Dawn Bowie shares with us a very personal and tender reflection for Lent. It's a story about reconnection and personal reconciliation. Finding our true self again after experiences of rejection. She has also accompanied it with a song by Amy Grant that explores the relationship of child to father.

What does God know?

St. Theresa of Avila said, "The earth and the sky will open their purse for you and your life will change if with all your heart you say these words each day, 'Teach me, dear God, all that you know.'"

Life-size wood carving of St Theresa of Avila by Queensland Sculptor and Creative Jeweller, Mauri Maunsell www.maurimaunsell.com.au

And what does God know? What He/She sees. Us. God sees us as we really are, the beautiful hearts we all have, if we only let our eyes be opened.

I was blessed with parents who loved me passionately and as well as humans can do, unconditionally. When we are fortunate to have parents like mine, the thing that forms us is that they see us as we really are, and they are delighted.

The importance of fathers...

Developmental psychology has shown that this experience (or the lack of it) with our fathers, shapes everything we experience later as adults in intimate relationships. For a long time after I became an adult, I'd refer to myself as having been troublesome during my childhood, and especially my adolescence. A few years ago, I made some comment to that effect in my father's presence. He stopped me and said, "Oh, Dawn, don't say things like that. You were a wonderful child."

From that day on, I started to heal from all the harsh assumptions I'd made about who I was as a human being, assumptions underscored by all the inevitable painful events and circumstances of the intervening years. I began to look at all those childhood photos of me and my Dad, and what I saw amazed me. One photo, in particular, struck me. In it, I'm a tiny infant. I'm wearing a frilly dress and hat made by my mother, and my Dad is holding me, face forward, and his face beams with pride. "This is my child," he seems to be saying, "Isn't she the most incredible thing ever?"

To this day, when he introduces me to anyone, he tells the story of how, when he first saw me, my head fitted in his hand and my feet just touched the crook of his elbow. As I began to remember that feeling of being valued, the dormant plant of self-worth I'd lost sight of for years began to push its shoots through the much of my consciousness and grow.

A tender plant…

A tender plant, this awareness of worth is easily tramped upon and crushed by pain or trauma or loss, but if the roots go deep, it survives. I didn't even know that I was looking for it when I chose to marry twice, to men who left my own sense of worthiness and value battered and, I thought, dead. But my parents had nurtured deep roots, and I was blessed to find my own reflection again, in the eyes of my Beloved. Every time he saw me, his eyes lit up, he was delighted, and, for the first time since childhood, I could see myself as precious in the gaze of another. The experience blessed and changed me forever. I lost him to death a little while ago, but even in losing him, he blessed me.

This year, for my Lenten penance, my wonderful Confessor assigned me the task of asking for the grace to go easy on myself. And I thought of St. Theresa's poetic suggestion. "Let me know what You know." So my prayer is, "Let me see myself as You see me."

Instead of relying on a human to reflect my worthiness, I stop when I find myself overwhelmed by the worn pattern of the hurt in my life that left me feeling that nothing I am or do is good enough. Because of my Dad and my Beloved, I can look in the mirror of my heart and see what my Father sees. I can know what he knows. "I formed you. I knew you before you were born. And you are precious in my sight."

Image Credits: The image used in the headline is a sketch entitled "a Father's Arms" by poetry artist, Launa, from her website: www.poetryart.net. Clicking on the images in the body of the article will take you to the original source.

Dawn Bowie is an attorney in Washington DC and a long-time member of one of the international cyber communities that has been one of the important catalysts for Catholica.

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©2009 Dawn Bowie

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