Before I returned to the Catholic Church, I began to collect small statues of Mary. My husband, a wood carver and devout Protestant at the time, started the collection with a six inch wooden replica of our Blessed Mother with her hands outstretched. I found it comforting to have her “around”. But I never prayed near her and with the exception of dusting and rearranging, I never touched her. I found the act of touching the feet of Jesus or kissing the cross to be an archaic, left-over tradition from centuries past when mankind had not connected the dots between exposure and contagious disease. So when I first knelt before the statue of Jesus in St. Joseph’s chapel on Mt. Royal in Montreal, I never intended to join the long line of people waiting to do just that. I watched them. When they finally came before him, some clung while some barely grazed his feet with their fingertips, but no one pulled out a handy wipe before or after.
When the line dwindled down to one person, my husband leaned over and asked me if I was going to “go up”. I thought of all the crutches that lined the walls in the entrance to the Oratory, each one bore witness to a miracle. In a burst of humility, I stood up and approached the ceramic Jesus.
Touched by so many before me, his feet hardly resembled feet, but I held them anyway and prayed. The act of treating an inanimate “person” with as much reverence as I would a live being reminded me of the night I held my twenty year old son Luke, six days after his unexpected death.
While my father sat beside him, quietly praying the rosary, I stood as close as I could, without climbing into the coffin, and placed my hand on his chest. He felt doll like, very un-real, and yet, I didn’t want to withdraw my hand. Turning to whisper to anyone else in the room, moving to the left or right so that my husband and other family members could see him, I kept my hand attached to some part of his body. I touched him with no less love than I did when he was a little boy sleeping, because touching the place that once housed his spirit was meaningful.
Four and a half years later, I find that same meaning when I gaze at pictures of him. Pictures serve as a reminder that he was here, that the love and laughter he shared was real, and that I’ll see him again, God willing.
As Catholics, we do not pray to statues. But statues serve as a reminder of the realness of the one it resembles. Just as with every image of our Blessed Mother that I placed in my home also included my plea, lead me to your son, kissing a cross or clinging in deep prayer to the feet of a ceramic Christ is a very real example of the spiritual gesture we are engaging in.
~Sheila LaSalle
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