My Heart Swells…

My eldest son served his first Mass today. Dressed in the traditional black and white, with his hands perfectly folded, he took slow, measured steps up the aisle as my heart swelled within me and my eyes brimmed with tears.

Here was my tiny baby, the one who should have died, the one who shouldn’t be able to hear, the one who shouldn’t be able to do so many things. Here was the boy who brought me faith walking solemnly behind the crucifix.

He snuck out of the sacristy before Mass to show me how splendid he looked this morning.

“Mom, I look like a priest. Did you ever think you would see me looking like a priest?”

How does a mother answer that except to smile with her heart shining in her eyes, caress a still smooth cheek and then hurry him back to where he should be?

I watched my class clown glow with pride and joy as he served his Lord this morning. His comic expressions traded for deep contemplation. All through the Consecration I watched him turning something over and over in his head.

I asked him later and he said he was thinking about the phrase “the Source and Summit of our Faith.” He read it last week and I refused to explain it to him. “Pray about it,” I told him. “It will come to you.”

“I get it.” He said in the car after Mass. “The Eucharist is the Source because it is Jesus Christ, and Jesus is where our Faith comes from.”

I simply smiled at him.

“I couldn’t figure out the Summit part.” He continued. “A summit is the top of a mountain. Then I thought that they are the highest part and that bringing Christ into ourselves is the highest thing we can do. That’s what I was thinking during the Consecration, the Source and Summit.”

He sighed deeply, feeling his own new-found place in all of this.

“The Source and the Summit,” he said to himself, “and I got to help.”