HerKind.com

Growing up Italian and Catholic there was never a doubt that church-going would be a regular part of my life. My mother was devout, me and my sisters were in the choir, my brother did his stint as an alter boy. My oldest sister and her husband’s entire courtship (age 13 on) happened in and around St. Francis of Assisi church in Toronto. My father drove us to church every Sunday and waited in the car for the duration. He had a private spirituality, I guess.

As a terribly fidgety child, easily bored, my mother used to give me her rosary to play with. My sister Frances and I (always partners in childhood crimes) would sit on the kneelers and invent games using the beaded circle with the dangling string. Even though we watched our grandmother pray with her rosary every night in her downstairs apartment in our house, it never occurred to us that the beads all meant something different and that praying with the rosary was an intensified form of devotional prayer. On the church pews while the monotone of the mass droned on, Frances and I were oblivious to the stares of disdain from strangers directed toward my mother and us. We played and giggled and fought over who got to hold the rosary.

Years later, after turning away from Catholicism, and completely out of practice about the mechanics of the mass, I began going to church as a way of remembering and feeling close to my mother after her death. Often, at lunch hour, I would attend the mass at St. Patrick’s church, close to my work place, listen to the familiar poetry of the mass, and cry. Afterwards, I’d stay to listen to the old Filipino ladies pray the Rosary in barely audible tones in a foreign language. Kneeling at the pew, I’d look around at the stain glass windows, the elaborate depictions of Jesus at various stages of torture on the cross and then rest my eyes on the women, bowed in deep prayer to Mother Mary and the Holy Trinity.

I wonder about faith, what it really is, how to have it and keep it in my life. I think about the overriding quality my mother’s life encompassed, which was grace. And somehow in my mind, I attach it to her devotion first to God and the church and then to everything she loved and believed in.

When I moved halfway across the country my sister sent my grandmother’s glow in the dark rosary, handed down. I keep it in a box by my bed and take it out to look at it sometimes. I still don’t know how to pray it. But holding it gives me comfort and reminds me that grace, above all else, is one of the truest qualities to possess, and probably the easiest to attain -- once you understand its effect on your life.

September 2004