I was sitting in Mass this morning and I wondered what would happen after I died. I wanted to know if when I came to the end of my life that someone would say about me that I was a good Catholic Christian. I hope that is the case.
I was born Catholic. My mother was in charge of religion at our house and by gosh, we were Catholic. Even though my dad was not raised Catholic and even after he joined the church he didn’t go to church every Sunday. That was probably a good thing because he would get us in trouble with Mom every time he went to church with us. He had a tendency to make fun of people and he had us all making fun of everybody in church. It made Mom so mad. But, I was born Catholic and I was raised Catholic. If I don’t make you aware of that in my life then I have failed all of those who came before me.
I went to Catholic schools for 12 years. 12 years. I wore school uniforms for 12 years. And I will tell you to be surrounded by all of those Catholic people, all of the nuns that taught me, all of my peers, formed me into the person I would become. But just because you go to school and live the life every day for 12 years doesn’t make you into being a Catholic Christian. That’s because this all happened during the time in my life when I questioned everything and everybody. Everything. Everybody. It wasn’t that I was rebellious, I was just curious. The bad thing about it though was that I didn’t know what I didn’t know. But it was a hellava foundation and I consider myself so very fortunate that my parents sacrificed new cars and bigger houses and other things in order to send me to Catholic schools. It wasn’t like it is today but back then $500 a year was a lot of money. Of course, today, $10,000 a year is a whole lot of money.
I married a Catholic man because that’s what I was supposed to do. When my marriage ended and I began to date, for awhile I dated a non-Catholic man. But it became obvious, as much as we said it wouldn’t, the religion thing was going to be a big deal. He couldn’t understand why I wouldn’t walk away from my religion and I couldn’t understand why he would ask me to do that. He was a great guy but this was an area that I could not compromise on. I could not walk away from generations before me on this path of faith. This was as much a part of who I was as anything else in my life. So, it didn’t work out. He left and I quickly fell for a man of my faith, who had been raised as I had, who understood what my faith meant to me.
And then I began to realize just how important it was for me to pass my faith to the next generation. I knew that I would. But I also knew that a lot of my support system was gone. My parents had both died, my in-laws were dead. So if I had walked away from my faith, if I had allowed my children to go in different paths then nobody would have noticed. Well, nobody except me. I would have known. I would have had to answer to my parents and all of those who had come before me. And I didn’t want to disappoint any of them.
So, when my time comes to an end, I do want to be known as Fred and Carilynn’s daughter, Jimmy’s wife, Jay, Carilynn, Katie and John’s mother, Curtis and Brittany’s other mother (?), and Alexander and Lucy’s grandmother. But when it’s all said and done, I hope that someone remembers me as a Catholic Christian who lived their faith, who loved their faith.