When I taught CCD, I used to tell my kids, ‘If everybody else is doing it, it’s probably wrong.’ The Christian life is difficult. The truth is difficult.” So said Kelley (as we may call her) when I interviewed her, in January 1999, a few months after the death of my late wife, Ruth.
I interviewed, then, seven of Ruth’s closest friends, homemakers, who used to gather to say the Rosary each week. In those years, I was busy writing books and papers for tenure. I had my professional contacts. But what was Ruth’s circle like? Men typically don’t have a glimpse. I wanted to learn, to make a record.
And so I did. But I promptly put the cassettes and transcripts away, not to look at them again.
If someone wondered why, I’d show him the interview with Alice Bernard, a hospice nurse, who counted herself fortunate that, without planning, she found herself at Ruth’s bedside in her final hours. Alice’s powerful account is nearly overwhelming to me even now.
But I have been as if compelled to go back to these interviews after the declaration, last September, by the Vatican Dicastery for the Causes of Saints, that Ruth may be considered a Servant of God.
Let’s return to what Kelley said. I asked, But why should the truth be difficult? She replied, “I ask myself that all the time.” And what do you find?
It’s not the job of the Church to make your life easy. Life in this world anyway. The job of the Church is to get you to Heaven. And if going to Heaven means that you have to be spiritual, then that means you have to be willing to see everything as tested from a viewpoint outside of this world: you have to see everything in a spiritual light.
“For instance,” she said, “what are the reasons why people use contraception? Mostly, these are very worldly reasons. They say, ‘I can’t afford another child right now.’ Or ‘The house is too small for another child,’ or ‘We have a strong, uncontrollable sex drive,’ – which is also a worldly reason. Or, they say, ‘I don’t have enough love’ – but of course you do not have enough love, if you see love as constantly giving material things. It follows that, if it’s the job of the Church to get you to Heaven, then the Church would be seriously erring if it allowed you to think in a worldly way like that.”
But what is spiritual about having sex and a having a lot of babies? “I suppose having sex is not spiritual,” she said, “But neither was death on the Cross – in a very bloody, human way – ‘spiritual’ in that sense. Sweat and blood and bodily functions or mucus or whatever are definitely not ‘spiritual.’ It is what grows from that and springs from that, which is the spiritual.”
But why should things be like that? Kelley said, “The spiritual must be human and ‘worldly’ because of Original Sin. This is what moms do, when they wipe a kid’s bottom for example. They take something very smelly and very gross and very human, and they turn it into something beautiful and something spiritual. That is what it is all about, for sure.”
Kelley said she never wanted to go to college but simply to be a mom. The fact that Ruth lived in a modest house on the poorer side of town “showed me from the very beginning that Ruth had no ambition to be wealthy, or to look wealthy.” Kelley would be at ease: “You’d go to her house, and somehow she’d manage to have fresh baked things, and apple pie, and great coffee.”
But weren’t you a little intimidated by the Harvard diploma that Ruth hung in the kitchen? Kelley answered with a story: “One day I got on the subject of her education. I said, ‘Well, I saved a whole lot of money, because I didn’t go to college – and I’m doing the same things you are doing!’ Ruth laughed and said, ‘Yeah, but I wouldn’t have met Michael if I didn’t go to Harvard!’ “ Kelley smiled at me: “So there you go. That’s the only reason she could think of for going to college!”
In college. Ruth had sung Beethoven’s Ninth and Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms with the Boston Symphony. She played oboe, piano, violin, and flute, learning musical instruments at will.
Kelley shared music with Ruth too: “We were, like, into Metallica. I used to tell her that I wished that we had met without abortion being the glue, or whatever, that drew us together, because I knew that she and I would have had such a blast, like at a rock concert.”
She added, “Ruth once told me that she loved [The Beatles’] Abbey Road. She remembered herself as a teenager, just she and her friend, walking down the street, screaming, ‘Oh! Darling.’ Walking down the street, just screaming! I often wish I had known her in those days. Because I could see myself walking around with Ruth, screaming, ‘Oh! Darling,’ without a care in the world.”
There are wonders enough in the lives of Christian moms. But the interviews recount strange happenings too, if that matters, like the woman in Boston who sat up in bed and told her husband that she had to go and see Ruth, who appeared to her in a dream. She arranged for a babysitter and drove to Worcester, just in time to pray at Ruth’s bedside before she passed.
The best story, perhaps, is of a friend who confided to Ruth that she believed her young son, who died of a bone marrow disease, had secretly been given the choice by God to be cured, but he chose rather to give his life back to God. Ruth was quiet for a minute, then looked up, smiling softly, and said, “Well, wouldn’t you choose the same?” To which the friend replied, “Yeah, I would.”
