Good chance I’m hellward bound after today, when the afterlife calls. Or the Day of Judgment. Some bad kind of god day, anyway.
You see, I was trying to get the one person at work who I know might be doing the whole mass thing and celebrating the Easter weekend to start a movement and take Good Friday off. Since she could head to an evening mass, and she knows I ain’t what you’d call devout or maybe a “believer,” I couldn’t get the movement going.
There’re a couple of kickers in my head about the whole exchange. The first is that I hadn’t figured for a minute that moving out here to the Bay Area, you know the kind of place with crystals and hot tubs and meditation and massage therapy and Jim Jones, a blue-state zone with seekers and lost souls, lousy with liberals, that here I would meet some native-born capital C Catholics.
Catholic to me is a Boston thang, or maybe the Vatican. I mean here you go to a Catholic school and there ain’t no lock the kids are all following one holy and apostolic church, and there’s probably a curriculum chunk of cultural knowledge and sensitivity. But, in my growing up, other religions were something you read about in books, or maybe Jon Feldman did an extra report in front of the whole class once a year.
So, we were chatting about the church and all, and a devout mom’s belief in the lostness of lapsed Catholics and her sense of anger from the folks who left.
Got me thinking. I think anger is the right word. In my writings, I gotta figure out how this all works into shit, but angry is the word for Pat when priests and their belief systems came into view.
It wasn’t the ultimate holy beliefs that seemed to chap her. It was the material, political world, from the earthbound place where priests actually reside.
I don’t know at the end of the day or night or her life if Pat believed in god, big G or little g. I don’t know about the trinity. The Holy Ghost, the Son of God and Man. I would guess so, in the same way I knew she liked meat and potatoes, because they were the staples of her life.
But, I do know, there was a chip on her shoulder slightly smaller than Nebraska when the church itself was invoked.
Maybe it was cynicism she had come by as a youngster, when her monsignor uncle had friends from the city archdiocese visit the family summer place, where they would have cocktails with their “chippies.” That was back in the olden days when priests dated women on the downlow in some kind of parish “don’t ask don’t tell” dealio, where discretion was the requirement, and life was a bit simpler.
Or maybe it was just all the sadness, the sense of loss without a safety net when my father passed away. He believed, he had studied for the priesthood once, but his church didn’t catch her when she fell. Or at least didn’t provide her the kind of soft landing she, widow, young, and with five kiddies, had wanted and needed.
One day, during one of the thousands of grocery shopping expeditions Pat and I trekked, I had a question for her. My entire life. my dad was discussed in soft, gentle tones, referential. No bitter words were ever passed. There was no speaking ill of the dead, and the deceased was now a saint.
So, I asked her. Given that she had never spoken a negative word to me, never had anything bad to say about her husband, but surely in any relationship there is some darkness, I asked her if there was anything she didn’t like about my dad. No beat was skipped, apart from a thoughtful pause, “He was too religious.”
She went on to explain with a huge dose of levity that when it came to the church, his belief, Catholicism, for her tastes, he was too serious. It was too much work, and not enough fun, I gathered, and she wished he would have lightened up.
But, she wasn’t angry at his belief, just the church.
piled with the day’s shopping and a flat of spring flowers for her garden or window boxes. She paused, a tad dramatically her own bad self, and told us that “you two look so serious,” perhaps implying that no one should be that serious.