Several things are on my mind before I turn it over to lesson planning for the week: Hurricane Katrina, my mother, and the teaching of our pastor this morning.
I haven’t been watching the news during the past week due to my attention to school. When school starts, and often throughout the school year, I have a very narrow focus. During the school year, my life is categorized into two broad areas: school, and not school. Five days a week, I devote and dedicate my time and energy to matters related to public education including lesson planning, parent conferences, staff development workshops, student academic and personal needs, curriculum, behavior management, and any paperwork that is necessary to complete a student’s education program. Oh, yeah, and teaching. The other two days a week I combine resting and church activities. Sunday is officially my day of rest, but sometimes I rest on Saturdays because spending three hours on Sunday evenings planning for the week hardly counts as rest.
So, when my mother called me yesterday afternoon to tell me she was alright, and back in Georgia, I didn’t know for sure what she was talking about, and I paused for a moment to consider her words. She continued with the news that the hurricane was heading for her new home place at Gulf Shores in Alabama, but she had driven to Georgia until it would be safe to return. Her voice was heavy with worry. She didn’t think there would be anything left when she returned to Alabama.
I told her I was glad she was safe, and hoped her worse fears were not true, and we talked about other matters. She was in her home, a temporary arrangement for that matter, as the bank has claimed the unpaid mortgages on her home, and she must be out of it by end of September. My mother is seventy-one years old.
She is an energetic, alert, and active woman for her age. She is stubborn, and fiercely independent now that she is alone. My father died three years ago this week, leaving her with heavy debts that were unintentional, but no less damaging in their impact on her present life. She is flexible in the way she deals with life’s turns, blows, and challenges. When she gets knocked down, my mother gets right back up and moves on. Nothing stops her from moving on, and nothing sways her from her strong faith and cheerful attitude that “Everything is going to bealright, Bea.”
Her children are not happy with the turn of events in her life, and have tried to help out financially, as much as any of us could. The dilemma is complicated by the fact that she lives so far away from me. My brother in California wants her to come live with him and his family of wife and two daughters in college. I have offered the same in my home. My sister in Georgia also has offered a house to my mother for a rent she can afford.
But my mother refuses us all, and I can’t help but think of her as the rebellious teen-ager, running away from her family so she can start her own adventure. She doesn’t put it into those words when we talk about what she is doing, or why, but she is clear about one thing: she does not want to live with her kids just yet. She is not helpless yet. She has her health. She has her dogs, and she has a male friend who is old enough to be her son, young enough to be my younger brother. He is living with her, she says, to take care of her, more like a friend than an adult offspring, and she takes care of him, more like a friend than a mother. I believe her heart is open to something new happening in her life. They are the oddest of couples, but in my family, no one is laughing.
I cannot with proper respect discuss the details of their friendship, but will say that my mother has always took in strangers into our home, letting them live with us for a day, a few days, a week, or longer. These were people she met through her various jobs as she went about her daily life. They sat at our dinner table and slept in our beds until they could get back on their feet. More than once I gave my bed up for a stranger, someone who had been evicted from her home, had no place to go, and I would sleep with my sister. We didn’t mind. We knew we were doing something good for someone. My father also brought in airmen off the base who needed a family for Thanksgiving dinner or to be with at Christmas. My brothers and sisters, and myself, never thought anything unusual about it then. I don’t know why we do now.
She doesn’t have the money to support herself properly, and that is our concern. At the age of 71, my mother is going against the norm of her life, and shocking us all. Her children react in different ways from, anger to denial, to acceptance. We all have promised to provide for her, we’re all ready to take her in and give to her what she sacrificially gave to us all of our lives, but she is not ready to be dependent on us. She is fighting it with a vengeance that troubles some of the youngest family members, her grandchildren.
There is one aspect of her situation that complicates everything, which is too complex to write about here, and causes the most concern, but it is something that is out of our control, and in her hands, but mostly in His hands. We have to trust her judgment about the character of her house friend. We don't want her to get hurt in the course of her autumnal adventure, but I know that life is messy, and we sometimes get hurt searching for what moves our hearts. My mother knows this, too, and she is okay with that. She sounds happy, and her only concerns are financial. She prays to God every day, and she is sure that He is taking care of her. I can only hope that this is so. It is the prayer of my heart, as well.
This morning’s sermon at church gave me goose-bumps. Our pastor was talking about finding Jesus in unlikely places. Citing scripture (
Romans 12:9-21), and the movie Places in the Heart, he reminded us that God is among us where we least expect Him. My arms chilled and my stomach fluttered, I think, because only this morning I had opened my St. Anthony Messenger issue and read an article about Mother Teresa. Mother Teresa believed and taught that “we meet Jesus - not a reminder of Jesus, not a symbol of Jesus, but Jesus himself, face-to-face,” hungry, thirsty, unclothed, longing for compassion and love. I can think of many people in these places of the heart, people as far away as Zimbabwe, and as close as Alamance County. They don't have to be standing on the side of the road holding a sign asking for a job, money, or food to be recognized and counted as one of the needy longing for compassion and love. They are here, among us, our neighbors who live in another neighborhood, who shop in the same stores we do, who have to pay outrageous gas prices like we do, and who try to kick their bad habits, just like we do. I haven’t always responded to them as though they were Jesus. But Mother Teresa did. We are called to do the same.I close this entry with my mind and heart on the great storm in the Gulf Coast that has forced evacuation of the people in those areas, and sent thousands of others into public shelter on higher grounds...and of my mother who wonders what she will find left of the new life she had hoped to start in Alabama.
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#1 “
Mother Teresa's Hunger for God” By David Scott. St. Anthony Messenger, September 25, 2005 (http://www.americancatholic.org/Messenger/Sep2005/default.asp).
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