My Two Mothers

Yesterday the Catholic Church celebrated the Feast of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary, mother of the Church. When Mary's life on this earth ended, her soul was not separated from her body, nor did her body begin to decay. Rather, she was taken up to heaven, body and soul. So the Church believes.

The Assumption of Mary is a fitting complement to the teaching that Mary was sinless from the moment of her "immaculate" conception. The unbelieving will quarrel as to which teaching is the more incredible.

I myself do not find the sinlessness of Mary so difficult to believe. Certainly the God who created the universe can lead a single human being through her short run on earth without a single moral misstep. And I need not believe that Mary never made a mistake, only that she never sinned. For there are many mistakes that are not sins, and Mary may have made them. Perhaps she accidentally slammed the door on Jesus' finger when he was a toddler. Perhaps she burned Joseph's supper and, with no choice but to eat it, he became ill. Perhaps she then resorted to the treatment of bleeding to cure him. Such actions would have been flawed and harmful but not sinful. I grant that true moral virtue strives for due care and correct judgment. And one can often bore down from a "mistake" to a sinful intent that gave rise to it. But errors resulting from unavoidable imperfections of body and mind are not sins.

The only person I have known who seems to come close to the sinless state of Mary was my other mother, Virginia Cerna Joseph, who died in 1982 at the age of 54.

The effort to find fault with this mother might yield some results. She was not much of a disciplinarian. Her efforts to spank her seven children with the wooden paddle my father had made were greeted with laughter. Perhaps there was some sinful laxity at work there, and we would have turned out better had she kept us on a tighter leash. She worried a lot. Perhaps that could have been the result of a lack of complete trust in God's providence.

On matters of sex and marriage, her judgments could be exacting. When a female friend of my brother's asked to stay a night at our house as she hitchhiked across the region, my mother resisted the prospect of a girl of such evident loose morals setting foot in our home. She had a low view of Martin Luther King, Jr., solely on account of his sexual dalliances as reported by J. Edgar Hoover. In the days before annulments became common, she did not support divorce as a solution to the problem of a spouse who seemed incapable of fulfilling the basic obligations of married life.

But that's all I can think of in the way of possible wrongs. And it's just the stringy backside of the tapestry. On the front lies her good cheer; her openness and sympathy towards others (she softened toward the hitchhiker); the impossibility of imagining her deliberately harming anyone; her abiding faith in God and her love for the Church. A priest who knew us both once said he saw some of her qualities in me. This is the highest compliment I have ever received. I am grateful to him for seeing things as they aren't.

When I think of my two mothers, I must confess that the image of one merges with the other.

If, meanwhile, there is a Mary-shortage among the rest of us, I am comforted in the knowledge that nearly everyone I have known possesses at least one virtue that is truly noble and excellent. Most of us are probably closer to becoming like Mary than we imagine.