Mary, Star of the Sea
Father Kevin sat back in the kitchen chair and offered his most reassuring smile, conserved for the confessional and the sickbed, and the house was both. “Idolatry?” he echoed. “Mary Angela, you’re one of the most pious women I know.”
She shrugged and looked out her window. Her gardens and those of her neighbors, separated by low lichened stone walls, overlooked the sea. “It’s still idolatry.”
“Well, tell me the nature of this idolatry.”
Mary Angela lifted her chin towards the sea, the thin tubes feeding oxygen into her nose sliding back as she did so. “Ronan is out there,” she said. “He promised me, when he was younger, that he wouldn’t swim alone. He used to go with his friend Fintan, sometimes almost every day. When he went off to the city, and Fintan went to university, they’d just pick up right where they left off whenever they were both back. At first light if that was all the time they had, in all manner of weather.” The story had animated her—she leaned forward, the tube to the oxygen tank almost taut for a moment. “But Fintan decided to stay near the university after graduation, and then, I don’t know, did they have a falling out or what—” She coughed, took a drink from a heavy goblet with a pattern of ornate cut-glass stars— “and when Ronan came back to be with me when I was getting sicker, I started catching him out there alone. In that frigid water. Not bothered a bit about it. And I say to him, You’ve been so good to me otherwise. Spare me this.” And then she leaned back in the chair, spent. “And I pray to Mary, Star of the Sea, what will happen to him without me? I should want to go, to be in the Divine Presence, and I just want to be here with him.”
“Ah. I see.”
“So I’ve made an idol of him. Abraham was willing to kill his son at God’s command, and I can’t even imagine leaving him behind, grown man that he is now.”
Father Kevin adjusted the narrow purple stole, which represented the yoke of an ox, the yoke Christ said he took upon himself—my yoke is easy, my burden light. Was it? he asked himself. To have to convince a good woman with a terrible sickness and a son she loved desperately that it would be all right to die?
Like so many of the young people these days, the lad came rarely to Mass. You were meant to be solicitous toward the young people, gentle and nonjudgmental. Well, you’re welcome anytime. We’ll always be here. And so was the sea, Father Kevin supposed, churning and yet immovable.
“If you think about this story as being about God’s love,” he said, “and you consider that God did not want Isaac to die, the story changes, I think. Abraham was surrounded by cultures that practiced child sacrifice, a horrifying thing of course—the God of Abraham assures him that he wants no such thing, that indeed the child he gave Abraham as a demonstration of his great love and faithfulness was not to be sacrificed, would grow to have children of his own and thus fulfill the promise God made in him. Perhaps this voice that had commanded Abraham to kill Isaac was not truly God at all—after all, angels appear to stay Abraham’s hand and deliver God’s true will, as often happens in these stories.”
Mary Angela considered this, taking a long breath and letting it out in a sigh. “The last of the laundries closed a mere five years before I had Ronan, you know that?”
“I do.”
“A few years earlier and he might have been taken from me. But I raised him all on my own. Saved and saved to buy our little council house here, so I’d have something to leave him, something he could always call home.”
“You did. And did a splendid job of it.”
“Did I?” She looked out the window. “Why is he so sad, Father? Why does he say so little, why does he go off on his own so much?”
“Perhaps he’s sad because his beloved mother is sick. Grief does funny things to people.”
“Sure, but he was like this before I was sick. Maybe always, in some ways.”
Father Kevin didn’t reply immediately, but he suspected she was right. He could sense the darkness that hung around the boy even on those few times a year he joined her for Mass: Easter and Christmas, the anniversary Masses for Mary Angela’s parents. Never outwardly rude, never so much as rolled his eyes. Shook hands and nodded after the Mass. But he never came to Confession, never took Communion, never lingered at the table when Mary Angela had Father Kevin round for tea even in better times. He lacked even that fire Father Kevin could grudgingly appreciate in each year’s batch of unwilling confirmands.
“Even if you were to live fifty more years,” Father Kevin said finally, “could you pull him from the sea or from this great darkness? It is his to live with or his to leave behind. He’ll always be your boy, but he’s also a man. Perhaps the idol is not your son, but the belief that you should have, could have done more. This world is always ready to tell you you can’t measure up, that you could always do more. But this world will tell you that, no matter when you leave this world, no matter what you’ve done. Then you will pass into the truth that God will do the rest, and that God’s will is perfect in all matters.”
“God cannot will for my son to—” She paused. “You know what I fear. It is still a mortal sin.”
“We do not know what opportunities God might provide for repentance and relief. Think of how much you love your son, what you would do to save him—and now think of how much more perfect is God’s love, the love that sees you both and is responding to you both even now.”
She looked away then, out over the garden and towards the sea again. “He’s coming out now,” she said. “Tell me what I should do.”
Father Kevin took her hand. “Dedicate your Rosary tonight to Mary, Star of the Sea. When you consider the Sorrowful Mysteries, when you consider what she would have done to save her Son if she could have—remember that she could not, and she did not, and through this terrible suffering came the salvation of us all. Her actions were perfect even then. More is not required from you. Pray into the vision of the Star of the Sea, trusting that she sees you and your son and is looking after you both.”
She nodded. “Father of mercy, like the prodigal son I return to you and say: ‘I have sinned against you and am no longer worthy to be called your child.’ Christ Jesus, Savior of the world, I pray with the repentant thief to whom you promised Paradise: ‘Lord, remember me in your kingdom.’ Holy Spirit, fountain of love, I call on you with trust: ‘Purify my heart, and help me to walk as a child of light.’”
Father Kevin lifted his right hand and made the Sign of the Cross. “Therefore I absolve you from your sins in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. May God grant you pardon and peace.”
Mary Angela blessed herself just as the back door opened, and then clanged shut, and in loped Ronan, all six feet of him, loose-limbed and wet long-haired. “Mam,” he said. “Father,” he added with a nod. “Will you have some tea?”
“Will I,” Mary Angela snapped. “Tell me, were you down there on your own again?”
“No, Mam,” he said, the merest edge of irritation just barely audible in his soft, low voice. “Fintan came by. He couldn’t stay for tea is all.”
“Ah, well,” she said. “How is he, anyway? I hadn’t seen in him so long, I thought you’d had a falling out.”
“Fine. Will you have a cup of tea, then? Father?”
“Oh, I suppose,” she said.
“If you’re making some anyway, I wouldn’t mind,” Father Kevin said.
“Have you had breakfast, Mam?”
“No, I suppose I haven’t.”
“Let me make you some porridge.”
Mary Angela sighed. “He’s a good lad after all,” she said, in a way that was meant to be overheard. “Isn’t he, Father.”
He patted her hand. “Raised to be.”
She squeezed his hand back briefly, then looked out the window toward the sea as Ronan warmed the milk and set the kettle to boil. Father Kevin followed her gaze towards the shore, where her boy’s long footprints were already being washed away by the low waves.
Abigail E. Myers writes poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction on Long Island, New York. Recent work appears with HAD, Discretionary Love, Tangled Locks, Farewell Transmission, Stanchion, Major 7th, and The Dodge, among other publications, and is forthcoming from JMWW and Atlas and Alice. Find her at abigailmyers.com and on Twitter/Bluesky @abigailmyers.
Amethyst Review 