Saints for All Occasions

by J. Courtney Sullivan

At Immaculate Conception, they believed that dealing with their struggles in the service of God could have a positive effect on the rest of the world. When you took your final vows, you became a religious and then every act you did became an act of religion. She was meant to wrestle with what was difficult in life, especially in her own family.

They learned to speak Latin and chant the psalms. They were to read The Rule of Saint Benedict every day, until they had committed

all one hundred pages to memory. This

She harkened back to her childhood saints for courage. She had once found such romance in their struggles. She recited from the Rule, the same line again and again. Do not be daunted immediately by fear and run away from the road that leads to salvation. It is bound to be narrow at the outset.

Motherhood was a physical act as much as an emotional one. It took every part of you.

Now she saw that marriage was like being in a three-legged race with the same person for the rest of your life. Your hopes, your happiness, your luck, your moods, all yoked to his.

“There are as many paths to God as there are souls on earth,” she said in a meeting with the abbey’s hierarchy. This seemed to move them.

The moment a woman was born determined so much of who she was allowed to become.

There were so many years in the middle of life when a person didn’t change much. But old age was like childhood, when if you went a month

without seeing someone, you might find an entirely different person waiting.

“What else?” Bridget said. She felt far freer to ask Kitty about it than she did Nora. For a certain kind of girl, with a certain kind of mother, an aunt

would always be the preferred confidante. An aunt could see you as you were. A mother could only see you as she wished you were, or once imagined you would be.

One of life’s contradictions: how human beings were at once entirely resilient and impossibly fragile.

Her

faith in God was renewed by the simple return

of morning, containing the seeds of the day ahead, bringing with it new chances f...

When someone left the group to sober up, they closed ranks and never talked about that person. Or else they said he was crazy, a drama queen, that he was just looking for attention. Brian could hear in their voices how much they needed it to be true.

One of Nora’s favorite sayings was, “What would you have today if you woke up with only the things you thanked God for yesterday?”

It wasn’t right that you could only understand your parents’ pain once you’d experienced the things they had, and by then, in her case anyway, they were gone.