What my dad taught me about holiness
My father taught me to pray with intensity and to be unafraid to kneel during Mass.
For
most of my childhood I was a little bit afraid of my father, a stranger
who didn't arrive home from his downtown office until after 6 p.m. and
who then demanded silence while he watched the local television news,
the network news, and another half hour of local reports before we ate
dinner as a family at 7:30. If my brother, Kevin, managed to make my
sister, Sue, suppress a laugh so that milk came out of her nose or
someone made the mistake of putting their elbows on the table, we all
flinched if Dad stood up quickly. If the offense was serious enough,
he'd make his slight, 5-foot 8-inch frame seem as tall as he could, bite
his tongue in frustrated concentration, and then deliver his belt to
someone's backside.
But if I stopped by my parents'
bedroom later the same evening I'd find my father on his knees, elbows
on his mattress. There he would pray and read from a little book
called My Daily Bread, its red leatherette cover folded back upon itself
and the pages well-thumbed. Sometimes I could see his lips move, but I
never knew what evening prayer he was saying by rote.
My
dad prayed with intensity, his hands covering his face and head bowed in
deep concentration. His hands always hugged each other, right thumb
over his first left knuckle, no other digits interlaced. Though this was
not the "little steeple" Sister Marie Blanche taught us in grade school
as the best way to "point to heaven," it seemed more like his warm
handshake and therefore better suited for his petitions. His focus was
so singular in Mass that when the rest of my family complained about the
crying baby who wouldn't be quiet he had no idea what we were talking
about.
When it came time to choose a sponsor for my
confirmation just before I turned 15, someone who would continue to
guide me in my faith as I became an adult, the choice was complicated by
the fact that part of my family and I were living in a new place. When I
was 13, my parents and the last two of seven siblings, my younger
sister and I, moved from the only Catholic church and school I ever knew
to a parish in Richmond, Virginia. The usual candidates of close family
friends or older siblings weren't available because we had left them
behind. So instead I chose a man who I knelt alongside in church my
entire life: my father.
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