Words on prayer

It was Christmas a few weeks ago, and every year like clockwork I find myself reflecting on my underdeveloped spiritual life. My attempts to connect with God often involve prayer, and a searching for something familiar that was lost long ago, like Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny. Every Christmas I get called back to my Catholic roots, and every season I recognize a deep conflict within myself.

As a tribute to the season, I had the pleasure of viewing a film that is a nostalgic favorite of mine called "King Of Kings". Jeffrey Hunter portrayed the most sympathetic and deliciously handsome Jesus ever captured on film. He is the Jesus of my youth, perfect love, and like Santa Claus, complete fantasy.

This movie evokes images of my father and his big wooden rosary that he used for prayer, and of a portrait of Jesus that hung in my childhood home. I’m strangely comforted when I watch this film, in part because it brings back warm memories of my father who died in my youth. But if I search myself more deeply it brings up great feelings of loss. I want the Jesus of my childhood to be real, and I grieve deeply when I realize that I can’t have my father’s Jesus, my fantasy Jesus.

I was baptized a Catholic without my knowledge or consent, and attended a Catholic School for 8 years. I learned everything that I ever needed or wanted to know about being a good Catholic. Most important of these lessons was that we could get to Heaven and have life everlasting if we were steadfast in our faith. Too bad for me then that faith is in direct conflict with my intellect.

Catholicism becomes a part of a persons DNA, and although I have searched other forms of Christianity, Eastern Religions, and even Wicca, I have never been able to shed the notion that once you’re baptized a Catholic, you’re a Catholic until death. I maintain a subtle fear of completely turning my back on Catholicism, because a voice inside always whispers, “what if they were right all along and I end up in eternal darkness?” I sometimes secretly envy those who have chosen to abandon logic and reason for an absolute and unwavering faith. In this abandon they find comfort and connection. In their faith, they have nothing to fear, not even death.

Isn’t that what we all really fear? The struggle for a relationship with God is based more on fear of death than it is on any other aspect of a spiritual life. I was spoon fed eternal life and salvation, and that’s what I cannot come to terms with.

It becomes a black and white proposition, and a schism within my self. I know that there is no God up in the sky waiting for me in my Catholic heaven. I know that my mom and dad and brother and husband and Golden Retrievers won’t be up there in the clouds waiting to greet me. I mourn the loss of these “truths”, yet still search for something to cling to.

Some people have said to me, “you don’t have to throw out the baby with the bath water”. You can go to church, take what you want from it, and leave the rest. Why doesn’t that seem like enough? Why doesn’t that seem fair? I want it ALL to be true, and if it’s not, then how can I make sense of any of it? The images are too powerful, too provocative, and create an anxiety within me that I find it difficult to bear.

In the final scene of “King of Kings”, Jesus returns to his disciples one last time before he ascends into heaven and I found myself crying like a child. Crying for my youth and innocence, for my father, and for the loss of something that was guaranteed to me by everyone who I respected and loved.

A few words about Dan Fogelberg - A confessional of sorts

I learned of Dan Fogelberg's death at 6 AM on a Monday morning. As my favorite news anchor read the brief obituary, I literally doubled over in tears. My husband climbed out of bed and came toward me to be of some comfort. He looked at me and said, "I know, honey".
How could he possibly know? Over the past 8 years, I had lost my 40 year old brother to a traumatic brain injury, divorced and remarried through dramatic circumstances, slowly watched my mother fall into the depths of dementia and die, lost a stepfather, dealt with my husband's own bout with prostate cancer, and slammed head on into middle age. My mom died just a year ago, and the loss is still fresh for me. Dan's death seems to amplify a grief that has been growing for years.

I was raised in an emotionally explosive home, and music was my favorite hiding place. My first true love was Neil Young. I wrapped myself up in his music, and imagined that he could heal all of my hurts and keep me safe. At the tender age of 13 I spent hours in my room with Neil, my only friend, and the only person who understood me. I started playing guitar just so I could play and sing his music. I’m convinced that his music saved me somehow, and protected me from harsher realities. I loved Crosby, Stills and Nash too, and throughout the 1970’s, I immersed myself in music.

Enter Dan Fogelberg, my shining light and romantic ideal, some kind of beacon of hope for a lost and longing 17-year-old girl. My sister had a copy of his album “Captured Angel” and she let me borrow it. For a teenage girl, it was a most passionate and sensual experience. It increased my longing and yearning, but it also made me feel hopeful and embraced at the same time. I felt that Dan somehow "got me", and this gave me something to cling to.

Okay, I admit that I was terribly in love with him, and fantasized that if he could just meet me, that he would fall terribly in love too, sweep me away to his Colorado castle of love, and provide me with the unconditional love and connection that I felt that I never had. Of course there was the bonus of passion and love and incredible sex!

I yearned and ached for Dan Fogelberg. Somewhere inside of myself I believed that I knew who he was. I knew that he was sensitive and emotionally available, and I knew that he had all of the answers to my questions. I knew that he could somehow perfect my life. He had no flaws. He could keep me safe from a world that I felt was dangerous and unpredictable. These were my unshakable truths.

I never missed an opportunity to see him in concert during the 1970’s. He toured the Bay Area several times when he was at his most popular. Funny though, as I sat at these concerts, I somehow felt as if my life was passing me by, and that I would never be the person who I imagined that I might become. Somehow I just didn’t measure up to the golden pedestal that I had placed Dan upon. I would sit at these concerts in tears, because part of me went there with the hope of somehow meeting Dan. I went to hear the music yes, but I also went fantasizing that he might actually notice me. Perhaps there was a way back stage? There never was, and this left me feeling empty and disappointed.

Many years later, my sister and I went to see him in Northern California. I hadn’t kept track of Dan, or how his music had changed or evolved. In fact, I really hadn’t given him very much thought since I was in college. Having the opportunity to see him again was kind of exciting, and that old yearning seemed to be stirring within me.

We were seated at a front table at a very small venue. I could practically touch my former fantasy man. You would have thought that I would have been in some sort of ecstasy, and filled with gratitude at this opportunity to see him perform again. I know that this was years later and that I had evolved as a person, yet I was surprised when I noticed that I was filled with anxiety and hostility toward him. How opportune it was then, that I was able to finally get Dan’s attention.

I proceeded to get really drunk during the concert, and I kept yelling, "sing Netherlands", which is a song that he no longer could perform since having throat surgery, and "how about a Scotch, Dan"? assuming that he most certainly would want to join me in my merriment. Imagine my shock then when he turned to me and said in a less than friendly tone, "why don't you have another Scotch?" I was mortified.

After the concert, I felt angry and rejected. Poor Dan didn’t know that he had been in a one-sided and dysfunctional relationship with me for 20 years. How could he have known how much expectation and desire that I had projected upon him, and how could anyone have ever lived up to that in the first place?

A couple of years later, I returned to the scene of the crime. I think that I needed some kind of closure, and I guess that I still had a score to settle, with myself.

It was a good concert. It couldn’t have been a lovelier setting among the vineyards and the rolling hills of the Napa Valley. He performed beautifully, exuberantly. I sat in the audience with the same sister, sipping wine, the 17-year-old girl within me still feeling that void, while the 40-year- old silently wept for her injured child within.


On this night, I could finally see Dan Fogelberg not as some sort of romantic super savior for that lost 17-year-old kid still imprisoned within me, but as a figment of a child’s imagination.

Ironically, I could have apologized for my miscreant behavior from years earlier. My husband was born in Peoria Illinois, and his mother Mary lived there for most of her life until her death in 2006. A few years ago, we were visiting her in Peoria and I happened to mention Dan, since he was born and raised in Peoria as well. Mary said with some delight and pride, "I play bridge with his mother Maggie every week." “Really?” I exclaimed. Well, I may have actually squealed! Secretly, I was as excited as a kid on Christmas morning. I envisioned Dan’s gold records in Maggie’s living room, and had a faint hope of being invited over to her house for a visit.

Unbelievably, my mother in law had an inside line to my former love idol. We talked about it for a few minutes, then the conversation faded back to other matters, like what she needed from Schnuk's Supermarket, and where we would dine that evening.

I ended up meeting Maggie Fogelberg at my mother-in-law's funeral in 2006. She came in to the memorial, and we stood there and spoke quietly for a few minutes. We talked about my husband's mother, and we talked about Dan, and I told her how much he had meant to me over the years.

She was the proud mother of a man dying of prostate cancer. I never asked Maggie to put me in contact with Dan so that I could apologize to him. At the end of the day, it was enough that I was able to honor his mother. It was enough.

The morning that I learned of Dan’s death, I was not only grieving the death of a man who had symbolized my unmet needs and my desire for unconditional love and connection, I was coming face to face with my own disappointments, regrets, and the realization that I couldn’t go back and make different choices in my life. I was grieving the passing of my own youth.


We exchange Christmas cards yearly with Maggie, and my husband and I sent her a sympathy card upon Dan's death on December 16, 2007.