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By Deborah Gyapong
Canadian Catholic News
MONTREAL (CCN) -- Halifax-based actor and comedian Judy Savoy kicked off the Catholic Women's League (CWL) national convention in Montreal August 13, addressing the League's 2007-2008 theme 'Love One Another.'
In order to love others, we must first know "the One who is Love," Savoy told the gathering of about 600 delegates from across Canada meeting August 12 - 15 at Le Centre Sheraton. That means knowing and loving Jesus Christ, she said.
"Christianity is a religion," she said, "but first and foremost it is a relationship."
We have to spend time with him, she said.
"Perhaps Jesus Christ is not the centre of your life; perhaps God is still distant for you," she said. Even if you already have a deep relationship with Christ or are just awakening to this amazing relationship, "we can all go deeper."
Using a garden metaphor, Savoy talked about how we need to cultivate the soil of our spiritual life and make sure weeds do not choke it out. She said fear is one of the worst weeds and it can come in many forms: fear of rejection, fear of death, fear of life, and "fear of wearing the wrong shoes with that outfit," punctuating her talk with her trademark humour.
"Anger is the child of fear," she said, asking the women present to examine what they are afraid of when they are angry.
Perfect love exists and is embodied in the person of Jesus Christ, she said. "If you believe with your head and your heart that he loves you, you will not be afraid."
She shared how she grew up in a Catholic Acadian/Irish family in Northern New Brunswick, the second oldest of five children, and the second of three girls.
One of her biggest fears, she said, was the fear of rejection. When she was 11 years old, her two-year old sister Nancy was struck by a car and killed. She could not comprehend her parents' pain at losing their child. Her father then turned to drink. She felt emotionally abandoned by her father.
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The way to please him was to get all A's in school. She took it upon herself to try to fix things in her family, noting that women should wear the equivalent of a handyman's tool belt with the various emotional tools they try to use to "fix it and make it better."
She found great success in school and in her career but experienced an inner emptiness. Though she had grown up Catholic, she was reading various existential philosophers and not searching for Jesus or for meaning within the faith. Instead, she was searching for love.
Working in television with a budding career as a weather personality and writer/broadcaster for the CBC, she found she was meeting people who had something about them that she wanted. They were Christians. That made her go into her walk-in closet one day and say, "Jesus, if you're real, I want you."
She said she went outside and the grass seemed greener and the sky seemed bluer, even though she "hadn't smoked anything."
She eventually married a man who became an Anglican minister. But some of the same patterns of trying to earn approval continued. She felt that if she were "not the best at everything than I won't be loved."
Then after 19 years of marriage, her husband told her he didn't love her anymore. He eventually obtained a divorce. She said she hit bottom after this devastating blow and had to choose whether she was going to allow God to lift her up, or to "just run away."
She chose to trust God. The first step in her journey was to forgive her husband and the woman he eventually married. Savoy said bitterness and resentment can destroy emotional and physical health.
"Forgiveness is not a suggestion, it's a command," she said. "Because it is a command, God will give you the power to forgive." For Savoy, forgiving has been a process.
"Forgiveness is not for them [the people who have hurt you], forgiveness is for you," she said. "It keeps your heart open to God."
"We ourselves are the most difficult to forgive," she said.
Savoy returned to the Catholic faith after her divorce. She said she finds in Catholicism a "depth greater than in any other denominations I have experienced."
At the closing banquet August 15, Savoy presented a half hour of her one-woman show 'Get Me Back to the Garden, I'm Chokin' on the Weeds.'
The show is a zany romp through the Bible with Savoy's unique characterizations of some Biblical characters like Eve, and some non-Biblical character's like Delilah's hairdresser, or Noah's wife who is convinced her husband is hard of hearing and God really told him to build a park instead of an ark.
Copyright Canadian Catholic News; no reprinting without permission.
August 23/2007
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Sincerely Carol Chapman
carol m @ navnet.net