A month ago I started this theme hoping fatherhood would start to feel less like something I was constantly behind on and more like something modeled on somebody bigger than me. I didn’t expect to end it thinking about a mother instead.

St. Zélie Martin buried four of her children and raised the other five through more grief and worry than I’ve had to carry in my whole life. Somewhere in the middle of it she wrote to her family that having children had changed her plans. “I wanted to have a lot of them,” she said, “in order to raise them for Heaven.”

That was the whole aim. Not a well run house. Not kids who turn out fine by whatever the neighborhood happens to be measuring that year. Heaven, named plainly, as the actual point.

I’ve spent this month mostly working on mechanics. Grace before dinner. A cross carved over the door. Saying out loud which way my house is going before anyone else answers. All of that still matters, but Zélie’s line is the one I keep forgetting to say to myself. None of it is really about raising decent kids. It’s about raising saints, or giving them every honest chance to become one.

One of her daughters ended up a Doctor of the Church. I’m not expecting that from mine. I’m just going to tell them tonight, plainly, what any of this was ever for.

Today’s Bible Study

Paul asks the Thessalonians a question he already knows the answer to: what will his hope, joy, or crown of boasting actually be when Christ comes back? “Is it not you? For you are our glory and joy” (1 Thessalonians 2:19 to 20). He isn’t naming a discipline he mastered or a church he built well. His measure is the people he loved into the faith. That’s strange to sit with as a father. On that day, it won’t come down to whether grace got said every night. It will come down to whether the people I loved are standing there too.

Recommended Reading

If you want to sit with Zélie longer than one line from a letter, her and Louis’s own correspondence is collected in A Call to a Deeper Love. It isn’t polished spiritual writing. It’s a working mother and father talking honestly about sick children, money, and each other, which is exactly why it’s worth reading.