Yaya meets St. Anthony
My mother-in-law, Yaya, is Baptist. Well, currently she attends Joel Osteen’s church, but the official denomination that she would claim to be a part of (and in which she raised my husband) is the Southern Baptist church.
Friends sometimes ask if there’s been any tension between us and Yaya since my husband and I converted to Catholicism in 2007, but there really hasn’t been. Occasionally my husband will try to start a good-natured debate with her about doctrinal differences, but she’s never interested: “I love Jesus and y’all love Jesus and Jesus loves us and that’s all I really need to know,” she once said.
Like in every other area of life, the details of Christian doctrine are of little importance to her — in fact, I’m not sure if she notices them at all. She is so intensely focused on the big picture that she doesn’t have time to mess around with the small things. (For example, when she unloads the dishwasher when she’s visiting our house, she takes the silverware basket and just dumps the whole thing into the drawer. “I’m not gonna sit there and sort knives and forks when I’ve got grandchildren I could be hugging and kissing!” she says.)
Nevertheless, as a gesture of respect, I rarely bring up the areas of Christian doctrine where Baptists and Catholics differ. In general, I figure there’s no need to wade into controversial territory and risk causing tension between us.
But then Yaya lost some important paperwork. And I decided to tell her about St. Anthony.
My phone rang one afternoon, and as soon as I said “hello?” I heard Yaya’s voice shouting, “I DON’T KNOW WHAT I’M GOING TO DO I’VE LOOKED EVERYWHERE FOR THIS STUPID THING AND IT’S JUST LOST AND IT’S DRIVING ME CRAZY!” She eventually calmed down enough to explain that she’d been helping an elderly friend who’d been caught up in a scam, and she’d borrowed some critical documents to contact state officials on his behalf. Now they were lost, and her friend desperately needed them.
I wasn’t sure how she’d react to this, but I decided to risk it: “Have you ever heard of the St. Anthony prayer?” I asked.
She said she hadn’t. I proceeded to tell her about the Catholic tradition (with a lower-case “t”) that Anthony of Padua prays for people who have lost items. I recounted some c-r-a-z-y moments I’ve had after saying the St. Anthony prayer, including the time my husband’s cell phone had been lost for a week. We’d turned the house upside down and had finally given up, though a new phone wasn’t in the budget. I was thinking about it in RCIA class one night, and asked St. Anthony to pray that it turned up. Not five minutes later my phone rang. I didn’t answer it since I was in class, but later I heard the voicemail from my mom telling me that the kids just found the cell phone. I have countless St. Anthony stories like that.
“That’s what I need! How do I do that prayer?” Yaya asked.
Surprised at what an easy sell it was, I told her the words to the simple prayer:
St. Anthony, St. Anthony, please come around,
something is lost and can’t be found!
I started to include some caveats about how we’re just asking another human to pray for us, that it’s not a magic spell or anything like that, but she cut me off and said she had to go say that prayer. She called back that night, ecstatic: she’d found the papers. Yaya was officially sold on the St. Anthony prayer.
Since this was obviously going to become a key devotion for her, I thought I’d take the opportunity for a little catechesis on the doctrine of the Communion of Saints. “Now, Yaya, I want to clarify that Catholics do not believe that saints have any power of their own,” I began. “We believe that they’re just regular people who are ‘alive in Christ’ in heaven and can pray to the Lord for us.”
“I am so excited that St. Anthony found that paperwork for me!” she shouted, and I heard the shuffling of papers in the background. I wasn’t sure if she heard what I’d said.
“You know, in the second century a bunch of prominent Christian writers talked about this belief. Origen of Alexandria wrote about how saints who have ‘fallen asleep in Christ’ pray for those of us still on earth…”
“I was so angry I was fixin’ to slap someone if I didn’t find those papers! But that St. Anthony sure did come through. I’m going to pray to him more often!”
“Ah, yes, well, I hope you understand that when we talk about ‘praying to’ saints, we’re using the word ‘pray’ there as shorthand for ‘communicating,’ different than when we pray to Jesus, which is an act of worship. We only ask the saints for their prayers, no different than when you asked your friend Ethel to pray that you found the documents.”
The response was more ebullient commentary over the sounds of scattering papers, so I said I’d just email her some additional info about this doctrine.
I figured she must have read what I sent her, or perhaps absorbed my erudite theological explanations, because we heard a lot about St. Anthony in the ensuing months. When she lost her safe deposit box key, she called my husband in a panic.
“I need you to pray to St. Anthony! I can’t find this thing anywhere!” she said.
“Sure, I’ll ask him to pray for us,” he said, thinking that that would be the end of it.
She paused, waiting for him to start. “Do it now,” she said.
“Oh, umm. Okay.” He cleared his throat and said, “St. Anthony, St. Anthony, please come around. Something is lost and can’t be found.”
She paused again. “Tell him it’s a safe deposit box key.”
And my husband repeated the prayer, this time replacing “something” with “a safe deposit box key.” Yaya found the key the next day, once again giving thanks to her buddy St. Anthony.
I was delighted with this opportunity for interdenominational dialogue, perhaps feeling a bit satisfied with myself that I’d offered such a rock-solid defense of the Communion of Saints that even my Baptist mother-in-law was convinced.
Then, the other day, I got another frantic call. This time she was so frustrated she could hardly speak because she’d lost her driver’s license and needed it to register for something. It’d been gone for a few days. She couldn’t find it anywhere. “Did you say a prayer to St. Anthony?” I asked. I’d obviously explained this teaching so well that I could relax my terminology, so I’d begun using the shorthand phrasing of “praying to” saints rather than the full articulation that we are simply asking the saints for their prayers.
“Jennifer, I’ve tried everything!” she said over the sound of slamming drawers and crashing boxes. “I prayed to Jesus, I prayed to St. Anthony — hell, I asked Jesus to say a prayer to St. Anthony!”
Looks like we may have a ways to go on this one.
Image from this t-shirt at Cafepress.
Best of Yaya
By popular demand, I’ve put together a “Best of Quick Takes about Yaya” post collecting all the times I’ve referenced my mother-in-law in 7 Quick Takes.
December 5, 2008
Matlock has become a verb in our family, specifically when used in the phrase “getting Matlocked.”
When Yaya is in town, one of the activities that we can all agree on as fun and not offensive is to watch reruns of the 1980′s show Matlock, which we record on our DVR specifically for this purpose. What has happened more than once, however, is that we end up getting sucked into one of the mysteries only to find out that we accidentally recorded a two-hour made-for-TV movie or that the episode we’re watching is continued in a Part II. But by the time we realize it we cannot rest until we see how it ends, so we end up staying up ridiculously late to see the story through to the finish. This is called “getting Matlocked.”
December 19, 2008
Yaya is visiting for a week. This picture pretty much summarizes the trip:
(Yes, that’s a cup in a potty chair.)
March 13, 2009
To my great distress, we saw a scorpion a few weeks ago (“a few weeks ago” as in “IN FREAKING FEBRUARY DON’T THESE THINGS EVER HIBERNATE!!!!!”). It is somehow not surprising that Yaya was involved (longtime readers may remember this classic Yaya + scorpion story). I heard her urgently calling the kids to come out on the back porch and ran out myself to see what all the commotion was about.
When we all got outside she was forlorn, explaining that she’d found a scorpion under the kids’ toy box and tried to catch it for them to play with but, alas, it was gone now. Having long since given up on trying to have the age-old “Are scorpions appropriate playthings for young toddlers?” debate with her, I feigned disappointed and turned to go back inside.
Just as I was about to close the door, on a hunch I asked, “Where did the scorpion go?”
“Oh, it ran in the house,” she said casually.
Scorpion season has begun.
March 27, 2009
If you were to look up “setting yourself up for failure” in an English phrase dictionary, this is what you would see:
Yaya brought this life-sized Easter bunny when she came to stay this week. It’s evidently something she’s had for a while that she wants to keep nice, so she’s adamant that the kids not touch it. It is sitting in the middle of our living room. Our older kids are ages 4, 2 and 1. This awesomely huge bunny has his own little outfit, an Easter basket, floppy ears and moveable arms and legs. And they’re not supposed to touch it.
About every ten minutes my husband and I have to run off to another part of the house to secretly laugh hysterically when Yaya reacts with shock that one of the kids is yet again playing with the rabbit. Many a joke along the lines of “Maybe we could put a mountain of candy in the middle of the floor and tell them not to look at it!” has been made.
April 3, 2009
He’s gone.
Yaya took him back to her house, the rabbit riding shotgun all the way down to Houston.
I have to admit, I miss the Sisyphean drama that unfolded hourly when he was here (described a bit in #2 here). Yaya would get the rabbit fixed up just right, then one of my little girls would bounce up and put a bonnet on him or take his little basket away. Yaya would react with shock — utter, complete shock — that the toddlers weren’t following her stern admonishment to not touch the brightly-colored, life-sized toy rabbit in the middle of the living room. She’d get him all fixed up again…and then my four-year-old son would come racing up and see how many times he could rapid-fire karate chop the rabbit before Yaya yanked him away. She’d get the rabbit all fixed up again and then…well, you get the idea.
After a glass of wine on Friday night I was inspired to do an interpretive performance of the events week, and went outside to yell at moths to tell them to STAY AWAY FROM THAT LIGHT. (Yaya was only mildly amused.)
June 26, 2009
Speaking of my tendency to write about stinging insects, here’s a Yaya story from this weekend: Shortly after we arrived, I was on her back porch with the kids and looked up to see a thriving wasps’ nest right above my head. Under normal circumstances I would tell you that it’s important to control your phobias so as not to impart your own irrational fears to your kids. However, when I looked up to see 100 (OK, maybe eight) wasps buzzing around their nest about a foot away from my head, my reaction was something along the lines of “RUN FOR YOUR LIVES! NOW! NOW! BEFORE THE WASPS ATTACK US! THEY’RE GOING TO STING US!!! AAAAH!!! IT’S SO TERRIBLE!!!!!”
I had just dragged all the kids to safety out in the yard when Yaya walked outside, holding some scissors she’d gone inside to get. I shrieked a warning at her just as she walked under the nest. She looked up, shrugged, and knocked the wasps’ nest down with the handle of the scissors. The nest fell right next to her feet, angry wasps darting all around her, and she took a moment to wipe off the scissors with her shirt before strolling off.
And you guys thought I was kidding when I said that she’s nonchalant about being stung by scorpions in bed!
Yaya’s hurricane preparedness tips
When I called Yaya on Friday to ask if she’d prepared for hurricane Ike, which was headed right for her Houston-area home, she announced, “I sure did! I bought six bottles of wine and a bag of turkey wings.” It was with colorful language that she noted from a patchy cell phone connection this morning that a better plan would have been to have bought a generator and fresh water.
My prayers go out to Yaya and everyone else who is without electricity (and will be for the immediate future) in the wake of hurricane Ike.
Stories from Yaya’s house
I’m packing up to head down to Houston this afternoon to spend the weekend at my mother-in-law’s house. Yes, that would be Yaya. Imagine me taking slow, deep breaths as I type this in an effort to remain calm and not start freaking out about the 436,841 things that could possibly go wrong.
Since I’m busy packing up the entire contents of our house and trying to cram it into our minivan (at least that’s what it feels like — traveling with three under four is no small feat), I’m going to re-run a post I wrote for an old blog during a week that I spent at Yaya’s house a couple years ago:
This post was originally published on October 30, 2005
My own personal reality TV show:
5 tales from Yaya’s houseONE
This morning I woke up to her yelling into the phone, clearly getting someone straightened out on an issue on which they disagreed. Towards the end of the call the person on the other end acquiesced, and she accepted his apology and his promise to do better in the future. Later when I asked her who she’d been talking to she casually said it was the mayor. I’m not sure what she’d called him about, but evidently this is not the first time she’s called him to set him straight on various problems she has with their city.TWO
We were at Luby’s and she found the service to be unsatisfactory, which always makes me start scanning the room for the nearest place to hide. She ended up loudly telling the waitress, the manager and various people at other tables next to us that the server at the salad station was “more useless than t*ts on a boarhog.”THREE
She was telling someone on the phone that her son (my husband) has degrees from Yale, Columbia, and this other school that she’s not so sure is a reputable institution because she’d never heard of it, Stanbrook or Stancliff or something like that [referring to Stanford].FOUR
A few months ago when I sent her some pictures of my son (her only grandchild) she said that at least twenty people had agreed that he was the cutest baby in the whole world. When I asked how 20+ people had seen these pictures since she’d just received them in the mail that day, she explained that she’d immediately gone down to the local Wal-Mart and started flagging people down, demanding that they tell her whether this was not in fact the cutest baby they had ever seen. She stayed for about an hour, until she was convinced that she had empirically proved my son’s cuteness.FIVE
Her neighborhood is a bit rough, and some local youths who were rumored to be gang members had been going around knocking over trash cans and vandalizing houses. Her neighbor came by to warn her about these boys so that she could hurry inside to safety if she saw them coming.The next day she heard a “ruckus” outside and looked to see that they had knocked over her trash cans. She bolted outside after them. When they started to run she chased them down, eventually cornering them. She forcibly held them there while she called the police and didn’t leave until they were in custody.
Her neighbor was horrified at the story, pointing out that they know where she lives. “What if they come after you?” the neighbor asked. My mother-in-law chewed her toothpick for a moment while she thought about it, then just shrugged and said, “they’d better bring a gun.”