2. A Revelation

My whole life I knew my mother was a Catholic.  I knew so because my father and grandma had told me.  Grandma isn’t- she’s Presbyterian.  The stoic woman she is, she refused to take grandads Catholic faith when they married, and so in those days, the apparent agreement in such stand-offs for stubborn wives was that the children at least would take the faith of their father.  So, at the age of 29, I was both bewildered and utterly confused when an old friend of my mother’s divulged that whilst sitting outside and indulging in a beverage of choice as us children played in the garden, the two of them would often debate the parameters of religion. 

My mother?  Debating religion?  Fiercely against the church?  “Of course!” insists A, who was one of my mother’s ‘mum friends’ and is a fairly devout Catholic herself.  “She’d tell me it was all this and that, and I would ask her why she couldn’t just leave it alone.”

This revelation of my mother as a twenty-something-year old debating the church, and politics- her and A solving the problems of the world… who was this woman?  I’d never been more confused or felt like I’d known her less, but at the same time, I was utterly delighted.  Because she sounded like me.  Debate- fiercely, but kindly.  Debate to understand.  Debate and discuss to learn.  Debate to feed the insatiable want to understand that astonishing thing that is the human brain and all it does for its hosts.

This new information made her all the more complex, and I loved that.  Often death simplifies how people recall the dead, so these things I was hearing for the first time were turning my mother into a living, breathing, tangible, 3D human being who wasn’t straight forward.  Why did she think this way when she was so heartily raised in the Catholic Church?  Confirmation.  First Communion.  Virginally white lace dresses.  Tiny veils adorned with hand-sewn roses.  Photos with nuns.  Where was her mind, and what experiences formed such charged and complex views?  I became obsessed with trying to read her mind in a bid to understand.

And then I heard about St. Mary’s.

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