The Gift My Mother Gave Me

When we celebrate the Feast of the Epiphany, we recall the journey of the Magi and their gifts to the Christ Child. These gifts were emblematic of his kingship, gold; his divinity, frankincense; and his death on the cross, myrrh. Some say that our tradition of gift giving at Christmas derives from these first gifts.

Gifts are wonderful and come in all sorts of disguises. Some things that come to us as gifts seem, after a while, to be burdens; likewise, some problems that we face turn out to be gifts. A saint would say that everything that comes our way is actually a gift from God, whether it is a sinus infection or a child or learning to play the ukulele.

Mothers give their children gifts and the gift of faith is no exception. A mother models her own faith to her children and they learn about God from her. Yes, fathers do likewise, but indulge me, please. I want to talk about my mother.

She had a rough time with religion. Raised in a strict Catholic home, she received a religion based mainly on fear, sin, penance, unworthiness and guilt. Try as she might to temper that message for me, the scary pageant of evil was paraded before me and I learned that I had to become worthy of God’s love through sinlessness, which was, of course, impossible.

My mother was an unhappy person who never felt worthy of God’s love, who obsessed over her shortcomings and saw only the chasm dividing her from Our Lord. She was afraid of almost everything and there was truly no one to help her.

But God helped her a little bit.

My mother had a profound delight in the created world. Although she never exactly connected her love of creation with the creator’s love for her, things in the world touched her deeply. It could be a thunderstorm or a tree-covered hill in autumn. It could be the stars or a race horse. It could be the sad face of a person on the bus or an old tree root poking up through the pavement. Her times of joy came from these promptings.

It was this that she gave me, for I, too, share in this delight in the world. I know that my truest and first real awareness of God came from being with my mother as she would rejoice over some wonderful sight or sound.

She and I would often take a walk after supper. The nearby cemetery* was one of our favorite spots (her melancholy being operative here, perhaps). One spring evening we picked many, many violets. I can still remember the sight of her work-worn hand clasping them. It is that hand holding those violets that I can still see as clear as day, that hand holding God’s violets so carefully. My own were held less gently to be sure.

She found a small vase to put them in when we got home. They sat on the kitchen table. The next day during breakfast, my father smiled at them and I thought to myself: Has he ever seen her holding violets? Can he know what these violets mean? Can anyone? To me those violets in her hand meant something that I wouldn't really understand for many years - though I never forgot the sight of them.

you see, my mother’s "religion" had not been able to seep into her love of creation. It was the one place in her life untainted by fear and guilt. Whereas she felt herself unworthy of the love of the Supreme Being in heaven, she was quite at home with the beauty and grace she found on earth. Whether she knew it or not, her touch on flowers was prayer, the old neighbors she cared for were saints, the sky was God.

This is what she gave me, and, in my few godless years, I drew grace from created things. Thanks to my mother I was never far from God after all. Far from the pew, far from the Eucharist, maybe, but not far from prayer, grace, God. These words from Psalm 27 sum it up for her and for me, too.

What if I had not believed
that I would see the goodness of the Lord
in the land of the living!

* The picture above was taken in the actual cemetery that my mother and I walked in so often. Thank you Google!