Reflecting On Life’s Disguises

By LORRAINE MURRAY, Special To The Bulletin

Published: October 30, 2003

A friend recently confided that her little boy plans to be a zebra for Halloween, or, in his 3-year-old terminology, a black and white “neigh neigh.” The boy knows it can be great fun to be something—or someone—else every now and again, and Halloween presents a fine opportunity.

During this season of masquerades, it can be telling to look back on our lives and see the different disguises we wore and wonder how we will deck ourselves out in the future.

I started out as a serious, plump baby, shown in photos gazing through the bars of a playpen. According to family legend, neighbors would come by and exclaim, “What a cute little girl!” and I would startle them thoroughly by repeating a word my big sister had taught me: “Dope!”

Adoring little sister was one of my first roles in life. No matter what Rosemary said or did, I mimicked her. If she ordered chocolate pie at the restaurant, so did I. If she wanted a new teddy bear, I was there too. Before long, I had gained the nickname that trailed me well into adulthood: “Me Too.”

Later photos show a dutiful Catholic schoolgirl, attired neatly in crisp, carefully ironed uniforms and spotless saddle oxfords. I said my rosary, attended Mass, lit votive candles and brought home report cards studded with gold stars. High school photos show me standing rather shyly beneath the palm trees in our Miami yard, with my dad beaming nearby.

Things got really scary when I was 17 and left home to live in the dorms at the University of Florida. Before long, I abandoned my world of prayer books and novenas, and assumed the disguise of full-fledged hippie. Photos show me wearing love beads, a dress so abbreviated that today it would serve as a blouse, and carrying (I am not making this up!) an Army gas mask bag as a purse.

I busied myself tuning in and dropping out, while my sister, who’d married at 18, was back home throwing Tupperware parties and raising children. To her credit, when I showed up on college breaks in my hippie garb, she made no comments, just handed me a baby to burp and no doubt continued praying that I would one day return to my senses.

Who can say how many prayers bring us back to our senses—and to God? College gave me a glimpse of a world I’d never seen and I embraced atheism with a vengeance, thinking it was somehow a progressive stance. When God did eventually draw me back to him, he didn’t use the standard arguments I knew by heart from philosophy texts, but rather the everyday details of the heart.

Many years after college, after I had married, my husband returned from a business trip to announce that he had “out of the blue” stopped at St. Patrick’s Cathedral to light votive candles for his father and my parents, who were by then deceased. My first thought was: “Oh, no, I never prayed for the repose of their souls!”

Shortly after, I started reading a book that had sat untouched on my shelves for years. It was Thomas Merton’s spiritual autobiography, “Seven Storey Mountain,” and after I’d read it, I knew it had not fallen into my hands by chance.

Little by little, the mask of atheism fell away, and I found myself once again in a Catholic church, on my knees, and making a simple request, “Help me to believe.” That prayer was answered, and in 1993 I returned to the church, and my husband converted to Catholicism.

Sometimes I despair over the masks I wore in my younger life. I drank too much, partied too heartily, and, yes, when that huge, handmade cigarette was passed to me, I did inhale. Sometimes I cringe over the younger versions of me, groaning over the stupid and immoral things I did.

Mercy is one of the great virtues of life, but sometimes people who are merciful to others are harsh on themselves. We may glance in the rear-view mirrors of our lives and shake our heads sadly. A man may wonder why he ever disguised himself as a Don Juan and broke women’s hearts. A woman may regret parading around as a vixen who enjoyed wielding power over men.

In God’s eyes, a thousand years pass as a second, and perhaps when he looks at us, he sees at a glance all the costumes we have worn over the years, starting with the moment when he first gave us life in the womb. He sees us in the playpen and dressed as a zebra at Halloween.

He sees the wild days of our youth and the more placid days of middle age. And what astonishes me is that, no matter how cleverly we disguise ourselves, he loves us nonetheless because he knows that, deep down inside, we are always his children.

Lorraine V. Murray is the author of “Why Me? Why Now? Finding Hope When You Have Breast Cancer” and “Grace Notes.” She is a parishioner at St. Thomas More Church in Decatur and can be reached by e-mail at: lorrainevmurray@yahoo.com.