June 22 – Feast of St. Thomas More

Let me tell you about my life-long crush on Thomas More...

The library in the Catholic school that I attended as a child was small and mandatory. Each week every class had an assigned library time. Each child was required to check out one book and return it the following week. By the time I was in fourth grade I thought I had already read most of the interesting books the small library had to offer. One day I found myself still bookless by the end of the library session. The teacher, a rather threatening nun, told me to just pick anything. I randomly grabbed a book off the shelf. It was a biography of Thomas More. I had never heard of him...

I was a compulsive reader. By this I mean that the printed word was somewhat irresistible to me. Of course I read the book - because it was there - and I fell in love with the man in the book. Briefly, Thomas More was a Lord Chancellor of England under Henry VIII. He opposed the divorce of the king and his subsequent marriage to Anne Boleyn. He was beheaded because of it, and the Catholic church eventually declared him a saint. Those historical facts were not what endeared him to me.

Thomas grew up the son of a lawyer in 15^th century England. He loved God and wanted to serve Him. He explored the idea of becoming a priest or a monastic brother, going so far as to live with them for awhile. He came away from his experience with the certainty that God was not calling him to the priesthood, but rather that he was being called to be a husband and a father. Like his father, he became a lawyer, an occupation at that time full of temptation and corruption. Thomas managed to avoid both. He married the love of his life and had several children. He was progressive in that he believed in educating his daughters as well as his sons. When his wife died at a young age, he quickly, pragmatically, remarried a widow who was several years older than he was. She was unlike his first wife in both temperament and education, and yet they had a long successful marriage. He rose to heights of political power as chancellor of England under King Henry VIII. He opposed the king's divorce from his first wife and his remarriage to a second wife as well as the king's setting himself up as the supreme head of the church in England. He was eventually imprisoned and finally beheaded for treason as the result of his opposition to the king. He managed to do all this with integrity, godliness and even humor.

Even as a nine-year-old, I appreciated the charms of a godly, humorous and faith-filled man who was in the world, but not of it. When I was in eighth grade, the Robert Bolt play about More, A Man for All Seasons, was made into a movie. It won numerous Academy Awards, including best picture, so the nuns deemed it worthy of a movie field trip. I saw the movie, read the play, and both added to my crush on Thomas More. He was the man I wanted to marry – a lover of God, a man of strong moral fortitude and someone with a quirky sense of humor (portrayed in both his biographies and in the play/movie). He had a rare ability to live a life serving God in the public sector, do his job extraordinarily well and without compromise, and laugh along the way. I made a deal with God – give me a man like that to marry, and my first son will have Thomas somewhere in his name.

Well, God does answer prayers. He gave me that kind of man as my husband, right down to the quirky sense of humor. Even better, my husband has managed to keep his head...so far. My son knows that his middle name, Thomas, is after Thomas More and he knows that there was some sort of deal involving God and a husband. And A Man for All Seasons is still my all-time favorite movie...

I do not care very much what men say of me, provided that God approves of me. - Thomas More