‘Good mothers refuse to give up’

Can we agree right up front that it’s weird to be a character in someone else’s story? That it’s disconcerting to view your life through someone else’s eyes? Especially when that someone happens to be your mother and she’s trying to explain to perfect strangers why you — her son — decided to do something as unexpected and inexplicable as becoming a Catholic priest?

It’s a little like sitting in the pew during your own eulogy. (As a priest I’m allowed pew analogies.)

My mother is not above exaggerating my virtues, perhaps most especially on Mother’s Day, but that’s not the real problem. The bigger issue for me is that the way she tells the story makes my life seem like destiny. It makes it seem like my life was a one-way street and all I did was drive it. And maybe in a way that’s true, but it never felt like that while I was living it.

I would have told different stories — stories in which I’m blind, where I feel like I’m tracing a line of braille down a page only to encounter a sudden emptiness, a gap caused by some typesetter’s error or practical joke. And afterward the line breaks in a dozen directions like roads off a roundabout, each of them readable, each able to make sense of the markings that came before.

I would have told stories about feeling steadily, gently beckoned by the light that is joy. I would have told stories about what it’s like to have to fight to follow it.

But I don’t want to oversell the point because there are (at least) two things that are more important to me. The first is that what my mother writes about me and God and the Church is honest and beautiful. The second is that what she writes isn’t really about me. It’s about us. And about what “us” means and who gets included in “us” and how “us” gets made and what has to be sacrificed to make “us.” It’s about how good mothers refuse to give up and how they will do almost anything to make sure that the “us” of mother and child remains intact.

And that’s why — even more than strangeness — I feel gratitude when I read what my mother has written. Or — even better — it’s that, in the best way, in the least degrading way, I feel unworthy to be the recipient of her love, to have been made by it. My own life more or less comes down to a response to having been well loved by her, by my father, by others, by God.

Now comes the — stick with me — semi-mandatory coda on religion.

Real religion is handed down over years like your grandfather’s smoking jacket, like an old family joke with all the edges worn smooth.

Real religion is a sacrifice to preserve the experience of having-been-loved when it’s so much easier to just let go.

Real religion is an actual re-ligio, a binding together of those who would otherwise fly apart.

In other words, real religion? It’s an “us.”

And that’s what I want my whole life to be about. It’s why I am a priest today, why I want more than anything to be a conduit of that immense and merciful love that precedes us and follows us on our way. I hope you have felt well-loved like that, too.