Additional Columns by Sherry Antonetti: Haiku Prayers The Year of Paul the Apostle The Gifts of Sons Teen Tips for Surviving to Adulthood, Spritually Intact The Luminous Mystery of Marriage, A Primer for All of Us Prayer Spam My Son Peter Meets the Pope Being Spiritually Awake for the Feast Why We Don't Always Get What We Want...And Shouldn't "Cheer, Cheer for Old Notre Dame!" Becoming a Great Story Learning to be Unafraid to Ask The Gift of Courage Coming Home to the Wide Open Door of the Father To Do List for the Day, Every Day Delighting in the Unexpected Immediate Intimacy of Answered Prayers Celebrating the Song of Songs on Saint Valentine's Day Forty Lenten Resolutions

Feeling like a World of Sparrows

When I found out I was pregnant the first time, way back in 1993, the first doctor I visited counseled “Abort.” after hearing my medical history. I went to a second doctor who sent me a specialist for my airway. The specialist also suggested “Abort.” So I found another specialist. Shaken by the repeated suggestions to as they put it, “terminate my pregnancy,” I decided to go to mass. I hadn’t thought being pregnant would be so scary. I was scared, and all these doctors wanting me to quit before I was two months into it made me even more frightened.

It was noon on a weekday in summer at a church I disliked but it had the merit of being close by. That unknown Wednesday in July, God arranged the attendees of that Mass to orchestrate what became referred to in my house as the “Dripping Babies” mass. The church was oddly packed with mothers, mothers pushing strollers, mothers holding two toddlers and having a pouch for the third. Expectant mothers with two, three, four and more children, coming up to receive.

Never before and never since have I ever been to another mass anywhere wherein I witnessed over and over and over again while watching the communion line, so many illustrations of God’s witness in the form of mothers. Each of them receiving the “Body of Christ,” each of them, by their presence that day, reaffirming what God had been shouting though I had not been able to hear, so fearful was I from my many doctor’s visits. Even the song sung at Communion, a rarity at a daily mass to say the least, was “Be Not Afraid.” The song and the women with their children coming up to receive and saying their “Amens” were God’s way of loudly whispering, “It will be okay. It will be okay. It will be okay.”

Earlier this year we found out our newest son, Paul, had Downs’ Syndrome. This time, God knew I would need waves of support rather than one grand gesture.. So every Sunday, from the one I learned of Paul’s disability to this, a different person with handicapping conditions, a different family coping with the blessings and graces of a child born physically imperfect in a world that places a premium on outward perfection, has been revealed to me. I sat by an autistic son and his father the first Sunday. The son loudly whispered throughout the mass, but he said the mass.

The next week, there was a row of individuals with Cerebral Palsy at the front. We tend to go to the same mass every week, but every week, I’d spot someone new. My dietician for gestational diabetes turned out to have a daughter with Williamson’s condition whose best friend had Downs’ Syndrome. The nurse who drew my blood for a Rhogram shot was one of ten. Getting my teeth cleaned, I learned my dentist’s favorite uncle was born with Trisomy 21. Online, my favorite writing site was founded by a woman whose brother Paul, blogged, weight lifted and had Down’s.

These were hand picked pilgrims, once again, pushed by the Holy Spirit to provide witness over and over again for me and for who knows how many others at that mass faced with something beyond human control. I had tried for weeks to rationalize, “I’m just sensitized right now so I’m more aware,” until the Sunday a Mother sat with her adult Downs’ Syndrome daughter right next to me in the back with my squirmy toddlers. As I wrestled with trying not to either burst into tears or begin to pester the mom with questions rather than pay attention to the mass, just in case I still felt stubborn, the communion song began. “Be Not Afraid.” These families, the song, these were the loud whispers of the Living Word. “It will be okay. It will be okay. It will be okay.”

As I shook with wonder at the orchestration of coincidence to great to ignore or push away, a great and glorious thought came, God is doing this for each of us, every day, for each of us is worth a world of sparrows. Each of us, is a whisper of God to someone else if we allow it.

Sherry Antonetti is a mother of eight children and a freelance writer of humor and family life columns with prior publications in Absolutewrite, the Catholic Standard, Beaumont Enterprise and the Washington Post. She can be reached at Smwbmpfjm@netzero.com. You can read additional pieces from her blog, http://sherryantonettiwrites.blogspot.com.