Mary Michaelina and the Deep Heart’s Core

I was sitting on the stoop outside the fifth grade classroom, eating my sack lunch which contained a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. One of the nuns walked by and asked me if I had heard the news.


“What news?” “Your sister has chosen her religious name. She’s taken a form of your name.”


“Huh?” “Michaelina. Her name will be Sister Mary Michaelina.” I was stunned and confused. Why did she do that? I thought. And the nun told me it meant “little Michael.” I was mortified. But surprisingly I was not teased—at least not a lot. And as I got older, I not only got used to it, but became proud that my big sister, the first born, chose to share my name.


All of us shared in who she was and what she did. Her younger siblings, Katie and Johnny and I, grew up in Mary’s shadow. When she was a senior in high school she gave a patriotic speech of her own composition that caught the notice of our pastor. He directed our local congressman to read the speech into the congressional record. In the early 1950s that was a very big deal. Especially for immigrant Irish parents whose own formal education had stopped at the eighth grade. For my mother it seemed to mean that Mary was on a destined Celtic path to be the first female president of the United States.


Mary grew weary of that youthful speech being referenced in family lore. But that discomfort did not sour her. She had a wonderful ability to joke about herself. She could turn shortcoming and disappointment into laughter.


She made full use of the gifts God gave her. Whip-bright and brave of spirit, she held both intellectual strength and spiritual depth in high regard. Many human marvels mattered to Mary but none more than music. She had a need for the sounds that confirmed the joyous and consoled the desolate. Thus she instructed young and eager pianists and played for private and public audiences. She was a fine keyboard practitioner save for one train wreck of a recital that I witnessed and Mary laughed about later. On that occasion she was uncharacteristically flamboyant as she ripped through the score. “Oh I was intense, all right,” she recalled. “I realized too late I was playing the entire piece in the wrong key! I tried to cover it with dramatic body language.” That incident was an aberration. For the greater measure of her life Mary was in the right key and very much in tune. No image of my sister’s love of music’s power is more telling than her playing of the harp for the disconsolate and the ill in homes and hospices. With that enchanting instrument she created her own balm of Gilead, music “to make the wounded whole.”


Mary cherished her family and friends as we did her. She had the ability to reach in us and touch in us what Yeats called “the deep heart’s core.” She had a kind of radar for what mattered most to us and she developed abiding relationships around that center.


My life surrounded by books surely got its start from the devotion to reading that Mary modeled. She was the epitome of the voracious reader but without the doggedness and tunnel vision. She read effortlessly and with total immersion. We talked about books and authors, debated merits, traded texts, and sent each other surprise boxes of books in the mail. What fun it was to find a package on the porch!


And then, of course, Mary was a writer herself. She created Lydia. Her novel of the early Christians and their courage of assent to a faith they barely understood was the result of research and rapture. It’s an engrossing novel because Mary was in love with her characters and knew how to invite us into their world.


Mary’s own world was marked by something more notable than her intellect, her professional and personal successes, and her talent for nurturing relationships. My sister’s spiritual life was in many ways different from other family members and friends. Unlike anyone else I have met in my life, Mary was a person who did not fear death. She prepared for it and could discuss it calmly. Most of us apprehend death as Lydia did water. She tells us in the novel’s first sentence: “Water has always terrified me.” But at the end of the story, Lydia is guided by the mother of God to the pool of baptism, and water becomes the saving force of the spirit. It births Lydia into a new life. Mary once told me that she believed the life after this life was not an existence that was static or fixed. We keep growing in heaven she said, learning more, understanding more, loving more. But all of it is larger, deeper and fuller than anything we’ve had on this earth. That’s a vision that calls for longing not lament.


I want to learn how to unfear death, and I know who I want my teacher to be. She’s only a prayer away.