By Amy Reisen
On a December day, several years ago now, my parents and other family members walked into a small church outside David City, for a day that I’ll never remember, but hold dearly in my heart. On that day I was baptized, and the people who surrounded me made promises to help raise me in the faith. Though I did not know it at the time, that day, a sound was made—the sound that would echo and amplify to become the passing of the faith in my life.
It would be a lie to say that the faith was the top priority in our family life when I was growing up. We went to Mass occasionally, but it was not a weekly thing. I learned the prayers I needed to, though many were learned at CCD.
While we weren’t always the best at attending Mass, my mother helped wherever there seemed to be a need. No one to run CCD? She’d step in as the coordinator. Need a new approach to the church dinner? Time to start a new one, with pasta and all sorts of sauce flavors. Her parents had instilled in her that the faith was important, and even if her faith was imperfect, she lived it out in the ways she saw fit.
As I grew older, I noticed gaps in her faith, and it was difficult for me to align what I saw as the daughter of a mother, and what I felt as a child of God leaning more into her faith. There was this discrepancy that I just could not reconcile on my own. In moments, it felt so much like I, the child, was leading my mother more in her faith.
In the last year of my mother’s life, her health was not great. There was not a scary diagnosis, but there were health struggles. That March, we traveled together for a dance convention. During this trip, she opened up about having started spiritual direction, and said confession had become a more regular part of her life. To say I was shocked would be an understatement.
After that trip, we never talked about these things again. She died two months later, on Mother’s Day of that year.
I spent a fair amount of time wrestling with the lack of catechesis she’d given me. Catechesis, though, is not something that is willed for oneself or simply infused. Instead, its very definition is a passing down; technically, an “echoing” down. Catechesis comes from the Greek work “katékhéo”—to echo down.
In order for there to be an echo, though, there must first be a sound. My mother, however imperfect or incomplete her faith was, along with my dad, chose to have me baptized in the faith. My parents ensured I received my first Communion, and Confirmation. They made a sound when I was unable to speak for myself, and that sound echoed on to where I am today.
This echo was not ended at my mother’s passing. In fact, her death, particularly in its sudden nature, amplified this echo. In God’s providence, I had previously scheduled a trip to Italy, Spain, and Portugal for the July after her death. On one of the first days of that trip, I expressed in prayer my deep anger and frustration that I would spend the rest of my life without a mother to walk with me. I looked up at a statue of Mary, and this anger melted away. She too, was my mother, and in every church, chapel, and city, she would be there, walking with me through my grief.
As the years have gone on, and grief is a less constant focus, my devotion to Mary has continued to grow. After a hard day, the place you’ll most often find me is sitting in a church under a Marian statue asking for motherly guidance, support, or just a listening ear.
Honestly, I would give almost anything to spend a few more years, or even hours with my mother. The hurt of that loss is not one I can see ever fully going away. Even so, as I reflect on her life and death, I am grateful for the noise she made to give me the faith, the echo that continued in the small ways as she raised me, and the amplification of that echo as I turned to the faith in my moments of great pain following her death. This isn’t a path to the faith I would have chosen, but one the beauty is clear in all the same.
