Paddle Your Own Canoe

Dear Friend, 

Facing this Sunday’s Gospel, I’m right there with Father Jude Siciliano, who expresses his first reaction very simply: Jesus, I wish you hadn’t said that. And yet, of course, our master teacher and Lord does say it in Luke’s Gospel: “If anyone comes to me without hating his father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple.”

Finding the courage to have hard conversation and being true to the source of our life as disciples will always bring us to intense moments of having to carry our own cross. My mother - a very strong woman who loved her family very much - always remembered the words of her dear aunt, Addie McCain: Mary, you have to paddle your own canoe. 

When she was eighteen my mother made the hard decision to leave her widowed mother, along with her three younger siblings, and go off to college. This was an unusual choice, to say the least, for a young woman in the United States in the mid-1940’s. She had done some careful calculation regarding the cost of her move, but it didn’t make it any easier.

In discipleship, we are not alone in our boats, but at some point, we all have to leave shore and push off into waters that can get rough. As I think about it, my mother’s choice foreshadowed so many other decisions that she would make on behalf of her new family and the man who would become her husband and my father. There was strength there and a faith she would live out very much in her own way. She gave me a priceless gift that shaped my life in ways she could never have imagined.

Gratefully,

Fr. Dan ofm, Pastor