Her Name is Frankie
Her Name is Frankie
S.A. Morrison
On the Great Cloud of Witnesses and a Family’s Patron Saint
I could tell you how she settled Cuban refugees in Dallas with her real estate acumen during the Cold War. Or I could tell you how she helped name the streets that still exist in the metroplex. I could tell you that she was a professional basketball player before the WNBA existed. I could even tell you how she was born on a farm, grew up on a tractor, has two birthdays, and was named after her uncle. But none of that is the most interesting thing about her. So instead, I will tell you about her faith.
Her name is Frankie. She is my husband’s grandmother and my daughter’s great-grandmother, as well as her namesake. She is also one of my most tangible reminders that we carry an inheritance of faith and belong to a cloud of witnesses who have preserved the heritage of God for generations. And she is, as close as any one person can get, love and faith and steadfastness.
Frankie was swept up in the world. The American Dream sunk its roots into the bedrock of her spirit; she desired to do great things. Perhaps God wasn’t the last thing on her mind, but it was definitely below basketball, tennis, golf, school, and a career. But the Holy Ghost, working in his mysterious ways, sought her. As a young adult in business school, living with her sister and brother-in-law meant she endured constant invitations to worship with them at church. But Sundays were already claimed: they were for tennis. On an unspectacular day with unspectacular motives, she went to church and sat in the back. God convicted her; he invited her to be a coheir with the Son and she walked that aisle like a good WWII-era-Southerner to accept the proposition. Frankie entered the family of faith.
She went on to marry her “damn Yankee” husband Bob (about whom even more ink could be spilled—how he jumped from the wing of a burning plane, became a beekeeper by accident, and how Frankie’s best friend refused to come to their wedding). She and Bob helped plant a church in 1958. Their daughter was the first baby born into the church and Frankie remains a member there to this day. She raised her two daughters, who each went on to have three children.
If we looked through the Sunday School roster over the last 60 years, I’m sure we would learn a little about Frankie’s faith. We could look through the yearly budgets and see evidence of her generosity. And I am certain there is no shortage of eyewitnesses, people we may not even know exist, who would eagerly testify to Frankie’s character and the Holy Ghost’s work in her life. But I would rather speak candidly about the palpable ways I see God when I look at her. Attendance and tithing and a marked-up bible tell us something, but it does not tell us everything. And it does not make my heart leap with gratitude for the woman she is. Her love does that.
Stepping into a new last name and family can be as frightening as it is joyous. Frankie quickly gave me the gift of being called her grandchild, and has physically welcomed me into her family though kissed cheeks and held hands. In her love of me, I see and taste and feel and know the love of Jesus, as if he himself rolls off the tip of her tongue. As if the Christ is what she sees before she sees me. As if he himself takes my face between his scarred palms and kisses my face. Yes— her palms are his and her lips are his and she is his. And the way that she always tells me that I, a married-in family member, am her own helps me know that I am Christ’s.
I was neither the first nor the last adopted into Frankie’s love. Her family through flesh and blood is large, but her family through spirit is larger. I believe she loves the refugees she helped house, and the staff at her favorite Mexican restaurant, and her neighbors all the same, and considers them all above herself. She is so attuned to what the love of God means in practice, that I think she sees Jesus before she sees a stranger’s face. Ironically, I think that’s the reason I see Jesus’ face before I see her.
Bough by bough, her faith grafted branches through her daughters and now her grandson. Her limbs have given way to fruit. She has been a trellis, inviting and encouraging the shoots underneath her to grow up toward the Vine Head. In so doing, these branches and tendrils have laced themselves through her lattice, through her very being. I’ve known her for little more than a decade, yet even I find myself weaving inextricably through her, unable to tell where my faith story stops and hers begins.
Frankie’s life has not been without sorrow. She was widowed at too young of an age. With her large family comes a slew of harrowing stories. Her life has been witness to the Great Depression, stock market crashes and recessions, World War II, Vietnam, presidential impeachments, and assassinations. She narrowly missed the pandemic of 1918 only to live vulnerably in the pandemic of 2020. To our great gratitude, she has lived long, but she has also suffered long. She worries for us all—not in the way of hand-wringing, but in the way of tender love and constant prayers.
*
I’ve long fixated on the mention of Eunice and Lois in Paul’s letter to Timothy. Lois came to faith in some lost-to-history way, raising her daughter up in that same faith. This lineage of belief carried over to Timothy; he carried with him the miracle of his mother’s and grandmother’s salvation in his own conversion. Because of Lois, churches throughout Ephesus were well-taken care of, theologically sound, and deeply loved.
I don’t know if my husband would believe in God if his mother and grandmother hadn’t introduced the two of them. While I still don’t know how my daughter will respond to the invitation of the Holy Ghost, my prayer is that the heaviness of her heritage impresses the story of the cross upon her heart.
*
The church never formally canonized St. Julian of Norwich, but I have canonized her myself. Her works are the first known written by an English speaking woman, though we know very little about her. Her life is almost mythical. But we know and remember her by her faith.
St. Julian asked for three things from God after her conversion: that she might understand the passion of Christ as if she witnessed it herself, that she might suffer a near-death illness that would enrich her relationship with him, and that she would be given the wounds of compassion, contrition, and longing for God. God granted her these things. She had a near-death experience during which she had 16 heavenly visions which she later processed through her writings.
In one such vision, Jesus tenderly said to her: “All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.” St. Julian is stirred to compassion and joy, convinced that all things wretched and vile would ultimately be righted in Christ.
St. Julian lived in solitude and devoted her life to contemplation and prayer for the benefit of the church. In her lifetime, she saw the bubonic plague, the Hundred Years War, famine, and the Peasants Revolt. Her love of God remained vibrant. Her contributions and writings have reverberated throughout history and the church still hears her today. She had a faith that I could only hope to emulate. Her faith reminds me of someone else, too.
I write that statement with trepidation, not knowing how my beloved centenarian Baptist would feel about being compared to a Medieval mystic who wrote about Jesus being our mother (and is the only one to have done so without being deemed heretical). But I have seen the spirit of St. Julian in this year of our Lord 2022. And I have seen it in St. Frankie (the church has also failed to canonize Frankie, but once again, I’ve done it myself).
St. Julian’s revelation of God as both our Father and our Mother hinged on the outworking of his love. God’s knowledge of us is his love os us, and the mercy to show us himself is love, too. God’s protection and compassion and generosity is all tangled-up in his persistent willingness to love. It is as though love is a language we are given to understand God, and to help others understand him, too. I believe Frankie knows this and has spent most of her life imitating it.
Frankie sees people, not their sins or faults, and she loves them with fire and stubbornness.
St. Julian taught us the motherly quality of God and St. Frankie manifestly revealed these qualities to me. Her motherliness is inextricably tied to her godliness. Because where there is opportunity to dote and treasure and spoil, she will take it, just as God chooses to give us gifts of grace. Likewise, where there is opportunity to protect, or embrace, or provide— she is ever-prepared to give. I think the aroma of love lays so thickly on her being that all of creation takes notice.
*
The world was beautiful and special enough with one Frankie, but we delighted in the idea of adding more goodness to the world with another. Our daughter arrived in 2020, and it was one of the greatest honors I've had to give her a name; the honor doubled to name her after someone so cherished. At its foundation, naming her after her great-grandmother was an effort to prolong the world-as-we-know-and-love it, for a world without Frankie would be so poor. I don’t know how the world ever managed without one. A world with two is all surpassing in its riches.
Our names are imputed upon us without our consent or permission. Our faith has a measure of this as well. Our names, like our faith, are inheritances worthy of preservation. Our faith bears fruit, if we let it. Maybe that fruit ripens and rips, spilling its juices, staining the letters of our names with its sweetness. I’m reminded of Elisha who, without being asked, is covered by the mantle of Elijah. He received a double portion of Elijah’s spirit and continued the work that God had already begun. We, too, participate in a relay of confession, passing the baton of faith from generation to generation. Like Elisha carried the work that Elijah had begun, I hope that my husband, daughter, and I would continue the work that was begun on a farm in 1923 (or 1922, depending on who you ask).
What great comfort it is to know that Lois, Eunice, Elijah, Elisha, and Julian are each a part of the great cloud of witnesses. I like to think, however un-theological it may be, that they see our infirmities through a vignette of God’s goodness and, with soft gazes, they cheer us on as we crawl our way to the finish line of this human race. They share their faith with us in the reward they have received as the fruit of faith—they now see with perfect vision the Christ; they live and dwell with him. They have received their inheritance.
In God’s pursuit of this great matriarch of our family, he also began the work of pursuing my husband, and now my daughter. In God’s great faithfulness to Frankie and her own sensitivity to that faithfulness, our faith seems thicker, stickier, and rebounding evermore. St. Julian was right to say that all manner of thing shall be well. I know this because I have had the privilege of witnessing a life so well-lived, a life that has preached to me that all manner of thing shall be well.
We know of Julian of Norwich primarily because of her writings. The great cloud of witnesses are preserved through those who have carried their stories, through the pens and papyrus because ink preserves those enduring words. I hope, too, that coming generations will know St. Frankie, the Elder and the Younger.
S.A. Morrison
Author & Writer
S.A. has been published in Fathom Magazine, Gospel-Centered Discipleship, and Humble Orthodoxy. Her first book With Those Who Weep: A Theology of Tears was released in June 2021. You can find more of her writing here.
Photography by Bekir Donmez