Chapter 1:  Religion as Magic

My earliest recollections of religion are marked by wonder and boredom.  Trying to sit still in the pew at church is not unfamiliar to most Catholics.  The mind numbing plodding along of the Mass is a testimony to the conservative’s need for ritual and repetition.  I was like any 5 year old.  I squirmed, sat, knelt, half knelt and daydreamed my way through every Mass.  It was torture.  These were the days before Sunday school and nursery options.  I knew there was a thing called “the crying room” but I feared it was a horrible place where you had to cry; a place where there were people who could make you cry if you were disinclined to do so.  My fears were often confirmed when, at least once per Sunday, a small child would be led, kicking and screaming, to that dreaded prison.

Once per week was bad enough, but the joy of the Eucharist was foisted upon me every single week day once I started to school.  In those days, Catholic students attended Mass every morning.  Thankfully, it was a truncated version without a sermon, in and out in a half hour.  But once I was in school, I learned that half sitting while kneeling was a mortal sin, or almost a mortal sin  (A mortal sin is a ticket to hell.  Do not pass go.  Do not collect a hundred dollars.) and my back would ache at every Mass as I squirmed around trying to alleviate the pain.  

One Sunday I sat next to Dad and when it came time to kneel, I noticed him half kneeling, so I joined him.  Whew!  What a relief!  That was when I invented the kneeling booth.  It was a contraption I devised during Mass one day that allowed its occupant to relax in luxurious plush upholstery while it automatically held you in the correct kneeling position.  There was a little window in the front so that you could see the proceedings and a speaker in the back so that you wouldn’t miss your cue to stand up, sit down, kneel, bow and all those other important acts of participation.  I’m sure I would have made millions if I could have convinced some lazy rich Catholic with a bad back to back me.  I told my best friend, Doug Draper.  But Doug told me it was a stupid idea.  In fact, he not only told me it was a stupid idea, he rolled on the grass laughing as I described it.  I ended up joining in with him, not wanting to miss out on a moment of hilarity, and pretended I was never serious about it anyway.     

Any Catholic my age can tell you about the toys given to us by well meaning nuns.  They would never call them toys, but that is exactly what they were.  I was fascinated by the rosaries, glow in the dark statues, scapulars, holy cards and especially, the relics.  Relics were just about the coolest Catholic toy ever invented.  A relic was supposedly a piece of cloth or bone from a dead Saint.  It was always encased in a fancy glass pendant so that it could viewed with reverence.  It was a bit like having a piece of the morgue or Madame Tussaud’s museum to carry around in your pocket.  Kids weren’t allowed to have them, but we managed to sneak them out and pass them around.  It was always a little chip of bone so small you had to get your eye very close to make it out.  We argued about whether it was really and truly the bone of a real live Saint or a piece of Kentucky Fried Chicken.  

I used to imagine what it was like in the factory that made relics.  I figured there was a big saw like in the cartoons with lots of holy priests gathered around making the sign of the cross every time they ripped across the rapidly diminishing corpse.  

Of course, all of this flies in the face of what we were told back then; that the Saints’ bodies never decayed and that their bodies were as perfect as the day they died.