Fallen Catholic (continued)

In those days there was no daylight between my religious life and my real life.  I somehow knew that Santa Claus and Disney were fake magic but I did not want to test those boundaries.  So I bought into the Catholic way and had no problem memorizing the catechism power points.  

“What is a Sacrament?  
A Sacrament is an outward sign instituted by Christ to give grace.”

Magic was fun but religion was serious stuff.  The nuns, the priests, my mom, my dad, all the adults in my life conspired to make my spiritual path unambiguous.  It was a great foundation of half truths and lies.  It was certainty.  It did not matter that it wasn’t true.  It gave me an easy to follow life assignment, just like school.  Do your homework and pay attention and all is good.  Don’t eat meat on Friday.  Don’t murder anybody.  Go to church on Sunday.  Don’t covet my neighbor’s wife.  Easy.  Oh yeah, don’t cuss.  Not so easy.  But I was sure you could not go to hell for cussing unless you said the “G” word and the “D” word together.  Which was easy.  Oh yeah, don’t steal.  As if!    

Even though I hated to go to Mass on Sunday, I loved to go to this thursday thing called Novena.  They sang some really cool songs in that show.  And the best thing of all was that gold smoking thing that they slung around the room.  Man that smelled like heaven.  I was told that it was frankinsteins, or frank incest, or something like that.  It was like two gold bowls clapped together on a long chain.  The priest would pull the two little bowls apart and sprinkle some kind of magic dust in there and the whole thing would start smoking like crazy.  Then he would run around the church clanging it and shaking it at every statue as if to say, “Take a whiff of this!”  So incredibly cool!  

And those statues!  Talk about magic!  I was convinced that the Saints were inside those statues staring out at me through the eyes.  That’s why the statue of Jesus on the cross was so hard to look at.  I was afraid to look at the bloody nail in Christ’s feet because I knew he was watching me.  It just seemed rude to gawk at the gnarly stuff.  But man, it was hard not to stare especially on those rare occasions when I was allowed to get close.  So if I was alone, I took my time drinking in the gore, ruminating on my horrible sins, the lies and fights with my brothers and sisters.  Yep.  Jesus was unbelievable.  And he did it all without crying even a little.  Man.  

It was during one of these scary moments of solitude at the feet of Jesus that I recalled the story of a thing called stigmata told to us by our second grade nun.  

Before I get into the actual legend of the stigmata, I want to mention what a wonderful bunch of teachers I had at Sts. Simon and Jude Elementary School in Louisville.  These ladies were absolutely the sweetest people you would ever want to meet.  I was taken aback as I grew up to hear the horror stories other Catholics told about nuns.  I became best friends with most of my teachers at St. Simon.  This was particularly true of my second grade nun, Sister Cornelia Marie.  I was just crazy about her.  She was young and wore those round frameless glasses and she smelled so wonderful and smiled so beautifully.  I figured they gave nuns great perfume because they were so holy.  I later realized it was Ivory Soap.  

Like all second graders, I was told never to touch a nun because they were holy and our filthy sinful hands would defile them.  I believed that, too, until Sister Cornelia Marie gave me a big hug one day...not one of those arm over shoulder jobs, but a real honest to goodness bear hug like my mother gave me.  It came as a shock to me but I drank it in like a teenager enjoying his first kiss.  I can still remember her rosary jangling as she bent down and again as she straightened herself.  Then I remember turning bright red as I felt the eyes of my classmates boring down on me.  

After that, I stayed as close to Sister Cornelia Marie as I could get.  I was a good pet.  

Okay, the stigmata.  Sister Cornelia Marie was a great story teller.  She would pull the shades on our classroom and turn out the large overhead neons and walk around the room while she spun her tales.  They were always stories with an obvious moral lesson, a lesson designed to make us better Catholics and therefore better people.  But as she told us about the stigmata, the wounds manifested on true believers, I was struck with how horrible it was to be close to God.  

A person who displayed the stigmata had the wounds from crucifixion.  Their hands and feet would bleed as if the nails had penetrated them.  And Sister Cornelia Marie talked about it as if it were a great honor.  All I could think was that I hoped God never loved me enough to bestow that prize on me.  

Of all the stories about God, this one bothered me the most because it occurred to me for the first time that maybe God was mean.  Maybe God was really a jerk and we were fools for worshipping him.   I remember chasing that thought out of my head, worried that God would hear me and strike me dead right there in my desk.  

He didn’t.  

Still I was sure I had just committed a horrible mortal sin and that I had to go to confession because if I died without confessing I would go straight to hell.  Do not pass go.  Do not collect two hundred dollars.

So I worried myself sick until I could get to the confessional.  Then, once I finally knelt down and the red light went on, I panicked.   How the hell was I gonna confess that?  Wouldn’t the priest jerk me out of the confessional by my ear and beat me to within an inch of my miserable blasphemous life?   I quickly made up some easy sins, dumped them on the priest and flew out of the confessional.  I ran halfway home before I slowed to catch my breath.  Now what?  I not only committed a mortal sin, but I lied about it by not confessing it.  I was going to hell twice.  Do not pass go...etc.  Jesus H. Christ!    

The taint from this sin was never erased.  I carried it with me like a ball and chain for the rest of my childhood.  Thankfully, as the memory faded, so did the guilt.  But shortly after my run in with the stigmata, I witnessed a real tragedy and got my first glimpse of mortality.

Anita Wilson (not her real name) was killed while crossing the street that year.  She was a nice girl. A pretty girl.  She sat a row to my left and 4 seats ahead of me.  She had beautiful eyes and big full lips.  She didn’t smile much.  We all went to her funeral and walked up to her casket and looked at her lying there with a bluish bruise on her forehead.  She wore her first Communion dress.  The parents cried a lot more than we did.  We knew it was a sad thing but she was not a close friend to me.  

I was able to look at the whole thing in a detached way.  I just could not imagine her in heaven.  All I could think about were the details of her interment.  What was it like closed in the casket?  Was it hard to breathe?  Within a few nights, the nightmares began.  I talked to my friends about Anita, but I never admitted to the bad dreams.  I didn’t grieve for Anita.  I was too scared for myself to think about her.  Death always frightened me.  And I never trusted the nuns to tell me the truth about death.  I just could not swallow the idea of heaven.  At the age of seven, I had already started down the path to damnation.   I was terribly afraid of the doubts that constantly crept into my mind after Anita’s death.  But like a good Catholic, I brushed them aside with a few fervent prayers.  

Sister Cornelia Marie gave us a little talk about heaven the next day.  It helped to think about Anita playing with her new friends in heaven.  This beautiful woman wept as she talked about the angels and Jesus and all of the little children who had died.  She talked about how lucky they were to be with God.  Every nun kept an arsenal of tissue under her habit.  And Sister Cornelia had to reach for one after another as she went on with her story.  Seeing her cry like that made me love her even more.  To this day, she is my favorite teacher of all time.  

A few years later we went to the downtown library to see a film about a little boy who died before he was old enough to go to school.  It was a Christmas story titled, “The Littlest Angel,”  narrated by Loretta Young.  There is a point in that movie when the little boy gives his humble gift to the Christ child.  It is a box full of his favorite things...the feathers from a robin’s nest, a set of jacks, some marbles and a sling shot.  When the Christ child sees this gift he prizes it above all the other expensive things offered to him.  Every year I read this story to my girls.  And every year I get too choked up to finish it.  It truly is magic.