The tree stands in front of the house that Kay lived in all her life. Across the street is the Church of the Holy Family.

23rd Sunday in Ordinary Time

Those who do not carry their own crosses and come after me cannot be my disciples. Luke 14.

When we were growing up, lots of grownups encouraged my siblings and me Among our favorites was my godmother, Kay, (my mother’s friend from her childhood). She was a witty woman, unmarried, with a career as an office manager. Kay lived her entire life in the same small house across the street from Holy Family Church in Manayunk. After her retirement and after her parents had died peacefully in their beds, she lived alone. Her life was her church, her house, her siblings and their families, her friends and a stray godchild like me. Her life was an easy one, her house immaculate, (we joked that everything in her basement could pass the white glove test), her routines her own.

But she told me about her doubts. She knew this gospel. She knew that the Lord was asking us to take up our cross and follow him. And she never had any crosses. She asked herself: Will I get to heaven without carrying any cross? So she did a very courageous thing-an initiative that the founder of the Jesuits, Ignatius Loyola, might recommend, but an initiative that I, and perhaps most of us, would shrink from doing. She prayed for a cross.

Not long after she began this prayer, the Lord answered her. Her favorite niece went through a divorce and found herself and her two teenage children without a place to live. Aunt Kay responded generously. The three of them descended on her and transformed her happy home. Her cross was giving up control of her space, giving up her privacy and peace, giving up the calmness of her prayer. She told me later to be careful about what I pray for!

All things worked out eventually for the good. Aunt Kay became the Lord’s disciple. And best of all, of course, Aunt Kay, dead now a number of years, is reaping her reward.