Sanctifying grace made us holy and pleasing to God, adopted children of God, temples of the Holy Ghost, and gave us the right to Heaven. (And this was the correct answer if I was called upon to stand up and give the answer from memory to the Baltimore Catechism question, “What does sanctifying grace do?”)
Sanctifying grace was earned through receiving the sacraments, the public rituals of the church’s membership. Sanctifying grace was dress-up Sunday clothes, the great gobs of goodness that your entire church, school, family and friends focused on. While most of the sacraments were received only once — Baptism, Confirmation, Matrimony, Holy Orders and Extreme Unction — Confession and Communion were the mortar that held the bricks of our church-going together.
If sanctifying grace was like my best outfit; actual grace was my everyday uniform. Actual grace was the daily sustenance I earned by performing the mundane little dollops of goodness, or avoiding the pesky little daily occasions of sin. So while acts meriting actual grace were the character-building bricks of our personal temple; sanctifying grace involved the Sisters and the priests, classmates, parents, and family.
Communion, along with Confession, was the meat and potatoes of parochial Catholic existence. Holy Communion was not only the “holiest” sacrament, it was also the one we could do repeatedly and frequently and publicly as the long aisles of pews emptied out and parishioners formed lines to go to the communion rail.
Once I made my First Confession, and then right afterwards, my First Holy Communion, I had three sacraments under my belt and was well on my way to building my bankroll of sanctifying grace, all sweet and purply.
First Communion was also the first pageant we parochial school kids performed. At age seven we were told that we had reached “the Age of Reason” so we knew when we’d done wrong. It was often confusing to know what was wrong and what was right. It was wrong and frightening to not do my homework and not know the answers in class. But it could also be wrong to always know the answer and be a showoff, a smartypants.
The white dresses should have told me something.
Being a little girl, I loved dolls and brides. Barbie had not yet been born, leggy and pointy-bosomed. My dolls were all hairless baby dolls, until the “Littlest Angel” dolls came along. They were pretty dolls who had clothes nicer than mine. Fashion wasn’t the dictator, at least for dolls and little girls, yet.
Better than dolls were brides. They were perfect and beautiful and the center of attention. The first bride I knew personally was our next door neighbor. At 23, Marilyn was ready to start a life of her own; she didn’t have to be an obedient child or student anymore. Marilyn was a golden perfect blonde with creamy skin, brilliant blue eyes, cherry-red lips, tall and slim. She was perfectly beautiful. Her bridesmaids wore heavenly periwinkle-blue sheathes. It was a
The women’s magazines promoted this ideal with a sense of class and mystery. The sanitary napkin companies placed their magazine ad on the back cover with a woman in evening dress mounting the staircase in a palace and the hype was simply, “Modess…because.” I didn’t know what they were talking about until I was well past the age of reason but I wanted that, whatever it was.
So the tradeoff was this: I had to start owning up to my sins, to always be aware that God was watching and cared about me and wanted me to do good and was offended when I did wrong and might not like me anymore unless I went to confession, but I got to be a little bride, and then after First Communion, a Big Girl who went up and down the aisle to communion by herself. Not a real bride, or even a bride of Christ, as the nuns described themselves, but dressed like a Princess Bride, with everything perfect -- white dress, white slip, white petticoat, white undershirt and underpants, white socks, white shoes, and white veils; all studied, planned, and starched: sterile perfection on everyday wild little garden flower girls.
My hair was curled into tight little corkscrews or sausages; my Saturday night bath was a wet and soapy ritual of its own, and then there was the fast.
Fasting was not all that big a deal in the 50’s. Fasting before receiving Holy Communion was meant to honor and respect the sublimity of the holy meal of the bread “hosts” and “symbolic” wine; for in those pre-Vatican II days, there was no wine of any form given with the communion bread.
The Carmelite nuns made the hosts: Carmelites were human saints, for many reasons. They had the wonderful honey-warm name; kind of like Carmello candies. We knew that they were named after some mountain in the Old Country; but our daily experience, our “other” religion, told us that they were inherently sweet, chocolatey and honey-flavored combined. Carmelites were cloistered; they never went out, but once taking their vows, they never saw their family again, except through a grill-like screen, like a prisoner or a confessional, and they spent their days praying. The only work they did was make the hosts, the circular flat bread that the priest consecrated (turned into the body of Jesus Christ, but this wasn’t cannibalism: this was a miracle!)
And they didn’t call it Holy Bread or Holy Body of Christ, they called it Holy Communion. Who cared if it made sense? Sense wasn’t part of do-or-die religion. That was why we had holy mysteries: “You can’t understand it so don’t try. But here’s the details of what you can’t understand. Pray for faith.”
Gentle old Sister Hilaria was teaching us arithmetic that morning, more adding and subtracting. It was all so ordered and clear and repetitive – first and second grades, addition and subtraction. Third grade, multiplication and division. Fourth grade fractions, fifth grade decimals. Sister Hilaria taught the lesson and we tackled the deskwork. I rubbed my empty stomach. She came to my desk.
“What’s the matter, honey?”
I didn’t know anything was the matter. This was normal.
“Nothing, Sister.”
“Did you have breakfast this morning?”
“No, Sister.”
“Are you hungry?”
I was always hungry. But if you didn’t get up for breakfast, then hunger was just part of the way you felt every day.
“No Sister.”
She got up from her crouch over me and left me there. Soon the class was over and Sister Ethbena came in to monitor our reading aloud. Sister Ethbena made us pronounce words wrong to fit in with her Irish pronunciation.
Sister Hilaria and Sister Ethbena put their heads together and whispered, and then Sister Hilaria beckoned to me.
I came to her, and she ushered me out of the classroom. And into the nun’s dining room, one of those mysterious rooms that lay beyond locked doors with translucent glass.
It was just a big room with wooden floors and high ceilings with 15-ft high windows looking out to the street. The room was filled with round tables.
“Here, sit down here, honey,” Sister Hilaria said. She went into another corridor in this hidden maze and I heard her speaking to Sister Ethel Marie, the crabbiest, meanest Sister in the school, who always frowned at us, and never spoke to us as she bustled around the kitchen corridors. She always wore a white apron over her black habit, as they called their floor-length wool dresses with shoulder capelets, and she usually was carrying large cooking pans.
“No, Sister,” I heard Sister Ethel say.
“But the child’s hungry. We can just give her some crackers, just a little something…” Sister Hilaria said.
She came back to the table with a plate of saltine crackers and some honey and placed them in front of me. “Would you like some butter with these crackers?”
“No thank you Sister, “I said.
She nodded, and left the table to go back in the kitchen. She returned with two steaming mugs.
“Here’s some hot tea for us,” she said. “I put lots of milk in yours. Do you want to put some honey in, too?”
“No thank you Sister,” I said. She spread some honey on the crackers and pushed the plate closer to me.
“This will help,” she said. “Now, eat.”
I did, and she smiled gently with her mouth, while her big brown eyes looked not sad, but serious.
Now I too could parade up the aisle, like a bride or a priest, even though I was in a long line with the rest of the commoners, to the communion rail, I would kneel in front of the wrought-iron twisted vines and clusters of grapes and wait for the priest and the altar boy to work their way down to me. The priest, a big adult man who wasn’t my father or uncle or grandfather, would approach little measly me, and I stuck your tongue out at him! No, don’t think that, I told myself, that proves you’re not very holy. What I meant to say was, I stuck my tongue out for the priest to place the Holy Communion bread on it.
Then, I had the tricky walk back to my pew: tricky in acting naturally holy when I was the center of attention, was everybody looking at me? If I acted too holy my brothers would make fun of me. If I acted too casual, the Sisters would take me aside and scold me. Plus I had to worry about swallowing the Holy Toast: I couldn’t bite it, that would be terrible! I couldn’t let it stick to the roof of my mouth. I had to let it glide whole down my throat, all the while realizing that God himself, the creator and ruler of the universe, was now in me! God in me!! Why don’t I feel holier, bigger, saintlier, more cosmic? I’m still just skinny little me.
So I just knelt there with my eyes closed and tried to act holier than I felt.
Food was a given: Mom made the meals and you ate them. No questions. Our family traditions respected certain quirkiness inherited from my father’s father: no vegetables that were dug up from the ground; hence no potatoes, carrots, beets, etc. My mother, being a poor minister’s daughter, ignored this tradition when she could, but my uncle’s family, who ate only rice as his father had, was held up as an example of principle whenever my mother served the ignoble root vegetables.
Again, my mother’s lack of principles, of standing up for her faith, was worrisome to me. Poor mom, she just didn’t have the stuff to stand up for her beliefs.
Being a plain Irish cook, Mom’s idea of garnishment was limited to Lea & Perrin’s Worcestershire sauce with the brown paper label. My first family job was to set the table, and Dad had a little silver salt “cellar” a finger-length tub filled with salt with a tiny little silver spoon for strewing the salt over his diner. The rest of us had a set of salt and pepper shakers. That was the limit of our seasoning.
A couple of times a year Mom would drive up to Canada to see her family, her Mom, the ferocious Nana, and Mom’s sisters all still lived in Vancouver. Two of their husbands, Tom and Gordon, who’d served in the Canadian army in World War II, loved to rib us about being Yanks, though my Mom didn’t become a US citizen until Shelagh and I were in high school
Mom’s family loved to sing and party, though in a simple natural way. NO performance, just spontaneous. Sometimes during those days Mom went by herself, and we were left to our uncertainty and apprehension in Dad’s care.
Dad was an unobservant, non-participating parent, as most of the fathers we knew were. Oh there were the bellowing, lecturing fathers, thank God Dad wasn’t like that, but I don’t think I knew of a concerned, loving father who enjoyed his children and guarded them until my Uncle Winkie’s kids came along eight and ten years after me, and by then the course was set.
The thing we feared, that consumed us with dread when Mom would take off for a weekend, was Dad’s cooking.
He loved to concoct weird recipes and Snow White’s evil stepmother couldn’t have cooked up more evil-looking sorcery potions than Dad’s greasy grey stews, pear-and bacon sandwiches with hard clumps of margarine breaking through the white pillowy Golden Rule bread that, along with the milk bottles, were delivered to our home every other day.
One Sunday afternoon Mom was gone to
Finally Mr. O’Farrell left, and Dad came into the kitchen to heat up some grey stew or muck we were supposed to eat for dinner.
“I’ve already eaten, Dad,” my brothers said as they came home.
“I’m not hungry Daddy” Shelagh lied as she blew in fresh-faced from playing with her friends.”
“I don’t feel good, Dad,” I said and went upstairs to brush my teeth repeatedly to get the plastic-garlic taste out of my mouth. Finally after numerous brushings, I squeezed the tube of toothpaste onto my finger and smeared it on my teeth, not to brush away, but to seep in and override the horrible garlic hangover I was tasting.
That night I threw up a couple of times, and the next day, when my mother returned home and investigated the occurrences during her absence, notice how my eyes had a yellow cast to them.
She hied me to Group Health Clinic (our membership in that health cooperative made us slightly suspect as Communist sympathizers in those days, as did my dad’s support of city-wide water fluoridation: who were we to deprive the doctors and dentists of plying their practice, just because were too poor to pay them.?) Instead we paid a monthly membership fee in the Co-op, and went to the doctor whenever we needed and could interrupt our daily routine with a trip to the clinic or emergency room.
At Group Health my doctor diagnosed hepatitis, and to my astonishment, I found that I was really sick and would have to stay in bed for a long time. I didn’t feel that sick, I was just throwing up a lot, but I wasn’t nauseated.
It was fun! I stayed home all day every day, usually in bed, knowing that Mom was downstairs. At first I was the center of attention, as everyone in my family had to get a shot – in the bum! My brothers teased each other about pulling down their pants of front of the pretty young nurse.
Then it got boring, and I made dioramas, of the Little House in the Woods, the little house a discarded Lipton tea box with straws glued to the outside for a log cabin, and tree branches taped to nails punched through the cardboard for a forest.
