One night, during my program on our catholic radio, I pulled out a copy of my book, “Stages of the Soul,” that I keep at the station to refer to from time to time. The program that night was about “How to Understand Life So As to Make It Better,” and I was going to do a segment generally reviewing the stages we go through in going from being lost souls to being fully re-enchanted with life.
During the break, I picked up the book and, without any effort on my part, it fell open to the title page. There I discovered that I had written an autograph dedicating the copy to my friends Helen and Joan, a remarkable mother and daughter whom I had known for many years. I felt a lump in my throat as I remembered that both of them had died before I was able to give them their copy. So instead of talking about “Stages of the Soul,” I did the segment on Helen and Joan and how they exemplified how to understand life and make it better.
Helen was Joan’s mother and as a fairly young woman working in a law office, Joan had a debilitating stroke. After months of very intensive therapy, Joan was able to go home.
She could walk only with great difficulty and her speech, though understandable, was seriously impaired. Helen became Joan’s caretaker, managing her care and the responsibilities of the household for the rest of her long life, even after she herself had a stroke and was in poor health. She died well into her 90s, and Joan died a month after her mother.
What was so remarkable about these women was that there was never any absence of joy in their home or in their lives. I would go to visit them, and there was never a visit that was not replete with love and laughter. I remember one Christmas, Helen literally bossed me around as she supervised my attempts to decorate their home for the feast! Sometimes the three of us would cook together, and it was always a wonderful meal and a great occasion.
At the heart of Helen and Joan’s ability to make a good life under such difficult circumstances was their practice of the Catholic faith. They couldn’t get out to go to Mass, so they watched faithfully every Sunday on television and a deacon from the parish came to bring them Communion. They said the Rosary every day and had a deep devotion to the Blessed Mother. Their home was full of statues and holy pictures. They were generous to Church-related ministries. Their love of the Lord kept them joyous and steady during the many tough days of their lives.
As I sat in the studio that night and thought of Helen and Joan, I reflected that they and others like them are the real heroes in life. Little-known and somewhat hidden away in a dedicated and loving life, they manifested the truth that our daily struggles, large and small, are made doable through the help of God. What might to some have seemed to be sad and tragic lives they saw as a powerful opportunity to bring faith and love and laughter into the world, right from their little corner of it.
I thought of the Little Flower who spoke and wrote so often about the “little way” of making everyday life a way of holiness. Our little lives are the mustard seeds that, nurtured by faith and love, go on to produce the largest of trees. Helen and Joan had been given their “little way,” and they embraced it joyously.
That night in the radio studio, providentially, God reminded me of two wonderful women who knew the secret to understanding life and making it better. I could not have chosen better subjects to talk about.
By FATHER PAUL KEENAN
