Aurora Magazine 2020

Aurora

for me not to conclude that at some deep-psychic level, Mary was already leaving us for another plane. Of course, such an observation is necessarily speculative, as much of this book has been, about what was transpiring in the deepest recesses of Mary’s spiritual life. I’m aware that I wasn’t privy to what she was experiencing, except to the extent that it showed itself in her body and in the lucid and compelling observations and counsel that she offered to those who came to see her at the end of her life. All I can offer in response to that skepticism is to say that, in my judgment—and in the judgment of many of those who came into contact with her—my mother was a saint. Now, I can imagine that many of us might roll our eyes when someone is pronounced a saint. We might put the observation down to a loving daughter’s rose-tinted views of her mother; or assume that “my mother was a saint” is just another way of saying that Mary put up with a lot in her life, and did so without complaining; that she wasn’t self-pitying, but was generous and oriented toward the welfare of other people. To a certain extent, that characterization has merit: she did undergo a lot of trials and tribulations; she was concerned about the welfare of others. But it’s also true that my mother wasn’t afraid to lament what was happening to her, and there were times (especially when she brought my troubled brother into the family) where her concern for the welfare of others placed her other children at substantial risk. My sister, Janet, had a much more troubled relationship with my mother than even the one that I’ve portrayed here, and I don’t want to deny the reality that up until only a few years before her death, Mary could be a difficult person to be around. I hope that that very human, very fallible side of her, has come through clearly in this book. In the popular imagination—fostered by innumerable images in stained-glass windows and hagiographies through the centuries—a saint is a man or woman, hands clasped in prayer, eyes lifted to the heavens, and with a halo circling their head. Or, as Thomas Keating said in his eulogy, the plaster saints in church. We may read about how they remained true to their faith in terrible circumstances, and how they were tortured or beaten or killed by authorities that refused to accept their beliefs, or that considered them so subversive that they were compelled to silence them. Likewise, when we think about what it means to be a “sinner,”we may conjure up ideas of evildoers rubbing

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