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“When the Script of Life Changes”

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“When the Script of Life Changes” by Katrina J. Zeno, MTS

Have you ever noticed that nobody gets the life they signed up for? I’ve talked to hundreds of women who enviously look at other women and think these women have the life they signed up for – they have the “perfect” marriage, job situation, or family mix; they never feel lonely, isolated, or snowed under; they always look cheerful, full of energy, and ready to volunteer.

Wrong.

If we scratch beneath the surface, we’ll most likely find dreams that died and losses that were sustained. Take my friend Leslie. Leslie graduated from college in 1987, worked as a nanny in France, and was still single at age 27. Obviously it’s not the end of the world to be single at 27, but if you’d plan to be married and having children by 23, sometimes it can feel like you missed God’s plan.

However, in God’s providence, Leslie met a handsome, concert pianist and wedding bells soon chimed. Within a year, a son was born and 17 months later another son. Baby stuff, diapers, and first smiles reawakened her original expectations for marriage and children. Then Leslie experienced a miscarriage, and another, and a third in which she almost bled to death. Suddenly, the script changed. Instead of the half-dozen children Leslie had hoped for, she and her husband had to avoid pregnancy just so she didn’t die. To the outside world, her life looked ideal: a beautiful brick house, two healthy, handsome boys, and a loving, talented husbanded. On the inside, Leslie had to adjust to a changed script, to the forced downsizing of her family, to the loss of children she would never have.

But Leslie is in good company. The Bible is full of men and women who experienced a changed script. Take Abraham, for example. He probably never planned to leave Ur of the Chaldeans and go to an unknown land. I’m sure he and Sarah never planned to be barren, and I don’t think a “vacation” in Egypt was on his top 10 list. But without God intervening to change the plan, Abraham wouldn’t have been the father of the Hebrew nation nor would Sarah have had any children. Precisely what wasn’t in the plan was what God used to birth the Hebrew people.

And look at Gideon – he was innocently beating out wheat in a winepress when the angel of the Lord commissioned him to lead Israel in battle. This was such a drastic change in plans that Gideon wanted to be sure: he put a fleece before the Lord and asked him to make the fleece wet while the ground was dry. God did. With this assurance, Gideon led 300 men into battle and was victorious. As a result, God’s plan, not man’s, was advanced.

Then there is the Moabite Ruth, who married a foreigner, a man from Bethlehem. As a young girl, she certainly didn’t dream of marrying a Hebrew! On top of that, her husband died, leaving her as a young, destitute widow. Right then Ruth could have cut her losses, returned to her mother’s house, and started over again. But she didn’t. She continued with the life she didn’t sign up for – she traveled with her mother-in-law back to Bethlehem where she eked out a living by picking up leftover grain. Through these circumstances, she met and married another Israelite, Boaz, and became the great-grandmother of King David.

The list of Old Testament changed scripts goes on: Joseph never intended to be sold as a slave, jailed in Egypt, or serve Pharaoh. Hosea wouldn’t have dreamed of taking a prostitute for a wife without God’s command. David planned to watch sheep all his life until the Lord anointed him king. Esther found herself queen of Persia where she interceded to save the Israelites from extermination.

These stories are but a preparation for the greatest script change of all: the Annunication. In an instant, Mary’s entire life changed. Whereas she intended to remain childless for the greater glory of God, she found herself “with child.” Instead of sharing the intimacies of birth with her mother and relatives, she shared them with Joseph, cows, and shepherds. The joy of consecrating her newborn son to God was interrupted by Simeon’s prophecy of sorrow. As a new mother, she fled her homeland and was forced to raise her infant son in a foreign land.

And that was only the beginning.

The rest of Mary’s life – and Peter’s and John’s and Mary Magdalen’s and Paul’s – testified constantly to a changed script. God conceived new possibilities and changed the course of history through them.

The same can be true of us. Instead of getting angry, bitter, or hard-hearted when God changes the script of life, we should be hope-filled, encouraged, inspired. We need to know that grace accompanies every script change, even the most painful of all: the sudden death of a child.

Death was the farthest thing from Ann and John Thompson’s minds as daylight crept into the sky on their eldest son’s 16th birthday. In fact, life was everywhere as John and 16-year-old Michael drove to the lake for a father/son fishing trip. Then, about mid-day, Ann received a phone call: John and Michael had been swept off a sandbar. The coast guard rescued John at the point of death, but they couldn’t find Michael.

As the reality of Michael’s death hit, Ann was blessed with a moment of infused grace. “I experienced an abiding knowledge that God had called Michael home,” she says. “The moments of conception and death are the soul’s most intimate encounters with God. I couldn’t imagine death being an accident, as if Michael’s soul was separated from his body outside of God’s power or plan.”

Even though Ann was tempted to think Michael shouldn’t have gone fishing, she realized there was a deeper issue: “If God was calling Michael home, he would have found another way to do it; the manner of his death was incidental,” she says. “God gave me blessed assurance that this was within his divine plan and Michael had lived out the number of his days.”

This “blessed assurance” didn’t exempt Ann from grief, loss, and depression, nor the awful moments of walking into her son’s bedroom to wake him and realizing he wasn’t there. “We chose not to discuss Michael’s death publicly for many years because we couldn’t talk about it without being overwhelmed by tears,” Ann says.

Now, 14 years later, the pain and tears have dimmed while the core conviction of God’s providence burns brightly. Her experiences of loss, grief, a changed script, and confidence in God’s plan helps others navigate the turbulent waters of eating disorders, family dysfunctions, and relational wounds through her work as a professional counselor. No matter how drastically the script may have changed for herself or her clients, Ann is confident that grace resides within that change. “My clients sense that I have walked the via dolorosa and have found joy again,” Ann says.

And in that joy, Ann is a living testament to the truth heralded in the Bible from Adam and Eve to Revelation: Even when things don’t go the way we planned, God is still in control. He’s the one writing the script. He’s the one with the master plan.

“Catholicism Returns to Slovakia”

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“Catholicism Returns to Slovakia” by Katrina J. Zeno, MTS

Despite years of religious oppression, the faith of this Catholic country couldn’t be ripped out. The Slovak flag tells it all.

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April 13 and 14, 1951, changed the course of Catholicism in Slovakia. Without warning, the communist government invaded monasteries and cloisters, arrested thousands of priests, brothers, and religious sisters, and shipped them off to work camps and prisons.

“The communists knew that to win over Catholicism, they had to break up the unity between the Holy Father and the bishops,” says Eva Klcovanska, a psychologist and professor at Tranva University in Tranva (pronounced tren-a-va), Slovakia. “Because our allegiance to the pope is so strong it was impossible. So they tried to destroy the relationship between the clergy and the lay people.”

Besides deporting clergy and religious, the communist government imposed severe sanctions on anyone professing to be a believer – promotions were impossible, jobs were often lost, and university entrance was denied for their children. Some were even arrested and sent to prison such as Dr. Silvester Krcmery, MD, and Dr. Vladimir Jukl.

Targeted as enemies of the state, these two Catholic intellectuals were arrested in 1951and imprisoned for 13 years. Upon their release, they were disheartened to find the churches empty. “They thought they spent so many years in prison for nothing,” Eva says.

Determined to revitalize the faith for which they had suffered, Drs. Krcmery and Jukl set about creating an underground church. They gathered people together in secretive groups according to occupation – students, workers, writers, teachers – and taught them to pray, study Scripture, encourage one another, and organize pilgrimages. They also published magazines and newspapers that gave the true history of Slovakia, news about the holy father and the Church in other countries, and articles on the meaning of freedom and the evils of communism.

“The next generation didn’t know what democracy or freedom meant because they were raised under communism,” Eva explains. “They couldn’t travel, so they thought this was life as it should be.”

The communist regime also implemented new, communistic traditions. This required rewriting Slovak history and removing all the signs and symbols of the country’s Catholic roots. This proved to be a risky venture.

“In Tranva’s main square we have a big tower and on the top is a statue of Mary,” Eva says. “One day, the communists sent someone up to remove the statue and in the process, he fell and died. After that, no one had the courage to try again.”

Other religious sites in Tranva weren’t so lucky. The bishop’s house was turned into a soldier’s barrack. Most churches, although left open, were neglected and crumbling. A large statue of the Holy Trinity in the main square was disassembled. However, after the fall of communism, the statue was reassembled from pieces people had hidden in their homes.

“Even though it was impossible to be raised Catholic officially for 40 years, many parents and grandparents still prayed with their children and grandchildren and went to church,” Eva says. “For the Slovak people, life means to live with God.”

This entwining of faith and history can be traced back to 863 when Ratislava, the ruler of Greater Moravia, invited Sts. Cyril and Methodius to this region. Not only did they bring the Gospel, but they created the Slovanic alphabet, making formal education possible.

Under Hungarian rule, Catholic culture and tradition continued for 1,000 years. Thirteen beautiful churches in Gothic and Baroque style were constructed in Tranva, earning it the title of “Slovak Rome.” Then, in 1635, Cardinal Archbishop Peter Pazmany established a university in Tranva, highlighting the city’s role as Slovakia’s cultural center. It was this historical and religious memory that the underground church and its publications kept alive, refusing to be deleted by communist amnesia.

After 25 years of secretive work, the leaders of the underground church decided to take their activities public. On March 25, 1988, a group of 2000 gathered in the town square of Bratislava, the former Slovak capital. Surrounded by policemen, guard dogs, and fire hoses, the group held a candle-light vigil in protest of the communist regime. As a half-hour ticked by without interference, a spirit of victory infused the participants. For the first time in 40 years a public demonstrated for religious freedom had occurred.

Now know as Big Friday, this first protest set the stage for the Velvet Revolution – ten days of protests and talks between the communist government and underground leaders in November 1989, which resulted in opening the country’s borders and allowing other political parties. As the grip of communism relinquished Eastern Europe, Slovakia became an independent country and two leaders of the underground church, Dr. Frantisek Miklosko and Dr. Jan Carnogursky were elected president of parliament and prime minister.

As this new government struggled with sky-rocketing inflation and unemployment, an equally important task confronted them: to re-establish an educational system free of communistic ideology. On March 25, 1992, four years after Big Friday, Dr. Frantisek Miklosko and Dr. Jan Carnogursky refounded Tranva University as a free (secular) university. “At the time, there weren’t enough Catholic professors because all education had been atheistic for 40 years,” Eva explains. “They brought good scholars together and hoped as time went on the university could become Catholic.”

The university, however, almost died in its infancy. Three months after its founding, Vladimir Meciar was elected prime minister and reinstated a communistic approach to governing. “He considered Tranva University as an enemy,” Eva says. “For eight years, he kept narrowing our budget and making it difficult for those who worked here.”

Despite these strangulation tactics, the professors persevered in bringing a new (anticommunistic) world view to the classroom. Eva’s specialty, Christian psychology, was nonexistent in Slovakia before her arrival at Tranva University in 1994. Even Eva didn’t know such a field existed until she studied for a year at Franciscan University in Steubenville, Ohio.

“My training under communism was confined to deterministic, Marxist psychology,” Eva explains. “ It was always my desire to combine psychology with my Catholic faith, but I wasn’t aware that somewhere in the world the field of Christian counseling and psychology actually existed.”

Through her year of study, Eva developed a deeper understanding of the human person as created in God’s image and likeness. She was also trained in the psychology of personality, Christian counseling, pastoral psychology, and the integration of human and spiritual issues, classes she now teaches at the university and a seminary in Banska Bystrica.

“At first, students (and faculty!) were shocked when they realized what I was saying – that we can extend the concept of God into psychology,” Eva says. “This was unacceptable for many because science and God didn’t go together.”

Now, however, the tables are turning. “We have students applying to our university precisely because of the Christian orientation of our psychology program,” she says.

It’s an orientation that is spreading throughout Trnava University, urging for additional development. “A very strong liberalism is coming, and we’re not prepared for it,” Eva says. “We need an intellectual atmosphere where our scholars can develop Catholic thinking and our students can be prepared to demonstrate the fundamental dangers of liberalism and its reductionistic thinking.”

Ten years ago, this type of intellectual work would have been unthinkable. But now, as Eva looks at the three mountains and cross that are the Slovak state symbol, she is reminded of God’s mysterious timing. “We believed communism would end, but many of us didn’t think we’d be alive,” Eva says. “After 40 years of communist oppression and aggression, it’s a miracle that we got to put the cross in our state symbol. God has the last word.”

[Originally published in Our Sunday Visitor, August 8, 1999, under the title of: “For Slovaks, Life Means to Live with God”]