Sept. 18, 2013

By Andrew Lauria
Contributing Writer

My Great-Aunt Lena is 73 years and a day older than me.  She was born and has lived her 102 years of life on one side of Eagle Street in Gloversville, N.Y.  She still resides in the house she bought with her husband when they were married in 1935. 

She speaks Italian in two dialects, which were out-lawed by Mussolini during WWII.  She still has all her hair, her whole vision, and has lost only one tooth. 

She is, according to my completely biased opinion, the best cook in the entire world.  And even though she and my great-uncle never had children, I consider her to be my third grandmother.

The world is a very different place for a modern, single, late twenties, globe-trotting guy than it is for this widow born the same year the first electric headlights were offered on an automobile.

So what do my great-aunt and I have in common?  We love our family and even though she has been a part of it for much, much longer than I have, we both feel the same gratitude for the people that we call our own flesh and blood.  We both love to eat.  Everything.  Not only do we enjoy the art of a well prepared meal, but we love the intimacy found in a long conversation over a cup of coffee. We even like a lot of the same music, which makes her feel young and me seem quite old. But most importantly we love the Lord.  Of all the experiences in her life and in mine, neither of us have a wider fascination or more profound gratitude than for a man named Jesus.

Christ stated over and over again that He would be with us until the end of time.  Aunt Lena says that He was right because she has been with Him since the beginning so she knows that He isn’t lying. I think that I sense the same eternality of this promise in my own life and we can relate to each other through this connection with Christ. We both share in the same terrifying but astounding faith that God will never leave us, no matter what happens in our short or long life.

But that faith is not easy.  Aunt Lena has out-lived every person she has known so far and that long life has come with a huge sense of loss.  I think the most significant loss she has experienced was her husband, Corrado, who died of cancer in 1986.  His death has tested her faith more than any other experience in her life.
She loved him more than anyone else and she still speaks of him daily.  She is always telling me stories of their young lives together and constantly reminiscing about their many trips to Italy.  The highlight is always how their marriage was blessed by Pope Paul VI.

She and my Uncle Corrado shared a deep love for the Faith and for the Catholic Church.  I think Aunt Lena misses my uncle because she misses the love that he gave her, a love that was undoubtedly sent by God.  Even though they have been separated for 27 years, she still carries the faith of the Church and believes in the Church which he loved. And I know that she believes that, like Christ, Uncle Corrado still loves her because of her fidelity to him and to God even after all these years.  She says that the next thing she has to look forward to is being with her husband, who is waiting for her with Jesus.

So while my life and Aunt Lena’s are different in almost every way, what we value most is actually not that different at all.  What we cherish most is the Catholic faith and the belief that everything we have experienced in this life can be understood as a gift from a personal God who loves us and keeps us close to Him.  After all, Christ stated that every one, no matter how different, is called to live in Him. 

As Catholics, we all share this one faith, a faith that has many different expressions according to the individual circumstances of our existence.  And what the rest of the world seems to miss about our Church and Her faith is the same thing that Aunt Lena and I celebrate every time we are together; abundant life found in our relationship with Jesus. 

I think this is the vocation of all people, simply to love one another as He has loved us and carry out that love until the end.  And if we take this vocation seriously for as many years as God calls us to do so, then we will have life.  And for some of us, that will be a very, very long.