Since we were together for 4 days, I suppose it’s only natural that my sister and I would break out our scissors and glue and get our craft on.
Saturday night after eating and shopping and sleeping and shopping and cleaning and drinking lots of coffee…we spent a few hours ripping and tearing and gluing and glittering and waxing philosophical about all the things of faith and God that we’ve been learning over the last year or two. I didn’t really expect to stay up until 4:30 am–especially with only a couple journals and gift tags to show for it. It just sorta worked out that way.
My sister was recently baptized and as new babes in Christ we’ve both been sorting through the strange mix of religion and tradition, spiritualism and mysticism, that seems to make up our childhood faith. Being motherless, there’s so many things we can’t ask, that we don’t know, that we might never understand–so many old patterns to examine, absorb, revive or discard…
Family traditions are hard to break. Family expectations are a hard thing to shrug off. Especially when you were raised with bonds of love and respect like we were. Even if we were not the most devout members of the Church, being Roman Catholic is ingrained in the fabric of our family history and it sometimes feels like a mutiny to be taking a different path. That we were jointly spurred in this direction after our parents’ accident is a bittersweet blessing.
We’re both walking closer with the Lord than ever before in our lives. And yet, it’s a road we may never have taken if we were still under the direct influence of our mother’s spiritual history. Or maybe we would, and she would be traveling it with us. And maybe that’s the hardest thoughts of all. I am so very thankful to be traveling this road with my sister, but it can still be a strange lonely trip.
