Seeds of Faith
So, my conscience has been itching lately. A good friend shared a hard reality with me – that he thought my faith was deeply influenced by and only existed because of my mother’s heavy hand over my life. This is a friend who met me in college at the Catholic Student Center on our university campus at a time in my life when I was leading youth group and college retreats, as well as going to Adoration and reading in Mass once a week.
I began to be offended, even from one I considered a close friend, but in the light of my mother’s death, have reconsidered. What I realize now is that the seed of my spirituality was watered in its earliest days by a schizophrenic woman. And I must be truthful, her personality, even without the disease, existed to control most everything around her. My brother and only sibling didn’t live by her commands to jump, but I certainly asked “How high?” in most matters.
Oddly enough, I came to faith first of anyone in the family, having joined a youth group and found a friend who would drive me to Mass. She and my brother found their own afterward, but once she did, the day-to-day piety in the house was of course guided by her. It is very hard to ask myself whether my faith eventually became a puppet, especially one so obvious as to be visible to those around me.
The summer I turned 19, I read – of my own volition – Catherine Doherty’s most famous book, Poustinia, and fell in love with faith, simplicity, “folding the wings of my intellect” and my Lord in a way that I never had before. And it was from that moment forward that I began making decisions that my poor mother didn’t like. I chose to visit Madonna House. I chose to marry a Canadian and I chose to move away, far away, from home.
Perhaps you can guess what a horrible quandary it was – making decisions based on faith without the truly blessing of the one I had once consulted in all things. How do you argue one heart of faith against another? In comparison, those early years of faith seemed easy, made up of prayers and mechanizations.
Am I being over-dramatic? Nope. My friend was annoyingly right in his observation. I do believe a great deal of my involvement with the Church at the time was pandering, and even though I had come to it first, had evolved into yet another way to make Mom happy.
Thank goodness that God had a fresh packet of seeds hiding behind his back for just the right moment.
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…and then there’s how frustrated your mother became when she was no longer able to hold such tight control over you. She couldn’t see your spiritual growth and decisions as your own, and instead assumed that someone else had taken control of you: and that must have been your husband.
Her attacks on your marriage show the real depth of her Catholicism. Personally, I think your mother’s religious fervor was all tied up in her schizophrenia. She used her religion as a way to make sense of things that didn’t make sense, and as a way to control a life/world she had no real control over.