Once We Repaired Things - Part 12 - A Place I Felt Safe

With Father’s Day today, I’ve been thinking about fathers.

My father. Grief. Loss. And the strange ways in which, when you’re carrying more pain than you know what to do with, you search for some point of human connection.

By this stage, I was trying to find whatever pathway I could to reach Paul through empathy, reasoning and understanding.

I was carrying too much. 

I was carrying everything that was happening to me professionally and institutionally, the fear about my future, the financial consequences, the years of trying to make people listen, and the extraordinary burden of having to advocate for myself when I had no one standing beside me.

But there was another pain alongside all of that.

There was the fear that I was going to be left alone for the rest of my life with something deeply unresolved. That there would be no compassion, no understanding, no acknowledgement of what had actually happened or what I had been trying to say. No remorse for the hurt that had been caused.

There are records for what happened to me institutionally. There are laws. There are obligations. There are dates, emails, documents and evidence. However exhausting that fight has been, I can point to something tangible and say: This happened.

Human relationships are different.

There’s no regulator for a suffering heart. There’s no statutory process that can compel another human being to listen to you, understand you or show you compassion.

And, for me, that made this part of what I was living through extraordinarily difficult.

When somebody won’t hear you, you start searching for another way to be understood. You reason. You explain. You appeal to empathy. You search for something you have in common. You keep looking for the pathway that might finally allow the other person to understand what you’re trying to say.

We had both lost our fathers.

Perhaps somewhere in my grief and hopelessness I thought that shared experience might provide a bridge. Perhaps it might allow us to understand one another as human beings.

I was trying to find some way through something that was crushing me.

And strangely, unexpectedly, one of those attempts led me somewhere else.

It led me to a parish.

I don’t want to identify the parish, because this isn’t a story about denominations, institutions or historical divisions within Christianity. Nor do I want something deeply personal to me reduced to gossip, or (heaven forbid) scandal, when there’s no scandal to be had.

This is about faith.

My faith is separate from the hypocrisy I have witnessed in institutions that profess Christian values while behaving in ways that, in my experience, have been completely contrary to them.

I can’t pretend otherwise simply because an institution calls itself Catholic or Greek Orthodox.

I can’t go somewhere and feel that, by remaining silent about conduct I believe is wrong, I’m betraying my own conscience.

And I can’t worship somewhere I’ve been made to feel unsafe.

A church shouldn’t be another place of fear.

It should be a place of peace.

Of prayer.

Of mercy.

Of compassion.

Of healing.

Of non-judgement.

It’s the house of the Lord. We’re all supposed to be welcome there.

And in this parish, I felt safe.

The parish priest was a humble and wise man. There was something about his humility, his wisdom and the way he treated people that reminded me very much of my own father.

There was mutual respect.

There was no performance. No superiority. No judgement.

Just humanity.

He has since retired, but I will always remember what that meant to me during a period of my life when I was struggling to find anywhere that felt safe.

I also met lovely people there. Down-to-earth people. Humble people.

I had somewhere I could walk into and feel that I belonged.

And yet there’s an irony in that too.

Sometimes I would sit in that church surrounded by a community and still feel profoundly alone.

I would look around and think: Where is my family? Where is my husband? Where are my children?

I could belong to a community and still feel the enormous absence of the life I thought I might have had. 

I was sitting among people, but I was sitting alone.

God saw that.

God knew that.

A place where I felt safe, even when I still felt alone.

There were times throughout these years when I quite literally dropped to my knees in prayer because I didn’t know what else to do.

I felt cornered from every direction.

I had tried reasoning. I had tried explaining. I had tried regulators. I had tried institutions. I had tried asking people simply to listen.

There were moments when all I could think was:

Please help me. I don’t know what to do anymore.

Perhaps that’s why St. Jude has crossed my mind so many times — the patron saint traditionally associated with desperate situations and seemingly lost causes.

Because so many of the things I’ve been asking for were never unreasonable.

They only became seemingly hopeless because people repeatedly chose not to act.

Sometimes a “hopeless cause” isn’t inherently hopeless at all.

Sometimes it becomes hopeless because human beings make it so.

Because somebody will not listen.

Because somebody will not intervene.

Because somebody decides it is somebody else’s problem.

Because people who can make a difference choose indifference instead.

There’s something else about how I came to this particular parish that I’ll keep private. It involved something that seemed connected with Paul’s father that I happened to see in a past parish newsletter.

Perhaps God was leading me somewhere I needed to be.

Sometimes I’ve even wondered whether perhaps a father I never knew somehow helped lead me towards a place where I could find a little peace.

Perhaps it was a path from Our Father, not a father. 

I cannot know that.

But I do know where that pathway took me.

It took me into a church where I felt safe.

And perhaps, if Paul reads this, he can take something positive from that.

Something good came from something that otherwise is causing me enormous pain.

I found a parish community.

I found a priest whose humility reminded me of my father.

I found people who were kind to me.

And I found somewhere I could sit in the presence of God when I had nowhere else to put what I was carrying.

Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to attend Mass for some time.

I’ve become too unwell.

Years of regulatory failure, institutional harm, financial pressure, uncertainty, fighting, pleading and trying to make people understand, eventually take their toll. So does carrying unresolved personal pain alongside all of it.

I can’t carry all of this alone anymore.

I’ve been saying that for years.

There are finally signs that parts of what happened to me are being heard beyond the systems in which I spent years trying to obtain help. I’ve had meetings. I’ve had phone conversations. I’ve provided records. Matters have now reached the Commonwealth sphere.

I hope that means I’ll finally have people with the authority and agency to do what I could never do alone.

Because nobody should have to fight this hard simply to be heard.

And that brings me back to something much larger than my own story.

Indifference is one of the great diseases of our time.

I’ve experienced far too much of it.

The further my situation progressed, the more I encountered — and witnessed — what happens when human beings stop seeing the human being in front of them.

That matters far beyond my circumstances.

It matters when we talk about loneliness.

It matters when we talk about despair.

It matters when we talk about belonging.

And it matters enormously when we talk about suicide prevention.

Australia now has a National Suicide Prevention Office. Suicide prevention is increasingly being discussed as something requiring a whole-of-government and whole-of-society response.

That’s important.

But there’s something I need to say as somebody who has lived through years of pleading with systems and people for help:

What we say and what we do must align.

We cannot talk about suicide prevention while tolerating systems that leave human beings feeling powerless, unheard and abandoned.

We cannot talk about connection while practising indifference.

We cannot talk about compassion while looking away from suffering that’s inconvenient to confront.

And we cannot keep placing responsibility entirely on distressed individuals to somehow become more resilient to environments and systems that are contributing to their despair.

That’s where the next part of my story is going.

Because suicide prevention is very dear to my heart, especially after losing my beautiful dad.

This Father’s Day, though, I’m thinking about two fathers.

One I knew and loved enormously, and another I never knew.

And about a small, unexpected path that somehow led me, in one of the darkest periods of my life, through the doors of a church where I finally felt safe.

Maybe some things don’t need to be completely understood.

Sometimes we simply recognise the small amount of grace that emerged from something terribly painful.

And for that, I’m grateful.