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A Toad and a Creepy Thing

A Toad and a Creepy Thing

Last updated on: June 11, 2022 at 2:35 pm by Mary Pezzulo

A Toad and a Creepy Thing 2022-06-11T14:35:27-04:00 Mary Pezzulo

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

I do my best thinking when I garden.

Gardening is where I meditate and contemplate and decide what I think about God.

Some people do that kneeling in a chapel or by their bed. I do it while I pull weeds and put down cardboard.

The other day, while pulling weeds, I was thinking about the time I got a chain stuck around my wrist without realizing it.

Of course, this happened at Franciscan University.

I was trying to join a Faith Household.

I now know that the Faith Households were set up by Father Mike Scanlan, to filter Franciscan University students into his covenant community which was eventually shut down by the bishop for being a cult. That community having been disbanded years ago, the Franciscan University Faith Households were now just cliques: little student clubs designed, with the blessing of the university, so that students could keep an eye on one another. They were halfway between a sorority and a junior religious order. Household Brothers and Sisters– always divided according to sex, men’s households and women’s households, no mixed Households for fear of shenanigans– would meet together to pray the Rosary or the Divine Office and go to Mass; they would police each other for disobeying rules of the Household Covenant that governed whether we could drink or go to parties. They would accuse each other of sins and ask each other for prayer. They would commit to days of prayer and fasting to atone for each other’s sins. Joining the household entitled us to a free t-shirt and to a band of close friends we got to call family.

The Household I joined was called Totus Tuus Maria. Part of our initiation was praying the Louis DeMontfort Consecration, gleefully obeying DeMontfort’s instruction that we were to think of ourselves as “toads and worms and creepy things” next to the majesty of the Virgin Mary. Initiates to the Household were called “Toadies” and had to wear a dark green t-shirt with an unflattering, warty frog drawn on it in marker while the full-fledged members wore blue. At the end of the initiation period, there was a secret ceremony where we were accepted as full fledged members of the Household. In the secret ceremony, we took a vow to belong entirely to be the Virgin Mary, to be her “slaves of love” who would serve her forever. And then one of the girls in the group came up to each new member, holding a small length of chain link like you’d buy at the hardware store.

“Take this chain to show that you belong no longer to yourself, but to Our Lady,” said the girl, wrapping the chain around my wrist. Later in the ceremony, somebody came by with pliers and cinched it on tight.

I didn’t realize until I went to take a shower that night that the chain would not come off. It was supposed to stay on for a lifetime, symbolizing our vow. In fact, it only stayed on for about a year, when an irritated nurse had to cut it off before my gall bladder surgery. After that I turned the bent broken link in the chain into a jewelry clasp and wore it a little longer.

After I got bawled out by a priest friend of the Household coordinator and thrown out of Totus Tuus Maria because my chronic illness made me a burden to them, I left the chain on a little rock protrusion at the shrine of the Assumption of Mary, behind the now infamous Portiuncula chapel. I haven’t worn a chain since.

As I gardened, I began to think about this.

The whole thing made no sense. Why did I let them put the chain on me in the first place? Why did that whole rigamarole seem like a good bargain to make in exchange for fair-weather friends?

What did I believe about the Virgin Mary, that made it seem as if she would like to chain people up and enslave them?

I wanted a family and a circle of friends, but I thought I wasn’t worthy of a family and a circle of friends, because I’d been raised to think I was a burden, a toad and a worm and a creeping thing. So I thought you had to do penance and hard work to earn love from people.

I thought similarly of God. I wanted to be loved by God, but I thought I wasn’t worthy to be loved by God because I was so sinful. Of course, every experience I’d ever had that I believed to be of God, had been one of a loving Creator who took joy in what His hands had made, but most of the lessons I’d been taught in the Charismatic Renewal, and then in Regnum Christi, had been about doing the right thing to earn God’s love in spite of being so sinful. About knowing the right formula to be a good person who would be safe from the coming chastisement. About repenting so exquisitely that God was appeased and killed the fatted calf. About reciting every prayer and showing up at every Mass and winning the God Contest so you could be awarded the God Prize.

I had assumed the Virgin Mary was something like a codependent mother in an abusive patriarchal household– there to comfort you as much as she thought practical after the Father beat you, or to plead with God the Father to mitigate the beating. Of course you wanted to get on her good side. Of course you wanted to come to her, throw yourself at her feet, sob about what a horrible person you were, and beg her to put you in chains. If you did that, you’d be hers. God the Father would have to go through her before administering another punishment.

Of course I thought it had to do with slavery. Slavery was the thing that I knew.

The whole universe I knew, through the Charismatic Renewal and Regnum Christi, was one of slavery, of buying and selling and quid pro quo.

What if I thought about it differently?

What if I had the courage to believe, right to the hilt, in the God of Love who I’d rejoiced in and spoken with when I prayed and meditated and worked in the garden, rather than the abusive god I’d been taught to revere?

Wouldn’t that lead me to reject the chains?

Wouldn’t I gladly blaspheme the capricious father of Regnum Christi and the Charismatic Renewal, if doing so honored the God of Love?

And where does that leave the Virgin Mary?

Surely the one set aside from the beginning of time to be the mother of such a God wouldn’t be a codependent ninny who wanted slaves in exchange for mitigated punishment. She would be a liberator, someone who cut chains off and set children free.

Surely if she saw a worm or a toad or a creepy thing, she’d do what I do with worms and toads and creepy things– what I was doing as I gardened, as a matter of fact. Gently pick up the worm who was sitting in harm’s way in the hot sun, and put them down gently on the soft soil to go back to doing its worm duty for the garden. Feel compassion for the toad and the creepy thing, and get them to safety.

No, no, I realized, we can take it a step further than that. Surely she would see the toads and worms and creepy things for what they were– creatures of God with an important place in the ecosystem God created, things to be revered and admired for what they are, not embarrassments. She wouldn’t have to fight her revulsion, as I did when I picked up a worm just now or rescued that squirming mud puppy so long ago. She’d rejoice in them.

If I am wrong about all of this, I’m at peace with being wrong. Because the wrong theology I just expressed is a far more just and righteous theology than the theology of chains.

If I have to be a toad and a worm and a creepy thing, I’m not a creepy thing in service to a God of Chains. I choose to serve a God of Love Who made all things bright and beautiful, all creepies and crawlies, all toads and worms, because He loves them and wants them to exist.

Of course, it might be that I’m not a toad or a worm or a creepy thing at all. It might be that I am something better than that.

Still, here out in the garden, you could do worse.

Image via pixabay

Mary Pezzulo is the author of Meditations on the Way of the Cross, The Sorrows and Joys of Mary, and Stumbling into Grace: How We Meet God in Tiny Works of Mercy.

Steel Magnificat operates almost entirely on tips. To tip the author, visit our donate page.

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