STEP AWAY So You Can See More Clearly

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Amazing How Stories Take Form in My Head Before They Even Happen.
At Anger Management at Hope Again today, the theme seemed to be:
STEP AWAY
So You Can See More Clearly
(I really needed to hear all of this today):

“Anger Used in the Right Way can be productive,” Pastor Ron said opening the session, and I was glad to hear that, because there’s no way I can just walk away from these crimes and start writing about something else. Writing about pedophile priests is now in my DNA. I’ve tried now about a hundred times to get away from the subject matter. I’ll see a news story or a fellow-crime victim friend will call, and the impulse to write about the crimes will come back. I'm already feeling tinges to start writing blog posts again after summer hiatus, as the fall approaches.

And anger, a justified anger is at the source of this drive to keep writing.

Ron said, something like, In the end you are best off using your time, your skills, and your handiwork to put the anger to work.
And do it right.

But if the wounds are deep- and in me, believe me, they are deep- the wounds can and probably will determine the rest of your life. When you think you are over your anger issue, it creeps back in.

Boy do I know what that's like.

Ron said, "You have to get the thing that makes you angry out there, talk about it, in order for healing to begin." (Photo found on Google images for AM, not Ron.)

The woman from Africa said, sometimes her anger arises from having expectations that don’t get fulfilled.

Boy do I know what that's like.

I had expectations of at least getting a small settlement from the Catholic Church while they were giving them out, but seems the Illinois State Supreme Court sided with the Chicago Archdiocese lobbyists and threw out any lawsuits that dated back more than forty years in that state. I've shared here before, the way that decision seems to have left me permanently in oppressive poverty has a lot to do with why I'm angry a lot.

And I mean, how stupid is that? It's only money.

Still.

In Anger Management today, as more people started sharing about their lives, and this one guy from East L.A. was going on that how he, "don't hang with them people no more,” I let myself drift into

A Daydream.

I’ll come home today and find an email saying, Church Settles Ebeling Case and I’ll finally be able to buy a condo.

I'm daydreaming that Cardinal Francis George of Chicago has been reading my blog and decided to make an exception in my case, forget the state high court deciding in the Church’s favor last September. The archdiocese is still going to settle with the Ebeling sisters, even if by law they don't have to.

Including a scholarship for my daughter.

And maybe a Roman shopping spree.

“The ABC’s of Anger,” Ron says with a lot of glottis shock so I'm abruptly back in the little room on Sunset Boulevard at Hope Again in Anger Management class again.

“A, you admit you're angry.” I write down, A=Admit.

“B, back off, step back until you can get body and soul together. C, Confess. And by confess, I mean resolve the issue.

“Then D, open a dialogue with the person or institution with which you are angry.”

I write down "D=Dialogue" and then shake my head, No, No, No.

One thing I doubt I’ll ever see with the Chicago Archdiocese is a Dialogue.

I scratch out Dialogue and write instead:

“D-Daydream.”

Then I'm back thinking about that condo I’ll buy, just two city blocks north of where I live now the neighborhood is totally different, wonderful, clean, on a whole different transit line… no human feces in the sidewalk cracks.

Once the Chicago Archdiocese admits that what they allowed to happen to me and my sister at the hands of Father Horne-y turned two intelligent, potentially successful females into aging nymphomaniacs doomed to be part of a population of older women in poverty in America in the next decades, they'll realize we just don't deserve it, we don't deserve it. And settle with us even though our case is more than 40 years old, so they think by law they don't have to...

D is for Daydream.

**********

The class ended with many forms of various maxims that pop up inevitably in Anger Management. Someone said, “You can feel peace and satisfaction, knowing they know what they did.” Someone mentioned Luke 16, I think it is, where Jesus says the stingy rich and powerful will call out to us from Hell asking us to give them at least a sip of water and we'll say sorry, can't reach you from here.

Ha ha, see, I have eternity to daydream about.

Another maxim that popped up and I wrote down: "Take responsibility for your part in what happened."

Only part I have in the whole pedophile epidemic in the Catholic Church is my insatiable need to write down everything that happened.

Gotta find a way to make writing on this subject something more positive.

Or at least funnier...

Start by making it all fiction, even make up the religion, with its ancient headquarters in ... where?

How about St. Louis?
***
By Kay Ebeling
East Hollywood California
Cartoon below found on Google Images