November 1, 2026
I wish I could remember the exact words my friend used when she reframed my ongoing struggle with retirement with one question. I was sharing with her an obstacle I seemed incapable of getting around. My ego. I keep asking myself that if I commit myself to doing what I am longing to do, return to my books, spend the days in silence, reading, prayer, and writing, and finally produce one of the four books that are dancing around in my head, isn’t that selfish? Is that my ego wanting to perform again, to get that sense of accomplishment back that I knew in school, by proving what I can do? Working toward an achievement? OR should I commit my time to service, visiting the sick, working at the soup kitchen, volunteering for Hospice, doing something in which my love and not my ego is primarily engaged?
Then she asked me THE QUESTION. It had something to do with my interpretation of the struggle. I had told her that I felt caught between my ego and what I thought was God speaking to me. She asked me what if that was not God at all and it could be that I was misinterpreting what was ego and what was not. Almost immediately, I physically sensed a kind of space open up in me. Something hard and unyielding started to break open.
I sit here this morning in a kind of mild amazement. Is it possible that after years of ministry, years of advising others to sense the spirit of God in what brings them life, in what makes their heart sing, that this was the sign of the unique individual made by God and their responsibility was to it, that I couldn’t believe it for myself? Did I believe I should be Mother Teresa instead of Kathleen? Now, I knew I could never be a Mother Teresa, so why do I constantly beat myself up for it?
Is it that you can take the woman out of the Catholic church, but not the Catholic guilt out of the woman? Oh no, I thought I had dealt with that years ago! I wrote a whole doctoral dissertation on Roman Catholic women and divorce which touched on many concomitant issues as well as the theology of marriage. I thought I had guilt exorcised!
I am beginning to understand one of the unsung truths about life transitions. They seem to relitigate all the issues of former transitions, like divorce, in a new form. I guess guilt has and will always be one of mine, and ego. But thanks to my friend, I will now always be careful to not conflate it with the will of God.
