Aurora Magazine 2020

Aurora

young woman in the 1970s, that Mary might be excommunicated for establishing the chapter of Divorced and Separated Catholics in the United States. But she shrugged off my concerns. People needed love and reassurance that God hadn’t forgotten them because their marital relationship hadn’t worked out. She certainly needed them, she reasoned, and if the Church wouldn’t provide that love and reassurance, then she’d make sure she did. That directness was another feature of my mother’s sanctity. She was blunt and honest and open to everyone—even total strangers, such as prisoners, who were, in turn, touched by her acceptance and compassion. Her insights weren’t pious platitudes, but practical and revealing (if sometimes uncomfortable for the person receiving them). She didn’t preach or pronounce, but would instead step back and allow the person who’d come to her to hear and receive what she was saying, in their own way. In sum, she was entirely human—both sinner and saint—and thus, completely accepting of the divine expression of God’s love. If I have a blind spot about my mother, it comes from the fact that I grew up with her, filled with my own foolishness and false self— the one grasping for approval from others or seeking advantage over them; the one filled with vanity and self-regard. In other words, also human—like all of us. Like Mary. My sister and I have never forgotten that Mary shouldered a lot: the responsibility of being a father and a mother, taking in ironing to make ends meet (barely), living in and then leaving an abusive marriage, adopting and fostering children, and then losing her faith at the outset of her divorce. I’m forever grateful for her honesty. Even in the messiness of her life immediately before and after the divorce, she was never anything but real with us. Yes, she was opinionated and testy and direct. She believed in telling the truth without sugarcoating it. She perceived what needed to be said, but even when she chastised or corrected you, she did it with love—and, more importantly, you knew that she did it with love. And that, I believe, is the final example of her saintliness: that, for the time that was allotted to her on this planet, she attempted to confront the world with candor. For her, truth was a form of prayer. Not supplication or penitence or propitiation, but an honest confrontation with our fallen human condition, a frank recognition of how vulnerable and weak we are, and then, an openness to the divine grace that is given so freely and so generously and which we

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