Happy Birthday
My wife’s birthday was this week. For some reason we’re not supposed to say how old someone is, especially women, and especially your wife. Not that Leone would mind, but I will say that she is still young and in her early thirties.
I hope you will indulge me this week the opportunity to brag a little on my wife. I’m sure every man thinks his wife is the greatest wife in the world (or at least they should). I just happen to be right...of course I will qualify that statement by adding the prepositional phrase “for me”.
Just saying that she is the loving mother of eight children is probably enough. Mother’s with only one or two often shake their head in disbelief when they meet Leone. The usual line is “How can you do it? I can hardly keep up with just my two?” Leone usually just laughs and makes some light remark. They walk away still shaking their heads, either canonizing her or committing her, in their minds.
In Leone’s case, the challenge of raising eight children is multiplied by the fact that since she is from the Virgin Islands, she is half-way around the world from the nearest relative. There is no mother or auntie to help out, no sisters, cousins, or even old friends to share the load with. On top of that we lived in near poverty for our first 4 years of marriage, first in Florida and then in Guam.
While teaching school, I began to build a business out of our home. Though Leone didn’t understand at first why I was building a business, she nevertheless pitched in and never complained that her living room was being used as a warehouse or that one of our two bedrooms had been turned into an office while five of us lived and slept on the floor in the one other bedroom. Today, things are much better on the financial front and we sleep in a bed. But the babies have kept coming. (Yes, we know what causes that.)
When one meets Leone, one is impressed with her energy and positive spirit. She’s always uplifting and encouraging people. She also looks great, and makes sure her kids look great whenever they go out. Many people marvel at her energy and patience. But I don’t. I know where it comes from. Besides a few natural attributes, such as her looks and her innate indomitable spirit, all else is a result of her Catholic Faith: the patience, the willingness to accept children lovingly from God, the acceptance of responsibility, the courage and positivity in the face of immeasurable drudgery (e.g. laundry).
But it wasn’t always like that either. Usually, God let’s us get to the end our rope before He hands us His. Thanks to an experience at a Medjugorge conference in 1993, Leone (and I) were handed a new rope (His) and have come to rely radically on the Blessed Virgin Mary and her Son as the only “relatives” we really need to help us raise our family.
Though both she and I were one of a hundred or so people who saw the “miracle of the sun” that afternoon after the conference, the real miracle was that which nobody saw. There was no getting “knocked off the horse”, no tearful “born again” experience, no big spiritual rush, just a quiet interior turning to that which was always there: the Deposit of Truth as conveyed through the centuries via the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church, especially as concerns the loving acceptance of children.
Today, many Catholic families are torn asunder by the tribulation and strife that stems from the lack of truly knowing, understanding, accepting, and the living of those truths of our Faith that for two millennia now have been our rightful heritage. And as the family goes, so goes the Church. The schisms we now see occurring within families with ever greater frequency are but a harbinger to even more cataclysmic and tragic schisms that will (and already are) tearing apart the Mystical Body of Christ.
But we need not test the “gates of hell”. We, Catholics, have only to realize that the Catholic Church offers, as Fr. John Hardon, S.J. says, “the only solution to the challenges of the family in our day...because only the Catholic Church possesses the fullness of God’s revealed truth about the family.” He notes that without exception, for the two thousand years since Calvary, churches calling themselves Christian have departed from the Church of Rome “because they refused to accept the Catholic teaching on the family.”
It is the sacredness of family life that defines and delineates the Catholic Fatih and vice-versa. I believe that the answers to our family woes, and by extension, almost all social ills, lie in God’s plan for our family as manifested in the teaching of our Holy Catholic Church....and yes, this includes contraception. We need only hear it more.
Well I’ve strayed a bit from the simple Happy Birthday I wished to give my wife, but maybe not. I believe that my wife’s life (or sacrifice of it) is a sign and example by which Jesus intends to save His Church from the “gates of hell” as He promised. I’m sure she doesn’t see this. All she can see most days is the next dirty diaper, the mounting pile of laundry, and the tangled heap of dirty dishes.
But I take great refuge in the fact that she has come to know, along with the great St. Theresa, that “God is in the pots and pans.” Happy Birthday, Leone!”, from a not-so-secret admirer.