Spiritual Giants

Who are the spiritual giants in your family?

A parent from our CGS program mentioned to me as an aside this week: "I meant to talk to you about something that happened to my son. One day after Wednesday CGS last year, he came home and insisted we pray together. He has kept it up each night for a year now. I don't know what happened that prompted that. Do you?"

I remembered back to last year and I clearly recalled the conversation that could have led to this boy's response. We were talking about "spiritual giants" in our family trees who carry their families and friends to heaven. The young man immediately recalled his grandfather. At his grandfather's funeral, the priest had told this boy that his grandfather was the holiest man he'd ever met.

"Wow," I told him. "That so amazing. He truly was a spiritual giant, and I'm sure he's still praying for you. But I wonder who will be the next spiritual giant in your family? Who will take his place"  One of the boys in the class nudged him with his elbow and said, "Better get on it!" I could see in the young man's face that he took this very seriously.

I also received this message last week and wanted to share it with you for you to ponder with me. Who is praying for you and your family? Who is praying for our parish? Who are the spiritual giants in your life?

"I read your blog about praying the rosary and I was thinking about what you said regarding the absence of prayer. Now bear with me because this will be a typical convoluted story [of mine] but...when I was a younger person, I had this notion that I was insanely lucky or blessed or something - but things went well for me much of the time in the big picture. Illness avoided, parents with jobs and staying married, good home, want for little kinds of things. (Which isn't entirely true, but as you know your perspective on such things is maybe not as fully aware when you're younger.)

Suffice to say, I felt like I led a charmed life and while grateful, I wasn't going to buck the trend. And that perception continued in my life for a long time. Though...recently, in the last few years, things in general have been more struggle for me. Seeing positives has been a challenge and reactions to negatives have been magnified. I got to thinking about it all and why that might be and I hit on something.

(This is where you're going to roll your eyes and remember that I wasn't well chatechized.)

When I was a little girl, all the way until [my son] was about 2, I had one of the world's best pray-ers, praying for me ALL THE TIME. And I had another all-time great pray-er praying for me ALL THE TIME up until a couple of years ago. The first, my mom's mom who rarely missed mass and had scapulars, a rosary, a well worn blue prayer book tucked with mass cards and prayers to saints resting on the glass end table-lamp combo next to her rocking chair, lived across the street from the church and chapel and heard the bells ring out in the old way daily. The second, my dad's mom who was Methodist so did things differently than how I was raised but still dedicated to prayer nonetheless. These women were pray-ers and they offered their prayers for me and a whole slug of other people they were compelled to pray for daily, multiple times daily even.

So I got to thinking that perhaps there's a correlation between the loss of these faithful women and their presence in my life through prayer and this idea that the charmed life is also gone.

And (finally getting to the point) after thinking about it more, and then cemented by your blog post today, I realized that I didn't actually lose anything, because they both gave me witness to faith and if those pray-ers are not here on earth to pray for me, all I have to do is remember that I bear each of their names, thus I can pick up the slack.

So...do they still make those blue books of prayer? Because I need to get one."

Needless to say, I sent her a blue book!