Pecan Pie Protestantism

My grandmother used to bake one pecan pie a year using her own pecans from her own tree, which she guarded with her own rifle. She said she would shoot any crow that messed with her pecans. Somebody might steal a scarecrow, so she figured she could do the job herself.

Memommy was as tough as nails, but she labored humbly and faithfully to serve her family. She cried in her last days because she’d never been gone at Christmas time. She would spend weeks planning to dress up like a Santa\’s elf and hide the presents so we would have to search for them, and then she would spend days cooking a meal for everyone. She held her namesake, Marie our fourth daughter, only once. The baby and I flew to Texas to visit Memommy in the nursing home, and I promised her that the two-month-old child in her arms would know all about the strength of her great-grandmother.

Then there was Granddad, her husband. Memommy and Granddad lived all of their 60 plus years of married life on the same original 600-acre Texas land grant that belonged to the family. He used to let us grandkids stand next to him in the pick-up truck with our arms around his neck as he drove us out to “Wild Kingdom” to shoot rubber band guns at frogs and catch fish with bamboo poles. He wore a Stetson® cowboy hat, real Dickie® overalls, and long flannel sleeves all year long in the Texas heat.

I never heard him yell once, probably on account of his sweet tooth. Granddad put pancake syrup on everything, not just dessert. To help my parents save money for college, he gave each of us grandkids a cow at birth. Each spring the calf born of the cow was auctioned at the sale barn and the money added to a special bank account. People look at me funny when I say that cows sent me to college, but it\’s partly true. Granddad taught us how to widdle wood with a pocket knife and shoot a rifle too. Before she died, Memommy made all of her grandkids a quilt out of pieces of Granddad\’s overalls and flannel shirts. Mine still smells like their home in Wolfe City, Texas.

My graceful maternal grandmother was quite different. She wasn\’t one to shoot or fish much with her pretty diamond-bejeweled hands. She waited and waited for one of us grandkids to name a child after her, and even though I had seven babies I never could find a way to make Fannie Mae work as a child\’s name in this day and time. She collected Precious Moments dolls and precious moments in the real sense. No one was allowed to wipe the smudges off the curio cabinet, and as great-grandchildren grew up, their little hand prints remained.

When I was little she taught me how to read my Bible every night and bought me fancy prayer journals to write in. I read the Bible three times through because of her, and have the majority of my childhood recorded in day-by-day entries that begin, “Dear Jesus, please help me…” She died six weeks after my grandfather, and on the day before she died she emailed everyone in the family a poem titled, “The Greatest Day of My Life.” It was about the sun and stars, flowers and butterflies. She probably died in her sleep dreaming of God. I also think she couldn’t live without Daddy Dan.

Daddy Dan was her high school sweetheart and he called her “Little Girl” until his dying day, also through 60 years of marriage. He was diagnosed with heart disease and was only supposed to live four months, but Fannie Mae nursed him for 14 more years before he died. He would have swum across a river of rattlesnakes to get her a glass of tea, and she would have sent him back with a tongue-lashing if he used sugar instead of Saccharin®. He loved music and at Christmas he\’d accompany me on the guitar as I played my violin for the family. I can still hear him sing “Our Father.” They played a recording at his funeral, his love for God almost tangible in his booming yet quivering voice.

Along with my parents, these are the people who first taught me about Christ. They were all Protestant, and they were the foundation of my childhood faith formation. Yes, I rejected religion as a young adult because, arrogantly, I saw no reason to leave my bed in the morning to dress up and go to church. Thinking myself a high-falutin’ college girl, I left the pot lucks and Sunday socials behind. I blamed Protestantism for my confusion and lack of conviction, but I really have no one to blame but myself.

What my parents and grandparents taught me was deeply Christian. They didn’t use words like “virtue” or “Confiteor” or “Advent” or “liturgy,” but I witnessed in them what virtue is and what it means to be accountable for my actions. They taught me how to ask forgiveness and to forgive. They taught me how to pray. They taught me how to commit to family and to respect tradition. I know they loved Jesus.

The time and culture in which they lived didn\’t tell them about the Catholic Church. They didn’t care who Martin Luther was or what caused the Protestant Reformation. They were who their parents raised them to be. I don’t wonder if my grandparents are in Heaven because I know that what I opine doesn’t matter. What matters are my prayers, so I pray for them all like they prayed for me, and I hope for them – I hope they found what they anticipated all their lives because I know they were sincere in their faith. Christians are a people of hope.

At first after converting I was so full of pride and self-righteous indignation. It is true, I think Protestantism is theologically myopic. It is also true that I felt sort of cheated for never having known about Catholicism. However, I know it would be wrong to be divisively arrogant, just as it was wrong when I arrogantly left religion in the first place. I can explain why we baptize babies, why we kneel, why we make the sign of the Cross, why the Eucharist is the real presence, why Marriage is a sacrament, why we are supposed to be One Body, but not all of the people I know and love want to hear it. Probably some of them thought I was lost to a cult when I converted, and for now I at least hope they know that I am not lost.

Life constantly reminds me how much I rely on the wisdom my parents and grandparents imparted to me, and I still have much to learn about faith. Sometimes, too, when I hear about the struggles in their lives I think, “Hey, the Catechism explains that!” But instead of lecturing, as I’m wont to do, I push myself to be a testimony to that wisdom in the way I handle my own difficulties. Wisdom, after all, speaks for itself.

I smile imagining my grandchildren talking about me. I hear them telling their children about my idiosyncrasies, and I hope they tell them how much their Catholic great-grandmother loved her family and loved Christ and His Church. Maybe they’ll say: “My grandmother used to bake one pecan pie a year. But she prayed the Rosary every day.”