What my dad taught me about holiness

What my dad taught me about holiness

 

My father taught me to pray with intensity and to be unafraid to kneel during Mass.

For most of my childhood I was a little bit afraid of my father, a stranger who didn't arrive home from his downtown office until after 6 p.m. and who then demanded silence while he watched the local television news, the network news, and another half hour of local reports before we ate dinner as a family at 7:30. If my brother, Kevin, managed to make my sister, Sue, suppress a laugh so that milk came out of her nose or someone made the mistake of putting their elbows on the table, we all flinched if Dad stood up quickly. If the offense was serious enough, he'd make his slight, 5-foot 8-inch frame seem as tall as he could, bite his tongue in frustrated concentration, and then deliver his belt to someone's backside.

But if I stopped by my parents' bedroom later the same evening I'd find my father on his knees, elbows on his mattress. There he would pray and read from a little book called My Daily Bread, its red leatherette cover folded back upon itself and the pages well-thumbed. Sometimes I could see his lips move, but I never knew what evening prayer he was saying by rote.

My dad prayed with intensity, his hands covering his face and head bowed in deep concentration. His hands always hugged each other, right thumb over his first left knuckle, no other digits interlaced. Though this was not the "little steeple" Sister Marie Blanche taught us in grade school as the best way to "point to heaven," it seemed more like his warm handshake and therefore better suited for his petitions. His focus was so singular in Mass that when the rest of my family complained about the crying baby who wouldn't be quiet he had no idea what we were talking about.

When it came time to choose a sponsor for my confirmation just before I turned 15, someone who would continue to guide me in my faith as I became an adult, the choice was complicated by the fact that part of my family and I were living in a new place. When I was 13, my parents and the last two of seven siblings, my younger sister and I, moved from the only Catholic church and school I ever knew to a parish in Richmond, Virginia. The usual candidates of close family friends or older siblings weren't available because we had left them behind. So instead I chose a man who I knelt alongside in church my entire life: my father.             

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