How to raise children like the saints:
Pray for their deaths, leave them in the care of others and join a monastery, leave THEM in a monastery..
…and so on.
How’s that for a book proposal?
No?
Today (May 22) is the memorial of St. Rita, known for many things, among them, her clear-eyed view of her children’s lives, earthly and eternal:
Rita Lotti was born near Cascia in Italy in the fourteenth century, the only child of her parents, Antonio and Amata. Her parents were official peacemakers in a turbulent environment of feuding families.
At an early age Rita felt called to religious life; however, her parents arranged for her to be married to Paolo Mancini. Rita accepted this as God’s will for her, and the newlyweds were soon blessed with two sons.
One day while on his way home, Paolo was killed. Rita’s grief was compounded with the fear that her two sons would seek to avenge their father’s death, as was the custom of the time. She began praying and fasting that God would not allow this to happen. Both sons soon fell ill and died, which Rita saw as an answer to her prayers.
From The Church’s Most Powerful Novenas.
Whether or not your faith can take you that far at the moment, it’s worth pondering, worth allowing your self-understanding as a parent – or simply a person who is connected to others – to be jolted, challenged and questioned.
It’s worth pondering on what we really believe and what we really want and hope for others and what we really think would be the worst and best things that could ever happen to them.
Raising children to be fulfilled in this world, happy with who they are in this world, and helpful to others in this world is good of us, but it’s also very 21st century First World of us. Parental bonds naturally bring deep desires to protect our children from any kind of harm or suffering, and of course it makes sense to have our parental goal be that vision of thriving, successful adults. Who still calls, of course.
But if we’re parenting like the saints , we’re nudged to consider different definitions and frameworks and paradigms. We’re sometimes even confronted with examples of what we’d today call bad – terrible – parenting.
That is not to say that we look to saints because all of their decisions were good ones. They weren’t and we don’t. It is also true that there is nothing much easier than using religion as a tool to manipulate others and escape responsibility. I’m really involved in church and God clearly has a mission for me that requires all my time there can often be more simply translated as thanks for the godly excuse to stay away from my family!
Following the dream and charism that God has obviously given me and involving my family in it might – might – just be, in reality, well…narcissism.
But if we’re serious about the Catholic thing, we do look to patterns, and the pattern we see is that when the saints think about other people, they’re concerned, first and foremost, with the state of their souls.
Now, we’d argue that – we are too! Because we can quickly direct our purported concern with “souls” into that “self-fulfillment” door that rules the present day. That is: your deepest desires, as you understand them at this moment, must come from God – because they’re so deep and you can’t imagine being yourself without them. So this is what God wants. What you want. And that’s: fulfillment, happiness and feeling okay about what you’re doing here and now. What more can we want for ourselves, for our children?
St. Rita offers….another paradigm.
And so does S. Marie de l’Incarnation – the great mystic and missionary to New France, died in 1672, canonized in 2014.
I wrote about her back on her memorial on April 30. I’ll just end with some words from her here:
You were abandoned by your mother and your relatives. Hasn’t this abandonment been useful to you? When I left you, you were not yet twelve years old and I did so only with strange agonies known to God alone. I had to obey his divine will, which wanted things to happen thus, making me hope that he would take care of you. I steeled my heart to prevail over what had delayed my entry into holy religion a whole ten years. Still, I had to be convinced of the necessity of delivering this blow by Reverend Father Dom Raymond and by ways I can’t set forth on this paper, though I would tell you in person. I foresaw the abandonment of our relatives, which gave me a thousand crosses, together with the human weakness that made me fear your ruin.
.…What’s more, the thoughts that had formerly occupied my mind, in wanting only spiritual poverty for your inheritance and for mine, made me resolve to leave you a second time in the hands of the Mother of goodness, trusting that since I was going to give my life for the service of her beloved Son, she would take care of you….I have never loved you but in the poverty of Jesus Christ in which all treasures are found….
It’s all very…complicated.
And while these decisions might not be any we want to emulate, it is worth considering the fundamental values and outlook they embody and perhaps even allowing ourselves to be challenged by them…..
I’ve done this (given ‘thanks for the godly excuse to stay away from my family!’) many times over the years alas. The ability to self-deceive is surely one of the greatest barriers to growth in the spiritual life. Indeed ‘it’s all very… complicated’.