Confession - Sin and Suffering

CONFESSION

Sin started before birth – though I was called a brat, and even more humiliating, a “little” brat at home, it wasn’t until 1^st grade at St Joe’s that I learned of original sin. Original sin was actually comforting to me: I couldn’t be held responsible for the human condition; that was Adam and Eve’s fault.

Once we were enlisted in our grubby sinful original state, then the very next year, in second grade, when we obtained the Age of Reason and could then be held responsible for our sins, we were the stars of the greatest childhood Catholic production – First Communion.

But before the glory of First Communion was the humility of First Confession, “Penance.”

Being seven years old, we had now attained the “Age of Reason,” which meant no more getting away with impulse. Now you could think for yourself and control yourself, and exercise Self Control and Offer It Up, because you were no longer a baby or a little child whose parents had to control you. From now one, you would not automatically go to Heaven because with the Age of Reason, you had to earn your place in Heaven.

We had learned about the Creation of the World and the Garden of Eden, a paradise for the first humans. But the snake, the devil, the tempter to self-indulgence offered Adam and Eve an apple they couldn’t refuse. An apple – even then we knew the lowly apple symbolized something more than a piece of fruit.

The apple symbolized the one thing God had withheld from them – the true knowledge of good and evil. But he gave them Free Will, the ability to choose: right or wrong, freedom or subservience, health or pain. Free Will means we choose our life, no such thing as destiny.

But Adam and Eve blew it for everybody. Satan, that snake, got to them in the Garden of Paradise, and talked them into believing in their own glamour, their own importance, their own ambitions, were more important than obeying God. They disobeyed God, who had given them Free Will to choose right or wrong, and now we were all born, with life, yes, but also with Original Sin.

Original Sin was sort of like the inevitability of new clothes getting worn: we were human, we were born with this stain on our souls, we couldn’t be perfect, we were going to fail, so admit it and start again, admit it and start again, admit it and start again.

St. Michael’s feast day was September 29, so early in the school year we heard the story of Lucifer, the head angel, who wasn’t satisfied, who wanted to be God, and so he and Michael fought and Michael slew the dragon (Lucifer) and Lucifer went straight to Hell and lost his pretty lacy name, Lucifer, and was forever after called Satan, the Prince of Darkness. The Devil was worse than the worst bogeyman, for if we gave in to his temptations, he made us hated in God’s sight, and we wanted to be on God’s side. Well, maybe not hated, but if we offended God, we had to make it up to Him.

God had respected Satan enough to give him Free Will, but was Satan grateful? No, bad old Satan used that will to try to be better than God. And now he is pure evil, and wants to snatch our souls away from God. But we have to resist.

Because we have Free Will.

And no one is greater than God especially not you.

Free Will meant that we were responsible for what people thought of us, good or bad. I could choose to be a good girl and live by my conscience, formed by daily reprimands; or I could go my merry way and then burn in hell for all eternity, much longer than even a long lifetime.

So to start off, you had to do what you were told. And suffer for the one true faith, like the saints did.

That was Free Will.

The stories of the saints were our holy fairy tales, and from them we learned the drama of blood and violence. Many of the saints were tortured and died horribly, stoned to death, crucified upside down, torn apart by lions. This was darkly exciting.

The novenas in March to St Francis Xavier, the missionary Jesuit to the Philippines, was the big priest celebration of the year, not Mass or even preaching from the pulpit could compete with the thrice-daily gathering to pray and sing. We didn’t have to do it, but everybody did.

But what really appealed to me in the saints? The drama of their lives, their heroism in defying authority? the cruel and imaginative torture the natives inflicted on missionary saints? The saints’ devotion to the poor and downtrodden? That St. Francis loved the animals and the simple life; that St. Therese of Lisieux died young, advocating “The Little Way,” living reverentially every day, invoking God in the least little thing she did?

In reading of the saints, I gravitated towards the women who had married and had children. I wanted to be a holy celebrity, but I also wanted to be normal, to have a husband and a family. Elizabeth Seton, who came to the United States with five children, was widowed, and founded the Sisters of Mercy, was a godsend to me. I could be married and still be a saint!

Saint Elisabeth of Hungary trumped even Elizabeth Seton, for she was a queen, as well as a wife and mother and saint. And of course, I visualized the women saints as beautiful, who could dream of ugly celebrities? The dark niches of St. Joe’s church were dimly illuminated by rich stained-glass windows of fair women with long soft hair and sweet faces, dressed in beautiful robes and piously taking their place in history and eternity.

Missionaries gave up all the pleasures and freedoms of America to go to poor and alien countries where they helped end disease and poverty and by the way, convert the ignorant natives, and all the thanks they got in this life was oppression and persecution and torture by the officials in power. Their reward was a one-way ticket to paradise.

In the face of their horrible suffering, we were chastised to offer up whatever grievance we had, whatever discomfort we may be suffering for the poor souls in purgatory, those everyday people like you and me who’d died with some smattering of, not evil, but let’s just say imperfection, on their souls and had to be cleansed by the fires of purgatory until they were pure enough to pass judgment and enter heaven.

Suffering and offering it up for the poor souls in purgatory meant we couldn’t whine or complain because there were others so much worse off, who were patiently enduring the flames and unpleasantness of purgatory. So if I’d just shut up about my own little hangnails and chilblains, I could get them out of purgatory and into heaven sooner.

But all this wasn’t much comfort as I got out of bed to an unheated house and my bare feet hit the ice cold gray-and-white woven-patterned linoleum of the bedroom floor, and I scurried to the even-colder tiled bathroom floor (once six other people had gotten out of it) and I ate the cheap and crummy oatmeal for breakfast and ran in the cold biting wind to school. There my lips stung, chapped from licking them in the cold winter wind. Chilblains burned my feet in their short cotton anklets; my arms itched mercilessly from the stiff wool sweater.

Oh I knew suffering, nothing can be done to make it better: offer it up. And how about the suffering of poor Mr. Donnelly across the street, who’d had a paralyzing stroke in his 20’s and who dragged his crippled leg as he painfully and strenuously walked down the street to the bus stop? How about the suffering of the sad lady up the street who never smiled, who had an equally taciturn husband, who seemed empty of warmth or joy? All offering it up for the poor souls in purgatory.

Even if you went to purgatory, it wasn’t so bad, because eventually you’d enter Heaven. And you had all the time in the world to go through the process, because eventually you’d get to Heaven, and Heaven was eternal, never-ending.

Thinking of eternity made my stomach hurt. It was okay for God to be eternal: always was, always will be, always remains the same, but for me? I knew I always wasn’t. I didn’t start to exist until I was born, but now that I was born, I would live and die but my soul would live forever.

Everything had a beginning and an end except my individual soul, like everyone’s: it would go on forever. At least the poor souls in Purgatory knew that Heaven awaited them. The worst part of Hell was knowing it was forever, no reprieve. So the ideal of dying and going “straight to Heaven” was better than a first class ticket to Disneyland.

Confession was the way to get that ticket and you could do it! It was attainable when summer camp, skiing, and Disneyland were wishes that were answered with the finality of “If wishes were horses, then beggars would ride.” But back then, we believed that God could be on your side whether you were rich or poor.

Every Saturday, you made your confession in the dark booth at the back of the church and received your penance, usually a list of Our Fathers and Hail Marys, and emerged clean as a whistle, ready for you Saturday night bath. If you died in your sleep, you’d wake up in Heaven, before you had the opportunity to commit another sin. Yippee!

But before you could examine your conscience and confess your sins, you had to decipher the Ten Commandments. “I am the Lord thy God, thou shalt not have false Gods before me.” Well duh, of course there was only God, who’d be dumb enough to worship the sun or an animal? We have the Trinity! Three in One! The Father (He was the one we really thought of as God) the Son, (the nice one that mean people crucified) and the Holy Ghost (kind of ineffable, this bird that once sat on people’s heads, and after all, you don’t want to think too much about ghosts — that’s nightmare stuff)

But oh no! It says right in the catechism that “A Catholic sins against the first commandment by not believing what God has revealed, and by taking part in non-Catholic worship.” Mom! You led me right into the Devil’s trap by taking me to that non-Catholic baptism!

“Oh that doesn’t mean you,” Mom said breezily. “That baptism was family.” I knew Mom wasn’t really a good Catholic, but it says right here that taking part in non-Catholic worship is a sin against the first commandment. The very first one! Mom read the anxious look on my face and said, “You’re also supposed to obey your mother. You were obeying me. I’m too blame. Quit worrying, for heaven’s sake!”

My mother, with her lackadaisical religion had let me off the hook.

Now, “Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain.” This one came right up against my hot temper, and my homelife. Neither Mom nor Dad swore in the slightest, but my older brothers slipped in the casual “Damn” and Mom was always telling me to stop saying, “Gol…..” in disappointment, or “Gad!” in exasperation or sarcasm. But I didn’t have to confess that, just stop saying it.

The Third Commandment , to “keep holy the Lord’s day,” was a cinch. Aside from the fact that everyone went to Church, unless you were so sick that you couldn’t get out of bed, and that all stores and businesses —everything! — was closed on Sundays, it was my one chance to dress up and sing, and afterwards, back home, Dad cooked sausages and rolled them up with mustard in crustless bread and wrapped them in tin foil. To sit on the living room floor with sausage rolls and orange juice and read the funny papers, that was one of the week’s highlights, and the only price to pay was going to church.

So far, nothing to confess. The fourth commandment, “Honor thy father and thy mother” was confusing because it didn’t say what you couldn’t do, only what you should do. The Sisters at school told us to think “Obey” instead of “honor,” so disobedience was the sin at hand. Plus, Mom and Dad were too busy with housework and business and paying attention to my brothers to waste their time telling me what to do. Just be happy and be quiet.

My problem with disobedience was that Shelagh, and my older brothers, all felt it was wrong, if not sinful, to disobey them. And disobeying them led to fights. I knew I was not supposed to fight, but I wanted so much to be heard, to be seen, to be noticed, and everybody was always telling me to shut up or go away and not be such a showoff. It appeared that disobedience and fighting were inevitable.

Which led me right into the Fifth Commandment: Thou shalt not kill. Of course I’d never kill! But the Sisters told us that fighting, and even angry words and complaints, were kind of like killing. And they knew what could land us in purgatory or even hell. And if it’s hard not to fight or argue, just remember: you have Free Will. You can choose to avoid the Near Occasions of sin. Those were the situations where you knew you’d get into trouble. Like Mom always said when I ran crying to her from my brothers’ teasing: “Oh just stay out of their way!” Mom was too busy to help me avoid the Near Occasions of sin where I’d be tempted to fight my brothers.

Then there was the squirmy one the 6^th, commit adultery, which meant any impure sin, and what’s impure? How do you find the words for that? I was nasty; I was impure; but what is “purity?”

All I could think of was Ivory Snow detergent being 99 &44/100’s percent pure. And not getting fractions until the 4^th grade and percentiles till the 5^th grade, all I knew that caustic laundry detergent held the corner on purity. Anything that had to do with nakedness and the bathroom was impure.

Shelagh’s neighborhood friends, Kathy, Pat and Martha were a year older than she. Kathy and Martha were the only girls in their family, and the eldest. They were motherly, bossy, and cool. Pat had a mean older sister Gerry who bossed Pat around, and her mom was strict and demanding, and devoted to her big husband. Pat’s family was wealthy and Pat urged Shelagh on to ditch me, or when it wasn’t possible, to oppress me with her maturity and innate superiority. After all, she was older than me, wasn’t she?

“Maggie, ask Mom where babies come from,” Shelagh taunted me, with Pat, Kathy and Martha smirking behind her.

“Mom where do babies come from?”

“Oh you’ve been talking to that nasty little Murphy girl again! “ Mom fumbled, “Ask me again in a year!”

So was asking about babies a sin? Was I being nasty?

The seventh commandment was “Thou shalt not steal.” No I’d never steal, though in boring moments I’d contemplate the prospect of being in a “Finders Keepers, Losers Weepers” situation; or I’d remember my brother saying, after he’d grabbed the funny papers out from under me, or snagged the last cookie on the plate, “Possession in nine-tenths the law.” The other saying that my brother quoted repeatedly was “I’ll slap you into the middle of next week” but instead of being frightened, I was fascinated. What would that feel like? How could that happen? Where would I be when everyone else caught up with me the next week? Where would that place me in eternity? Whatever, I knew it would be a powerful blow, so I’d best quit whatever it was I was doing.

And then the 8^th commandment: thou shalt not bear false witness (lying).

Everything just happened, there was no anticipation. In second grade, the Brownie troops formed. How did it happen that I was not in a Brownie troop?

Mom called up one of the leaders, the dour, prim-mouthed Mrs. Degnan. At the second meeting, I was kneeling on her living room floor, unintroduced, with the other Brownies.

“How come you’re here?” they demanded.

I squirmed, embarrassed. “I’m just here!” I bravely announced.

Other Brownies’ mothers were having babies. They were strangely glamorous to me, young and sweet with big bumps of fullness and belonging swaying in front of them.

“My mom’s having a baby too,” I declared.

“OOOOOhhh?” the Brownie leader questioned, her eyes big with disbelief and incipient gossip, that my mother, now well past 40, could be having a baby after three rowdy boys and two skinny little girls.

I had to lie, I wanted so badly to believe. It wasn’t a lie; it was just a truth that only I knew.

The questions presented by the 9^th and 10^th commandments about not coveting, and what was coveting anyway, and if you didn’t know what it was, how could you not do it? The Sisters didn’t understand it much better than we did, but explained that coveting meant wanting what your neighbor had, his goods or his wife. Well wasn’t that part of the American Dream, to want things better than what you had? I complained to Mom about having to clean out the bathtub everytime I wanted to take a bath, “We’ll never ever have a shower!”

I should have known Mom would reply with one of her favorite bromides: “Never is a long, long time.”

And who cared about your neighbor’s wife, or even husband for that matter? The trick was to get a husband or wife at all. That’s what all the stories were about.

Not to want something: that was almost heresy if you stop to think about it! What about ambition, what about getting into heaven, what about being a martyr? What about saving the world from Communism?

Now that we’d reached the Age of Reason, instead of reciting the prayer Dad had taught us as we went to bed, (“Now I lay me down to sleep I pray the Lord my soul to keep, if I should die before I wake, I pray the lord my soul to take”); the rhythm and simplicity of the poem blinding us to the morbid possibility of dying in your sleep and never waking up; we learned to Examine our Conscience.

To Examine our Conscience, the Sisters taught us to lie in bed and think about all the bad things we might have done that day. So we were encouraged to focus on sin and guilt; how we’d offended God. Then we’d recite the nightly Act of Contrition: “Oh my God I’m heartily sorry for having offended thee because of thy just punishment but most of all because they offend thee my God who art all good and deserving of all my love. I firmly resolve, with the help of thy grace, to sin no more and to avoid the near occasion of sin.”

Then we could recite the comforting prayer we’d learned in first grade: Angel of God my Guardian Dear/ To whom God’s love entrusts me here/ Ever this night be at my side/ To light, to guard, to rule, to guide.

The trouble with thinking about how bad you were was that the potential for other evil or tragic acts came into your head.

In those quiet, uneventful days, two terrible things entered our consciousness.

The first was kidnapping. Most of our older brothers had the city’s daily newspaper route. It marked a time of the day, just as the milkman, breadman and morning newspaper announced daybreak; the Morning Offering (with its daily intention changed every month) started the school day, lunch was preceded by the Angelus bell, and the evening newspaper along with the Mickey Mouse Club meant that dinner was just around the corner.

One afternoon the newspaper headline screamed:

Girl, 7, Kidnapped in Tacoma.

It was a mystery, but not a holy mystery that we had to believe in, a terrible and evilly fascinating puzzle as to what had happened: a young girl stolen from her bedroom in the middle of the night. The only evidence was a sheer curtain blowing in the air fro the open window. Never found, no traces, footprints, weapons, whispers, notes, nothing. Taken from her own home, her own bed.

For no reason. Vanished.

I became consumed with fear and worry. What if the kidnappers were hiding behind the hydrangea bushes between the Seering’s and the Borthwick’s houses, ready to jump out in the dark and nab me as I ran across the street from Patty’s house, where we’d been playing dolls and singing, to my own home, where the light from the windows promised warmth and safety? The threat of being swept away by a boogeyman, by a bad man, was real. I could smell it. I raced those hundred steps as if my life depended on it, for indeed it did.

I made a run for it, raced up the cement stairs two at a time and flew in through the front door to warmth and light and the smells of dinner cooking.

“Help me get dinner on the table,” Mom said. “Shelagh had to do the dishes two days in a row.” We were supposed to do the dishes after school, but I hated to do them. The house would be cold and the dishes piled in the sink would be soaking in cold grey water. Mom had gotten a job as a secretary at a meat-packing plant. She hated it, but it helped out, and we were gone at school all day, so Mom had to “go to work,” and we had to do regular weekday chores.

But that night, neither Mom nor anyone else appreciated that I was even there, and had not been stolen in the middle of the night, never to be seen again.

And though I may have escaped the kidnapper, most nights I still had the horror of nightmares to live through. I’d wake from a macabre chase to crawl in the dark, threatened at every step, to my parent’s bedroom; sometimes to be taken in, sometimes to be turned away to creep back down the hall with terrible criminals grasping for me from every shadow.

The second specter to haunt my mind as I searched my conscience for personal evil, was the Holy Angels school fire in Chicago, where a hundred children died trying to escape from their burning school. The Holy Angels fire screamed of innocent loss and stricken parents from the newspapers.

That tragedy occasioned fire drills and heightened fire precautions, for no one wanted to die, even if you went straight to heaven, as we were told Sisters and children were sure to do.

So if you’d successfully examined your conscience, you should have a list of sins ready for when the priest heard your confession. For most of us, the one-to-one meeting in the confessional was our first performance, the priest our first audience.

Sometimes on a slow Friday afternoon, the Sisters would shoo us over to church where the priests would hear the kids ‘confessions.

You’d enter huge, dark, silent St. Joe’s, and queue up outside two of the six confessionals that lined the walls at the back of the church. You’d hear the murmurs from behind the darkened wooden doors.

Then it was your turn. You had your list of safe sins, but maybe you had one you were too ashamed to tell: the words weren’t even there. You couldn’t tell it, but if you didn’t tell it, you were in the state of mortal sin. And if you died in the state of mortal sin -- straight to Hell. And if you didn’t die, but you went to Holy Communion the next Sunday, you added another mortal sin; but if you didn’t go to Communion, everyone would notice. So back in that cold wooden booth, you knew you had to tell your terrible sins, not just your safe ones.

But now you were there in the dark, and the unknown priest was focused on you. “Bless me Father, for I have sinned. My last confession was… “ and you were soon ticking off your sins. The priest would give his measly penances, three Hail Mary’s and two Our Fathers, or maybe the other way around. The penance was as boring as your sins. We’d be in and out like a revolving door.

If you went to confession on Saturday afternoons, and especially Saturday evenings, the confession scene grew more serious. Usually a neighborhood mom would be going to confession, and a gang of kids would go with her to get it over with. If it had been a month since your last confession, that was too long. I worried about Dad, because he only went to confession a couple of times a year, and he was a long time in the confessional.

The parish pastor, Father Rinn sat, invisible and threatening, behind the door at the first confessional on the left. Without a word being spoken, you knew that he was for adults, especially men and their really bad sins. What would a really bad sin be? Maybe you’d think of murder and fighting and being a coward, or denying your faith, unlike the saints. It wasn’t exactly a sin to be poor, but it was better to dress nice and hold yourself strong and important. Oh, and to be funny and laugh – if you were a man.

You sensed the women’s sins were more of a desperate nature, but really, how could women sin? Their job in life was to tell you what YOU’d done wrong, how bad you were, not to second-guess themselves.

So you went to the younger, milder priest on the other side of the church. If you missed confessions on Saturday afternoons and evenings, you still had one last chance before Mass on Sunday mornings. But a kid could NEVER go to confession on Sunday morning. That was like telling everyone you had a mortal sin, and following Saturday night, well…. that was for adults. No child was bad enough to commit a mortal sin on Saturday night.

But the Sisters were there to tell you how important, destructive and serious your sins were, as when Sister pulled me aside in 3^rd grade to ask was that my bright little hat she saw in church? How vain of me to call attention to myself in that way: that was wrong, not a mortal sin, but wrong.

They’d educate us in the intricacies of sin; not just breaking the Ten Commandments, but the more subtle forms of wrong-doing. The one that really got me tied up in knots was Culpable Ignorance: if you had a chance to learn something was a sin, but weren’t paying attention, you were still held liable for that sin. I was afraid of not knowing something I was supposed to know, and going to Hell.

After you learned about your sins, you learned about the great heresies, the faulty thinking that threatened the One True Faith. The Sisters taught you about Jansenists, who were too scrupulous in examining their consciences; or Manicheanists, who believed in the gods of light and darkness, of good and evil. But wasn’t that kind of like Jesus, the Prince of Peace, and Satan, the Prince of Darkness? No you silly girl of course it isn’t the same: the heresy is believing that there are two Gods, one of good, one of evil.

But then what about how we believe in the Trinity?

That’s a mystery: we can’t understand how there are three persons in one God; all equal, just different roles. We don’t have to understand, we just have to believe.

What if you don’t believe?

Then you better pray for the gift of belief.

.

Focus on your sins, not your beauty (vanity) or potential (pride) or education (covetousness): you were only to probe and purify yourself.

And then you were to examine your regret for your sins, in perfect and imperfect contrition. You were supposed to be sorry because you’d offended god, and oh yeah, a little bit because you feared punishment and burning in hell.

The pagans didn’t have this chance and you had to do it for them by sending money to the missionaries to ransom pagan babies, nickel by measly nickel. The colorfully beautiful chart on the second-grade bulletin board measured the progress towards the bounty, until $50 had been collected and a pagan baby became a holy innocent, thanks to you!

You prayed the Communists didn’t rule the world; you prayed that there would be no mushroom cloud destruction of the world, as you scrambled under the clunky wood seats of your desk on runners, two or three desks strung together, ass-backwards, with the bench seat of your desk forming the back of the desk of the person behind you

Priests: what were their sins? They couldn’t sin, just like doctors and bankers and policemen couldn’t make mistakes and your mother always knew what was best for you.

I was a remarkably innocent child as far as sex went, or as Mom called it, “the man-woman thing” but I sensed one priest to stay away from. Maybe it was just prejudice, he was a big raw-boned man, but whereas I was terrified of Father Rinn and Father Reager, and thought Father Eckstein was just OK, I avoided Father X.

Priests were men to be flattered and entertained for their approval, but you knew that they had given up women and children and a family life. Giving up these normal things for a higher aspiration (were they coveting something?) made priests superior and pure to focus on cosmic, eternal, spiritual things. You had to study for years to be a priest.

The social hall was a huge room with a kitchen at one end, and a stage in the middle. There the women socialized, the kids ran wild, and the dads lingered by the doorways, or outdoors, waiting to take their families home.

Mom was an assistant leader of Shelagh’s Brownie Scout troop. The Girl Scouts were putting on a show about trees after Mass one Sunday. Shelagh had willow branches woven through the loop on her beanie, she was a willow tree. Jackie Stafford was the chestnut tree and recited “Under the village chestnut tree the mighty smith stands, the smith a mighty man is he with large and sinewy hands.”

On Girl Scout Sunday, all the troops, from the Brownies to the green-uniformed Girl Scouts to the older, blue-clad Sea Scouts, filed into Church, their scout banner and the US flag paraded before them, and sat in the first rows in the center of the church.

Father Rinn, the big, grim-faced Pastor of the Parish thundered from the pulpit. The younger girls were restless, you could see them squirm, their shoulders shaking. The Moms in the side and back pews fidgeted nervously. Suddenly a bubble of giggles erupted from the second pew of Scouts. Hands went up to mouths, and red-faced Jackie Stafford looked like she was about to explode, or Heaven forbid, wet her pants!

“AND YOU STOP THAT, YOU IN THE SECOND ROW!” Father Rinn roared, his face huge and violent with indignity. He shook his finger at the little Brownie in front of the whole church. “I MEAN YOU, RIGHT THERE!”

This was mortifying; torture, hell, couldn’t be worse. The giggles turned to silent tears of embarrassment and shame.

“Who was he yelling at?” I whispered to Shelagh on the dark cement stairs leading from the church to the social hall. She told me, but to my surprise, there was no pillory to be whipped at, no hole for Jackie Stafford to drop through. Her disgrace had been complete and apocalyptic in church, and the women who ruled the social hall swept in behind the Girl Scouts as they disguised all the disappointments and embarrassments in their lives.

“You girls go play now, get ready for the show!” they told us with smiles and eyes that were softer and kinder than usual, pretending that nothing had happened, that the priest wasn’t anger-ruled and mean to a little girl.

We looked to the future with fear, of a Last Judgment, of nuclear holocaust, and of the periodic Days that the World Comes to an End.

From nowhere a rumor would spread that on a date certain, usually no more than a week away, the world would come to an end. The dread, the praying, the trying to be so good personally that the world wouldn’t end.

You’d be going along like normal and then suddenly remember that the world was due to end in four days, or two, or tomorrow. There was nothing you could do about it but pray desperately. Pleeeeeeeeeeeeeeease God!

The apprehension! And if on a rare occasion, by a fluke of our ordinary lifestyle, we’d confide in our parents, they’d dismiss it scoffingly.

“But Mom, everybody says so.”

“Oh everybody always says so, and they have for years. The world’s not coming to an end, and if it was, what can you do about it?”

Mom was so matter-of-fact in the face of the threat of the world coming to an end. She was no help at all. This was REAL.

And what made it almost worse was that the next day, the world continued on as it always had, and you didn’t even think about the world coming to an end until the day after, and hey, wasn’t the world supposed to come to an end yesterday? Well, it didn’t and Mom was right. So I slapped Shelagh right back when she casually slapped me.

Then there were the occasions when spontaneously, it appeared that the world WAS coming to an end, as at Ann Conroy’s when summer sheet lightning flashed across the sky and in our pre-adolescent hysteria we were certain that chariots and apocalypse were coming right behind. We clambered onto the living room sofa, six little girls, and prayed for mercy, for a reprieve so we could go back to our playing.

Things went back to normal until a year or so later when again, quietly but with a growing urgency, it was announced: the world is coming to an end next Thursday.

We learned of the miracles at Lourdes and Fatima – in this century! When the Blessed Mother had appeared to children, to dumb little Bernadette Soubourous, but a miraculous curing spring of holy water appeared at the spot where the little French girl had seen her. At Fatima, in Portugal, the Blessed Mother had appeared to three children, and one of them was still alive! We learned that the Virgin Mary had written a letter to the Pope, through the children at Fatima, with “promises” —future predictions— to be revealed. When Pope Pius XII read it, he cried. The letter would be opened, in 1980 and it probably said the world was coming to an end. There would be chaos, fires, bombing, destruction, separation from loved ones, death alone and then judgment. Would you be happy ever after, ever after having no end, or would you be tormented by Satan and his pitchforks and burning and unending pain?

It all depended on if you used your Free Will to chose to be good, and confessed your sins to the priest if you chose to be bad.

Copyright 2006 Port Gamble Publishing. All rights reserved.

The Sacrament of Baptism

Prologue
Growing up Catholic in the 1950’s was participating in a rich culture, spoken and unspoken. We lived in a now-foreign place and time where dying for your faith was a daily part of your religion, where a language and concepts that no longer exist was spoken and professed.

Growing up in a homogenous Catholic neighborhood still presented a conflict of cultures, a daily duality of religions: the practice and beliefs which define your life. The two faces of my Catholic childhood were the family: do what you have to in order to get by; and the church/school: do what you must to go to heaven.

THE CHURCH BUILDING
THE BOOGEYMAN’S HOUSE

My brothers, six to ten years older than me, would be put upon to take my sister and me for walks in our neighborhood. Just a few blocks from home, close to a small business, there were several stone, tomb-like, empty, dark, lifeless, churches that reigned unpeopled during the weekdays. In boyish glee, my brothers would haul us into the cold dead churches announcing they were delivering us to the Boogeyman’s house, and then listen in delight as we’d scream bloody murder. No one to hear us. Scream scream scream again until they’d had their fun and would drag us out by our arms and cram us both into the outgrown baby stroller and squeal down the sidewalk, whooping with life and mischief.

Back home on Thomas Street, at the dividing line between Capitol Hill and the Central District, our family of five kids was busting out of the house. My sister Shelagh, just a year older than me, had been threatened by the cranky
neighbor lady with grass clippers. My brothers, 7 year old Tony, 9 year old Peter and 11 year old Michael, were wrestling and fighting nightly in their tiny shared bedroom.

One rainy Sunday afternoon my mom stormed out of the house in desperation and found a lovely big shambling house further south on Capitol Hill, at the end of the Number 10 bus line and just a block away from both Volunteer Park and Lakeview Cemetery.

Our new home at the top of a rockery and a curving uphill garden path, sat high above the street. The floor plan was deep, with a front verandah that ran the length of the house, then a front hall and living room, backed by a high-ceilinged kitchen and dining room; the laundry room and tiny toilet closet, breakfast room, wall-papered with bright red cardinals hopping about on green leaves, and my dad’s cubbyhole of a den formed the last rank of rooms on the first floor.

The front hall held a tree-like coat rack with a full-length mirror in the middle of it, and a small telephone table and chair. The wallpaper depicted a two n in reddish-pink and green against a grey background that wound up the stairs. Just before entering the kitchen was a three-foot wide coat closet, a favorite hiding place in indoor hide-and-seek games. The grey-painted stair banisters had telephone numbers written in pencil, with the idea that someday they’d be cleaned off, written higgledy-piggledy all over them.
The stairs wound up two three-step landings before the final 14-step climb to the second floor. On boring days, Shelagh and I practiced jumping, first conquering the 3-step intervals, then increasing to 4, 5, and 6 stair leaps until my mother would yell from the kitchen, “Stop that jumping!”

Mom and Dad had guests for dinner, and in his hyperbolic playacting of discipline and mayhem, my dad whipped off his belt and thrashed it around the corner of the stair landings. In terror and glee my sister and I ran screaming upstairs and then in fits of giggles, snuck downstairs again.

Finally my mother excused herself from her guests, scolded my Dad for stirring us up and marched us upstairs all the way to our bedroom at the end of the hallway.

“Now stay in bed and don’t come downstairs again.” She was annoyed and stern.

I wanted to stay in our bedroom so that Dad wouldn’t get in trouble again. However Shelagh hated to be told what to do, so she ventured to the end of the hallway, on her way downstairs again. She egged me on and I climbed down from my high bed and followed her to the end of the hallway.

But there was a watchdog to the downward stairs to freedom. Just as Shelagh reached the end of the hallway, and beckoned me to follow her down the stairs, the door to our brother’s room swung abruptly open and there stood Michael, relishing his role of spoiler and sergeant. “Get back in your room!” he proclaimed with the authority of one who would stand firm until compliance was attained or punishment was dealt.

All three of my brothers shared the divided room at the front of the house that had once been two rooms. The supporting wall between these two rooms had been removed, with the result that the ceiling sagged in the middle.

Michael recreated the separation of the wall with a long, crudely built bookcase of rough lumber. He loved airplanes, and longed to fly them one day, but for now he displayed his model airplane collection along the top of the bookcase, with his book collection underneath.

This biggest bedroom had wallpaper with a dark purple background with voluptuous white magnolia blossoms on it. The room had a fireplace of pink bricks at one end of it, and both ends had walk in closets with deep built-in drawers. A door led outside to another thin verandah that ran the length of this room, and here the tar floor bubbled on the hottest summer days.

Already at those young ages, we were defined. Michael, the eldest, was the smart one, the good kid, the leader who’d go far. Peter, the blond brother, was funny and easygoing, though like most of the easygoing people I knew, was the most unpredictable and frightening when he was roused to anger. Tony, the youngest of the boys, was the bad kid, the rebel. As the youngest of the three boys, yet older than my sister and I, he relished lording it over us.

Shelagh, the first daughter, was sunny and carefree, and I was the baby, given into more than spoiled, for Mom was too tired to challenge my strong will, except when I’d push her too far, and then her Irish temper would give way and she’d be provoked to scream angry words or throw something at me.

From our mom and dad we inherited our good looks, our love of music, and our conviction that we had to fight for every thing we got.

Mom had grown up an Anglican minister’s daughter in Canada; Dad’s family was Catholic. When the boys started school at St Joe’s, my oldest brother Mike was tormented by the knowledge that Mom would go to hell when she died, because she wasn’t a Catholic. Finally she couldn’t stand to see him anguish in that way, so she was quietly baptized a Catholic, just to shut the nuns up. “It’s exactly the same as the Anglican church anyway,” she said. Her easy adoption of the Catholic religion told me that keeping the peace everyday was more important to Mom than going to hell when you died. She would never be a saint.
Soon after moving into our new big home, we got a piano. No sooner had we gotten it than my brothers playing war, threw the heavy bookends into it and put three big nicks in the wood. My Dad, the most unhandy husband a woman could have, patched the dents with wood putty, and the patches formed a quizzical face in the piano’s belly.

I listened to my brother Mike play his eighth grade recital pieces, The chords struck out and the arpeggio’s came pounding down. Tony also took piano lessons which he stuck with only because the nun who taught him piano was charmed by his puckish independence, and looked past, or perhaps admired, his rebel’s defiance.

So Tony thumped out a rustic, two-handed Dvorak melody. I picked the notes up from listening to them practice, and when I played the piano, I rocked the bench back and forth, kicking the underbelly of the piano in rhythm as I played.
“Stop kicking the piano!” Mom cried out in conflicted desperation, for she loved hearing us play, but she hated that we had to wreck the only nice thing she had in the process.

“What’s your favorite song, Mom” I asked.
“Oh I don’t know…“I Know That my Redeemer Liveth” she said.
Mom was so occupied with us and Dad that she didn’t reflect much on the past. It was years before I came across a sketch of a young woman with beautiful long blonde hair singing in a choir with the pencil-written notation underneath it, “The loveliest of the sopranos captures me with her angelic voice as she tells that her Redeemer liveth.”

“Who did this Mom?
“Oh I had a boyfriend in the choir who had a crush on me,” she said.
Mom had a boyfriend…then why did she marry Dad?
“Did you have lots of boyfriends? How come you married Daddy?”
“I had one man who was nice to me at the bank, where I worked. But he was very shy, and so was I. One Christmas he gave me a giftbox with gloves inside, and the glove had a ring on it. But there was no man-woman thing, and I moved with my family a few months later.”

“What’s your favorite song, Dad?”
“Oh I don’t know, Little Horsie. I love Chopin, I love the soft gentle caress of his songs, like…” and he came to the piano keyboard and lovingly pressed down a jumble of discordant notes.

Dad was shaving in front of the kitchen mirror and bellowing out the one song he knew:
“BRAVO BRAVO PUNCHINELLO! BRAVO PUNCHINELLO
HE,,A STALWART PUCHINELLO
She, a graceful Columbine
BRAVO BRAVO BRAVO”

He launched into a high sweet falsetto for Columbine’s line before roaring out to the end of the phrase.

One Saturday Dad drove Pete and Tony out to the country to shoot their bb guns. Mom made him take Shelagh and me. That was a dry and dusty day. We finally pulled off onto a dirt road. Dad parked the car. The bushes and grasses were dried out and scraggly. “Now Little Horsies, you wait here” Dad said to Shelagh and me. Then he and Pete and Tony went further down the road to where the brush grew high overhead and formed an arcade as they disappeared into its mouth.

Well, there we were in the country, to sit on a log and wait. There in the middle of nowhere we sat with the sun overhead and flies buzzing around us, Dad’s old green Packard with the dark leather seats, the big log and each other to look at. We heard pops from the brushy wood, and so knew Dad and the boys weren’t far. It was kind of like waiting for Dad when he went into the liquor store and we waited in the car, only this time we were outside and we had each other for company.

Mom took me to the recital at school in the big dark wooden-floored auditorium The eighth grade boys (for there were no girls in the school after 3rd grade) sang “Wouldn’t it be Loverly” from My Fair Lady.
I was happily swinging my legs back and forth to the lilt of the song when Mom leaned over. “Stop swinging your legs, you’re kicking the chair.”
“What are they singing?” I whispered to Mom.
“Wouldn’t it be lovely?” she said, “Only with an accent.”

***************
Aunt Barry and Uncle Winkie lived in an old home converted into apartments. They lived on the second floor, and we never went to visit them without being hushed on the stairs.
My aunt knit baby clothes because they were going to have a baby. Beautiful pastel tiny garments that said, ‘This baby is wanted.’ Then one day the baby clothes were put away and there was to be no baby anymore.
“Why?” I asked my mom.
“Because the baby wasn’t strong enough to live,” she said.
That isn’t fair, not fair, and no one was powerful enough to make it fair. Except God.
There wasn’t much heralding when, a year or so later, a baby did arrive.
Suddenly I was in a boogeyman’s house, but my parents were with me, and my sister, and my aunt and uncle and the new baby. She was in a beautiful long white dress, and she was being baptized.

“Don’t talk about this at school,”my mother admonished me.
“Why not?”
“Because we’re not supposed to be in this church.”
“Why not?”
“Because it’s not Catholic.”
“Oh…????????????”

“Do you renounce Satan and all his pomp?”
“I do.”

“Mom, Who is Satan?”
“The devil.”
“What’s pomp?”
“Oh you know like pompous, think too much of yourself. Vain, always looking at yourself in the mirror.”

But that was the fun! To stand in front of Mom’s dresser with the full length mirror in front, and the wing mirrors that you could swing to see any angle of yourself. And then to play, to pretend.

“’It’s Howdy-Doody Time” we heard the song from the television downstairs. We ran down to watch the freckle-faced puppet and his master, Buffalo Bob, and then at the end, Howdy-Doody’s face beamed from the TV screen as the program ended. Shelagh walked right up the TV set and kissed Howdy’s face. I crowded her out and kissed him myself. Then she elbowed her way back to kiss him again, and I nudged her away for my second turn. We continued to tussle back and forth until at last the black and white screen flashed on to a cooking program.
Then we ran back upstairs to Mom’s dressing table and snuck Mom’s lipstick out of the top drawer again, applied it liberally and sloppily and kissed the mirror again and again and giggled at the mirror, our reflections pock-marked with lip imprints.

Shelagh ran across the hall and came back with a ribbon of toilet paper wrapped around her hands. “Quick! Wipe it off with toilet paper before Mom finds out!” she coached me.

********************
Then Shelagh was at school and I was in kindergarten, morning kindergarten. I walked the three blocks by myself after the first week, past the row of giant chestnut trees. Where in the autumn we collected prickly spears and the glossy nuts inside them; past the grocery store with the asphalt tiles siding the building that kids carved their initials into with a nail, past the street of two-story houses divided into apartments where strangers lived, to the school.
Home for lunch with Mom, Campbell’s chicken noodle soup or peanut butter and jam sandwiches.
“Lie down and take a nap now.”
“I don’t want to take a nap.”
“You need to rest, you’re tired.”
“I’m NOT tired!” I wailed.
“Well, I’m going to lie down.” Mom yawned and curled up at the end of the sofa. The soap opera hummed from the TV with the depressing organ music and the heavy drama playing out. It was kind of creepy. There was nothing to do.I lay down at the other end of the sofa.
The next thing I knew, Shelagh was home from school and Mom was in the kitchen and I had a blanket over me. Tricked again, and I hadn’t even been tired.

********************
Summer days became hot and boring and one night when my cousin was visiting she said, “It’s starting to get dark earlier.”
In the hot late August days, we trekked downtown to try on uniforms, the dark navy jumpers and sweaters, the thin white blouses. We stopped at the department stores for white slips, socks and underwear, and the brown oxfords.
School started, and I took up my new red satchel with pencil and paper in it and followed Shelagh with her matching blue satchel to St Joe’s. We lined up outside according to class, and Shelagh deposited me with the first graders and we filed into school when the bell rang.

At lunch, we again marched in file downstairs to the cafeteria, across from the dark, high-ceilinged gym with the brick walls and the cement floors: nothing comfortable about the gym. The boys threw balls hard and if you weren’t looking in every direction, you’d get hit by a ball, or worse, yelled at, “Get out of the Way!”
The cafeteria was crowded with kids, noisy kids chattering and yelling away, hastily eating lunch from brown paper sacks and running outside to play. I spilled the orange juice from my lunch and it ran down my sleeve. Yuk. There was nothing to do but throw my paper bag in the garbage can and follow the other kids outside. The orange juice dried, harsh and scratchy on my wool sleeve. It scraped my bare arm in a sticky, itchy, uncomfortable way.
I could hardly wait to get home and change into playclothes.
****************************
The little reading chairs were rounded in a circle for reading lessons. Already knowing how to read “See Dick run, run Dick run,” I was in the first group, and after performing, sat down to read silently while the other groups had their turn.
In religion class, we had the richness of posters of Biblical stories, Adam and Eve spurned from the Garden of Eden, St Michael fighting Lucifer, the baby Moses found in the bulrushes, Jesus at the Last Supper, the Guardian Angel hovering benevolently over the two children crossing the bridge.
But no interpretation, no discussion or sharing our thoughts. We were too young to have thoughts of our own. No, there were only the thoughts we were meant to learn from our Baltimore Catechisms.
“Who made you?”
“God made me.”
“Why did God make you?”
“To show forth his everlasting goodness and share eternal life”

One by one we rose from our desks to answer the questions. As in a complicated poetry structure, each answer built upon the previous answer, so you prayed to be the first one called upon to answer the first question. We had to be able to say the answers without looking at our books, by heart. Then we read the next day’s lesson, knowing that we’d be called upon to answer those questions by heart.

It was important to be good and to believe. It mattered that we uphold the goodness and zeal of early Church martyrs. We knew about the Romans and the catacombs and martyrs and gladiators and virgins and tyrants thanks to our religion. We knew about war and Korean orphans and missionaries. We knew that it mattered to God who was a just God, not an indulgent or a punitive parent, that we try to be good and overcome our Original Sin.

***************
We’d all go to church together when my brothers were altar boys. Their wardrobe that they wore on the altar had a language of its own – vestments instead of clothes, surplice instead of blouse, alb instead of slip, chasuble instead of dress, cinctures instead of belts.
Dressed up in their long black robes and white lace blouses over the top of the robes, my brothers and boys holier and more respectable than them, served the priest with his richly colored vestments.

For weeks and weeks, Sunday after Sunday, steel scaffolding enveloped the cold dark columns of the church, as richly somber purple and dark green vines and leaves were painted up the cement-block columns of the church.
Dark recesses lined the outer walls, the votive candle banks in front of the stained glass windows of the saints the only glimmers of light in the shadows.
The gory crucifix of a nearly-naked Jesus was off to the side, just between the main altar with huge, Byzantine-looking mosaics of Jesus and two other men, and the side altar with an equally ominous mosaic of St Joseph, who was the most approachable saint, because he was older and took care of Mary and Jesus when he was just a little kid. So you looked at Joseph and tried to pray, though your eyes would sneak off sideways to see Jesus in terrible anguish, with just basically a diaper around his lower body, his eyes twisted pitifully up to heaven, and the blood streaming from his wrists and ankles as his bony knees cried out for relief and warmth.
Suddenly everyone stood up and the figures at the altar stared speaking in Latin, I knew the Mass had begun because everyone stood up. Mumble, mumble and then drop to your knees and pound your chest with your fist and imitate seagulls “Kee Kee, Kree Kree Kee Kee.“ It sounded like seagulls begging for freedom and forgiveness.
Then the altar bells would peal out and the Glorias would start. Nobody was named Gloria, that was a show-offy name like Marilyn Monroe. There was something beautifully threatening about Marilyn Monroe. She was pretty, but she wasn’t cute or appealing or compliant. She hinted at something hidden and dangerous.
Shelagh distracted me by kicking my ankle with her foot. As we sat down, we locked legs at the ankles and started swinging our legs together. As the priests mumbled on and on and strutted back and forth at the front of the church, we swung our legs harder and higher, suppressing guilty giggles.
Mom reached over and grabbed my fingers in her fist. With her other hand stretched across her lap, she quietly but firmly pounded my finger tips. This wasn’t part of the rituals of Mass.
She let go of my fingers and pointed her finger to the altar. ‘Behave” her eyes said louder than her lips. The priest had climbed the stairs to the pulpit and everybody stood up while he read the Gospel from the Bible. Then we sat down and listened to his sermon, explaining the words of the gospel, or asking for money. Very rarely, the priest would say something like, “I know you want to go home and listen to the baseball game on the radio, so thank God for all the blessing that allow you to enjoy the World Series, in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost, Amen.”
Then it was back on our feet as the whole church said out loud in Latin, “Confiteor Deo omnipotens” and the rhythm of
beatum Maria,
beatum Michaeli,
Sanctos apostolos Peter et Paulum
was broken as we knelt at the words
Et incarnates est (And was made Man)
in the middle of the prayer,

Then the kneeling began. You knelt and you knelt forever. If you were a little kid, your Mom might let you sit down. But you had to be good. You had to sit quietly and not be a nuisance.
And when the bells rang out again, three times urgently and you heard people say, “Sanctus, sanctus, sanctus” you had to kneel and watch the priest dip his fingertips into a shallow bowl of water at the side of the altar, and first kneel to the peal of bells, then raise first the Communion host, a round bread wafer, then repeated again for the chalice, the gold-plated wine goblet, above his head with both hands to a second call from the bells, and then kneel again to a final call from the bells.
The awesomeness and enormity of the church, the people, and the ritual struck you dumb and motionless.
Then the kneeling people, with their heads bowed, would say quietly,

Domine non sum dignus
Et interim pectam meam
But say the word
And my soul shall be healed

That was the most profoundly somber moment, as the humbled hundreds bowed their heads, and again made a fist and beat their chests, “Lord I am not worthy…”
Soon after that, most of the people in the church would stand and file out to the center aisle, row by row, to go up to the communion rail. The organ played serious strictly metered music from the choir loft at the back of the church as row after row of parishioners knelt at the wrought-iron rail, hands together in front of them. The priest progressed one-by-one down the length of the rail and back again for what seemed like hours as the altar boy held a plate-like gold paten under each person’s chin and the priest took a single communion wafer from the chalice and placed it on the communicant’s tongue.
As they got up from the communion rail, the row of people lined behind them would kneel and take their places. As the communicants filed back to their seats, you’d hear the swish-swish sound of the women’s nylons as they came back from the communion rail.
Soon now the Mass would be over and the herd would lunge for the Church exits (sound it out, ex-its).
Talk about pomp and calling attention to yourself! Who was better at that than the priests with the parish processions and rituals of Baptism, First Communions, crowning of Mary, funerals, and the church parades of the Knights of Columbus.

***************************
I loved singing in a strange tongue. Nobody taught you, you just listened week after week to the same song, you heard it more than “I had a cat and the cat pleased me and I fed my cat by the Yonder Tree” as you pranced around the living room on the rare days that Mom would let you play your one record on the record player.
But “Tantum Ergo” was there every Sunday that you went to the last Mass, the one that had Benediction afterwards. Some people would sneak out in the seconds between the end o f Mass and the beginning of Benediction, but you weren’t supposed to, so we stayed planted in our pews.

The singing started. The song called to me, “Janey Doyle, Janey Doyle,” I interpreted the Latin, :”Genitori, Genitoque”.
The priest was joined by two other priests as they placed the Blessed Sacrament, the round palm-sized wafer in a gold chalice, a heavy vase-like showcase with radiant gold beams shooting out from it, and then swung the censer of incense and the lovely warm aroma of perfumed smoke filled the air.
The people started to sing the melodic “O Salutaris Hostia,” knowing that soon it would be over and they could head for home, or socialize downstairs in the cavernous Social Hall, across from the gym.
***********
Dad was walking me to a school music recital, and I seized this rare, private, now-too-seldom sober moment to ask, “Dad, how come you don’t go to Mass on Sundays anymore” Perhaps I could change his fallen-away ways, and we would be A Good Catholic Family.
“Well, Little Horsie, I just can’t agree with a religion that says little babies who haven’t been baptized can’t go to Heaven.”
But Dad, there’s Baptism of Desire….”
“Well if Baptism can be by implied desire and not exactly the physical act of pouring water on a baby’s head, and putting salt on a baby’s tongue, and oil on a baby’s forehead, then why don’t they just say so? Why must be accept that unless a baby goes through that, they can’t be saved?
“And Little Horsie, why are we taught that we come into this world inherently marred, original sin, a big black evil birthright?”
“Well Dad because Adam and Eve…”
“But if we have free will, if we’re individually responsibly for our souls, then how can we inherit sin?
But now, Little Horsie, we’re going to your music concert, and I want to tell you a little secret.”
My heart leapt at a secret between Dad and me; a secret shared, not like his disappearing trips to the liquor store where he would be gone for what seemed like hours while I waited in the car, and when he got home, Mom would sigh, and Dad would disappear in his small, booth-like den.
I looked up eagerly to him. “What is it Dad”
He smiled gently and leaned down to whisper in my ear. “Daddies love horsies.”“Oh Dad!” That wasn’t a good secret – everybody knew that!

copyright Port Gamble Publishing 2006. All rights reserved. Contact Pub@FishermansQuilt.com for reprint permission

Work in Progress "The Wild and Holy Days"

Remember the 50's?
Sitting in St Joe’s I hear seagulls cry
Over the priests murmured consultation with the decorator A House of Prayer needs quiet
I remember when they redecorated the church columns, painting the cement with vines and branches
The dark recesses lit by the stained glass windows of the saints
The wrought iron altar rail
The gory crucifix of Jesus is gone
The cold cement floor and the grates where women’s high heels would get stuck
The swish-swish of their nylons as they sashayed back from communion

Kneeling, standing, sitting, fasting
Benediction and the songs
The bingo hall, the stage, the smorgasbord, the brownies and girl scouts
The processions
Bless throats with candles, foreheads with ashes, palms given out on Palm Sunday

copyright Margaret Doyle 2006