My Catholic Great-Grandmother's Sacrifice

This past June the 8th, my 8-year-old daughter was baptized at Sacred Heart Catholic Church. My grandparents, who are Methodist, were present for the occasion. I knew from my mother that my grandma had been "sprinkled" as a baby, so I had a vague notion that she had been Catholic. But some Protestant denominations also baptize infants, and I never really knew the story. When I was growing up my family, including my grandparents, belonged to the Church of Christ. This was the church of my grandpa's youth. My grandparents left that church after long time membership and joined the First Methodist, which was the church that my grandma had belonged to in her youth. But it turns out there's more to this history.

Either before or after my daughter's baptism I had the opportunity to share my Rosary miracle with my grandma (see June 1 post). This brought back a flood of memory for her. She told me that she too had been baptized at the Sacred Heart Catholic Church. Her mother was a Catholic Frenchwoman, and she took my grandma and her older sister to church there when they were very young. My grandma's father, however, was Protestant, and he went to the United Brethern Church (from my understanding, this eventually become a United Methodist Church). So the family was divided by religious denomination and did not attend church together. My grandma told me that when she was only 3 or 4, they came home from church one Sunday, and there was a proliferation of pink roses in full bloom in her yard. She is 84 years old, and she still has this vivid image of the roses in her mind after 80 years. She can still see them perfectly. Why this particular memory stands out, she says she does not know...

In my mind, I am screaming, "Mary!"  Grandma associates the roses with her young childhood in the Catholic Church. And there is no more predominant symbol of Mary than the rose. Rosary literally means garland of roses. My grandma did not attend the Catholic Church past the age of 4. For the sake of family unity, my great-grandmother began attending church with her husband so that they could all worship together. But, my grandma told me, her mother never, ever stopped being Catholic. She never transferred membership to my great-grandfather's church. I believe strongly that Mary knew that my grandma, and her mother and sister, would be leaving the Catholic Church, and the gorgeous pink rose blossoms were Mary's way of letting them know that she would always be with them. She would always be their Mother.  Subconsciously my grandma associated my Rosary miracle with her own miracle of roses.

I was only 5 when my great-grandmother died. I have memories of her, and I remember crying when my mom told me that she had passed away. I wish I would have known my Catholic great-grandmother who sacrificed so much for the peace and unity of her family. How did she live without the Holy Sacrament, the Eucharist? How did she live without Mary as part of Christian worship? Did she still pray her Rosary? How her heart must have ached. How brave she must have been, how full of faith.

But I am comforted by this thought:  My great-grandma Ruth is a saint in heaven. I can talk to her whenever I want. And how happy she must have been on the day of my daughter's baptism, to see from the celestial view her great-great-grandaughter coming into the Church that she had so loved in her lifetime, the Church she left but never abandoned. And of course she will also be thrilled to see me enter the Church at the Easter vigil next year! In my small way, I can make reparation for her sacrifice.  I can give something precious back to her, and I am humbled to be able to honor her memory in this way.

Marian Protestantism?

November 6, 2011

It is evident that I must continue to write about the Virgin Mary. As personal as this spiritual journey truly is, it can't stay locked in my head or hidden in my heart; perhaps because I intuit that I am not the only one facing these questions. And it is conceivable that I may have a unique perspective as a person brought up Protestant, as a spiritual seeker, and not least as a woman. While it makes me vulnerable to post for the whole world to read, I have never been one to shy from controversy. I may very well have something entirely new to contribute to the ecumenical dialogue.

I went to St. Mary's Catholic Church in Edgerton last night for mass for the first time. Beezy went with me, and when we entered the sanctuary a little early, there were already "Hail Mary" prayers being recited. The Rosary is of particular interest to me. I have for some time craved a spiritual practice that involves a metaphysical element, a meditative path to the deeper mysteries of the Christian faith. The church I grew up in, and was baptized in, was in no way mystical. My personal experience, however, was mystical indeed. At the age of 8, while sitting in Sunday school in the basement of the Church of Christ, God spoke to me quite clearly and instructed me to be baptized.

Right after Sunday school I told my mom of my experience. Surprisingly to me, she took me seriously. I thought that because I was a kid she would not. She asked if we had learned about baptism in Sunday school, which we had not, and I told her again that God just told me to get baptized. She said we would talk to the minister after church about it, and we did. I was ready to be baptized immediately, but because of my age I had to undergo religious instruction via visits by the minister to give me a slide show presentation with corresponding workbooks to be completed. To me it was all very simple. God told me to get baptized, and I wanted my sins to be forgiven. The condescension of the slides and workbooks was annoying.

At last the day of my baptism arrived, with the slight insult of my uncle, who was 13, getting to go first. After all, it was my idea (or rather, God had personally directed me), and he was copying me (as it seemed in my young mind)! What I remember is affirming my belief that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the living God, and He is my savior. I wore a white robe, which I remember being very heavy after I was dunked and it became thoroughly saturated. My spiritual experience was the opposite. I felt completely light, pure, and free from sin. I vowed never to be mean to my little brother again!

So having my first experience as a mystic at the age of only 8, I suppose I was destined to continue a long, long search for the Divine. Mary, as I have written before, was of no great significance in my religious upbringing. Now I am finding that there is a vast history of the Christian church of which I have been wholly ignorant. From the time of the earliest Christian communities, the people were devoted to Mary and understood her role in the new religion as a full spiritual presence, in a cosmological as well as a human sense. This was all lost in the Protestant tradition, and as I have read in the book Missing Mary, much of the mystical beauty surrounding devotions to the Mother of God was also lost to the Catholic Church after Vatican II in the early 1960s. Yet apparitions of Mary appearing to people on earth right into modern times is certainly significant and should not be ignored.

My question today then, is can a Protestant be devoted to the Virgin Mary, or must one convert to Catholicism to do so? With a quick internet search, I could see that there is a resurgence of ecumenical dialogue on the subject of Mary, and the idea that she may very well serve as the bridge between the various branches of Christian faith, that is so desperately needed. In fact, Mary seems to be honored more in the religion of Islam than she is in the Protestant tradition!

So here I find myself often visiting the Rosary Garden, and with a small statue of Mary on my fireplace mantle, studying how to pray the Rosary, and waiting for vintage rosary beads to arrive in the mail. Unfortunately, although I want my daughter to be raised with a much fuller expression of the sacred feminine as part of her religious experience than I ever knew, the Catholic churches in this area have no Sunday school or children's church experiences. So to a 7 year old child it is a boring service! Can a family belong to two churches? On the Sundays in which the Presbyterian church that we have attended does not have children's church, perhaps we could go to the Catholic church instead. And perhaps I could go to mass by myself some of the other weeks.

I don't doubt that some readers will think me confused. But a renewal and deepening of my faith, and a deeper dimension to the mysteries of the life of Christ are being opened, and I believe that there are many, many possible paths. This is mine, and I am sharing the journey.