Forgiving, faith give a mother strength

Tale of loss, forgiveness brings a prayer breakfast to tears

Sandy Banks

March 22, 2008

Barbara La Porte demurred at first when Father Fred Bailey offered to fly her out from New Jersey to speak at the annual Good Friday prayer breakfast sponsored by his Orange County church.

I'm just a mother, not a professional speaker, La Porte said.

On Friday morning, that much was clear. La Porte spoke softly, formally, her eyes seldom straying from her written speech. But her message didn't need polish or professional flourish.

"Last year, on April 16," she began, "an assailant took the lives of 32 people on the Virginia Tech campus and my son was one of them."

She led the audience through her son Matt's 20 years, tracing the evolution of a bright but impressionable youth and of the mother who tried to chart his path.

In sixth grade, Matthew brought home his first failing grade, began running with a bad crowd and arguing with his parents. So they sent him to a military school in Pennsylvania -- "one with strong morals and values" -- 198 miles from home.

"I didn't cry when I dropped him off," his mother said. "I was placing Matt in God's hands."

Matt blossomed in boarding school. Six years later, he enrolled at Virginia Tech on an Air Force ROTC scholarship. He studied political science, took salsa lessons, played tenor drum for the school's regimental band, the Highty-Tighties. Most days, he wore his cadet uniform to class.

He was in his sophomore year last spring when a deranged student stormed into his French class, firing.

Barbara La Porte didn't worry when she heard news of the attacks. But the day wore on and her son didn't call. By the time a policeman showed up at her home, "I already knew."

She doesn't pretend to understand why her son died. It was God's will, is all she knows. "I'm letting the Lord lead me," she said. And everywhere, she sees signs of comfort.

She thinks of the account of a Virginia State trooper, who found Matt's lifeless body on the classroom floor "in all that chaos and horror" with a beatific look of peace on his handsome face.

She was grateful for the letter from the family of girl who survived because Matt helped barricade the classroom door and kept the killer out long enough for her to hide.

And she saw a sign in the sunbeam that broke through the clouds one afternoon and settled, for a moment, on the sofa next to her, as she read John 15:13: "Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends."

"I turned and blew a kiss to Matt's photograph," she told the audience, "and when I turned back, the sunbeam was gone." It was the only sunlight of the day.

Father Fred, as Bailey is known, is a priest at Aliso Viejo's Corpus Christi Catholic-Christian Community.

Each year he brings in speakers familiar with loss, grief and recovery to speak on the most somber day of the Christian year -- the day Jesus Christ was crucified.

Speaking of La Porte, he said, "She's a mother who, like Mary, knows the grief of losing a son. . . . No mother thinks she's going to send her kid off to college and get him back in a casket."

Her story, he warned the 500 breakfast guests, would be "difficult to share and difficult to hear." And it was.

All across the hotel banquet room, women pulled tissues from their purses and dabbed at tears, and gray-haired men pressed hankies to their faces, as if they had runny noses, not welling tears.

But it was as much a message of hope as of grief -- much like the Easter season for Christian believers.

La Porte said she never felt anger over her son's death: "God was there for me. . . . Through his mercy I was able not to feel the anger but to focus on the love. That had to be through divine mercy."

After Matt's death, her family walked around in a fog for weeks, she said. Then they realized they could mourn in isolation, or accept comfort and find relief.

"If I was full of anger, I wouldn't have been able to receive healing. . . . I came to the realization that forgiveness, love and mercy helped to lift the burden of the cross."

It's hard to fathom, especially for a parent. But perhaps that's the meaning of forgiveness. It's not a gift to the wrongdoer; it's a blessing to the one who forgives.

After her speech, La Porte was called back to the stage. She walked past giant photos of her son -- in his cadet uniform, with his family, mugging for the camera with friends -- and joined two Air Force officers standing at attention. They saluted and presented her a folded flag.

As the audience rose to applaud -- the gray-haired men finally let out their sobs -- and Barbara La Porte walked back to her seat, cradling the flag in her arms, as a mother would a newborn child.

sandy.banks@latimes.com