Tag: Helen J. Rizzo

Making Peace with my Mother’s Paradoxes

Dear Mom,

You’re one of my angels now, nine years gone, cheering and challenging me from the spirit world after you blessed my vocation in our last real talk….but I’m still trying to make sense of your paradoxical legacy as I, in my turn, approach elderhood. Not only your legacy in my own life, but the legacy you left the nation through your contributions to the Heritage Foundation and Republican Party and the rest of your conservative causes.

I know you would never have wanted a man like the DT to become president – he would have horrified you – but his position as president-elect is nevertheless the outcome of many of the things you supported devotedly in your life. And I still, to this day, can’t figure out why. Why someone so profoundly spiritual as yourself – I’m not talking about your conservative Catholicism, but your incredible, compassionate, visionary spirituality – could have fallen so completely for a party that waves its collective middle finger in the face of all the virtues you taught by your lifelong example: reverence for the natural world and all its beings; compassion for all regardless of color, nationality, creed; strength that did not deny your femininity.

Propped by my desk now is the prayer by Max Ehrmann that hung over yours, and spoke to the values you demonstrated through your life…

Let me do my work each day; and if the darkened hours of despair
overcome me, may I not forget the strength that comforted me
in the desolation of other times.
May I still remember the bright hours that found me walking over
the silent hills of my childhood, or dreaming on the margin of a quiet
river, when a light glowed within me, and I promised my early God
to have courage amid the tempests of the changing years. 
Spare me from bitterness and from the sharp passions of unguarded
moments. May I not forget that poverty and riches are of the spirit. 
Though the world knows me not, may my thoughts and actions be
such as shall keep me friendly with myself. 
Lift up my eyes from the earth, and let me not forget the uses of the
stars.  Forbid that I should judge others lest I condemn myself. 
Let me not follow the clamor of the world, but walk calmly in my path.
Give me a few friends who will love me for what I am; and keep ever
burning before my vagrant steps the kindly light of hope. 
And though age and infirmity overtake me, and I come not within
sight of the castle of my dreams, teach me still to be thankful for
life, and for time’s olden memories that are good and sweet; and
may the evening’s twilight find me gentle still. 

 

I still remember when I came home from school crying because someone in my fourth-grade class had said I was communist, because we had family in Lithuania, then behind the Iron Curtain. I was raging, “I hate the Russians for what they’re doing to our people!” and you corrected me, saying that the Russians were victims of their government, and that it was the Soviets who were holding our people prisoner.

Thirty-some years later, I was asking your former parish priest, the saintly Father Tony Dranginis, of the Lithuanian community’s church, St. Alphonsus, to help a Russian refusenik friend to bring his wife and son to the U.S….he was appalled, saying, “Do you know what the Russians did to our people?” I quoted your words verbatim…and he had a change of heart, and sent me to the Lithuanian community’s immigration attorney. She made the same objection, I gave her the same response…and six months later Sasha was welcoming Tatiana and Sergei to the U.S.

Your compassionate teachings had more of an effect than you probably ever knew.But for all your parenting wisdom and visionary writings, you could be just as righteous an essayist as your media favorites, William Buckley, George Will, Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter. And here I find myself choking on why? Why, always Why? How could you not see the hate, the arrogance, the meanness of these people?

I remember years ago, when you told me, “When I was young, I was just as liberal as you are. Then somebody took me aside and told me how things really are.” I’ve wondered for years who that person was, what sway they held over you, that they could turn you aside from the natural inclination of your own soul – the compassion to which you’ve returned since your passing, that shone out of you so many times as you cried over forests being razed and wrote impassioned letters to the editor about cruelty or neglect to animals. The compassion that led you to feed the birds, squirrels, raccoons (“poor Mrs. Raccoon, having to be a single mother and raise her babies alone!”), foxes, possums, cats, dogs….any animal that came your way knew it would receive a meal.

Part of it, I believe, was the church in which you grew up – as Baltimore’s Lithuanian community church, St. Alphonsus was deeply imbued with anti-communist and conservative Catholic ideology; to this day it is one of the centers of the Tridentine (Latin) Mass, which you swore to the end that you preferred to the modern vernacular version. Part was surely generational trauma – your parents and sister Olga fleeing Lithuania for their lives, just ahead of the Soviets in 1919. How many anti-communist pamphlets did I unearth among your papers, your uncountable issues of The Voice of the Martyrs chronicling the horrors of life under Soviet Russia? I vividly remember writing letters to my cousins in Lithuania, with you carefully schooling me to
remove any references to Christian holidays because they could cause our family to be sent to the gulags.

I stumbled on an article the other day – The Red Scare and the Liturgy and Life Pamphlet Collection – that gave a deeper perspective: evidently good Catholics couldn’t enter or exit their parish churches without being accosted by ranks of anti-communist literature. And at St. Alphonsus, with its Lithuanian population still grieving families behind the Iron Curtain, that anticommunist message must have been particularly powerful….and amnesiac. I didn’t learn about Lithuania’s quisling government, or collaboration with the Nazis, until I was in my 20s, and was devastated by the information.

And you seemed to swallow it all in your devoted loyalty to Nixon, Reagan, Oliver North, the Bushes, your scorn for the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Democratic politicians across the board – “godless liberals.” Your conviction that only incitement by malcontent leaders with malign intent could twist “our fine black families” to engage in protest against the conditions of their lives. And yet you lived just blocks away from poor black neighborhoods in your Depression/WWII young womanhood in Union Square; you must have seen those conditions at least in passing. Or was your ethnic childhood so insular?

If anything emerges from my browsing through your writings, it is your innocence, your naivete, your allegiance to the patriarchal establishment, so conditioned that you couldn’t see the fusion of church and corporate interests. Working for Standard Oil in your younger days, you would have been in the thick of that paradigm, the rise of Christian Libertarianism. And surely there was an attraction (a crush?) to your hyperliterate conservative gurus; how many times did I hear you dreamily quoting William Buckley’s articles, savoring his turns of phrase like a fine wine?

You could have had no idea how it would all wind up; you died years before the rise of the Tea Party, when even Dad, staunch Republican that he was, abandoned the GOP and voted for Obama, not once but twice. “It’s a sin and a crime what the Republicans are doing,” he said. But even in his dying days my work for green businesses and the Earth was still anathema to him, your blessing clearly a misinterpretation on my part.

But always, you and I shared a deeper understanding. And I am heart-glad that, despite our differences, you saw that I was still coming from that spiritual/mystic place we shared…heading in different directions, but from the same point of origin.

Mom, as I’m reading the writing you left behind – years of letters to and from Aunt Olga and Dad, carefully stapled and filed in a box with cheery 1970’s flowers on the cover; years of Op-Eds, articles, and Letters to the Editor, carefully pasted in on fragile pages in big leather scrapbooks – I’m seeing some of the forces that shaped you, but so much remains a mystery. I’m glad that – even while you veered wildly between holding your political ground and cheering me on as a writer; asking me to review your outraged op-eds and saying you were proud of my work; borrowing books from your parish priest on bringing lost family members back to the Church and telling Dad that my husband’s and my Earth-based spirituality was no less real and valid than the fervent Catholicism you practiced – I never doubted your love for me. However reactionary your political and religious positions, you framed them from a place of heart and spirit, and even while you argued fiercely for the default masculine pronoun and derided feminist ideology, you were never any less than proud of being a woman, nor did you expect anything less than that as a woman, I would be strong and hold my own in a man’s world.

For all our differences, Mom, you’ll always be one of my heroes.

Guest Post – The Mystery of Love

To honor the memory of my mother, Helen Joan Rizzo, this Mother’s Day, I am posting one of the many essays she wrote…this one was printed in the Catholic Review.

 THE MYSTERY OF LOVE

All through our lives, our greatest need – our greatest hunger – our greatest pain – is our desire for love. Not the natural, definable emotion we are most familiar with – like that of children for parents, married people for spouses, lovers for beloveds or devoted fans for their heroes, but the soul’s mute ache for, recognition of, communication with, and response from someone who speaks our soul-language.

The human spirit wanders through life for the most part lost and alone. We are essentially aliens in an alien world. Our routine relationships with others provide little more than superficial contact on a material plane. Even our most intimate alliances with relatives and friends fail most often to meet the depth of sharing we yearn for.

A great hunger for a deeper love haunts us all our lives. On rare occasions, a kindred soul or a sublime intellectual or cultural experience or a deep spiritual insight (and, oddly, even sometimes the acceptance of unavoidable suffering) may sound a chord within us which we somehow sense as familiar in a transcendental way. While it may bring brief enrichment, we soon realize that the feeling is gone and we are lost and alone and hungry again.

The ability of families and friendships and marriages to endure is not because perfect love is discovered, but rather because the imperfection of human love is instinctively recognized, accepted and accommodated.

Our human vulnerability is often exposed by the strength of even imperfect love. This can be illustrated by our stoical ability to maintain composure under truly heroic circumstances as long as we are not undone by love. During periods of mourning, for instance, we can bear grim, unrelenting grief for long stretches, but only let a compassionate loved one appear newly on the scene and our stoicism dissolves in a poignant outburst of tears and love for the deceased. During illnesses, we can present an enviable bravado even while enduring severe pain. But in the open-armed presence of one who knows and loves us in spite of our weaknesses, our bravado diminishes and we become childlike again in our need to be held and comforted. However, we sense somehow that we cannot long expect this sort of comfort – that sooner or later we must face our pain or sorrow alone.

The striving for but always failing to achieve the strange, inexpressible yearning within us has long saddened humanity and particularly intrigued philosophers and poets. Keats, in his “Ode to a Nightingale,” described the agony of the world’s inadequacy: “Here where men sit and hear each other groan;…Where but to think is to be full of sorrow and leaden-eyed despairs.” Francis Thompson, in his “Hound of Heaven,” said “And now my heart is as a broken fount…Wherein tear-drippings stagnate, spilt down ever…From the dank thoughts that shiver…Upon the sighful branches of my mind.”

Still there seems to be embedded in the human spirit a strange magnetic phenomenon so profound that when or if something stirs the elusive memory, it hits us with such a shattering force that we can never forget the experience but we cannot reproduce it at will.

C.S. Lewis, in his book “Surprised by Joy,” described his first such experience by noting that for him “the memory…suddenly arose as if from a depth not of years but of centuries.” It was, he said, “a sensation of desire, but desire for what?” Before he could know that he desired, it was gone. “It had taken,” he wrote, “only a moment of time; and in a certain sense everything else that had ever happened to me was insignificant by comparison.”

Perhaps it is that when we are born, we come trailing a dim recollection of God’s eternal love, and He lets it remain deep within us. Then, suddenly, when we are searching silently for we know not what, it stirs again as a reminder that He, who knit us together, is the source of all love and truth and beauty. Further, while our desire for perfect love is never satisfied in this life, He does give us the wondrously comforting recognition that those dearest to us are actually individual facets of His own immense love, just as we all are.

Bishop Fulton J. Sheen once said, “Love is a messenger from God saying that every human affection and every ecstasy of love is a spark from the great flame of love which is God.”

And from this, we can slowly come to perceive that what we are really enamored of is God Himself! We realize that He is the architect of the greatest geniuses of all time, and of the humblest saints – all that we find so appealing in our most cherished beloveds and most admired heroes is but a tiny glimmer of the supreme appeal of their Maker – and that He is the embodiment of all the loveable things we love in others.

The happiest ending to any love story, then, is the deepening mutual closeness of two people to the Source of all love – a closeness the world cannot match. The profoundest, truest fulfillment of all our human attachments can only be found in God, the hub of the wheel of eternal love.

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