My Mother, My Church

 

By FR. KEVIN M. CUSICK

As my mother declines through the ravages of vascular dementia, my family has joined forces to organize around the clock presence with her in the hospital. She was admitted after stroke symptoms resulting from a brain bleed at the nursing home prompted a call for the ambulance. We are faced with very difficult decisions to make as we ensure her care is in keeping with our Catholic moral principles.

We have watched and surrounded her for some years now after the initial diagnosis following her experiences of memory loss. She has been blessed with many visits from loving and faithful friends in addition to family in the Catholic nursing home to which she was admitted after home care became inadequate. My father has accompanied her with his love and presence in faithfulness to his marriage vows made almost 65 years ago.

Perhaps the greatest blessing resulting from the nursing home care has been the restored sense of affection between my parents, made possible only when my father was freed from the caretaker role.

How terrifying and beautiful is the gift of love received from its true source in God. We both desire to possess Him thus but also find ourselves drawing back at times in fear of its great demands which threaten to overwhelm us. We are indeed little before God. Our love is indeed poor in comparison with His. It is precisely through love no matter how imperfect that we share in His goodness and beauty.

My strong, beautiful mother has always been a paragon of important spiritual realities in my life. My ideas about the beauty and goodness of Our Blessed Mother were formed early in life through the experience of my mother’s love and attention. My reverence and desire to fight for the right to life of the unborn was inspired by her unflagging dedication to the March for Life every year in which we participated, no matter the weather. She led parish and other efforts gathering signatures and organizing participants and buses for the March.

Finally came the stage when she no longer had the physical strength for the winter walk in D. C. and her children carried on in her absence. She has lived to see the fruit of her labors after these many years of marching and fighting as the injustice of Roe v. Wade is overturned. But sadly she might not be able to understand the full import of the news.

My ideas also of the Church, our Mother, with her beauty, goodness, and nurturing power were also inspired by the nurturing care of my mother. Her daily, faithful love and perseverance in supporting the life, health, and spiritual good of her children was the first sign and symbol of God’s life- giving and salvation made possible through the holy Church, our spiritual mother.

Too, the church buildings themselves speak always of the indescribable through mere whispers: symbolizing in earthly form the infinite spiritual power and glory of God. Pointing upward and speaking through the ringing bell within, the steeple of my parish at home in Maryland, though built of earthly stones, was among the most powerful symbols of the Spirit poured out by God and impelling us back toward Him throughout our lives.

The bell accompanied us as we walked through mornings chill and warm, from school or on Sundays, to answer once again the call of the Lord to come to Him.

College in New York introduced grander symbols of the Church. Fordham’s stone buildings, St. Patrick’s Cathedral, and the monumental edifices to the Church’s care in hospitals like Misericordia, a nightlight soaring skyward above the evening traffic, spoke of the care of the whole person as part of the mission of saving the soul.

Youthful notions, lacking the refinement gained through both uplifting and disappointing experience, can tend more to the romantic. The chapel of the Dunwoodie seminary with its gold apse mural and spired high altar beckoned further discernment of the vocation to priesthood through the transition from college to the Army.

As we have witnessed our mother age and suffer the ravages of dementia, my family has learned more deeply the invaluable lesson of love. The pure gold of faith burned into a radiant luster through the furnace of suffering, together with our poor human love, must be refined by the seeming cruel turns the body and mind sometimes make as they wend their inexorable way toward death.

Our lives in the Church our Mother are marked by disappointment as we see unfaithful men of office attack and drag her down into the gutter with their scandals. Our faith is threatened as her ageless beauty is marred by their heresy and waywardness. This while we, too, confess our own sins and return to the Church each time we have rejected her loving embrace and nurturing care. Our souls are bereft of life without her.

My experience of the priesthood is one of espousal to the Church and her members, putting into practice persevering love like that of a good mother for her children. Answering the calls for help and pleas for God’s mercy and life on the part of His little ones, the souls of the baptized, mirrors God’s faithfulness. Presence in the confessional shows the reconciling love of the Father in giving the Son to sinful humanity.

As my earthly mother ages, love endures. The body may wither and fail, yet the spiritual power of love remains and becomes more precious still. Staying overnight with her in the hospital, or standing over her bed as she sleeps, reverses roles. Once she stood over me in love and care while I slept. Now I do the same for her. The human person seems to return in some ways to childhood as with age and disease dependence on the younger and stronger deepens. This vulnerability calls us to figure forth our own faith as we return the love we have learned from our parents in the gift of care for them.

My mother will be born one day soon to the life with God for which she longed and prayed for more than eighty years. As we accompany her through the days remaining to her in this teary vale, we never flag in our hope and confidence in the next life which only the Lord in His mercy and goodness can confer. She was named for Mary, Our Blessed Mother, as she reminded me just days ago in the hospital. We prayed together the holy rosary and she joined me, intoning the blessed words of the Paters and Aves. Her faith remains strong though so much has already been taken of mind and body.

Our love will be further refined as we, through our faithful presence, undergo the test of witnessing her suffering. The Church is with us and we are the Church: the Lord’s Mystical Body as we accompany her, grace for grace. We will not let our gaze shrink from the awful beauty of her soul bursting forth from the confining dust of flesh on her final day. This is the cost of love which ever seeks its true life, never- ending in glory with God.

(NB Since writing the column my mother has returned to the nursing home where she is able to take some nourishment. Laus Deo.)

(This column was published in the August 25th edition of The Wanderer Catholic Newspaper http://thewandererpress.com)