“She Who Chose Us”

By Jill Landry Stoner, Parishioner, St. Rosalie Parish, Harvey, LA

I first encountered Don Bosco and Mary under the title of Help of Christians in the seventh grade when the Salesian Sisters arrived at Immaculate Conception Grammar School in Marrero, LA. When I was 14, my family began attending St. Rosalie Church. Fr. Joe Vien, SDB, a young associate pastor, would ask me to lector. Like many teens, I would grumble to myself, but in hindsight, it proved to be a formative experience that led me to lector regularly as an adult. I attended a tri-school COR retreat at Archbishop Shaw High School and subsequently staffed another. There, I got to know Fr. John Nazzaro, SDB, a young priest at the time, who was just as much fun then as he is now!

I came home from college one weekend and heard a homily about the need to increase donations to the collection basket. I was incensed and hastily dashed off a letter to Fr. Jim Curran, pastor at the time. God bless him! He kindly wrote me back and explained that the church had bills to pay, too. Fr. Jim and I would become great friends over the years.

When my intended and I sat down with Fr. Jim for marriage preparation, we were surprised to discover our wedding date, May 24, was also the Feast of Our Lady, Help of Christians. Fr. Jim thought we selected that date with Mary’s feast day in mind—but it was She, Our Lady, who chose us.

The desire to live in God’s grace through following the Church’s teaching on Natural Family Planning was a transformative experience in my life. My eyes were opened to the beauty of the Church’s teaching on marriage and family life; how wonderfully designed the human body is by Our Creator; how my body naturally worked to bring forth new life; how the composition of mother’s milk changed depending on whether the baby was premature, full-term or even, an older nursling. It was in those hectic moments of motherhood that I found my greatest joy and ample opportunity to reflect on Our Lady as a mother and wife.

I could relate to Mary’s hidden years in Nazareth in my years as a young mother, years that were busy with the minutiae of daily life. These included nurturing, rejoicing, and reading books to insatiable young minds thirsty to hear more stories, be they Mother Goose rhymes, Blueberries for Sal, D’Aulaire’s Greek Myths, Lives of the Saints, or stories from the children’s Bibles. They also were made up of establishing house rules for a growing family and always trying to imagine the best way forward to bring these young souls to know, love, and serve Christ.

In the Divine Praises, we hear:

Blessed be the great Mother of God, Mary most holy,
Blessed be her holy and Immaculate Conception,
Blessed be her glorious Assumption,
Blessed be the name of Mary, Virgin and Mother.

Being counter-cultural through our practice of Natural Family Planning led us to disregard many of the opinions of the world. Although it proved to be a slight nuisance to my girls once they began school, they were both named after the Blessed Mother as Mary Rosalie and Mary Cecilia. My boys both have Joseph as one of their middle names—Blessed be St. Joseph, Her most chaste spouse.

Bringing each child to the Blessed Mother’s altar after his or her Baptism reminded us of Mary and Joseph bringing Jesus to the Temple in His Presentation to Simeon in accord with the Mosaic Law. One year, our family celebrated several momentous occasions corresponding to the Glorious Mysteries: our eldest had her birthday on Easter Sunday, our fourth was born on Ascension Thursday and was baptized on Pentecost, and our second made her first Holy Communion on the Feast of Mary’s Assumption.

An old maxim is “the hand that rocks the cradle rules the world.” Although I am licensed to practice law in Louisiana, I chose to spend my life raising my children as a full-time mother. I am indebted to my Salesian Family for developing a spirit of accompanying youth in me, which has led me to fully embrace letting the dust settle and the household chores wait so I could be “present” with my children in their daily lives. This includes picking them up from school when they were most eager to talk and excitedly relating their day to me while sitting at the kitchen table (or, occasionally, their sorrows and challenges).

After 30 years of marriage, our children are now fledged, forging their own paths in this sometimes chaotic world. As a mother, I have had a hard time letting them go—it’s a bittersweet experience, as we don’t live in my grandmother’s world where everyone was right down the block or around the corner. My children are flung across America, stretching from California to Virginia and Chicago to South Bend. Like Don Bosco’s famous dream, I anchor myself and my family between the two pillars: I imagine my loved ones under Our Lady’s mantle and at each Holy Eucharist, where I receive and place them in Jesus’ most Sacred Heart (slightly riffing on the Anima Christi):

O good Jesus, hear me,
Within thy wounds hide them,
Never let them be separated from thee,
From the evil one defend them,
At the hour of their death call them
And bid them come unto thee,
That with thy saints they may praise thee
Forever and ever. Amen.

Jill Landry Stoner is a 40-year parishioner of St. Rosalie Parish in Harvey, LA, along with her husband, Jim Stoner (a 30-year parishioner). The Stoners volunteered as teachers of the sympto-thermal method of Natural Family Planning for 23 years through the Couple to Couple League, (a true blessing and the best-kept secret of the Catholic Church!) and are parents of four living children— Rosalie (28), Cecilia (27), Anthony (23), and Dominic (19).