Mother Angelica’s Lasting Legacy

‘The richest part of her life, maybe the most important, happened hidden away in silence, in a corner room in Hanceville, Ala., when she could not feed herself, she could not move on her own, she could not get out of bed. That’s when, I think, she did her greatest work.”

Raymond Arroyo was talking to me about Mother Angelica, his friend, mentor, and subject of a series of books telling about her life and her prayer. His most recent is about her final, bedridden years.

Mother Angelica was the founder of the global Catholic network, EWTN. She spent hours on air, talking, conversing, teaching, and listening — including taking questions from callers and the audience in her Birmingham studio. It was a defy-the-odds kind of story on many fronts, especially when you know the details of her tough early life: riddled with sickness early on and at other times in her life, raised by a struggling single mother. There were healings. There were graces. And there was gratitude. Her whole life became thanksgiving leading her to take many “risks for God,” as Raymond puts it.

In his book, Mother Angelica: Her Grand Silence: The Last Years and Living Legacy, Raymond Arroyo writes with the love of a son and the precision of a biographer taking care that nothing essential gets lost to history. And while his subject is the foundress of religious communities and a cloistered nun who ran and established an international multimedia network, in many ways he simply tells the story of the Christian life and the difference it can make in the lives of individuals, with enduring impact on the world.

“Mother famously said, ‘Faith is one foot on the ground, one foot in the air and a queasy feeling in the stomach,’” Arroyo writes. “She knew that feeling all too well.” He goes on to mention her “deserting her mother, Mae, to join a Cleveland monastery at the age of twenty-one, to building a television network with no funds in the woods of Alabama.” She acted on her faith “in such a way that the fruits of her efforts became manifest to all. Hers was a gutsy faith.” He writes about her final years, years hidden from the world, when she was left largely silent from a stroke. But her faith was nothing less than it ever was, Arroyo testifies.

He quotes a message from Pope Benedict XVI on World Communications Day message in 2012: “It is often in silence, for example, that we observe the most authentic communication taking place between people who are in love: gestures, facial expressions and body language are signs by which they reveal themselves to each other. Joy, anxiety, and suffering can all be communicated in silence — indeed it provides them with a particularly powerful mode of expression.”

It can’t be an accident or coincidence that a woman who was so well known as a talker would deliver a final witness about silence. She insisted that Arroyo tell her whole story. Its release of that this year, with her death this past Easter, can’t be missed either. We have a president-elect who tweets in the middle of the night. That’s like a prompt to all of us who finds ourselves wondering where the last hour went when we were checking Twitter or Facebook or Snapchat or whatever the kids of all ages are using today.

Have we lost the ability to reflect? To be quiet? To hold back a thought for consideration? Can we be alone with ourselves and our God? Can we encounter people again when we are with them, or even go out to visit them? (You’ve seen, and maybe contributed, to the scene in many a restaurant where people are focused on their phones instead of talking with one another.) Donald Trump may just make America great again, as he says, but in unintentional ways: by prompting us to reflect on how we got to reality-TV America and calmly and to silently visit the sick instead, and to reverence them with love, no matter how old or needy or irritable or inconvenient.

And to think about the likes of Mother Angelica the next time someone complains about a glass ceiling or other circumstances. Go do something about it. Take the first step, she used to say all the time, as Arroyo remembers. If you feel a call, take the first step even when you don’t see the next step, even when you don’t see the full plan.