"Braided Cord of Humanity"

From Russell Baker's Growing Up, a memoir excerpted in a magazine I read last night. The book is said to be a memoir relating, among other things, his mother's life that he had at one time found to be "uninteresting", and later felt to deserve far better sentiments ...

"These hopeless, end-of-the-line visits with my [increasingl senile] mother made me wish I had not thrown off my own past so carelessly. We all come from the past, and children ought to know what it was that went into their making, to know that life is a braided cord of humanity stretching up from time long ago, and that it cannot be defined by the span of a single journey from diaper to shroud."

Yes, yes, yes, yes ... oh Lord. How very simple and ordinary my own mother's life was, at one level. And how deeply, deeply grateful I am for that simple and ordinary life. Except of course it was not simple and was not ordinary ... really nothing is. An individual's life is indeed part of a braided cord reaching far back into the mists of time.

Likewise Pope John Paul II's Theology of the Body places any individual's life squarely in the midst of a family tree stretching back to primordial Eden and forward to prospective New Heavens and New Earth. We are truly all "in" Adam; and by God's Grace "in" Christ; and what that means ... and will mean ... won't perhaps be revealed truly till the End of Time. In the meantime, though, O Lord, help me to know indeed that my life ... and my mother's life ... like all lives ... has a depth and a character of enormous ... indeed, eternal ... value.

I love you Mom ... now and always ...

Charles Delacroix
Son of my Mother
Son of Adam and Eve

Feast of St Wenceslaus