BoomerGirl Diary

One of my favorite stories in the Bible is about a female who “gate crashed’ an all-male event and threw herself at the feet of Jesus. We are told she washed his feet with her tears, wiped them with her hair, and then proceeded to massage them with expensive cream. Can’t you just see it? What a spectacle! Imagine what might happen if someone did this at a church on Sunday? The men were rendered speechless and were shocked that Jesus should let such a shameless hussy tend to his feet.

In the middle of all of this, Jesus asked the kind of question I would ask when my brain and mouth don’t connect. “Do you see this woman?” he said to the men. When I first read this, I thought: “How could they NOT see her? Hasn’t she just made a complete show of herself?” I now know, from experience, what Jesus meant. The gathered men did not see a woman, they saw someone they had already labeled as a “prostitute” or, as we would say in Ireland, a “real floozie.” Jesus saw beyond the label to the real WOMAN.

As women, it can be very easy to lose sight of who we really are. We can get lost in the labels people give us. When I became a nun over 30 years ago, I was given a different name. Eileen Roddy was encouraged to disappear. Many who saw me dressed in the black and white habit of a Sister of Mercy, expected me to be well behaved and “holy.”

My sisters did something similar when they got married. They changed their names, sacrificed careers and themselves to take on the role of wife, mother and the invisible title of “Mrs. Fix-it-all-for-everyone-else.” Churches encouraged our lives of self-sacrifice by telling us to “love our neighbors” as Jesus commanded. Many women wore themselves to a frazzle doing that.

Jesus actually said: “Love your neighbor as yourself.” By the time many of us discovered that, we had forgotten how to love ourselves; too many people had sucked us dry. Many younger women are wiser than me. I only started to learn the lesson as I approached my fiftieth year, five years after leaving the Convent. I am still rediscovering the gift of the woman I am, and learning to love and accept myself as a beautiful gift from God.

When I introduce myself to people these days, I no longer say: “I’m Eileen.”

I say: “My name is Eileen.” It may seem like a small thing, but it is a biggie for me. The name is just one aspect of the woman God created me to be. I am more than my name, and more than the roles I play. How about you? When you look in the mirror, who and what do you see?