Growing up physically can be measured in inches on the kitchen wall or in pounds on the scale of the school nurse. The growth of the soul isn’t so easily assessed, yet it happens whenever the world as I know it encounters the world as you know it to become the world as we know it. The soul grows when its world expands.
The soul grows when its world expands.
The acclaimed American novelist Richard Ford has just published a memoir, entitled Between Them: Remembering My Parents. Memory cannot summon up an entire life. It can only offer fragments to us, which we gather as clues to the whole of a life. “But pieces can stand for the whole well enough,” Ford insists. “Though each must make a difference to me or I wouldn’t remember them so well.”
Here’s a small passage, recording a moment in the life of every child: when we first learn how the rest of the world sees the parent, who is the center of our own world.
I remember an elderly neighbor stopping me once on the sidewalk and asking me matter-of-factly who I was. This was on Congress Street. Maybe I was nine or seven or five. It was a thing that could happen to you in Jackson. But when I said my name—Richard Ford—she said, “Oh, yes. Your mother’s the cute little black-haired woman up the street.” These were words that immediately affected me, and strongly, since they proposed my first conception of my mother as someone else, as someone whom other people saw and considered and not just as my mother. A cute woman, which she wasn’t. Black-haired, which she was. She was five feet five inches tall, but I never have known if that is tall or short. I think I must have believed, as I still do, that it was normal. I remember this, however, as a sentinel moment in life. Small but important. It alerted me to my mother’s—what?—public side. To the aspect of her that other people saw and dealt with and that was always there, alongside what I saw. I don’t believe I ever thought of her again without thinking of that, or ever addressed her except with that knowledge. That she was Edna Ford, a person who was my mother but who was also someone else.
It is, of course, a good lesson to learn early—cute, little black-haired, five-five—since one of the premier challenges for us all is to know our parents fully—assuming they survive long enough, are worth knowing, and it is physically possible. The more we see our parents fully, after all, see them as the world does, the better our chances to see the world as it is.
Unless she’s absent from its life, every child knows its mother. Her face is the font from which the world will flow; she is the portal through which the rest of the world first enters. Ford remembers this mundane incident, a neighbor commenting upon his mother’s appearance, because it truly was “mundane,” a founding stone of his adult world. Mundus is Latin for “world.” Ford’s soul grew when what he saw and what others saw—all the while looking at the same spot in the world, namely his mother—combined into a world that was simply, yet profoundly, greater. That is how any soul grows!
The deepest Christian conviction about Jesus of Nazareth is that he is not of this world, that, in him, this world, which all of us know, encounters another world, which none of us know. This is what we mean when we speak of him being truly man and truly God. In the Christ, earth and heaven meet, though only in him. Put another way, here on earth he is all we know of heaven.
To profess that Jesus was truly human is to insist that he grew as we do.
Imagine what it must have been like for Jesus to hear the God, whom he called Father, be described by others. How many of the adjectives, which they might have employed, would have struck him as strained, useless or simply untrue?
To profess that Jesus was truly human is to insist that he grew as we do. That means that his soul grew as his world expanded. But to profess Jesus as God is to insist that it was our knowledge of the Father that grew in our encounter with him, not his.
Jesus said to him, “I am the way and the truth and the life.
No one comes to the Father except through me.
If you know me, then you will also know my Father.
From now on you do know him and have seen him” (Jn 14:6-7).
In all of the Gospels, but especially in the Fourth, Jesus is savior because Jesus is revealer. The vehicle or instrument of salvation is true knowledge of God, which is revealed in the very person of Jesus the Christ. To know who God is is to know what God wants of us. It is to know who we are meant to be, who we must become. Jesus would not be who Christians confess him to be if he did not reveal the Father to us and allow us to enter another world, one which we could never have known without him.
To know who God is is to know what God wants of us.
Yet the God whom Jesus called Father, whom Jesus reveals, remains an ever-elusive mystery. God is pure spirit, which means that most of the adjectives that we use to describe our world can be applied to God metaphorically at best. Yet, as we gaze upon the face of Jesus, as we ponder his actions—as both of these are given to us in the Gospel the church proclaims—we learn all that we must know of God in order to come to God.
Whoever has seen me has seen the Father.
How can you say, “Show us the Father”?
Do you not believe that I am in the Father and the Father is in me?
The words that I speak to you I do not speak on my own.
The Father who dwells in me is doing his works.
Believe me that I am in the Father and the Father is in me,
or else, believe because of the works themselves (Jn 14:9-11).
So, to write about my parents long after they’ve gone inevitably discloses hollow places, failures, frailties, rents and absences in me, insufficiencies that the telling, itself, may have tried to put right or seal off, but may only have re-opened and left behind, absences that no amount of life or truthful telling can completely full or conceal. These I agree to live with. Though when I turn to regard life—my own or others’—I now never fail to struck, amid the onslaught of all that’s happened and still is happening, by how much that’s gone from me. Absences seem to surround and intrude upon everything. Though in acknowledging this, I cannot let it be a loss or even be a fact I regret, since that is merely how life is—another enduring truth we must notice.
Readings: Acts 6:1-7 1 Peter 2:4-9 John 14:1-12
Father Klein's reflection made me think of last week's season-ending episode of BLUE BLOODS, a particularly emotional episode involving the entire Reagan family. In the last years of my father's life, watching this show together was a Friday night ritual we both enjoyed. My Dad was a retired New York City policeman, and being Catholics we both enjoyed the Sunday dinners preceded by a pause for Grace before Meals along with the many references to the Church in the show. Reading Fr. Klein's piece, I connected with the observation that Jesus must have listened to so many tell Him their understanding of who His Father was and what He was like. And no matter how sincere, how heartfelt, they were inadequate, but yet they were necessary on the journey to discovery.
My own recollections of my own Dad remind me of what I miss but also of how much I have, not a loss but a truth, as Richard Ford so wisely says. At the conclusion of last Friday's BLUE BLOODS episode, the family is really struggling with the events of the last couple of days, involving tremendous danger and loss to some of them. Danny, the older son, is asked to say Grace before Meals, and he can't get the words out because he doesn't feel very thankful. Then his wife, Linda, sums it up and brings him and all of us viewers right back where we belong as she says, "when we have everyone we love, we have everything, and for that we should be grateful." Amen! Thanks, Fr. Klein.
“What writing about our parents can tell us about God,” very interesting reflection by Fr. Klein, as his reflections always are. About my maternal parent, my Mom, long before my First Grade Teacher, Sister Gertrude Agnes told us kids that God is a Father, my Mom, I should say “our” Mom as there were within ten years of marriage six children, taught us call God “Poppa God.”
For some, calling God “Poppa” could be a not good thing depending on how the earthy poppa was viewed. If the Old Man was nasty, then God became nasty, if he was kind and loving, God became kind and loving. I liked my Father although we kids never saw much of him and suddenly he wasn’t there! But he was a happy guy, loved singing, so from My Dad I think I got the notion that God is a Happy Guy too, a “Happy Poppa God” and to this day I believe that, even though later schooling did all it could to convince me that God is a tyrant in the sky, ever ready to zap you for mistakes, call them sins, whip in hand ready to smash you down!
That image of God never took much hold of me and now it’s just a memory thanks to my parents each in their own way. But I think it was the foundation set in place by my Mom that clinched for me how I would see God, as an ever loving, kind “Poppa God,” a French term as she was of French ancestry, her Father from Bordeaux. Mom would tell us as we cringed how Grandfather ate cheese that walked across the table, legged by maggots natural to the cheese, relationally perfecting its flavor. Yuk! Later on it dawned on me that we eat clams and oysters killed moments before eating them, whereas Grandfather killed as he ate a favorite cheese. Not much difference to enjoy a delicious outcome. Come to think of it, in some way Grandfather too taught me something about God. in that in Eucharist, don’t we gnaw at the Resurrected, not the dead Body of the Lord for spiritual sustenance, the “worm” or “maggot” and “not a man” that Isaiah called Jesus in his Suffering Servant dialogue? It shows me once again that somehow, whatever is possible naturally, is also possible supernaturally!
Yes, we learn a lot about God through parental contributions, like from a saintly Mom who after Dad was no longer there, raised six kids singlehandedly! God bless my parents and my granddad.