Musing with my Mother
I asked my mom about the Seven Sacraments last night while waiting for my laundry to finish in the washer.
We sat at the small round kitchen table that has a window facing my late Great Grandmother’s house. I had to first ask if I was really baptized twice, or if that was just a joke. The story goes: upon returning home from the ceremony I wouldn’t stop crying and pitching a fit, so my dad said to my mom, “You might need to call the Priest, I don’t think he did it right.” This sense of humor is something I very much appreciate about my dad. Despite me still being a terror in my home, that baptism was my first step to soul purification through the sacraments.
My mom is a Biblical encyclopedia, so picking her brain about these kinds of things is like bringing in an expert. She has endured a great amount of suffering in her life and credits her faith for the ability to do so. I started to skip around with my questions. “Okay, so I did my First Communion, does that mean I’m confirmed? Also, who is St. Agatha?” I regularly ask my mom about the saints that are referenced in my Farmer’s Almanac. Our modern calendars no longer include these holy designations and just reading about them on wikipedia does not invoke the same feeling for me as seeing my mom’s enthusiasm. “Your First Communion is when you accept Christ into your heart.”
My jaw dropped and both hands met my forehead. Actually it was before I ever attended Cattechism when I did that. While I was later than most in receiving my First Communion, I voluntarily accepted Christ into my heart on the top bunk in the Dogwood Cabin at a Baptist summer camp years prior. I’d love to know which year, but what I can remember is the feeling of a buzzing heat in my shoulders and chest, and an overwhelming ecstatic joy. I’m sure at some point during the day some youth leader had encouraged us to utter those words to someone else. So I had said exactly that to my camp counselor that night and had unknowingly fulfilled the requirement to receive the Holy Eucharist.
To answer my question about being confirmed, I learned that was a separate commitment and a separate sacrament all together. A much heavier oath. She quite frankly said that in order to be confirmed I would have to choose Catholicism over all other religions. I quickly responded, “But I’m still exploring” and she responded “Yes, you are still exploring”. I could see that she was accepting of that, deeply accepting. Her faith has not ever waivered with my interrogating questions. She’s always leaned into them with the conviction of the stories she knew.
This exchange later reminded me of a secret I had found one day while I was clearing the attic in box of documents. My mom kept track of nearly all the pertinent paperwork from our family’s history. Near my parents marriage license was a questionnaire from the Catholic Church. Because my mom is Catholic, it was part of the process of matrimony for her husband to convert to Catholicism. I saw my dad’s answers to questions like “do you plan to convert?” to which he responded with something to the effect of “No, I don’t see why I should have to.”
I spent the better part of the night sobbing because I finally understood my mom and what it would take for her soul to ascend to be with the Heavenly Father. My mom told me she prays to Mary because Mary was the Temple of Christ. Mary scolded Jesus when he went missing and this led him to declare his duty as a son to obey. She directed Jesus to perform a miracle and make wine at the Wedding of Cana. While the religion does not worship Mary, it recognizes her as a chosen messenger.
One of the things everyone in my family remembers about Great Grandma Bourgeois is that she was a devout Catholic but never attended Mass except for Baptisms and Weddings. She had an altar in her home. One of the most beautiful things about her is that she died 27 years ago, but my family still talks about her rituals. She would cook a ham and make potato salad every Sunday and ironically “Gaaaaaaaad damn” is a catch phrase that my family members still use to impersonate her when I ask what she was like.
For me, I look at my two sacrament streak and think, “Holy shit I’m pretty far along in this”. I also have a pretty good head start in most of the world religions just by chance. “What if I tried to catch em all?” like Pokémon. Or what if I try to understand one religion to the same depth as my mother chose. I have this innate feeling that if I can achieve that wisdom, then I’ll be able to pass it down. The purest, deepest understanding, not the shallow commercialized religion. I had this same desire when I realized I’d been to one of the Seven Ancient Wonders of the World as a kid when I visited the Temple of Artemis on a school field trip. Should I take the soul of Jesus Christ on a quest to see all of the Ancient and Modern wonders in this world, as I seem to have been groomed to do?
Originally written in Collective Journaling at The Stoa
