And while those knots can be very beneficial, the same does not go for all knots. Sometimes we want them to work the opposite way and come undone. As a mom, I have spent plenty of time getting knots out of shoes, hair, and the dog, thanks to the kids. I have also dealt with less tactile knots, like ones in my kids’ nervous or excited stomachs. There were some knots, though, that I could not and still cannot untie.

In her article, author Maureen O’Brien writes about some of life’s more challenging knots that she has found herself facing recently, such as the stress of COVID-19 and other knots that are out of our hands. It was in the midst of her struggles that this author discovered Mary, Untier of Knots, and received her help in loosening the grip of those personal struggles.

This month, as we celebrate Mother Mary, let us embrace and express gratitude for the many ways in which our mother helps us untie our troubles when we most need her.

When life gets tangled, who better to go to than our mother?

Envision the knots that you have tried to untie in your life—a gold chain, a phone charger, or a vacuum cord. Maybe a string in the waistband of your sweatpants. And did you, as I have done, worsen the problem by being impatient? Did you pull the knot even tighter, becoming angrier? I think of all the times I tried to undo a knot by poking it with a needle or nibbling at its strings with my teeth.

These are the literal knots in our lives. And thus, we have the exquisite metaphor that is “Mary, Untier of Knots,” a Marian devotion inspired by a painting of the same name. Because, as we know, it’s not the snarls in our hands that cause the most pain, but the ones pulling tightly within us—the scary knots that become unbearable. As Pope Francis once pondered, “Those are the ones that are out of our hands, the knots of selfishness and indifference, economic and social knots, knots of violence and war.”

We can trace the journey of her ribbon of hope through the pope himself, as he’s treasured this Mary within his own heart for decades. He first discovered the original painting in the 1980s when he was a student. The artwork, dated around 1700, is by Johann Georg Melchior Schmidtner.

Pope Francis transplanted this image from Augsburg, Germany, and brought her to Latin America. The adoration of the Blessed Mother has spread across years and continents. And now it has landed right in the middle of the world’s heartache over COVID-19.

Personally, after these years of the pandemic, I’ve been saddled with brain fog, unable to finish most books that I start, unable to concentrate, relying on the calculator on my phone to add and subtract the simplest of numbers. The list goes on.

My intellectual sharpness has eroded, and I’m emotionally numb. I find this is true for most people I encounter—both strangers and those close to me. Perhaps the word to best describe it is disorientation. I don’t know when exactly, but at some point, Mary burst through my weariness and became a central part of my prayer life. Because, in all honesty, I have been floundering there too.

Let Go of Suffering

Mary entered, as she always does, because of grace. What burned through my gray sky, my despair, my loneliness? The simplicity of Schmidtner’s painting. All I had to do was think of my problems as knots and give them to her. It was so simple that, even in my pervasive exhaustion, it could be done.

In the painting, Mary is lit by the orb of a dove. She stands gazing down at a white ribbon, untangling a knot. With a calm expression, head tilted, the knot she’s working on is at the precise moment of opening wider and becoming loose. I know that feeling—when the knot finally yields.

The angel assisting her on the left stretches out his bare arm. The silky tip of the ribbon hangs from his open palm. He stares out at us, the viewer, composed and confident. The expression on the angel’s face says, to put it in contemporary language, “She’s got this.”

The angel on the right is assisting with the messy spool of ribbon. It’s enormous. But why fear problems and pain that might be in the future? Why not just trust? It’s hard, especially when our knots are situations that never seem to heal, never shift, never stop. It’s overwhelming, but not so much if we simply ask, “Can you help me with this?” And, being a mother, she responds with: “Let me try. Hand it over.”

I’ve spent a lot of my life chasing after God, thinking my efforts were what would lead me deeper. And I do admire my discipline, my desire for an ever-deepening intimacy. But what this image has been showing me through all that has frayed in the pandemic is that it’s time for me to know that God reaches us.

Our simplest stories have pointed to this over and over. We are the lost lambs being met more than halfway. In fact, we’re met all the way. I’ve wondered if it is the ingrained part of our American culture, the belief that striving is a virtue. Is this the result of a misguided belief that we somehow must earn God’s love? This is in direct opposition to what we have been told: of a love everlasting, unfailing.

It’s harder to pare down, to simplify, to trust the process of stillness. When I saw the photo of Pope Francis in 2021, praying before Mary, Untier of Knots, I was moved by the gift of his continually modeling that we place our trust in God. We are deserving of love and grace. It’s not about the doing, but about the receiving. And if we put that knot into Mary’s hands, we can let our suffering go. Then our own hands are free to receive.

Hearts Opened

I’m no expert on novenas, but I’ve done one for Mary for a very simple reason. During my morning prayer time, I’ve been slipping and sliding, unsure of how to get any traction. I do novenas because they allow me to use a predetermined structure: day one, day two, day three, and so on. Wake up, get coffee, light a candle, start the prayer.

If I’m honest, my tightest knots have to do with family situations—ones that have been there a long time or more recently. I know that the point of a novena isn’t like making a wish on your birthday cake and wanting it to come true. But I can say that, doing this novena, I have found more peace as the knots begin to dissolve.

The request I’d been making concerned a family matter weighing heavily on my heart since the death of my father last year. On day five, something happened in my life that was a miracle of sorts. It wasn’t huge. But it was, to me, a knot that started to loosen. I took a risk with a family member to say the truth of where I stood amid a complicated conflict. “My heart is still open,” I confided to one of the family members angry at another. He laughed and said, “Well, my heart isn’t. It’s closed.”

But then, within days, the tone of his text messages shifted. Just a little. Just enough for a miniature silken thread of peace to slide through. Truthfully, the knot is still in my life, but there’s the beginning of its becoming ribbon—moving forward and growing softer in her hands.

Lost and Found

Another time Mary found me was when I took the back roads home from visiting my daughter in Boston once. I had the opportunity to visit the Shrine of the Little Flower in Harrisville, Rhode Island. I had also begun to read St. Thérèse of Lisieux’s words every day. A story that St. Th érèse told illuminates this idea of God coming to us, finding us.

She said that we are like toddlers climbing stairs and struggling to lift our legs up. God is at the top of that staircase, will see us worn down with struggle, and will come and lift us up.

Again, in these times of dis-orientation and grief, it is straightforwardness and simplicity I need most. Anything else only increases my burden of separation and isolation, from both God and others. Is it possible that one gift of these pandemic years has been the realization of knowing that grace eases our uncertainty?

At this particular shrine, the acres are full of dozens of statues, lovingly maintained by local parishioners. There is a moss-tinged outdoor Stations of the Cross, statues of Mother Teresa, the Holy Family, Our Lady of Guadalupe, and Gabriel. Silvia, the director of the shrine, gave me a tour on a cold winter day when I was the only one wandering happily, kicking through the leaves that swirled along the paths.

As we stood at the bottom of a set of concrete stairs leading up to a tall pavilion with the crucifixion, she pointed to an empty area to the side of the railing. “I’m hoping to put another statue here,” Silvia said.

In that extraordinary assortment of walkways and statues—some fresh, some eroded by years of winter ice and time—I couldn’t imagine who might be missing.

“Who?” I asked.

“Mary, Untier of Knots,” Silvia responded.

I laughed, knowing this is how Mary works. In the empty spaces—the places before you think you have to push yourself and work harder and climb—she will meet you there. What I have learned mystifies me. I only need to allow the Blessed Mother to do what she wants to do: comfort me.

It’s understandable why Mary, Untier of Knots, has become a part of our lives. My inability to concentrate, the grief I feel over the loss of a parent, over leaving a job of 25 years, have led me to a new place. I’ve been a “spiritual seeker” for a long time, and I thought I had to work hard to find my mother.

I had it backward. It is our mother who will never forget. It is our mother who will always find her child. Hand her your ribbon.

Mother Mary: Pray for Us!

If you are new to Mary, Untier of Knots, you will find that, as Our Lady is renowned for doing, she will appear in places in your life now. One example is a recent trip I took to New York City to St. Francis of Assisi Church on 31st Street to do a talk with the friars there. I had quality time with my new friend, Father Tom, and I told him about my recent trust in this Mary. “Oh, ” he grinned, “go on our website. We have a devotion to her.”

When I looked it up, I was moved, perhaps because the first four items in the litany were my own most painful and primary knots. The list was so concrete, so physical, so purely addressing how hard it is to be human here.

With all struggling families, we pray: Mary, Untier of Knots, pray for us.
With all beset by financial struggles, we pray: Mary, Untier of Knots, pray for us.
With all seeking employment, we pray: Mary, Untier of Knots, pray for us.
With all suffering from mental and physical illness, we pray: Mary, Untier of Knots, pray for us.
With all bound by political ideologies, we pray: Mary, Untier of Knots, pray for us.
With all the homeless and the destitute, we pray: Mary, Untier of Knots, pray for us.
With all burdened with loneliness, fears, or worries, we pray: Mary, Untier of Knots, pray for us.
With all living with addictions, we pray: Mary, Untier of Knots, pray for us.
With all estranged from the Church, we pray: Mary, Untier of Knots, pray for us.
With all who have been abused by the Church, we pray: Mary, Untier of Knots, pray for us.
With all enduring religious or ethnic persecution, we pray: Mary, Untier of Knots, pray for us.
With all overwhelmed by shame or despair, we pray: Mary, Untier of Knots, pray for us.
With all traumatized by violence or neglect, we pray: Mary, Untier of Knots, pray for us.
With all targeted by racism or discrimination, we pray: Mary, Untier of Knots, pray for us.
With all struggling to let go of grudges, we pray: Mary, Untier of Knots, pray for us.
With all working to protect our planet, we pray: Mary, Untier of Knots, pray for us.
With all seeking peace, we pray: Mary, Untier of Knots, pray for us.

_{Artwork courtesy of Carol Cole}

We may find common ground on pro-life issues when we expand our view to include other pressing social problems.

American Bishops are struggling with the idea of “eucharistic coherence.” The issue presented to them is, in a nutshell, what to do about politicians (most obviously, the observant Catholic President Joseph Biden) who hold a pro-choice position on the question of abortion. Should they be subject to some as-yet-to-be-defined discipline?

The argument put forward seems very simple to a portion of American Catholics: How can you square what the proponents of this move term “support for abortion” with a Catholic faith that teaches abortion to be an “abominable crime” (Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2271)?

On the other hand, many Catholics see the move as an attempt to politicize and even weaponize the Eucharist on behalf of a shortsighted political agenda that does not deal with the enormous social, political, theological, and moral complexities of the American Church.

Among this latter group would appear to be the pope himself. In a recent interview, when he was asked about “bishops who want to deny Communion to the president and others who hold office,” Pope Francis flatly declared: “I have never refused the Eucharist to anyone, to anyone. I don’t know if anyone in that condition came, but I never, never refused the Eucharist. As a priest, that is. Never.”

Pope Francis then added: “The problem is not the theological problem—that is simple—the problem is the pastoral problem: How do we bishops deal with this principle pastorally? And if we look at the history of the Church, we will see that every time the bishops have dealt with a problem not as pastors, they have taken a political stance on a political problem. . . . What must the pastor do? Be a pastor. Be a pastor and don’t go around condemning. . . . But if he goes out of the pastoral dimension of the Church, he immediately becomes a politician: You see this in all the accusations, in all the non-pastoral condemnations the Church makes.”

I am not a bishop and will not presume to tell them their job. But I am, I hope, a faithful member of the flock—as well as a citizen of the United States charged by the Church with the job of actively participating in our democracy. As a layperson, it actually falls to me, far more than to the Church’s shepherds, to do the work of sanctifying the secular order. I do this out of a desire to protect human life from conception to natural death as the Church teaches.

At the altar, the priest presides. But in the world, we laity preside. So when the bishops contemplate barring a president of a secular nation-state from the Eucharist on the grounds of “eucharistic coherence,” this directly impinges on what the Church itself declares to be my proper sphere of authority as a layman and citizen called to involvement in our political process.

A Historical Perspective

First, a brief discussion of the Church’s abortion policy is in order. It is a popular myth among some Catholics that to vote for the left side of the spectrum is to “support abortion” and thereby make oneself worthy of the fires of hell. The simplistic formula at work here is: Liberals promote abortion while conservatives fight it. Therefore, there is a moral obligation to vote conservative.

In fact, America’s abortion policy is the creation of a Supreme Court that has been dominated by Republican appointees since 1970. The historical truth is that every Democratic appointee to the Court could have been golfing on the day Roe v. Wade was decided, and it would have made absolutely no difference to the outcome of the ruling. Moreover, when the biggest entrenchment of abortion law since Roe—the 1992 Casey decision—was made, the Court that made it consisted of eight GOP appointees along with a Democratic appointee who was pro-life. In short, our abortion policy is a completely Republican creation.

_{As a Catholic who believes human life should be sacred and honored from conception to natural death, what am I to do? And what would I like the bishops to do?}

This brings us to the next point. While it is true that those on the left tend to favor a pro-choice position, it is not true that they “promote” abortion. What they do is maintain a GOP-created and -entrenched system that permits—not compels—private citizens to have an abortion. There is no state-ordered abortion program. This is neither the Nazi regime mandating the death of the “unfit” nor the People’s Republic of China compelling women to abort.

Our abortion policy is, in fact, a triumph of libertarian thinking and the free market. Women can abort or not as they wish. To speak of “promoting” abortion, as though it is ordered by either the president or a politician, is to radically distort language. In fact, what drives abortion is not the state but economic pressure.

Abortion is primarily pursued as an economic relief valve by women who feel they cannot afford to raise a child. The number one abortifacient in the United States, according to the Guttmacher Institute, is poverty. To that degree, the “pro-choice” position is a misnomer, not because liberals compel it but because certain right-wing policies that are economically hostile to poor families do. Large percentages of women abort not because they choose to, but because they feel they have no other choice.

By the Numbers

Abortion rates rose from 1973 to 1980, during the tenures of two pro-choice GOP presidents and one Democrat who was on record saying that Jesus would not support abortion in most cases. Abortion rates slowly declined during the Reagan/Bush years, though these presidents would consistently appoint to the Supreme Court justices who would form the backbone of entrenched support for abortion rights in the Casey decision.

But suddenly there came a precipitous drop in abortion rates in the 1990s. The reason had nothing to do with the Court. It was due to Clinton-era policies that took economic pressure to abort off lower-income women. Far from “promoting” abortion, the goal during the Clinton years was, in the words of the administration, to make abortion “safe, legal, and rare.” And the numbers show that Clinton’s policies, in fact, achieved the pro-life goal of reducing abortion.

In other words, what the Clinton administration chose to do was to leave in place the abortion policy that was the creation of Republicans and not attempt to interfere with the supply of abortion, but to instead tackle the problem of demand.

This would be the same tactic used by the Obama-Biden administration. And in both cases, abortion rates saw their steepest declines since Roe. Not until Trump (who, by the way, also raised funding for Planned Parenthood to historic levels) did abortion rates rise because conservatives, as they have historically done, pursued policies that punished the poor. If we want to speak about “promoting” abortion, that is where the problem lies. What promotes abortion is not supply but rather economic pressure that creates demand.

If we want to effectively fight abortion as opposed to merely talking about it, then a committed, pro-life Catholic voter like me concludes—with a completely clear conscience—that he not only may, but must, support the policies of Obama/Biden.

What Do Americans Want?

This brings us to the next problem that politicians such as Biden (and pro-life voters like me) face as pluralistic Americans living in a representative democracy: the paradox that legal abortion is among the most popular things Americans loathe.

It’s like this: Precisely because there is a demand for abortion created by a host of economic and social pressures on women, only 13 percent of Americans want abortion to be outlawed. At the same time, only 21 percent want “abortion on demand without apology.” Meanwhile, 60 percent of Americans feel deep discomfort with abortion, but do not want Roe to go anywhere.

That 60 percent in the middle is a huge, fluid demographic of people who find abortion distasteful and repugnant, but who have no intention of telling some petrified teenager that she must carry her baby to term even if her parents disown her or her boyfriend ditches her (as well as a million other crisis scenarios you can easily imagine). The result is citizens who insist on maintaining some form of legal abortion and, at the same time, eagerly hope they never have to hear about abortion again. That means that both proponents and abolitionists can truthfully say that some 75–80 percent of Americans side with them in both opposing abortion and wanting it legal.

Our political discussions are built around that ambiguity. Neither party wants to do anything to get rid of our abortion policy for one very good reason: Americans don’t want them to do that. But both know how to exploit the fears and angers of their base in order to keep milking them for votes with promises of (and dire warnings against) imminent abolition, even though both parties know that is not going to happen.

Eucharistic Coherence: More Than Abortion

As a Catholic who believes human life to be sacred from conception to natural death, what am I to do? And what would I like the bishops to do?

To start with, I take as a given that, for the foreseeable future, abortion will remain legal. But the idea here is not to “support the lesser evil” (we can never do that), but to lessen evil, to reduce it, to do what is possible.

I applaud the idea of “eucharistic coherence.” But what I want to see is not zinging one Catholic politician about abortion. The claim that the Catholic Biden, acting as a secular politician in a secular democracy, is somehow confusing the world about what the Church teaches concerning abortion is, to put it simply, nonsense. Everybody on planet Earth certainly knows that the Church opposes abortion. What they are confused about is not the Church’s teaching about the dignity of human life from conception, but the Church’s teaching about any form of life that gets in the way of what American conservatives want to do.

Eucharistic coherence includes being against war and torture, against the death penalty, against injustice at our southern border. Eucharistic coherence includes care for all people, regardless of race, creed, sexual orientation, or any other type of division. Eucharistic coherence is incompatible with insurrection in our nation’s capital.

As a lay voter, I don’t need to be reminded that the Church opposes abortion. I know. I agree. I have for decades. What I want to see is the Church (clergy and laity) really presenting a full-orbed and coherent picture of Catholic teaching that is more pro-life, not less; more eucharistic, not less.

_{^{Instead of turning the Eucharist into a sort of reducing valve designed to cut people off from grace, I would much rather see grace extended as fully as possible through the Eucharist to every person, born and unborn, in the Church’s pastoral preaching.}}

For the past 15 years, many Catholics have claimed that the Church teaches that abortion is a so-called “nonnegotiable” issue while such things as war, torture, a living wage, climate change, racism, police violence, sexual abuse, the dignity of marginalized people such as LGBTQ individuals or refugees, the death penalty, murderous insurrection, and a host of other pressing questions are “prudential matters” and therefore trumped by abortion.

The practical result of this claim (nowhere attested by the magisterium) is that the unborn are pitted against rather than related to nearly the whole of the Church’s social teaching and the people it aims to protect. Indeed, in many cases, support for the Church’s social teaching is often sneered at by self-identified “pro-life ” advocates, as though objecting to the death penalty, or climate change, or the kidnapping of children at the border necessarily makes one “pro-abortion.”

This must cease. Jesus, fully present in the Eucharist, offers his body, blood, soul, and divinity—his very self—for every human being from conception to natural death. Therefore, any attempt to pit the unborn against all the other forms of human life Jesus loves and cherishes is incoherent.

More than this, the Eucharist—which is Jesus himself—must not be turned into a thing: a lucky talisman for blessing one party and withholding favor from another.

Don’t Weaponize the Eucharist

As a pro-life citizen, I oppose abortion. I always have. I voted for Biden because I am pro-life and knew that his policies would, as they did from 2009 to 2017, lower abortion rates. I did not vote for him because I “support the lesser evil” (I repeat: no Catholic can do that) but because I sought to lessen evil.

More than this, I believe Catholics must provide a credible witness to those who do not share our conviction about the unborn. The way to do that is to relate the unborn to—not pit them against—all those people menaced by the threats many non-Catholics rightly care about.

In addition to the unborn, we must bear witness to the Church’s teaching on the dignity of the lives of victims of climate change, racism, poverty, hatred of LGBTQ individuals, capital punishment, sexual abuse, and a host of other issues. Every time the unborn are pitted against all these other sorts of human beings instead of related to them, true eucharistic incoherence occurs.

Instead of turning the Eucharist into a sort of reducing valve designed to cut people off from grace, I would much rather see grace extended as fully as possible through the Eucharist to every person, born and unborn, in the Church’s pastoral preaching. Instead of beginning every discussion of the Eucharist with “Who do we get to exclude?”, we should, like Pope Francis, preach the good news of the grace and mercy of Christ to every person from conception to natural death.

Coherence or Confusion?

What does Eucharistic Coherence really mean? To be coherent with Catholic social teaching, the following cases should be considered as violations of the Church’s pro-life teachings on a par with abortion.

• In the ramp-up to the Iraq War, noted Catholic “pro-life” conservatives like Michael Novak pushed for an unjust war rejected by two popes and all the bishops of the world. There was no push to punish advocacy of mass murder as eucharistic incoherence.
• During that war, EWTN’s Raymond Arroyo more than once offered apologetics for the Bush administration’s use of torture, an act every bit as incoherent with the Eucharist as a celebration of abortion.
• In 2018, Nebraska Catholic governor Pete Ricketts vowed to continue killing prisoners on death row despite the legislature moving to ban capital punishment and the Church calling for its global abolition—and despite the estimate that 4 percent of death row prisoners are innocent. The eucharistic incoherence of killing innocents in order to unnecessarily kill guilty people went unchallenged.
• TV host Laura Ingraham, who is Catholic, mocked refugee child detention facilities as “essentially summer camps.” The eucharistic incoherence of laughing off kidnapping and jailing children went unchallenged.
• Austin Ruse, president of the Center for Family and Human Rights (C-Fam), celebrated the murder of George Floyd by tweeting, “Just a reminder that George Floyd has gone five weeks and two days drug free.” He also tweeted support of his nephew for being a member of the White supremacist Proud Boys group and declared, “We need more not less toxicity.” No calls for eucharistic coherence resulted.
• John Eastman, chairman of the board of the National Organization for Marriage, authored the proposed plan for the Trump administration to overthrow the results of the 2020 election, as well as helping to foment the insurrection on January 6, 2021. Eucharistic incoherence was not invoked over this massive public scandal.

“Man must conquer nature” is a quote attributed to Communist leader Mao Zedong. This narrow-minded approach to the natural world should chill a Franciscan heart. William Mulholland (1855-1935), a UK-born, self-taught civil engineer, however, would have likely agreed. His St. Francis Dam in California’s San Francisquito Canyon, finished in 1926 to address Los Angeles’ growing water needs, collapsed on March 12, 1928, killing hundreds. Mulholland ignored one simple truth: Nature will always have the final word.

“Flood in the Desert,” American Experience‘s quietly riveting examination of this disaster and its ripple effect generations later, is another impressive addition to the program’s canon of documentaries. And the central message of the film is still applicable to a 21st-century audience.

Just before midnight on March 12, as the St. Francis Dam started to erode, the power across the city of Los Angeles flickered. Mulholland, the mastermind behind the dam’s conception and construction, slept through the electrical hiccup. By morning, some 430 people would be swept away by over 12 billion gallons of water. The precise death count will never be known.

Mulholland came from humble Irish beginnings to amass profound influence in early 20th-century California. His engineering plans for the St. Francis Dam, as much a vanity project as one of necessity, were not peer-reviewed—likely in deference to his power. Mulholland would endure water wars with White settlers in the Owens Valley as well as Northern California’s native Paiute people, whom the colonists displaced. But by 1924, construction on the dam began. Tragedy followed four years later.

“Flood in the Desert” manages to check several boxes in a scant 52 minutes. On the surface, the documentary examines the ingenuity—and blind arrogance—needed to harness an element as formidable as water. But a deeper dive examines how the quest for power always comes at the expense of the powerless. And human-caused disasters aren’t relegated to the history books. The Deepwater Horizon oil spill in 2010 and California’s Camp Fire in 2018 show what little we’ve learned in the following decades.

Mulholland spent the rest of his life in seclusion, reportedly haunted by the tragedy. But he was introspective when questioned about it: “If there is an error of human judgment,” he said, “I am the human.”

• The rise and fall of Joseph McCarthy has been likened to a Shakespearean tragedy—or comedy—depending on your political persuasion. But under the steady hand of American Experience, the life of the disgraced Wisconsin senator is handled with evenness and authority.

• First aired in 1993, “Goin’ Back to T-Town“ examines “Black Wall Street,” a community of thriving Black-owned businesses in Tulsa, Oklahoma, that was the site of one of the worst acts of racially inspired domestic terrorism in our nation’s history. This should be required viewing for all Americans.

• L. Frank Baum created one of the most enduring stories in all of children’s literature with his Oz series, but his own life was no stroll down the yellow brick road. American Experience‘s measured and deeply engrossing exploration of the author’s life is worth a revisit.

Stuart Long (Mark Wahlberg), whom everyone calls “Stu,” grows up to be a boxer in his home state of Montana. As he’s aging, the wins are fewer, his body is showing signs of wear and tear, and so he tells his mom, Kathleen (Jacki Weaver), that he’s going to Hollywood to be an actor. His estranged dad, Bill (Mel Gibson), works construction there. But they only meet when Stu tries to “borrow” his father’s pickup truck to go to an audition.

To cover expenses as he waits for his big break, Stu gets a job at the meat counter of a supermarket. There he flirts with Carmen (Teresa Ruiz) and tries to sweet-talk her into a date. She posts a flyer about St. Mary’s Church, and Stu finds her there. He has an annoying but endearing manner, but Carmen says her parents will not let her date a man who is not baptized. To everyone’s surprise, Stu begins the process of the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults (RCIA). He becomes friends with Ham (Aaron Moten), who volunteers at the parish.

After his Baptism, Stu and Carmen become close. She is falling in love with him, and he meets her parents. He goes to confession for the first time and then stops for a drink at a bar. A stranger tells him, “Life is going to give you a lot of reasons to be angry, but you only need one reason to be grateful.” After, he is in a terrible motorcycle crash. When he wakes from a coma, he believes Mary spoke to him at the crash.

Stu begins to feel the call to the priesthood. He asks to meet with Carmen, who thinks he is going to propose. Instead, he tells her he is going to become a priest. She is angry and heartbroken. Stu applies to the seminary in a most unconventional way. The rector sends him a rejection letter, but Stu doesn’t take no for an answer. His conversion is an ongoing endeavor.

Father Stu is based on the true story of Father Stuart Long of the Diocese of Helena, Montana. Wahlberg and Gibson give credible performances as a father and son at odds with one another. Writer-director Rosalind Ross, in her first feature film, combines humor and heart in a profanity-laced story about redemption. However, themes of family, grace, faith, forgiveness, and reconciliation prevail. Father Stu is in theaters now.

A-3, R ‚ Pervasive language, sports violence, peril.

The Adam Project

In 2050, Adam (Ryan Reynolds), a fighter pilot, goes rogue by traveling down a wormhole and crashing into his past in 2022. However, he was aiming for 2018 so that he could stop his father, Louis (Mark Ruffalo), the godfather of time travel, and reset the future by destroying an algorithm in a particle accelerator. Adam’s boss, Maya (Catherine Keener), is exploiting time travel through “The Adam Project,” which she cocreated with Louis for profit and power. Adam finds his younger 12-year-old self (Walter Scobell), who constantly starts fights at school, and his mom, Ellie (Jennifer Garner). Adam’s wife, Laura (Zoe Saldaña), has been stranded in 2018, and Adam wants to find her too.

From here on in, the narrative of the catchy script, directed by Shawn Levy, is classic Ryan Reynolds, who engages with his younger self with heart and humor. Scobell is a perfect foil for Reynolds’ inner journey of forgiveness and righting wrongs.

After the ethical consideration of tampering with the universe, it doesn’t really matter what happens in the film in terms of parallel time travel because this is ultimately the story of a family in grief trying to find a way forward in love. I really enjoyed it. The Adam Project is available on Netflix.

A-3, PG-13, Greed, peril, science fiction violence.

Drive My Car

Although this Oscar-winning Japanese film opens with some uncomfortably explicit talk, it tells the story of Yûsuke Kafuku (Hidetoshi Nishijima), an actor and theater director, and his wife, Oto (Reika Kirishima), a screenwriter. The film, available on HBO Max, develops into a story of hope, grief, and healing.

Oto tells her stories to Yûsuke, who writes them down. But she dies suddenly after having an affair with a young actor who will come back into Yûsuke’s life two years later when he directs a version of Anton Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya.

Yûsuke, however, must accept a chauffeur to drive his own car while in residence. The driver’s name is Misaki (Tôko Miura). She is silent and smokes, but never in his car. Over the weeks the characters come to know each other, and they grow in ways they could never have imagined.

At almost three hours long, Drive My Car is a dramatic, artful showcase of human grief, love, and loss with exceptional acting that culminates in transcendence and freedom.

L, Brief nudity and sexuality.

I have always felt that if a mother could do one last thing on earth for her family, she would not preach a sermon to them; nor would she give them directions as to how to live their lives. I have a feeling that her last act, if she was capable, would be to say, “Listen, dear ones, just sit down at the table because I want to cook you the best meal you ever had.” Nurture and feed: It’s what moms do best.

A Mother’s Healing Power

The other thing mothers possess is healing power. A mother’s kiss has healed more skinned knees and stubbed toes than you can count. Broken hearts are harder to heal, but the best chance you have is for Mom to hold you. She feels the hurt, too, and wants to take a little bit of it on herself.

I have very distinct memories when, as a young boy of six or seven in the 1940s, I had a bad head cold, chest cold and cough. My mom would put me to bed for the night and then begin her powerful medical care. She would take a big of jar Vick’s VapoRub and lather my chest, throat and around my nose with it. And then she would take a flannel cloth that she had heated in the oven and put it on my chest. Next, she would button my flannel pajamas right up to my neck and pull the covers up to my chin.

She would then kiss me and say, “Good night, Jimmy. Sleep tight.” I would be left in my bedroom that was vaporized with Vicks and its magnificent odor. Even with a really bad cold, I felt so content and at peace. Talk about healing! I remember those occasions 70 years later as though they happened yesterday. Even today, when I smell Vick’s, I’m again filled with those feelings of a seven-year-old boy. There’s one thing I could never figure out, however: Mothers never seem to catch their kids’ colds. Maybe they are immune.

The death of our moms is surely one of the saddest days of our lives. I’ve often said that, in life, we have a thousand images of our loved ones. At their death, we have 10,000 images of them.

Long-forgotten incidents and events come to mind. They usually are not earth-shaking situations we remember; rather, it is just the little things that made our relationships with them so dear. Sometimes we feel a few regrets when we realize how much we loved them. We see so much more that we could have done. But moms would feel the same about themselves toward us.

Most wonderful, of course, is that our faith has a way of answering questions and helping us understand that their deaths and those of all our loved ones are not signs of an ending, but rather a new beginning for them. The separation is only physical, though that initially is very painful. Spiritually, we are never separated from them. That’s because the God we believe in and who revealed to us the truth about life, death and life eternal never separates people who love one another. God is love. Why would he separate loving people? Actually, they are closer than ever. We can’t see them, but they can see us. They can hear us and they still watch over us; that’s what mothers do! And our faith reminds us that there is a reunion waiting for us when we have completed our journey on earth. What a reunion that will be!

Personally, I know my mom and dad are always with me. Each morning at prayer, I say these words: “Dear Mom and Dad: Thank you for the gift of life you gave to Marianne (my sister) and me. Thank you for sharing your faith with us and supporting us in our vocations as priest and sister. Dear Lord, they deserve your special care. They gave us to you in our vocations, and so we now give them to you. Amen.”