Aurora Magazine 2020

Aurora

their hands in glee as they plan to perpetrate a crime, or people who visit unimaginable cruelties upon the innocent. Yet, as my mother showed and Keating suggested, the holiness of a saint is not to be found in the explicitness of their piety or in a kind of neutered blandness. Mary was an earthy, brassy, even outrageous individual, who made lots of mistakes in her life—perhaps more than most. Far from being plain and sexless and contemptuous of this world and its so-called temptations, Mary was a fully embodied being, who liked material possessions and enjoyed and even flaunted her femininity. She had a warm and embracing presence, a robust sense of humor, and a strong temper. She was also a sinner, in the way that all of us are sinners. We’re all less-than-ideal individuals, prey to the pulls and pushes of our fallen human condition. There were times in her life that she lost contact with God, even moments as she herself acknowledged when she turned away from the heart of the faith that had sustained her. She was controlling and impulsive; stubborn and open to new possibilities; a woman who, all her life, searched for God and who struggled at every moment with resentment, fear, and an ego that craved acceptance and attention. But she kept on returning to God, and, eventually, was visited with the kind of hard-won and yet, paradoxically wholly unearned presence of the divine that we call grace, and which was so visibly expressed by her in her last years. Her saintliness, therefore, had less to do with the travails that she was subject to in her life. It had more to do with the fact that, like the Samaritan woman at the well in John chapter four, she wasn’t afraid to approach Jesus and challenge him (and be challenged by him) on the meaning of faith. Like the Samaritan woman, she wasn’t always appropriate. She didn’t intone the scriptures in a measured manner, but had a thick New York accent and unvarnished guffaw. Like the Samaritan woman, she wasn’t married for much of her life. Like the Samaritan woman, she ran afoul of the religious authorities, with their dictates about who is or who isn’t an appropriate vessel for God’s word. Mary wasn’t hidebound by liturgy or dogma, or the kind of Pharisaical nitpicking that stultifies belief and turns it into an account ledger of which rules and regulations you’ve followed and which you’ve bent or broken. Indeed, she didn’t wait around to get the approval of the religious authorities. I recall how worried I was as a

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