A "Hot Mess" Finds Healing

Leticia Ochoa Adams' life has not been an easy road. She endured repeated sexual abuse as a child - and she lost her son Anthony to suicide a few years ago. It took a long time for Leticia to acknowledge the traumas she had endured and the poor life choices she made as a result. But after becoming Catholic and slowly forging a healthier relationship with God, she has been able to move toward healing. Leticia shares her story in her raw, honest, sometimes funny memoir, Our Lady of Hot Messes: Getting Real with God in Dive Bars and Confessionals.

Though the designation "Our Lady of Hot Messes" may seem an unusual one for Mary, the mother of Jesus, it is grounded in the lifelong reverence Leticia holds for her and the belief that Mary was always loving and guiding her, even when her life was a hot mess. Growing up, Leticia's aunts and mother all had pictures or statues of Our Lady of Guadalupe in their homes. And following Anthony's suicide, Leticia always found herself sitting next to a painting of Our Lady of Guadalupe at Mass.

During a Christopher Closeup interview, she recalled, "At some point, I realized there was a shift in my idea of Mary, that I didn't have to be perfect to come to her - and I never was. She's always seen me exactly for who I was. . . . So even in those moments where I'm the messiest, she's there and patiently, lovingly praying for me. That's where the title came from. [I'm] trying to convey the message that just because Mary was sinless doesn't mean she expects us to be perfect. . . . So, when we come to her in this idealistic version of ourselves that we [think we] need to present to her, we're kind of lying, and we're not trusting that she loves us as we are."

In order to be honest with Mary, Leticia first had to be honest with herself. The sexual abuse she suffered from the ages of five to nine left her feeling "angry at the world," yet wanting to be liked by everyone. As a protective mechanism, she rejected people before they could reject her, thereby projecting her own low self-esteem onto others' views of her - and even onto God's view of her. Leticia started attending a Baptist church when she was eight years old and interpreted all the sermons herself. "As a kid, all I heard was, if you're not good enough, then God won't live in your heart and your life won't [have] . . . manifestations of material goodness, wealth, happiness, all these things," she recalled. It wasn't until she began converting to Catholicism that she came to see God in a different light, though even that took time, as well as therapy.

Leticia admits that facing her own demons involved hard work. She explained, 'I think Catholics can tell the Protestant prosperity gospel, but sometimes we have a hard time seeing the Catholic prosperity gospel, where it's like if you just pray the rosary, you don't have to go to therapy. . . . Sometimes we forget that healing also comes from doing the hard work of looking at ourselves, which is why Confession is a healing sacrament. But if you just go in there and list your sins without truly looking at yourself and why you're making these choices to fail to love, which is what sin is, then we're not getting the healing. We're getting the absolution, but God can only give us what we ask for."

This essay is a recent "Light One Candle" column by Tony Rossi, Director of Communications, The Christophers; it is one of a series of weekly columns that deal with a variety of topics and current events.

Background information:

The Christophers