By Mary Ann Wilson ’06, ’13 M.Div.

My grandmother, Sue Dominick, showed up for her freshman year of college and registered for French, Italian, and Spanish. She wanted to be in the foreign service and travel overseas, seeing the beauty and diversity this great world has to offer.

My grandmother’s life did not follow the trajectory she envisioned at the beginning of college. A few years after graduation, she met and married my grandfather, and my mother came along shortly thereafter. The Dominick family would grow until the seventh child (and only boy!) was born, and my grandmother remained firmly rooted in her hometown as she attended to the many needs of the family she and my grandfather raised. For most of my grandmother’s life while her children were young, she was a stay-at-home mom living the road-most-often-taken for mothers, which included the mundane tasks of making meals, washing dishes, wiping noses, and driving carpools.

Grandma Dominick may not have traveled the globe, but her vivaciousness and profound faith led her to explore and love the world within and just outside her door. Grandma delighted in each person that she met and considered it a great gift to welcome any person to her home. My aunts recall coming into the kitchen and often finding my grandmother on the phone, listening to someone and praying with them: it could be an old friend or someone she just met. The total hospitality of my grandparents’ home meant that at one meal, a near stranger joined the table and nobody said anything until the meal was almost over. This delight and reverence for each person she met also led my grandmother to connect the many people she loved to each other, often across divides, as she hosted interfaith prayer groups in her home and started a Catholic bookstore for Southern Catholics and Bible Belt Protestants alike to learn about the riches of the Catholic faith.

My grandmother did not blaze trails in foreign lands or fill up her passport, as she initially desired. In an era that can lift up novelty and adventure, I admire her willingness to give up a more romantic path for a more simple, ordinary one. But Grandma is much wiser than I, and much more in tune with the other Saints of our tradition who gave up their visions of glory for the greater, deeper, truer glory of God: St. Ignatius of Loyola surrendering his dreams of prestige on the battlefield to instead follow and fight for Christ; St. Therese of Lisieux forgoing visions of far-flung missionary activity to live in her community, only to touch the hearts of millions throughout the world and throughout the centuries. These saints and my grandma know that the only path worth taking is the one that the Holy Spirit leads us on, whether it be near or far, simple or daunting, extraordinary or quite mundane. In the spirit of Grandma Dominick and these holy trailblazers—who all intercede for us each step of the way—may we too walk our paths with faith and joy, asking for God’s grace to direct our paths to heaven.