The Crooked Mystic

I only wrote one post this week. I planned on having more. I had a bunch of ideas I thought would make it past the “notes on my iphone” stage of development but they didn’t. It has been an absurd blur of a week, the catalyst of which was a teeny tiny bit of a concussion. My life has been a series of lessons in letting go–of expectations, of presuppositions, of any sense of certainty and control. I believe God has used the things in my life which have knocked me down to help me grow.

Recently, there have been a lot of those falling experiences, and I hope I have shown sufficient growth and grace and wisdom–but I know sometimes I haven’t. Sometimes I have been angry, self-pitying, poor-me-ing, and bitter. That is just life and being human. We second guess, we love and we hate, we make mistakes. And I think if my series of illnesses of innumerable unexplained origins have taught me anything is that I am far from a perfect person, and I will always be far from a perfect person. Big surprise, right. Well I think I need that reminder a lot. Because my expectations of self and others has been often skewed.

I think of people like Teresa of Avila who spent 3 years, in bed, writhing in pain and how much God graced her with insight and humility she might not have ever had otherwise. I think of how she struggled and fell even after her most painful experiences which gives me relief that I don’t have to be perfect now and will not be perfect ever, but I can become a better human in this and through this painful experience of life. I think of Julian of Norwich, who I have been drawn to lately for so many reasons, who also suffered great pains and who found intimacy with her “Mother Jesus” out of that pain.

I find God leading me through illness with the anchors of the mystics who suffered similarly. I hear him calling to me with love through voices from the past and voices of those I find in my present, like gifts to my soul, each unwrapped with care by God and grace. In this pain God has chosen to give me greater and greater chances for empathy in those moments people have unraveled to reveal the soulful center of themselves. Even though I have worked with 100′s of people as a therapist, where they share the greatest traumas of their souls, often for the first time in their lives, I am still honored when anyone tells me their deepest and most sacred things.

I thank God for many things this week….

• I thank God for Genju who brought me the gift of the Grey Nuns–my tribe of mothers from a time before memory began.
• I thank God for Judy who shared with me the legacy of her life story, all 83 years, and the vision of God as we can see him right before we meet him in full, at the weathered and worn edges of last moments of life.
• I thank God for air in my lungs, again, and consciousness (both literal and spiritual) which, like most things, can only be really  appreciated after it has been taken away and then restored.
• I thank God for the many patrons of my life who I can feel caring for me in the space between now and eternity–especially on the really painful days.
• I thank God for my husband, my mother, my friends, and my dogs who all, in their own way, support me when I feel I can’t support myself.
• I thank God for the many voices I have found in the virtual world who tell a story, live a parable, and write it out in new and surprising ways and, like gifts, unravel to reveal beauty I need when I haven’t the energy to sustain beauty on my own.
• I thank God for my centering prayer group (the one I attend as a participant) and all the beautiful souls in it who have become like a spiritual family so easily, the years between us seeming negligible when we share in silence and the gifts silence brings to our soul.
• I thank God for my writing group and their wisdom and capacity to turn words into life and life into words–and listen to my attempts at doing both, as well.
• I thank God for every single human being who tells me their story, and reveals the ghosts of their soul, weekly in therapy. I pray always that God gives me the grace to get out of the way enough to help them the best He can, not just the best I can.
• I thank God for everything I have and everything I don’t have–knowing that both teach me innumerable lessons.
• And my concussed, dizzy, and aching head thanks my new inhaler for not making me pass out every time I breathe it in. I didn’t like the week of asthma “whip its” which, quite literally (from my vague teenage recollection of doing one of the dumbest drug options ever just the once–even at 16 I knew it was stupid) felt like doing actual “whip its”.

Who knew someone with asthma could be allergic to albuterol! It made me feel like the story of my friend’s cat…who was allergic to cats. You have to think it is some sort of hiccup of creation–except for, of course, the fact that through another anomaly of biology (which I am great at) I was able to value all the things I am thankful for in an intimate way.

So, thank you God for the greatest beauty hidden inside of the greatest burdens of life. Even if, like the cat, I am built to be allergic to myself.

Below are a few more things I was thankful to have found throughout the blogopshere this past month or so, inspired by HopefulLeigh and her May-so-far List of things she loves…

Carl McColman’s article at patheos to celebrate Julian of Norwich’s (ancient British contemplative)feast day…
http://www.patheos.com/Progressive-Christian/Julian-of-Norwichs-Timeless-Message-Carl-McColman-05-09-2012.html

mama:monk’s post on Benedictine Compassion …
http://mamamonk.com/2012/04/25/practicing-benedict-compassion-and-sober-judgment/

The Velveteen Rabbi’s Rumi Shabbat pdf which is a tradition woven new in a way that could be practice for Christian, Muslim, or Jewish person of faith…
http://velveteenrabbi.blogs.com/blog/2012/05/rumi-service-pdf.html

I was also happy to discover Christian Piatt’s new twist on the ancient tradition of Psalms as spoken word or song …
http://christianpiatt.com/spoken-word/

This beautiful eulogy of sorts to Maurice Sendak by Cathleen Falsani (one of my newest discovery and greatly loved voice–witty with depth…my favorite)…

http://sojo.net/blogs/2012/05/08/maurice-sendak-has-died

Kathy Escobar provided a wonderful series on “rebuilding after deconstructing” which is a great guide, spiritual direction and formation all in one which gives people permission to stumble on the difficult road to faith which is evolving…

http://kathyescobar.com/2012/04/16/rebuilding-after-deconstructing/

…And all the beautiful statements of love and unconditional compassion which came in the wake of the Catholic Church and their nuns issue as well as the gay rights/civil union issue. The beautiful capacity for so many people to speak their heart without damning everything and everyone else. Not that everyone is capable of this nuanced balance but I was so gladly surprised by the many that were.

and…

My favorite posts to write were my series on “Unlikely Mothers” and the preceding post “Life in Utero: Finding God, Grace, Birth & Motherhood in Infertility”…
http://www.crookedmystic.com/?p=677

A Final Thankful Prayer for Mercedes Rosaria Pineda de Martinez, who passed away last week for creating FANA–the orphanage of my beginnings, the place of my naming, and where my known history began. Without her passion for helping the orphaned children of Colombia myself and my adopted sister (as well as 1000′s of others) might never have found a place to call home.

photo of Marie-Marguerite d’Youville, founder of the Grey Nuns

I find with increasing amounts of amazement that the deeper my heart opens to God, the more I let go of the things I once thought I had control over God sends me gifts in the shape of words, images, people and experiences. I feel him whisper in a light breeze, glint in the eye of a bird that holds my glance longer than necessary, and often in the way my crooked path lands me right at the doorstep of the next safe harbor of hope and faith on my journey to wherever He takes me.

Yesterday that song to my soul came by way of an unlikely resonance from an unlikely but, equally, likely place. I love reading blogs, articles, and essays of contemplatives from other “faiths of origin”. The Buddhist, Taoists, Hindus, Muslim and Jewish contemplative voices resonate somewhere in the familiar space of quiet penetrated infrequently by a gong or bell calling “time in” or “time out” to a period of prayerful reflection. Where our core beliefs of our traditions may separate us in philosophy, silence and our reverence for silence binds us in one common pursuit–to get closer to something far greater than ourselves and to let go of our small “selves” to do so.

I was reading one of my fellow pilgrim’s blogs yesterday, the articulate and thoughtful author, Genju, of 108zen books on the path of Buddhism in the tradition of the beloved Thich Naht Hanh, and I found a beautiful consonance in her life and mine…in the shape of socially conscious women called “the Grey Nuns”.  Her post “hearts that awaken” discusses how she found herself on a Buddhist retreat in the sanctuary of the Grey Nuns. She writes:

 What penetrated me was the interconnections and the surfacing of the past in a new perspective and with new understanding.

That is what I have felt about my recent unraveling of my history with nuns and particularly the Grey Nuns. They are part one in the (known) history of my life. They gave me my name, after Teresa of Avila, they fed me and clothed me and came to my crib when I cried in a room full of babies in cribs living in the in between after the unknown that was and waiting for our “forever homes”. I used to think they spoke to me in Spanish, but having read the history of their founder and finding out in my own research that they were plucked from French-speaking Canada, by the Pope of the time, to help this foundling orphanage for Colombian ninos abandonados (abandoned babies) I am not altogether sure whether their lullabies were Spanish or French. Maybe that reveals my childhood fondness for Madeline and Le Petit Prince.

The mosaic of my life and faith continues as the story of Genju weaves into mine, like one more bead in a chain, like the 108 beads on the japa malas (what I call the “Buddhist” rosary) or the Catholic rosary of my youth.

Isn’t beautiful where we find resonance, like Easter eggs hidden in the garden, God leaves us secret blessings, deep connection with others, and an unfolding abundance around every turn of the path of life. Whether, like for Genju it is walking down the hallways of Grey Nun relics and remembering the Sister who taught her devotion to practice, or me reading her post and being transported back to the lessons before cognition and memory which the sisters left for me in caring hands, teaching me that love is all there is–beyond time, and memory, and in the deep recesses of the ever-unfolding yard of fabric, with God’s hand always revealing new layers of understanding.

Thank you Genju. Thank you Grey Nuns. Thank You God for unwinding another piece of the continuously unraveling fabric of my life. Thank you for being more beautiful than I could have imagined, more complex than I can ever envision, and for allowing me to open my eyes enough to see a flicker of your light that streams from the kind ghosts of the past into the present, and forward from today into forever. May I always learn more, see more, and continue to be astonished by the power of grace happening every day.

When has God spoken to you in little ways? In nature, in people, in experiences, or in words? What have you learned from those unwinding fabrics of your life?

It is the week (and day) of the Feast of Julian of Norwich and Mother’s Day. In following the last week of posts discussing literal and spiritual motherhood I thought the following passage from Julian’s own writing would be the perfect thing. I used this reading this week in my guided contemplative prayer group, read three times, each time followed by a period of contemplative silence.

Passage of Julian of Norwich, excerpt from 40 day Journey with Julian of Norwich…

“Jesus Christ, who opposes good to evil, is our true Mother. We have our being from him, where the foundation of motherhood begins…our true Mother Jesus …alone bears us for joy and for endless life, blessed may he be. So he carries us within him in love and travail, until the full time when he wanted to suffer the sharpest thorns and cruel pains…and at the last he died. And when he had finished, and had so borne us for bliss, still all this could not satisfy his wonderful love… To the property of motherhood belongs nature, love, wisdom and knowledge, and this is God. For though it may be that our bodily bringing to birth is only little, humble and simple in comparison to our spiritual bringing to birth, still it is he who does it in the creatures by whom it is done… And in our spiritual bringing to birth he uses more tenderness, without any comparison, in protecting us…And from this sweet and gentle operation he will neither cease or desist, until all his beloved children are born and brought to birth.“

You can try a contemplative silence today similar to the practice I did with my group this week.

1. Find a quiet space inside or outside, where you won’t be interrupted.

2. Read the passage above (out loud)–or pick your own passage of poetry, spiritual writing, prayer, Psalm or other Bible passage .

3. Set a buzzing timer on your phone for 5, 10, or 15 minutes (start with small increments of silence if contemplation is new to you–it staves off feelings of frustration).

4. Enter into a time of silence, reflecting on the reading. Maybe using one word or image the reading evoked to focus on in your silence–to ground you, like an anchor to hold you in the space and guiding you into union with God.

5. When the timer buzzes slowly open your eyes. Read the passage again. Reset your timer.

6. Go into the second period of silence–follow the same guidance as above.

7. When the timer buzzes slowly open your eyes. Read the passage for a third time. Reset your timer.

8. Go into a third period of silence.

9. When the buzzer goes off, slowly open your eyes. Reflect on your meditation. You can journal a few thoughts if it feels right for you.

Happy Mother’s Day! Happy Feast of Julian! Blessings to all!

After discussing at length my “unlikely mothers” who were people on my path of life who showed me the compassion and unconditional love of a mother-figure, I wanted to take a moment to thank my “band-aids and cough medicine” mom. Which is to say, I want to thank the mom in my life who provided me with the ever day miracle of just loving me, even and especially when I was hard to love. She was the mom who taught me what love was, and by every psychological developmental model of learning, is the reason why I can reflect love out into the world–having learned how to do it from a genuine source of love.

I would say that more than one time in my life, her ability to love me, saved me–literally and spiritually. In working in the field of trauma I see many people who, by the developmental standards, where at a disadvantage early in life because the person, their parent(s), who were to be their example of love provided them, instead of stability and care, like my own, a mixture of neglect or abuse that made their basic understanding of love and loving difficult from the start. I was blessed with a mother who reflected everything I needed to me so that when I dealt with trauma, in my early adult life, I had a spiritual and emotional life preserver to hang onto when I could’t stay afloat. Many people don’t get this and I am so sad for that, and so grateful for my mother.

The following micro-story is my version of a long “Mother’s Day” card to my mom…

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My childhood was lucky. I have known many people in my life whose growing up was a parade of horrors, losses, neglect, and alienation. Their lives became gritty long before their brain could understand any other way to love than the imprints of relationships, like fingerprints of dysfunction and pain, left their mark in their psyche.

While my life would later know levels of personal torment, my childhood didn’t lack in any way, providing me all the suburban kitsch, and as fluffy a developmental security blanket as I could want or ever need.

My mom made beds, did laundry, gave me notes with my nutritionally balanced school lunches, and made yogurt ice pops and bran muffins from scratch. She played with my hair, softly, and like a kitten I would purr myself to sleep in the cocoon of her love for me.

We read books on cold winter nights in front of the fireplace, and I would harass the household with a multitude of one to three act plays spanning from the birth of Jesus to my rendition of “Beauty and the Beast”. My mother always clapped and lauded my literary “masterpieces” or, on the occasion when it called for it, broke up fights or ameliorated tears when I began to harangue my “actors” aka my younger siblings who would never learn their lines–always mumbling something about “not being able to read yet” or some other nonsense.

I played spy in the backyard during the summers, cloaked in my father’s trench coat and woolen hat, and she would politely ignore me leading me to believe, for  many years, that I was the most covert spy . I trampled through flower beds to move from one “secure location” to the next, holding my breath as I clung to the bark of tall but narrow trees, with my coat billowing out like sails in the wind.

When I was an angry teen, hating her for everything she was and wasn’t, hating God, and hating the embarrassing needlepoint Mary sitting, always visible, across from the front door in the living room, my mother prayed for patience and (sometimes) prayed for the capacity to love me when I was truly unlovable.

At age sixteen I grabbed all my spiritual iconography, in an act of defiance (towards her and God) and tossed it all out of the second floor window of our house, along with the only luxury she had ever owned (a bottle of Chanel #5). I wanted to make clear my angsty adolescent individuating from everything found in that safe space of home and mother. She collected all the items and stored them away for the someday I would want them again.

When I came home at age twenty-three, after three years living over 1000 miles away in the Rockies, and after dealing with sexual traumas and an emotionally volatile romantic relationship, she hugged me tight and helped me carry all my baggage to the bedroom I slept in when I was a little girl.

When I was ready, a few years later, she handed me back all my religious tokens, which had been tucked away in the back of her bedroom closet in a shoebox. And she showed me the journal of my life she had written from her perspective and told me about the years spent praying that might heart would reopen, like a flower, to her, to God, and to life.

When I was married, on a New Year’s Eve almost four years ago, she stood by my side, tearful in the candlelight of my living room in urban New Jersey, “giving me away” with a psalm and a prayer from my home-made ceremony.

And today, she is the one I call in the best and the worst–the voice I listen to, the one that knows me better than anyone. And as I prepare for my first trip back home in almost two years I smile, picturing the needlepoint Mary, the kitch of stability in the doorway of the place I will always remember as “home”. It is the place that contains the lineage of a life, of love, and God, and my “band-aids and cough medicine” mom.

Psalm 46:10 (NIV)

He says, “Be still and know that I am God;

I will be exalted among the nations,

I will be exalted in the earth.”

In many ways Alicia could have easily gone first in the timeline or countdown of mothers but I decided to make her last–nestled between the stories of the women (although there have been a few men too who fit the criteria) who have shaped and imprinted on my lives and the following (posting Friday) Mother’s Day tribute post called “Needlepoint Mary” which discusses my “band-aids and cough medicine” mom who raised me.

Without Alicia, the evidence of these other mothers in my life–the unlikely and the likely–would not have necessarily carried so much wait. I call her the anti-mother because my knowledge of me doesn’t allow me to determine her compassion or her unconditional kindness in the same visceral way I could with my other “mothers”. She is the absence-of-mother that made my lifelong search for mother-figures so vivid and potent…and my finding so many, so beautiful.

Alicia is my birth mother. I don’t know if she was a care giver but she was a life-giver to me. I exist because she did and because she brought me into the world. And I live in the city, state, and country that I do because she brought me at two months of age to the Nuns of the Grey Order in Bogota, Colombia. I have my name because of the day she birthed me, and because of where she left me–in the hands of devout Catholics with their love of saints.

She deconstructed my reality and definition of mother before I had the brainpower to understand–she is why my confines of motherhood are already so vast. Biology was never where I found home–my mother is of Hungarian descent and my father British, born and raised. I love scones and tea and Blackadder (with Rowan Atkinson). I speak English and occasionally some sad amalgam of high school Spanish. I will never be the president and I have a picture of my dad and I, raising our hands in a crowded room, as we both were sworn in as citizens of the United States, together.

Her absence in my life gave me everything I am, by her absence. This is always a struggle. The absence of lineage recreates lineage.  This is how I can see Teresa of Avila as so much a filial mother–she fills in the space in my history which, before, was a tree without a root on the dreaded school “family tree” projects. Not knowing her made me hungry for mothers in my life–and probably why figures like Mama Weidi and “Mama” in Luang Prabang carried so much weight in my heart. She was probably why it felt so easily true that my Grandmother, and patron saint in time, was so easy to love and feel in her absence–after many years of filling in the blank space of biological mom in my mind with all kinds of ideas.

I remember spending hours in front of the mirror in high school, visualizing what part of my bio mom might be looking back at me. I tried to pinpoint the parts of her I carried in me in the many ways I different from my parents–my intensity, imagination, and writing style that overflowed with adjectives (a big characteristic of many Latin American writers, but also of LM Montgomery which I read religiously as a child). I tried to parcel out, before I understood the psychology of it all very well, my nature and my nurture–looking for signs of her in the shape of my eyes, the olive in my skin, or the way the Spanish trilling “r” would roll off my tongue like it belonged.

I spent most of my life, until recently, looking for Alicia everywhere and in everything. And I found her, or rather I found mothers, in many of the places and periods of my life.

The irony of my biology leads to a strange place–a place where I may be both the beginning and the end of my genetic line as I know it. In coming to terms with that, and the way it feels antithetical to the very nature of our based “being” if we define “being” by the animal kingdom’s worlds of propagation of the species. Which would negate the lives of every infertile person (like myself), of every adoptive family, every gay couple, or of every monastic or celibate religious person who chose a path of abstinence from the traditional definition of family to (in the best of cases) pursue a divine calling to another kind of parenthood.

As I wrote in the post “In Utero” my life is an experience of unfolding–of mothering and being mothered to and by many. My life is not a story of biology and neither is my story of family.

Alicia gave me much in giving me so many spaces of love to fill and to help fill in/for others. She gave me an empathy for those that can be mothers in so many different ways and those who need mothers in lives where maternal love is desperately lacking. Alicia gave me the gift of absence–and a life on the other side of her relinquishing me to nuns.

Thank you Alicia, for my life, and your part in it–as a conduit to openness of being able to see motherly love found in many places, and in many people. Thank you for teaching me that motherly love can be absence and both having and letting go for the good of someone else. Thank you for helping me burst through the confines of what family or mother or love can be. 

…She gives me the idea of a stainless lily, but a metallic lily, forged of wrought iron.~Durtal in JK Huysman’s En route (about St. Teresa of Avila) as quoted from the Intro to St Teresa’s “Vida” translation by Mirabai Starr

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“I don’t want any of it! I hate him! I hate you! It’s all bullshit!”

Shouting and shaking, with tears rolling down my face, my arms full of religious totems, I stormed up the stairs to my mother’s bedroom, and into her bathroom, locking the door behind me.

“Teresa, don’t do this. You are going to regret it. Get out of there now!”

My mother’s certitude and interpretation of my hormonal rage fueled my infuriation, and I grabbed her Chanel #5 sitting on the bathroom counter. It was the only decadent thing she owned, and something I selfishly knew would hurt her to lose. I balanced the items in my right hand and began furiously cranking open the skylight window above me with my left.

“You don’t know what I want! You don’t know what I believe! Just shut up!” I cried with the bitterness of a confounded, angry heart.

Breathing heavy, almost panting, I crawled up on the bathroom counter, head peaking out from the skylight’s open window lid–the jagged edges of crosses, rosaries, and tokens of a broken religiousness dangling from under my elbows.

“It’s all bullshit! It doesn’t mean anything!”

And with that one final cry of indigence I tossed God, Jesus, Mary, and anything that had ever meant anything to me out the skylight window, listening to the sound of the crash as it hit the stone tiles of the backyard below me.

Many people say that the moment a suicide jumper releases both legs from the ledge there is an innate, almost survivalist, feeling of regret. Although I never told my mother, and spent years denying the sensation, the moment my faith hit the ground and shattered, I felt a whimper of regret.

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Margaret Puppish lost her mother at an early age along with a brother who had been her protector. Her sister, Bette, was a raving narcissist who told her at every chance she could, out of jealousy and insecurity, how ugly and worthless she was. With no older brother to come to her rescue, as she grew into womanhood, she believed the myth of her sister’s making, completely. Her feelings of unworthiness, belief in her own smallness, left her meek–but her meekness was also her sainthood.

She felt so unworthy that she leaned on God, and the only mother she had, Mary, to guide her through her life. She didn’t ask for greatness, wealth, or accolades, only companionship. The simple honesty of her soul brought her to a level of spirituality people spend lifetimes trying to cultivate. She prayed the rosary daily, and was deeply and madly in love with the spirit of Mary. Her unquestioning devotion was something she also brought into her marriage to a man named Rudolph, who everyone called “Moxie” who made her feel beautiful and wanted in a way she never completely believed she deserved.

On her wedding day she wore a white silk gown with lace at the neck and beaded buttons down the back, her veil trailing behind her as she walked down the aisle like a divine wind, holding her up. In her arms she carried a simple bouquet of calalilies, her favorite flower–a luxury for a foundry worker and his new wife.

Moxie worked hard labor at the nearby foundry, through WWII (during which he was rejected from service as 4F for bad ulcers), and through the births of two daughters, Margie and Patty. Margaret loved her daughters and her husband and attended church daily, in her continued devotion to her faith. She reveled in the sacredness of daily duties: motherhood, marriage, cooking, and the arts. Moxie was a craftsman and made creches, Margaret his counterpart in life and in crafts, was a delicate and intricate artist who painted the nativity sets that went in the creches.

The roots of their love didn’t bear fiscal abundance but was more than enough to form their daughters into gracious adults, and those adults into their own marriages, and those marriages into the birth and adoption of daughters and sons.

One night, while Margaret was thoughtfully in prayer, a bright light grew like a tiny speck of dust into a great silhouette, and from the brightness came a woman cloaked in white, like the silk of Margaret’s wedding dress, which hung in the closet to the left of her bed. The brightness was too vibrant to look at head-on and the figure appeared like a dream, vivid but out of focus. Before Margaret could see the woman clearly she faded out, into a speck and the speck into nothingness. In the darkness of her room, alone in prayer, Margaret shook in reverence and in fear.

“What is happening to me, what is wrong with me? Why is this woman coming to me?”

Margaret’s lack of self-worth, the very reason the vision came, was the same reason she couldn’t grasp why it would come to her. Her fear of the divinity rang out in her head, doubts blooming from her feelings of unworthiness.

She had many visions for many years, and kept silent of the experience to those around her.  Throughout her visions, although she may have questioned herself often, she was certain of who it was who came to her, but afraid to tell anyone. She was frightened of what it meant or what the figure was asking of her. She tearfully sat in worried prayer, questioning their intentions in her mind and heart.

The final vision was not completely a vision at all, it was a sensation of someone behind her, while she prayed. Later she told her youngest daughter, by then a woman in her 40s, about the final vision, a figure she could see, but not see–Jesus at her side. His Mother had come as emissary, preparing her for this final presence.

“What do you want?” She had asked, over and over in her mind.

The answer was simple, it was what she had always asked for, companionship.

During the final vision she begged for them not to return to her. “Please, I am not worthy of you. I cannot do whatever it is you want. I am afraid when you come. Please, I beg you, do not return.”

Talking with her daughter, afterwards, trembling from the experience, she asked her too, “What do they want from me?”

Her daughter relayed, knowing the sincerity of her mothers heart and the faithful devotion of her life, “I don’t think they want anything, mom, just to be there for you.”

Shortly after this final vision Margaret suffered a stroke–she was only 65. She would remain paralyzed on her entire left side for the remainder of her life. Her husband, Moxie, nicknamed for his boldness would become her left side, her right side, and never leave her, not even when his emphysema, from years of hard foundry work, made it impossible for him to be both husband and wife, homemaker and nurse. Where the image of Mary and Jesus left off in spirit, Moxie remained in their stead, doing the life’s work of being her companion and her caregiver, and later her roommate in the nursing home–where everyone knew them as the most romantic and loving couple they had ever seen.

Her life was love abundant, in God, in her husband, and in her family. Moxie once asked her, one night shortly before her death, “Please don’t go first. I can’t live here without you.”

It was the only promise to him she ever broke. But not really. I don’t think she did leave him at all.

I had an image of her, in my mind, one that I can never shake, on the day that he died, lying breathless with empysima in his hospital bed. It was 6 weeks after her death, to the hour and the minute, and his body stopped breathing. I can see an image, a silhoutte, cloaked in light and silk, with a calalily in her hand, reaching out with a promise that she made, to not leave him behind.

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My mother told me the story of my grandmother’s visions at fifteen. I think she suspected my flailing faith in an invisible God, my anger at church-goers hypocrisies, and the burnt embers of a brutal Evangelical summer camp experience, that felt more like an exorcism of faith than an exercise in adventure.

I didn’t have the reaction she expected. I hadn’t had much memory of my grandmother pre-stroke. I was the only one of my siblings to have known her before she lost the use of her limbs and before she was relegated to a life in a wheel chair but I didn’t remember much. Most of my images of my grandparents were formed with caregiving Grandpop and a gentle but absent grandma–delicate and but somehow vacant, as if part of her was never really there. I adored my Grandpop; Moxie was a hero of mine and always will be for his selflessness and capacity to endure anything. But my grandmother had always been a mystery to me, one that was only filled in a little by my mother’s sharing of her visions.

I was a teenager, hormonal and raging with identity issues, and the world, duh, revolved around me. My initial response, as someone probably too young to be given the wisdom of requited faith and lifelong spiritual devotion, was jealousy. Extreme and vitriolic jealousy. This woman who had been a mystery to me, someone who I couldn’t understand and found it hard to hold affection for, had experienced the most sublime gift of faith I could ever have imagined. My jealousy fed my existing rage of indignance about the hypocrites, the hate-mongers, and all the worst I had decided to see in my “faith of origin”–Catholicism (I didn’t even understand, yet, that there was a line drawn for others between Catholicism and the Evangelical Christians of my camp fiasco–that would be a later, mind-bending baffle).

I began seeking miracles in my life, proof from God that I mattered too. I thought, if my grandmother could have visions of eternal glory and beauty, a living presence and companionship of God, then why couldn’t I? I was good, I thought. I was devoted. I believed in God, so why didn’t he believe in me as much as he did her? My bitterness spread as the vacancy of God in my life increased, until there wasn’t even room left in my Christianity for faith–there was only space for resentment.

The resentment festered, as I sat in church on Sundays, received communion with conditions (no eating before church), and judged all the judgement I saw in everyone else. Then one day I decided I didn’t want to pretend anymore, and I was sick of waiting for signs of divinity, and parting clouds, and blinding light. I grabbed up every representation of faith and devotion I owned–the crosses and rosaries and prayer books and bibles–and tossed them out the window, with a bottle of Chanel for good measure.

It took me years to revisit those items, carefully gathered and stored by a mother who had learned devotion from Margaret, and who learned caregiving from Moxie. (She had to have, I was a terror of a teenager.)

It took me years more to understand the visions of my grandmother and the nature of true devotion to God. And it took me until my grandmother died, to begin to understand her life and her faith and the sainthood of her soul.

______________________________________________________________________

My grandmother had died the night before and my mom and aunt were rushing around, figuring logistics and making arrangements. In the frenetic aftermath of death there was no one to stay with my Grandpop, and so I offered to go to the nursing home and be present in his grief. I felt immense guilt over not spending more time with my grandmother before she died, and for not really wanting to–always uncomfortable in her presence, like every time I met her it was like meeting a stranger.

I walked into the small room of the New Providence Nursing home my Grandpop had sharing with my Grandma in the last few years of their life. Two twin beds sat a short distance apart, a curtain to separate the room, open, and the cherished things on their bedside and walls made it almost seem like a reproduction of the bedroom in Union they had shared for decades, except for the antiseptic smells.

“Hi Grandpop,” I said, tentatively, as he sat on the nearest bed, dressed in one of his everyday outfits of brown polyester slacks with a crease down the center and a buttoned blue collared shirt with a men’s tank underneath.

I knew he had already been told that my grandmother had passed so I knew it was a mournful duty I had taken on but one I could handle.

“Oh, hi, Teresa. Do you know where your grandmother is? She hasn’t come back yet from the hospital?”

I paused for a moment, realizing in the fading of his short term memory he had completely forgotten his wife had passed. I gulped, looking at the man I loved so much, and promising myself I wouldn’t cry, I would be strong for him. I sat down on the bed.

“Grandpop, grandma passed away last night. Do you remember?”

“Oh, yes. That is so sad,” he said, pausing, his eyes welling with something beyond sadness.

“I remember, she promised me I would go first. She promised. She shouldn’t have broken her promise.”

“I know grandpop,” I said, not sure how to fill the space. The room seeming drenched in his grief. I could barely breathe.

“Oh, have you seen this picture of her. She was so beautiful, wasn’t she?” A little smile crept on his face and he lifted up an 8×10 picture in a weathered golden frame, sitting next to him on the bed.

The image was my grandmother on her wedding day, draped in silk, with a cluster of calalilies in her hand, smiling in a way I couldn’t ever remember having seen in her lifetime.

“She was beautiful,” I replied, unable to say anything else.

“I remember the day I met her. I was driving with my friend and she and her sister, Bette, were on the side of the road. Their father’s car had broken down. So, my buddy started flirting with her sister, but I got to work on the car and she talked to me, she was so worried about her father’s car. She always worried. She was so beautiful, I couldn’t even believe it. I couldn’t believe it when she said she would marry me, either.”

“What a great story grandpop. I can tell you loved her so much.”

“Teresa?”

“What is it grandpop?”

“Where is your grandma? She was supposed to be back from the hospital by now?”

We spent the rest of the afternoon in a loop of reverie and grief, almost too excruciating for me to bear. His love for her, his devotion, how he could see her as amazing every time he told the story, and how his loss for her was crushing every time I told him she was gone, opened my heart to her in a way I had never been able to in her life. I saw her in the repetition of his memory, in his hands grasping at her memory in the photo, and in her smile I looked at for an entire afternoon–distilled joy, silk and lilies. In his mourning, in a softly lit, antiseptic room, I began to understand real devotion, and the pettiness of my own soul.

In his love for her and her love for him I could begin to see the divinity in earthly devotion, and began to glimpse at her sainthood which I had never seen while she was alive.

Later that day my aunt and mother came and more family entered the room, to sit with my grandfather. I was grateful and exhausted. My mom asked me to do one final errand with her, get the flowers for her casket. I went and with an urgency my mother questioned, insisted that the flowers be lilies, in honor of the memory Grandpop had imprinted in my mind, and in reverence of a woman I had never really known.

That night I collapsed in my room, filled with grief not as much for her death, but for my selfishness and pettiness in her life. I had always carried the grudge of her divine gifts, even seeing her trapped in her metal cage of braces and wheelchair, I had spent a decade locked in jealousy of her. I felt guilty I had not known her enough, had not tried to enough, and that it was too late to start. I was aching with the thought that I would only know her best through the eyes of the man who loved her most.

I passed out somewhere between bursts of tears and penitent prayers for her presence, for her guidance, for something to tell me she was ok, and I was ok, and we were ok. It wasn’t the prayer for magic of jealous adolescence, but it was a prayer of confession from a heart beginning to open to real love.

I woke up in a dream. It was a dream, but it was more wakeful than a fantasy. I was in a room I call now the “visiting room” which was like a large ballroom-sized picnic area, full of tables, chairs and people meeting one another. There was the noise of movement and color all around, and through the crowd I saw my grandmother, first at a distance and then right in front of me, so close our knees were almost touching. I sat down in a chair and we talked, without talking. I told her about everything in my life and her replies and caring filled me with a feeling of her authenticity I had never seen before. Her mouth never opened but the words were spoken in my head, and into my heart. I replied out loud. She sat in her wheel chair, but she didn’t need it. Somehow I knew that, and I knew she sat there only because it was familiar to me. I loved her so much and I knew that she loved me. It was the most beautiful day we’d ever spent together–like the beginning and ending of a great story of friendship in one timeless moment.

I have spent my life having nightmares, I am pretty neurotic and it acts itself out in my sleep. That and pure faith are the reasons I know that day with my grandmother was not made of my mind, and was not a dream at all.

Knowing her now is such a joy to me. Her visit gave me assurance that she had not left Moxie behind, and that six weeks later, in a hospital room, at the same hour and the same minute of her death, when emphysema and heartbreak took his last breath, that she was waiting for him–beautiful and smiling, cloaked in light and silk, with her arm stretched out to guide him into eternity.

I never really met my grandmother in life, but in death she has become a very sacred saint, a dear friend, and very much a mother. She answered the prayer I had always asked for. She was my vision, but only when I was finally ready, when I didn’t ask for greatness or earthly wealth or accolades, but only companionship.

Thank you to Margaret whose maternal guidance and the view of her life in mine, in retrospect, taught me about patience, humility, and a devotion to God I could only hope to touch upon in 100 lifetimes. 

Do you have someone who might be your own personal “patron saint” mother figure? Is there someone you find it difficult or confusing to love? Has there been someone whose grace in your life was only visible after they were gone? 

image c/o wikipedia page on Luang Prabang, Laos

PART 1

It was summertime in Laos when I arrived in Luang Prabang, not the capital city but the most mystical one in the country–it has more temples and monasteries than anywhere in the whole nation. The air was so saturated in humidity it made you pray for the rain which came like clockwork every hour. The city had been colonized by the French and so walking down the main street was like being in a tiny French town with colonial doors, windows, and arches bringing something familiar to me into a very unfamiliar place. Luang Prabang means “Royal Buddha Image” and for its distinct beauty and reverence it was named a World Heritage site.

Every morning at dawn the hundreds of monks who inhabit the city walk down the main streets, draped in saffron and silence, collecting alms as has been the tradition for years. Everywhere I went, the town was permeated by the orange robes–it seemed this was not a place for the casual monastic, like Chiang Mai had been, but only the truly serious spiritual devotees.

I found a little guesthouse up the hill from the Mekong river, by way of a couple of backpackers from England and Scotland. We had been on the same flight together and, since I had no plan for where to stay or what to do after I exited the plane, I inserted my way into the conversation between these newly made plane-buddies, like seemed to be my new custom in solo backpacker travel; they asked me to join them in finding a hostel outlined on the British girl’s “Lonely Planet” guide. So, we all jumped in a tuk-tuk (open air taxi) and the driver dropped us at the base of a steep but short cobblestone walkway beginning next to the Mekong.

Up the slippery stones, dressed in western clothes which were still not breathable enough for Laotian heat, we huffed our way to the top where the most undistinguishable guesthouse sat, nestled between private homes. A cross-eyed woman sat out front, staring into her purse looking for something, and then like Mary Poppins magic bag, she pulled out a bunch of bananas with great satisfaction.

“Sabaai dii!” she exclaimed, welcoming us with a “hello” in Laotian. “You would like room? Yes? Mama has wonderful rooms, come look!” and without more than a nod from us she ushered us into a narrow entry way with a guest book and a wall of what looked like  mug shots of endless faces.

“Mama asks for pictures from all mama’s guests–and then they go on wall for Mama forever!”

There was something authentic in her beautiful smiled, perched below crooked eyes; you could not tell where she was looking but she radiated with something rarely seen in a Westerner.

“Come see! Mama and Papa have made new rooms upstairs–they are beautiful!” She led us up a narrow pine staircase which may or may not have been to code but felt sturdy enough to step on. Up the stairs was another dark hallway lined with narrow doors, made of the same unfinished wood.

“Look! Rooms have fan and bed, how big! Mama and Papa worked very hard.”

Each room was bare wood and light of the midday sun snuck through the cracks between the planks that made up the walls, and bounced playfully around the darkness. A large fan sat above and to the left of each room’s doorway, pumping hot air into and around the room. Each bed was a simple double mattress, naked, with two single sheets carefully folded at the foot, waiting to be stretched onto the bed’s bare skin. A mosquito net, the most necessary amenity in any rentable space yawned over ever corner of the bed and fluttered in the warm air of the fan.

“Dorm room downstairs is full–many Germans. Those rooms less money but these 23 Kip, $3.”

“Khop Jai,” I said, a “thank you” and nodded “yes”, I would have one of these expensive three dollar rooms.

She bounced with joy and began searching through her bag, which never left her arm, pulling out another banana and offering it to us.

Later that night, sitting and telling travel stories with my new British and Scottish friends over a glass of cold red wine in a lounge off the main street (cold anything was a delicacy in a place like Laos, where cold was a commodity to come by), my Brit friend asked, “So, when do you think we are going to  meet Mama, the woman kept talking about her?”

The Scottish girl and I looked at each other and laughed, “That was Mama,” I said and she began to giggle too.

Mama of Laos, with her Mary Poppins bag, her crooked eyes and not so crooked smile, the woman who loved her travelers as much as her guesthouse and Papa and her two daughters (who we would meet later in the week), and her bananas–she was something special in this world, I could see that already.

PART 2

I got a horrible sinus infection over the course of the week that followed my entering the city of LP, and the pharmacist in town did not have non-penicillin antibiotics. I considered taking it, because the delirium had reached a peak and the heat only added to my brain fuzz, but then I remembered my last encounter with Mr. Fleming’s magical elixir and the subsequent hives and throat closing.

As sick as I was I felt a welling sadness over leaving Laos, and Mama, and the tiny city of monks and art galleries along the Mekong. I had met many other travelers over the week, equally bewitched by the magic of the city, who had decided to stay and open a restaurant or a shop. I did know that medically I had to get some medicine although Mama was nearly medicine enough. She doted over me every morning, checking my sweaty forehead, shaking her head and furrowing her brow and then digging into her bag of wonders, pulling out a cough drop one day and methylated adhesive strips another.

Mama’s daughter laughed at me from behind Mama the morning she pulled the strips out and, before I headed to town for my solo breakfast, she urgently pressed four strips all over my face. I walked past the small homes lining the street from Mama’s house, like a kid sent off to school in a wild hat knitted by their mother, as all the neighbors stared, with some fear, at the strange woman covered in patches. Once around the corner, making my way to the main street I pulled off the strips, which in the humidity already brimming at dawn, left traces of white stickiness all over my face. I placed the strips in my bag, sure they had cost Mama more than she could afford to give me–and dedicated to use them later that night.

On the day I was leaving for Kao Samui and some necessary medical remedies, Mama got up before dawn, walking past the monks praying for alms in the street, and through to one of the larger temples on the edge of the city. She sat in prayer for a time, her devotedness to Buddha stronger than all the other loves in her life. Knocking on my door, as I was packing my bag, she came and sat on my bed, and motioned for me to do the same.

I sat beside her as the fan whirred frantically overhead, pulling the hair on both our heads into a dance with the air. She took my hand in hers and opened it up, then she opened her had to reveal a tiny black and white bracelet made of beads and string. It had skulls carved on every bead, alternating between black heads and white.

“Mama went to temple today. She pray for you. She ask monk to bless this bracelet and it will protect you when you are not with Mama anymore.”

She placed the bracelet in my hand and closed my palm. Then she closed her palm over mine. We sat for a moment in total silence as the light snuck in through the cracks in the wall and the fan created its own rhythm like a drum in the background. My throat tightened and I held back tears, she looked at me and her eyes seemed to be looking right at me and through me, I couldn’t even tell they were crossed anymore.

Outside, when my tuk-tuk arrived, I waved goodbye to Mama and Papa and their daughters. Mama held up my passport photo, shining with joy as she had her piece of me for her wall of international travelers–all of us blessed to be children for a time in Mama’s house.

Mama gave me a gift that last day in Laos, in only what I can call a healing ritual of companionship and silence. As I sat in the plane, on the tarmac in the strip of an airfield outside Luang Prabang, I thought of what she had given me–still to fresh to see it fully but knowing it was profound–and I began to cry.

Mama had reinstate a piece of my soul in a short week’s time, and I would find, years later, she had also pass along to me the spiritual inheritance of a little piece of hers, as well.

Khawp Jai Mama, which in Laotian means “Thank you.”

Have you found mothering and care-taking across the invisible lines of faith lineage, race, culture? Have you found a maternal figure in a place far from home? Have you found the caregiving  blessings of God/Christ in another? 

Mama Weidi–I remember her for so many reasons. Everyone know’s the expression “giving someone the shirt off their back”. Mama Weidi, 85 years old, living in a Fema trailer, quite literally in her “van down by the [Mississippi] river” (Chris Farley reference), and she welcomed us into her studio apartment on wheels with a sincerity that would make most people’s egos blush and cower in the corner from shame. Within three minutes in “Mama’s house” I received a hot chocolate in my hand and an inescapable ninja-quick hug.

In an attempt at repairing my post-adolescent relationship with my own mother, while I waited to hear back from NYU as to whether my little Bachelors in English would get me into their Masters in Clinical Social Work program it seemed appropriate on a variety levels to head down to the tiny town of Pearlington on a “mission trip” for Thanksgiving. I was still in my tepid reintegration process to the religion called “Christianity”, still cringing when I said the label out loud, and still not sure about what I believed, completely. On top of that, the words “mission trip” evoked something akin to a cross between colonization and brainwashing, with an ethnocentric twist, that sat tart in my throat, like lemon juice squeezed on an open wound. And Christianity, for me, was still a very open wound. But I figured if anywhere was safe to do this kind of work it was the Deep South, which I was pretty sure had been colonized by Christianity way before I got there.

There were two van-loads of us on this trip, and one broke down on the way. There were the college teens who were living above the rectory of a nearby church as some kind of early experiment of what would probably have later been identified as a kind of new monasticism (maybe) and with whom I had nothing in common–mostly determined from me by the fact that they all had personal Bibles, which made the journey with them. Then there was the couple of middle-agers, Red Cross Certified and looking to aid someone somewhere, and my mother and her social worker friend.

Her friend explained to me on the car ride that she was a “real” social worker and if I went to NYU for clinical social work it didn’t really count, cause real social workers didn’t do therapy. This argument seemed akin to the ongoing Christianity feud (of which only recently I had been made aware) over what was the “real” kind of Christian–Catholics or everyone else. I hate those debates–so I nodded in agreement and she seemed to be satisfied with my compliance. Mixing politics or religion in a social environment is never advised, but particularly foolish on a 20+hour drive.

The leader of our band of misfits was a priest, the first one in my life to that date who shaped into seeming like a real human rather than a figurehead at the altar or a sin-arbiter in the confessional. He was young, dressed like clergy up-top but jeans on the bottom, and loved U2 of which he would play a lot around the camp fire throughout the week. He was the reason we were in Pearlington–Mama Weidi was his mother. There is nothing more humanizing for anyone, but especially a priest, than meeting his “mama”. She cooed over him with extra special care and, not that he had one, but I could envision her spit-fixing his cow-licked hair as a child.

Mama’s house looked like it had been swallowed by a whale and, like Jonah, spit back out. It was a soggy skeleton of a structure, with everything in it covered with about eight layers of muck too filthy to ever wash clean. It was so humbling and such a lesson in personal futility to show up there in our two van-fulls of people, and try to remedy any part of a drowned out town with less than a dozen useable people, almost no resources, and not anywhere near enough time to make a dent.

I realized quickly that this “mission trip” had less to do with what I could give the town and was more about what the town would teach me, and particularly what Mama Weidi showed me, about love, faith, and unconditional kindness, that not even a great flood could tear asunder.

Every day and night Mama made sure we had enough to eat and enough blankets to keep us warm. What she gave us–me–didn’t fit into the confines of “southern hospitality”, although there was never a shortage on sweet tea. Her care was from a deep-down soul place. She radiated with and in it. There are few people I have encountered in my life who radiated with divinity in the way that she did and with such a humble simplicity. Even her priestly son, beloved to her, could not out shine her–but it did explain his choice of calling. How could you come from such intrinsic divinity and not want to serve something divine?

While we spent our days shoveling out, helplessly, the muck under the muck that used to be the homes which lined the dirt road block on her side of town she made visits to people in other neighborhoods–making sure everyone had what they needed. The town was segregated on top of segregated (racially and denominationally) and the lines were not crossed often if ever–except for by Mama.

The law left Pearlington with the flood when their sheriff packed up before the storm and didn’t return. The Catholic church where Mama had gone for a lifetime was completely emptied by the raging storm. It stood as a cement block shell, more like a large prison yard than a sacred space. Mama had become like the surrogate spiritual cheerleader for her town. She would not abandon the skeletons of homes past or stop praying for the return of days spent on wrap around porches in rocking chairs and Sunday feasts at her neighbor’s house with everyone in walking distance (so, half the town). That said, she made it clear in the way she lived, so genuinely, that she could also be content to live out her days in the FEMA trailer, if that was God’s plan.

Mama was the first Charismatic Catholic I had ever met, and, till then, the first Charismatic Christian. When we attended church with her on the morning of Thansgiving, in the cement hall that reverberated with every sound, and I saw her fall to her knees I thought there might have been some kind of medical emergency thinking, “Oh, my God, this woman is having a heart attack.” Then, before I could respond, I heard a “Praise Jesus,” bouncing on her lips and ricocheting off all the walls like a frenetic ping-pong ball. Then I knew the spasmic collapse had to be something intentional and  I should not run over, throw her on the ground, and begin chest compressions, but it wasn’t until later that night that someone would explain what it meant. Coming from a life (prior to absenting my faith for a period of time) of Christian understanding learned through the lens of Catholicism, I had no idea the many permutations and variant denominations in the tradition.

Still, to present, she is still the only Charismatic Catholic I have met.

While Mama was not my mother and I knew her only for a short week in the dire backdrop of Post-Katrina Mississippi, she is someone I think of when I consider the many unconventional experiences of mothering which have graced my life. She was a woman beloved across all defining societal lines, who could smile and make hot chocolate next to the drenched remains of a the house which had been her home for a lifetime. She embodied a faith I  (at that moment in time) had still not believed could exist–one untainted by the dark divisions and derision of baser humanity. She represented a  faith-full-ness which was illuminated by her simple way  (similar to Therese of Liseux) and a divinity found in the ordinary, which could persist through extraordinary circumstances.

She taught me about love for strangers, and she embodied an inherent, resilient, courage born out of faith. She made me believe that Christianity could be so many  things and so much more than the pettiness I had experienced in my spiritual past–both in myself and others. She reinforced my hope that a soul could surmount trauma, however devastating, by falling to their knees and finding gratitude in the cement foundation of new beginnings. She taught me how much a mother could love their child, and how a priest was someone’s son and could be human, just like me.

Mama reminded me that what is dead can rise again–whether it is a town or a person’s faith.

Thank you Mama for the lessons.

Who taught you something about faith, devotion or love? Have there been “unlikely mothers” in your life at points where you needed a dose of that maternal compassion? 

Mother Teresa of Calcutta image c/o Time Magazine and the article “Mother Teresa’s Crisis of Faith” by David Van Biema

“If I ever become a Saint — I will surely be one of ‘darkness.’ I will continually be absent from Heaven — to [light] the light of those in darkness on earth,” she wrote in 1962. Theologically, this is a bit odd since most orthodox Christianity defines heaven as God’s eternal presence and doesn’t really provide for regular no-shows at the heavenly feast. But it is, Kolodiejchuk suggests, her most moving statement, since the sacrifice involved is infinite. “When she wrote, ‘I am willing to suffer … for all eternity, if this [is] possible,’” he says, “I said, Wow.”

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1655720,00.html#ixzz1tqJxAyv2

After writing my post last week “Life in Utero” about the many manifestations of motherhood (and in preparation for Mother’s Day on May 13th) I wanted to elaborate on the many permutations of motherhood that exist–by way of describing a few ways this role, title, and definition of motherhood, can be broadened to the definition as follows (from the previous post):” Mothering, to me, is the ultimate grace and expression of God in the world; it is expressed as unconditional love and compassion“.

The above quote is from an article that epitomizes one of the greatest mothers in the last decade of civilization who carried the title of Mother graciously and gratefully, and whose struggles with darkness, illuminated after her death, were some of the greatest gifts she shared, unknowingly, with the world. Her quote above, of carrying the darkness even after death, for those who struggled her struggle of  and with and  in and out of faith (so, pretty much all of us) is an eternal cross of devotion and the ultimate expression of compassion and unconditional love. Mother Teresa embodies non-tradition motherhood. And, in terms of the early Christian Church, we can say she also represents the first symbol of motherhood, Mary who, although she gave birth, everything else about her life of mothering was divergent from traditional in a multitude of ways.

In this new realm of deciphering motherhood we can strip away all the preconceptions and consider mothering as caregiving, life-giving, love-giving in some way.

This is not an essay about the traditional “band-aids and cough medicine” mom of daily life– which I was generously blessed with–but rather the unexpected and unlikely places and persons who can and have embodied this wider net of love that is not based necessarily on gender or on giving birth or on lifelong caregiving, but just on the willingness (for a minute, an hour, or any length of time) to love someone unconditionally with genuine compassion.

Over the course of 5 Days & 5 Posts I will share five very different mothers who were non-traditional in appearance and special to me in continually unraveling ways. I was going to write one post with all the stories but my inability for brevity and the enjoyment of lingering over each person was so great that I have decided to split them up into single day “bites” of mothering.

UNLIKELY MOTHERS, Day 1

Mother (and Saint) Teresa of Avila: A Spiritual Mother

I did not know her very well for most of my life but she has come to be one of the most influential parts of my personal lineage of faith. I spent a long time fraying the rope that tied us together through time and beginning in a name, but when I embraced her as a literary figure, a contemplative teacher, and as the root of my family tree it seemed that she appeared everywhere–in a book I found when I needed it, or a line of text that explained how I was feeling, or in the people she has led me towards and the moments she has drawn me back, to reflect.

I was named after Teresa of Avila by the Nuns of the Grey Order who ran the orphanage in Bogota, Colombia where I was brought by my birth mother two months after my birth. Normally incoming babies were named in the usual orphanage Dickensian fashion by running through the letters of the alphabet (which is how my adopted sister would later get stuck with “yolanda” which she didn’t like very much). In my case, Catholics as they were, they made an exception due to my birth date–October 15th, 1979.

My adoptive parents were, at that time–unknown to me and I to them–praying in the pews of their  New Jersey suburbia’s local Catholic Church–St Teresa of Avila. They had a few names on their list, for when they got the call that there would be a baby for them, but when they discovered what the nuns had named me and why, it seemed too serendipitous to change.

I spent much of my childhood in CCD classes trying to shuffle out of the image of saintliness, only knowing sainthood best as the reason people made fun of me with calls of  ”Hey, Saint Teresa,” or “oh, you are so good, Mother Teresa.” In retrospect, the taunt of decency wasn’t much of a taunt at all, except to a shy-ish, bookish, pre-pubescent girl with a tendency towards crimson cheeks.

It wasn’t until I was in my Women Studies coursework in undergrad (after a three-year way-lay in Colorado just working and biding time post-trauma, enmeshed in PTSD, and with a bad radar for bad relationships) when I came across Teresa in any kind of respectable way. A wacky professor, with a penchant for delusions of the psychic persuasion, told me she could feel Teresa’s spirit around me (which in retrospect wasn’t all that cooky) and gave me the name of a book that would change my spiritual perception: “The Interior Castle”.

Through “The Interior Castle” I would explore the beginnings of my contemplative path and come to know Teresa in a way that felt friendly and reverent. It would be another 4-5 years before I found kinship for her in a sincere way and a couple of years after that until I would finally pick up her autobiography “Vida” in a time of deep physical pain and emotional stress and realize that she had been a Mother I had always had, the only genealogy I would be able to hold on to, and that flecks of her brightness and passion and fuerte (fiery nature) brewed in my heart, mind, and soul (in microscopic ways that only I could see).

Teresa was a soul-ful mother to me in so many ways and, in reviewing landmarks in my life, she was there in imperceptibly light wafts that I could only see in the rearview mirror view.

It is love alone that gives worth to all things. ~Teresa of Avila

 

Stay tuned for the next installments!

…Unlikely Mothers, Day 2:  Mama Weidi in Post-Katrina Mississippi, A Caretaking Mother

…Unlikely Mothers, Day 3: Mama in Luang Prabang, An Interfaith Mother Experience

…Unlikely Mothers, Day 4: Alicia In the Mirror, A Visceral & Visual Mother

…Unlikely Mothers, Day 5: Margaret the Good, A Patron Saint Mother

What mothers have you found in our life? Who were the  ”obvious” mother figures? Who were the surprising mothers? If you think of motherhood as a broader definition (one inclusive of unconditional love, giving, and kindness) do you find mothers in your life who you didn’t see as mothers before? Who has shown you kindness that you would like to thank this Mother’s Day–both traditional and untraditional mothers?

Next week, at the conclusion of the Mothers Series, I will share my experience with my “band-aids and cough medicine” mom in my  final post leading up to Mother’s Day titled “Needlepoint Mary: A Mother’s Day Thank You”.