Faith and Family / Sean Gallagher

Families can be ‘construction sites’ of the communion of the saints

My mother-in-law Edith Lecher prayed the rosary every day for years.

Sometimes, she did this at her home with her husband Steve. She often led it before Mass at St. John the Evangelist Church in Enochsburg, a campus of St. Catherine of Siena Parish in Decatur County. Steve and Edie, as she was commonly known, also prayed the rosary often during their frequent trips to visit their 11 children, 33 grandchildren and one great-grandchild.

Every time she prayed the rosary, Edie affirmed her belief in the communion of the saints when she recited the Apostles Creed at the start of the Marian prayer.

Sometimes, our thoughts on the communion of the saints can be disconnected from this life, focusing more on those who have gone before us who are in purgatory or heaven.

After Edie died in her sleep on Aug. 1, I was blessed to see anew how she embodied the communion of the saints here and now in down-to-earth ways in her daily life.

It appeared to me in the long stream of people who came to her visitation that went on for a couple of hours past its scheduled ending time, and the church that was packed for her funeral the next day.

For so much of her life, building up connections with other people, a communion of the saints, was Edie’s pastime. That started with her husband and children.

During the 22 years that her 11 children were away at college (10 of whom graduated from Marian University in Indianapolis), she mailed handwritten notes to them, often several times a week, to maintain and build up their bond of love beyond their family home, to strengthen their communion.

Edie knew the birth dates and wedding anniversary dates of so many people far beyond her immediate and extended family. She came to know well the families of her sons- and daughters-in-law, her neighbors, her fellow parishioners and so many more.

In the days after her death, I noticed in her home boxes of cards for birthdays and anniversaries, get-well cards and cards just to let others know that she was thinking of them. Edie did her part to keep the U.S. Postal Service in business with all the cards she sent out from week to week.

As she opened herself to advances in technology, Edie started sending text messages to her grandchildren on the feast day of their patron saints. And the sphere of people she made connections with grew greatly as she became active on Facebook.

But building up the communion of the saints with people in this life wasn’t the end goal for Edie. She wanted that communion to extend to heaven. That’s why she prayed for these people every day. And it’s why in recent years she and Steve attended so many funerals, sometimes two in one day.

All those people were a sign of the communion of the saints that Edie, with the help of God’s grace, built up in her life and which drew her ever closer to Christ and the Church. She showed me how families can be construction sites where the practical work of building up the communion of the saints that can reach from Earth to heaven happens.

But while God’s grace is necessary for this work, it doesn’t happen if we don’t take action to cooperate with it. Building up the communion of the saints was Edie’s life work in all the ins and outs, the many little and sometimes big tasks of her daily life as a wife, mother, grandmother, great-grandmother, sister, aunt, parishioner and neighbor. And God enriched her life immensely because she cooperated with his grace in this work.

God puts before us in countless ways every day opportunities to make connections with a growing sphere of people, from our own families to people who may be complete strangers.

Ask him to help you not only recognize those opportunities and see the value in them, but to grab hold of them like Edie did. Then he’ll help us see glimpses of the communion of the saints of heaven even in this life. †