The Memory of His Saints

We all get the saints we need. There are the ones we think we need, know we need, the ones we choose. They fan across the heavens like the walls of teddy bears at a carnival game, and we match our needs to their color and plush. They may answer some immediate dilemma or long-term goal, some item on our spiritual syllabus we’ve somehow overlooked. But the saints we really need are often undeclared, undocumented and, usually, unconsciously chosen. If anything, they choose us, answering some subterranean prayer in us, inchoate, wordless. Their miracles are subtle, even boring—so subtle, you sometimes don’t even realize you’re healed until they’re gone. Sometimes you didn’t even know you were sick.

Mary was already ninety-one or ninety-two by the time I met her, so I knew from the beginning the friendship wasn’t destined to be a long one. In the book of her life, I’m a character introduced in the final chapter, not terribly well developed. (Though there’s a cute scene where she teaches me how to carve a turkey.) I first got to know her working the Sidewalk Sale, a brainchild of hers that, legend had it, began many years ago with her sitting in front of the rectory at a card table loaded with, by all accounts, “nothing but a bunch of junk” and was now a neighborhood favorite, a funky flea market that popped up periodically and brought in several thousand dollars to the parish a year.

By the time I got involved Mary’s role was more symbolic than administrative, rather like the Queen visiting an orphanage at Christmas. We’d arrive very early on Saturday morning, and Mary would already be there with a fresh pot of coffee and her homemade Irish soda bread. We’d have something to reinforce ourselves and then begin lugging the tables and boxes from the school basement up to the street. Mary’s own heavy—and even light—lifting days were over, but she knew the sidewalk sale set-up like the back of her hand and somehow seemed to be everywhere at once. It was watching her those Saturday mornings that I realized there comes a time in life where people start telling you to “just sit.” (I can hear my mother saying to my grandmother, “Mother, would you just sit?”) People were beginning to tell Mary to just sit. But just sitting wasn’t really Mary’s thing.

Eventually, though, even your body starts telling you to just sit, and eventually even someone like Mary has to listen. Various conditions ongoing, sporadic and chronic kept her more and more at home. Like most of the older people in the parish—and all of the older Irish—she would crawl to Mass if she had to. So when she stopped making it to Mass, we knew she must be in real pain. When I first told her I’d be happy to bring her communion, she dismissed the idea, assuring me she’d be back at church in a few weeks. I think she was a little offended: after all, communion at home was for old people, and she was only ninety-two. But a couple weeks later she called and said maybe it would be nice if I brought her communion for a little while—just until she felt good enough to get back to Mass.

Tarcisius, martyr chrétien, 1868, musée d'Orsay

by Alexandre Falguière

I sometimes thought of St. Tarcisius as I walked from the noon Mass to Mary’s apartment. Tarcisius is a 3rd century Roman martyr, a young boy who, bringing the Eucharist to Christians in prison, was killed by a group of older boys when he wouldn’t let them see what he was holding beneath his tunic so closely to his heart. In second grade we were told about him as we were preparing for First Communion, and I imagined that his murderers were probably eighth graders. Walking to Mary’s, the pyx in my breast pocket, I experienced a sense of reverence I can only call sweet. Despite the starkness of its mystery, there’s a tenderness to the Eucharist, soft yet powerful, warmly overwhelming. And I savored a feeling I so often savor in the Church: the feeling of being part of a long and living tradition; that my 12:30 Eastern Standard Time was but a tiny speck in a stream of time that stretched back over 2,000 years and, in Christ, into eternity; that, Roman prison or New York apartment, it was really all one instant, one moment, all one memory.

Each Saturday we traced the profound yet gentle rhythms of the Rite: Penitence: Gospel, Communion, each leading us deeper into the silence. Immediately after receiving, Mary would lower her head and close her eyes and the apartment would be steeped in stillness. Even the city, pressed tight against the windows, seemed to fall silent while Mary communed with her Lord. Then, slowly her lips would begin to move as her brogued whisper curled around the words of her post-communion prayer (“Behold, O kind and most sweet Jesus…”) Finished, she’d look up, I’d read the closing prayer, we’d wish each other peace, and she’d say, “I’ll go put the kettle on.”

There was a very human, very holy dynamic to our friendship right from the beginning: Mary needed to talk and I needed to listen. And listen I did. The farm in Ireland; her time in New York; her life at the parish: I walked the rooms of Mary’s memory, revisiting some of them many, many times. Early on, when she’d begin a story I’d already heard several times and I’d start to get bored, something in me would say, “Keep listening. Stay alive.” As someone who prays the psalms day after day, year after year, and keeps hearing something different in them every time, why couldn’t I find the same resonance in a tenth hearing of her nephew’s death in a car accident at “that curve right where you come off the George Washington Bridge.”

The nephew’s car accident. The three dead bodies she’d found over her years in the building. The infant son she buried; the husband. This friend, that friend. Seemingly hundreds of priests. By the time I met her she probably knew more dead people than alive. Although it was only the two of us at the dining room table, the room was rich with ghosts. But it was more than just ghosts. In The Confessions St. Augustine talks about the power of memory: as a power of the soul and as a power that transcends the soul, since its deepest memory is the memory of God—to which all of our memories are somehow connected. The more I listened to Mary’s memories, especially the repeated ones, the more I realized what she was telling me by them. She was saying, “This is where God touched me. This is where He knocked me off my feet. This is where He moved me so deeply, so strangely, I can never forget.” And by weaving me, through memory, into the texture of her life—her life in God—she slowly showed me the texture of my own.

Each morning now as I head up the street to the 7:30 Mass, I pass Mary’s old apartment. It’s only been a few months. I still get sad. I always cross myself and look up at the window and say, “Bless me, Mary.”

“Remember me.”