Tuesday, March 5, 2013

Nostalgia





My family wasn’t over religious. My mother went to church on Sunday and took me with her until I decided I had had enough. She didn’t oppose my will, but once in a while we still talked about faith. I would tell her that I believed in the afterlife but not in God, and she would answer that she could see Him in the beauty of nature.

 “Look at these flowers!” she would say. “They must have been created by a divine being!” 

Back then I thought she was naïve, but I must admit that now I agree with her, especially when I think of all the animals that populate the earth.
If you believe that God created  Nature, then you can have no doubt that He likes variety. How does variety manifests itself among human beings? Of course, in the context of our different personalities, considering that  we all look pretty  much the same! And so, it is good that each one of us approaches God in a different way. He would be utterly bored if we all followed the same path to find Him.


Like my husband, my mother also met Padre Pio. I remember vividly her disappointment when she told me that he had refused to give her the absolution. He had a huge reputation for clairvoyance, and perhaps he saw in my sweet mom an excessive attachment to luxury. When it came down to beautiful things she was like a child with her toys, and she would get angry at my dad if he didn’t buy them for her.                                                                                                                                        
As I’ve said before, my father lost all his possessions because of wrong investments in Yemen.  It was very difficult for my mom to adapt to the new situation, and she was never able to renounce all her habits. I couldn’t help but finding her a little immature, although she had a big heart and was a good mother.  She was the only one in my family who was professing religion, and this is one of the reasons why I never took it seriously. Even as a teen-ager, I thought that if my mother believed in the gospels, they were probably fairy tales. 
Oh, how I wish we could do it all over again! Love and understand each other better in the light of Christ!



I was born when my mother was forty-two. By then my father was making a lot of money, and my mother played with them and me together. I was her companion when she had to meet  her tailor or her jeweler, and she was mine when I needed new outfits, but she didn’t spend time with me doing what mothers normally do with their children; that was my grandmother’s role. 

My grandmother lived in our home and woke me up in the morning to get me ready for school and helped me with my homework in the afternoon. She died at the age of ninety-two. I had just turned twenty-four, but we were still very close. When she become ill she gave me an old golden bracelet to remind me of her, and I wore it all the time. One morning I got out of bed and it wasn’t on my arm anymore. I looked everywhere and I found it under my bed, broken.  I went to my mother’s house and found out that my grandmother had died during the night. That was the first time I experienced a coincidence so peculiar that I had a hint of the supernatural.   

2 comments:

Manny said...

Your mother had you at an advanced age. Were you an only child? My mother has several blind spots too as it comes to her faith. Forgiveness is not one of her natural traits. If someone crosses her, they might be an enemy for life. But she is charitable with everyone else.

Antonella said...

I have a brother who is 17 years older than me and a sister who is 13 years older. My mother used to dislike people for no serious reason, but she was charitable and affectionate with everyone else!