared. When Father Richard pushed my head underwater, all I remember was hearing his words of “I baptize you in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.” The water covered my face and head and with each plunge under I felt a greater sense of peace enter my heart. When I rose up after the third time, I kept my eyes closed and felt the water run down my face. I didn’t want to open my eyes because I wanted to breathe in and feel that moment for as long as possible. When I did finally open my eyes, Father's hand was extended down to help me up from kneeling down in the font. I didn't look up to see that it was Father's hand, and truthfully, a piece of me in that moment felt like it was Jesus' hand outreached to help me up into my new life.   

  
            When I first walked down the aisle in my white rope after changing, I felt like a halo of light must’ve been surrounding me for all the happiness I felt. When Father anointed my head with oil and confirmed me, I felt like all of the scattered and broken pieces of my life were fused together in an unbreakable bond. When I went up and received the Eucharist for the first time, I finally felt the significance of that sacrament and was reminded in a profound way of what Christ did for me. Truly feeling His sacrifice made me want to work so much harder in my own life moving forward to prove to him that His sacrifice was worth it…..that giving His life so that I might live was worth it.
 

            I was told many times by members of my RCIA team that coming into the church would not be the end of my journey but merely the beginning. I had a glorious 12 hours of so after my baptism of feeling utterly at peace with myself and the world and truly feeling God’s forgiveness and love for the first time in my life. But in the nearly two years since I’ve come to realize just how much the work has really only begun for me.

            The feeling of having over two decades of sins washed away in one night is something I could never fully convey to anyone. And it’s one of the big differences of being baptized as an adult. As infants we have original sin forgiven but I experienced 27 years being forgiven in an instant. But I quickly learned that my baptism wasn’t a cure all for my brokenness and sinful ways. I was not perfect still and many of the sins I hoped to have washed away forever from my life with my baptism I continued to struggle with. But there was a difference this time around. This time, I had the spirit of Christ within me. 

            While I’ve suffered plenty of failures in the days since my baptism, the one thing I have not failed to do is to turn to God every day of my life….whether it be in prayer, attending Mass or confession or Adoration or simply crying out for assistance. And slowly, with all of those practices becoming an integral part of my daily life, God has healed me in the ways that my baptism didn’t fully do. From the moment his spirit first descended on me, He has never left me or stopped helping to mold me into the best possible version of myself. 

            It would have been very easy for me to get baptized and then say, well wonderful! Now I’m forgiven and saved and part of the church…my work is done. I could’ve just decided to do the bare minimum and attend Mass—when it was convenient, made my annual visit to confession like I’m told I’m supposed to do and skipped meat on Fridays during Lent and called it good. But my baptism, and the fact that it happened as an adult, made me see how much of a lifelong conversion I had begun and that I owed it to God and the rest of the world around me to continue the work that he had started. To not just become robotic and stagnant in my new faith but to continue moving forward and constantly improving myself and the ways in which I serve those around me. 

            Each of our baptisms, whenever and however we experienced them, do not just join us with God’s love and mercy, they join us with his death on the cross. The death he suffered so that we might have another chance to lead a different life. We are called then through our baptisms to honor his sacrifice for us every day after. 

            The task is not always easy but it is simple. All we really must do is choose God every day—though our actions, thoughts and words….through how we love and forgive others….in how we love and forgive ourselves. I was told by a priest once in confession that God loves us so much that he has always given us the freedom to make our own decisions. 

            What we have to learn and strive to do then is to choose God every day, in every single thing we do regardless of our current situations in life. We have to choose him when we are sick or hurting, when we are busy or preoccupied. We must chose God whether we’ve done good deeds or sinned repeatedly. We must choose him whether we are understanding and accepting of the hardships he has put on our shoulders or whether we are fighting to understand why life must be so hard sometimes. Because the fact is that whatever God leads us to he will always lead us through with his abundance of mercy and love when we trust him to do so.

            Most every week when I find myself sitting in the pews here during Mass my eyes are fixated on the crucifix behind the altar. I never understood Catholics’ fixation on the seemingly morbid display of Christ on the cross prior to joining the church. And now it is the one image I cannot bring myself to look away from. It is a depiction of the greatest mercy in the history of the world. We must learn to never take that mercy Christ showed us for granted. 

 

            Tonight’s reading from Paul’s letter to the Philippians is especially meaningful for me and truly conveys my current state in my faith journey. In choosing to answer God’s calling and be baptized I “accepted the loss of all the things and ways of living that I’d grown accustomed to and thought were good enough as well. I consider all of it rubbish now as Paul put it compared to the righteous things and new ways of living I have gained through Christ. While I now have the spirt of Christ within me, I still have yet to attain, however, perfect maturity (again, as Paul described) but I continue my pursuit in the hope that I may possess it someday. 

            Mercy--whether received through baptism, reconciliation, forgiveness or kindness from others, or any other means--calls us to forget what lies behind but instead strain forward to what lies ahead. I continue my pursuit toward the goal, the prize of God’s upward calling in Christ Jesus. I hope the rest of you will do the same. 

    

Extinguishing Doubt

It’s said that the greatest pleasure in life is doing what people say you cannot do. This has always proved true for me. It’s actually an inside joke between my husband and I that if he wants to get me to do something he simply suggests it’s beyond my capabilities to do it. He, of course, knows this will kick my stubborn nature into high gear and I’ll go and do it if for no other reason than to wipe the taunting grin off his face. But throughout the years I’ve come to realize that the truest pleasure is not, in fact, derived from doing what others say you can’t…but from doing what you’ve convinced yourself you cannot do.

In recent months a promising potential business deal has landed in front of me and slowly nudged its way from being an ambitious dream to a near reality. I’ve spent the past few months formulating dozens of seemingly legitimate reasons why I think this potential business is a terrible idea. Not one of them has anything to do with the business itself, but rather with me. I’ve tried to convince myself that I don’t have enough knowledge, experience, or tenacity to pull it off.  In my mind, I’ve reduced my potential and worth in this endeavor down to a smidgen not much larger than a mustard seed. And it has frustrated the hell out of me.

But then a few days ago, while pounding out some miles at the gym, I had a series of revelations which shifted my mindset from one of contagious fear to hopeful ambition. With every step and drop of sweat I surrendered to the treadmill, another key memory struck me that reminded me just how much potential and tenacity really does exist within me. 

My earliest memory dated back to over two decades ago when I attending Four Georgians Elementary School with my best friend, Jamie. We were avid rock fort builders at recess…pretty much the queens reigning dominion over the outskirts of the playground where the forts were built. But one day, word spread across the playground that school administrators had decided to demo the region where our forts existed and level our architectural masterpieces to the ground. While other kids shrugged and accepted the authority of the adults above us, Jamie and I were determined not to go down without a fight. 

So we started a petition, which in one recess assembled 190 signatures. Much to mine and Jamie’s fears we were summoned to the principal’s office at the end of the day. While we expected to be suspended or worse, we were met by a stunned and approving look on the principal’s face. She told us she was so impressed with our efforts that she decided to forgo the plans to demo the hillside housing our rock forts. We were ecstatic! A few days later, the picture below appeared in the daily paper. It was a testament to the world that anything is possible, regardless of age, authority, or hopeless state of a situation as long as you believe in yourself and the dreams in your heart.

 Flash forward to around 18 or 19 years old and I found myself neck deep in the chaos and academic hell of college. While I had always been a successful student, college was a game changer and pushed my scholarly skills to the limit. I found myself confronting daunting classes like Western Civilization, Human Biology and Algebra…..classes I was personally told by other students were nearly impossible to get As in. But like I said earlier, I love nothing more than proving people wrong. So with my teeth grit and head bore down, I trucked through with uncanny determination. I went so far as to begin studying for a class over Christmas break just so I was ahead of the game come the start of the semester. All the hard work paid off in the end, however, when I graduated college summa cum laude after receiving a 4.0 GPA my entire college career. 

 A year out of college, with my energy levels revived, I sought a new challenge for myself. It came on two spindly tires and a seat that no butt was designed to sit on for hours on end. I began road biking on a brand new Trek hybrid bike. After a few months of diligent biking during the week, I set my sights on a ride to test my strength, endurance, and sanity. I planned to ride from Helena to Lincoln in one day, which was approximately 76 miles. To avid cyclists this would seem like no big deal, but for me, it was nearly incomprehensible.

 I was the student in high school gym class that was always the last one around the track and who looked for any excuse possible to be exempt from the week’s hellish physical torture. I was the one who after my freshman year of college could barely run one block without feeling like I was going to keel over while gasping for air. Yet there I was determined to embark on a feat of physical endurance unlike anything I had experienced before. Ready or not, my journey began on a hot summer day, the 1^st of August to be exact. Over 7 hours later, sweaty and covered in road grime, I pulled into Lincoln to the smiles and cheers of my parents. Like most hard things, it seemed impossible until it was done.  

 All of the endurance that evolved from my many epic bike rides must’ve truly thickened my hide by a few layers because a few years later, I allowed my father to talk me into joining a novice hockey league at the local rink. I had never played a game of hockey in my life but thought, “how hard could it be?” After purchasing the multitude of padded gear and a brand new pair of hockey skates, I found myself waiting to step onto the ice for my very first game. I recall watching part of the game scheduled just before ours and seeing two players slam into the glass right in front of me in a brutal fight over the puck. I wondered what in hell I’d been thinking. My legs were literally shaking when I finally stepped onto the ice to play….especially when I realized I was one of the only girls playing. I was a fantastically terrible player that first game but a fire of passion was lit inside me for the sport. Now, four seasons later, I wonder what I ever did before I played hockey. And whether there are five other girls on the ice or just me, I don’t feel a bit intimidated to play.

 In between my cycling and hockey feats, I also worked tirelessly at developing my writing career. Unlike many of the other English majors I graduated with, I refused to take the more straight shot and secure career path of becoming a teacher. I wanted to write and that’s exactly what I’ve spent the last 6 years since college doing. I do not write full time or make a living off it by any means, but I have scarcely gone a month since graduating without receiving at least one paid writing assignment. And each year, I have managed to wedge my work into new publications. There are some weeks when I juggle two or three jobs, but I try not to complain because doing so enables me to still do what I love. All along, I’ve always known I could’ve taken an easier or more prosperous route with my degree, but when you find something you love to do, you must always pursue it with fearlessness and resilience.

It’s hard to believe that all of these memories flooded my mind in the mere 45 minutes I was at the gym, but I took them all coming to me that day as a sign. They reminded me that while I have rarely taken the easy routes in life I have yet to see much in the way of failure. What stands out in my mind even more with these particular memories is that within each instance I suffered terrible moments of fear and doubt in my ability to do the things that, in the end, I accomplished. I didn’t have a bunch of people on the sidelines booing me and telling me I should give up. All I really had was my own internal voice telling me I couldn’t do them. While most people can learn to still the voices of doubt from others, it is far more difficult to silence the ones within you. But when you do….that’s when the real wonder and accomplishment begins. 

I don’t yet know what lies ahead for me and all the opportunities that have presented themselves in recent months. But one thing I know for sure is that whatever happens, I never want to know that I walked away from something possibly amazing simply because of fear or doubt in myself. Any other reason might be justified, but not that one. I would rather live out the rest of my days living with the pains at having tried to do something and failed at it than always wondering about what could’ve been when I walk away before even beginning.