The Faith
My Mother Planted

There is something I understand at fifty-three that I did not understand when I was thirteen, seventeen, or even thirty-three.

My mother was planting seeds.

She is eighty-three now, and thankfully I still have the opportunity to tell her that.

Some of my earliest memories are actually inside our parish church.

My mother used to volunteer to help clean it.

I was the youngest of four children, so sometimes that meant I went with her.

I was probably two, three, maybe four years old.

She would bring me a pillow and a blanket, and I would lie across the pews while she cleaned.

Sometimes I had a Hot Wheels car.

Sometimes an action figure.

Maybe a little green army man.

Just something to keep a very young boy occupied while his mother worked around the church.

And somehow, I remember it.

I remember the pews.

I remember looking up at the crucifix.

I remember the church around me.

I remember that faint smell of incense that seemed to stay in the air even when Mass was over.

I remember being bored.

I remember being curious.

I remember playing.

I remember watching.

At that age, I certainly did not understand theology.

I did not understand the Eucharist.

I did not understand the sacrifice of the Mass.

I did not understand why the crucifix mattered.

I was simply a little boy lying in a pew with a blanket and a toy while his mother cleaned the church.

But now I think about how extraordinary that really was.

Before I could explain the faith, I was surrounded by it.

Before I understood the Cross, I was staring at it.

Before I understood sacred space, I knew that church felt different from other places.

Before I understood incense, I knew its smell.

Before I understood prayer, I had watched people pray.

Those memories were being written into me before I had words for them.

Sometimes seeds are planted before we even know we are soil.

Later, when I was older, my mother continued taking me to Mass.

Many times it was just the two of us.

To a child, Sunday Mass can simply feel like something your mother says you are going to do.

You get dressed.

You go to church.

You sit down.

You stand.

You kneel.

You follow along.

Then you go home.

But looking back now, I see those mornings very differently.

My mother was showing me where home was long before either of us knew how far away I would someday wander.

And she was teaching me things neither of us probably realized at the time.

Almost no one knows this, but some of my earliest understanding of music came from the Catholic Church.

I would follow along with the music at Mass—the psalm responses, the hymns, the simple melodies printed in the missal.

Much of the music was basic enough that a child could follow it.

I began to notice that when a note moved higher on the staff, the sound went higher.

When it moved lower, the sound went lower.

I began to recognize rhythm.

I began to understand that different notes represented different lengths of sound.

I could see that what was printed on the page corresponded to what I was hearing people sing around me.

I did not know all the terminology yet.

I simply understood that those marks meant something.

Then, around the age of twelve, I began taking formal guitar lessons.

And something interesting happened.

When my teacher began explaining how to read music, much of it did not seem completely foreign to me.

I already understood more than I realized.

The staff.

Notes moving higher and lower.

Rhythm.

Note values.

Following a melody across the page.

Eventually it occurred to me where some of that familiarity had come from.

The Church had quietly given me my first music lessons.

At the time, none of us could have known where that little seed would lead.

Music became a serious part of my life.

I went on to become an accomplished electric and classical guitarist.

I studied at Musicians Institute in Hollywood.

I spent a semester studying at USC.

Later I went to the University of New Mexico, where I studied classical guitar with Michael Chapdelaine.

By my college years, I had developed into a serious classical guitarist performing at a very high level.

And sometimes I think about where part of that journey began.

Not in Hollywood.

Not at USC.

Not at a university.

Not in a formal guitar studio.

It began much earlier.

It began with a little boy sitting beside his mother at Mass, staring at notes printed in a missal and trying to understand how the marks on the page became music.

I love that connection now.

The same Church that was quietly giving me the beginnings of my faith was also quietly giving me the beginnings of music.

I did not recognize either gift for what it was at the time.

I would spend years developing one.

And decades wandering away from the other.

But both had been planted.

My mother planted other seeds too.

When I was seventeen, she worked with our priest to make sure I was prepared for Confirmation and could receive Holy Communion before I turned eighteen.

She cared enough about my faith to make that happen.

I read the Bible.

I learned about Catholicism.

I knew many of the teachings of the Church.

The foundation was there.

But there was something I did not yet understand.

Knowing about Jesus is not the same thing as belonging completely to Jesus.

I had knowledge.

I had exposure.

I had sacraments.

But as a teenager and young adult, I never made the connection or commitment to Christ that I should have.

And then life moved forward.

And so did the culture around me.

I came of age in the 1980s—the decade of excess.

More money.

More success.

More status.

More sex.

More possessions.

More freedom.

More of everything.

The culture was loud about what supposedly mattered.

Television, movies, music, advertising, magazines, celebrities—they all preached their own kind of gospel.

It was rarely a direct message to reject God.

It was more subtle than that.

You do not need religion to tell you how to live.

Success proves your worth.

Money gives you freedom.

Sex is just another part of life.

Do what feels right.

Follow your desires.

Build the life you want.

Be independent.

Be admired.

Be successful.

And above all, do not let anyone tell you that you should deny yourself.

Looking back now, I think my generation was catechized by that culture far more deeply than many of us realized.

The Church might have had us for an hour on Sunday. Popular culture had us the rest of the week.

That matters.

I do not say that to avoid responsibility for my own sins.

I made my choices.

I own them.

The culture influenced me.

It did not make my decisions for me.

But it would also be dishonest to pretend we grew up in some neutral environment where faith and the world were given equal voices.

They were not.

The world was louder.

Much louder.

And for a long time, I listened.

That is one of the things I understand differently now.

The world catechizes too.

Television catechizes.

Movies catechize.

Music catechizes.

Advertising catechizes.

Social media catechizes.

Our friends catechize us.

Our culture catechizes us.

Something is always teaching us what is valuable, what is normal, what is true, and what kind of person we should become.

The question is not whether we are being formed.

Who is forming us?

For many years, I let the world answer that question more than I let Christ answer it.

Then came adulthood.

For roughly thirty years, faith was simply not something my parents and I talked about very much.

They lived their lives.

I lived mine.

They allowed me to become my own man.

They did not constantly lecture me.

They did not pressure me.

They did not make every conversation about religion.

They loved me and allowed me to be me.

And by many of the world's measurements, things went well.

I built a family.

I worked.

I built businesses.

I had successes.

I had responsibilities.

I loved the people around me.

I tried to be a decent man.

From the outside, there was no obvious catastrophe.

But something was lacking.

Faith.

Jesus was not at the center of my life.

And for a long time, I did not even understand that something important was missing.

The world had taught me how to measure success. It had not taught me how to measure a soul.

But underneath all of it, something remained.

Mass with my mother.

The Bible.

The prayers.

The Church.

Confirmation.

The Eucharist.

The music.

And even older than all of those conscious memories—

the pews.

the crucifix.

the smell of incense.

a pillow.

a blanket.

a toy in my hand.

my mother somewhere nearby, quietly caring for the church.

Those things did not disappear.

They were buried.

There is a difference.

And decades later, when I finally began finding my way back to Christ and the Catholic Church, I discovered something remarkable.

The road was not completely unfamiliar.

I had walked parts of it before.

My mother had taken me there.

That is why I am writing this letter while I still have the blessing of being able to say these words directly to her.

Mom, thank you.

Thank you for taking me to Mass.

Thank you for going even when it was just the two of us.

Thank you for bringing a pillow and blanket when I was little enough to lie in the pews.

Thank you for letting me bring a toy and simply be there.

Thank you for giving me memories of the Church before I was even old enough to understand what I was seeing.

Thank you for making my faith important when I was too young to understand how important it really was.

Thank you for working with our priest when I was seventeen.

Thank you for helping make sure I received the sacraments.

Thank you for putting Scripture and the Catholic faith in front of me.

And thank you for the music.

Because somewhere in those missals, psalms, responses, and hymns, another part of my life was quietly beginning too.

Years later I would study music seriously.

I would study with remarkable musicians.

I would spend countless hours with a guitar in my hands trying to understand music at a much deeper level.

But some of my first lessons had already happened.

Sitting beside you.

At Mass.

And to both of my parents:

Thank you for giving me a foundation and then allowing me the freedom to become my own man.

There were years when faith was not something we talked about.

There were decades when I went my own way.

I built a life.

I built a family.

I built businesses.

I experienced success.

But eventually I discovered something success could not provide.

I needed Christ.

And when I finally began looking for Him again, I realized that the seeds planted in childhood had never really died.

They had simply waited.

Maybe that is the lesson I want my own children and grandchildren to understand.

Parents do not control the harvest.

We plant.

We teach.

We take our children to Mass.

We pray.

We put Scripture in front of them.

We bring them to the sacraments.

Sometimes we even bring them along while we clean the church and let them play with a toy in the pew.

We expose them to beauty.

To music.

To Scripture.

To the Cross.

To things they may not understand for another forty or fifty years.

And then eventually, they have to choose.

Some may wander.

Some may wander for a very long time.

I did.

But that does not mean the seed is dead.

Because sometimes a child does not fully understand what his mother gave him until he is fifty-three years old and finally realizes:

She had been showing him the road home all along.

Some seeds grow quickly. Others wait underground for years. Keep planting.