By Fr. Andrew Heaslip
I am grateful for this opportunity to write about someone in my life who has passed away and yet who continues to deeply impact my life of Catholic faith. Yet, due to a recent experience, I have to choose two people: my mother, Alexis and my father, Larry.
About a month ago, I received a voice message from one of my father’s childhood friends, Joe Rooney. He called because my father and mother were on his mind, and he had been wanting to have several Masses celebrated for them both. Happily, I was able to celebrate these Masses on set days where Joe and his wife, though in a different state, could also attend Mass and be united with the intention and Mass I was celebrating.
On the days when these Masses occurred, God gave me several graces regarding the influence my parents had on me, not to mention an awareness of my communion with them. Yet one specific grace the Lord gave was to help me to see the loving impact that my father had on my life, and through it, on my faith. I had known for many years and continue to be aware of how deeply my mother guided me and protected me in the Catholic faith, yet it was always less so with my father.
I would like to thank Joe for asking me to celebrate these Masses. He was an enormous support to my father and indirectly, but immensely, to my mother in the last years of my parents’ lives. During my mother’s battle with cancer, my father had to undergo open heart surgery from which my sister and I were quite worried whether he would have the will to recover. Though living at a great distance, Joe and his wife flew into Nebraska to be with and support my father while he was in the hospital. I have no doubt that this was integral to his recovery.
My mother truly needed my father in the last years of her life. After my dad recovered from heart surgery, I saw him support my mom in ways that I had never seen in my life. On several occasions, he would wake up with my mother – up to 14 times a night – to assist her to use the restroom as she had an infection, and the cancer affected her mobility. He would likewise daily bring her the food and treats that she liked, and which were the only ones she could stomach in the last months of her life.
It was this kind of raw fidelity, amid the heaviness and sufferings of life, as well as the small and ironically cheerful words and gestures of kindness that my father had, which the Lord helped me to see more clearly during the time when I was celebrating these Masses. Particularly, Jesus helped me to remember many experiences of my dad’s simple efforts of fidelity toward me when I was a boy and also his straightforward words of kindness in my childhood and adult life.
However, what accompanied these memories was the realization of how deeply and inescapably God the Father shaped my life through my own father’s humble words and gestures of kindness and goodness to me. Amid these memories and realizations, I could not deny, even if I wanted to, that it was these small acts which shaped my understanding of God the Father’s loving fidelity toward me and the meaning of my fidelity toward Him.
I am profoundly grateful for my mother and my father who have both deeply influenced my Catholic faith and of whom I continue to be aware and pray in the light of that same faith. To conclude, I would encourage all who might read this reflection to have Masses celebrated for their deceased loved ones and to attend those Masses, at least in some way; I can testify that they are occasions of grace not only for the deceased, but also for the living.
