Renovation

In a Polaroid shot taken the day of my first Communion, I am magnificent. I wear the boys' standard blue suit with white shirt and clip-on blue tie. My hair is an unruly mop of curls. My parents flank me like the cherubim — tired cherubim. This would be the family's last first Communion, as I was born when both Mom and Dad were forty-seven. Both worked union jobs (seamstress, welder) in shops that were ovens from May through September. A Saturday was not enough for the body to recover. And, anyway, their youngest child was what the aunts and uncles called "a handful." The wild hair was an outward sign of inner mischief.

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As one of my sisters snapped the picture, I pulled a yellow pirate's dagger from my pocket and lunged forward. My sister trapped the moment in photographic amber, and still today it stirs my emotions: I loved that dagger.

 

For the next photo I pulled out a toy knight. After that, they seem to have given up on getting a serious photo. None survives in the album.

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I don't remember much else from that day. Just this: our church was undergoing renovation, as were all the other nine Catholic churches in our little town. So my first Communion was in the school cafeteria, where the aroma of peanut butter was permanent.

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So my first Communion was in the school cafeteria, where the aroma of peanut butter was permanent.

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Everything was under renovation. That could be the title of a memoir of my Catholic boyhood. "The Council" was a recent memory, and it was often invoked in just that way. "The Council" was the reason that this or that was changing so rapidly.

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Some of the changes were magnificent. Air conditioning! Thanks, Council!

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Others left Third-Grade Me feeling ambivalent. The crowd of statues that had captivated me were now demoted to the church basement: St. Lucy with her eyes in a bowl, St. Rocco with his dog bite and guilty mutt. These had been the go-to remedies for my attention deficit. Now what did I have?

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But, with the exception of that redecoration our pastors and teachers went slowly. At school we were taught to genuflect on entering a church. We were taught to address the bishop as XLNC. In fifth grade we had to memorize the entire Baltimore Catechism before we could go forward for Confirmation. I concede that the book had limitations, but it also had excellences. Its questions ranged from the metaphysical (“Who is God?” “What is man?”) to the existential (“Why did God make me?”). You could build an intellectual and spiritual life on it, as my parents did, without the benefit of college education. 

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Something happened, though, between fifth grade and sixth. When we returned to school, religion had somehow gone from the certainties of Baltimore to the Sixties in Berkeley. We were working mostly with mimeographed sheets that asked us questions about our feelings. We made felt-and-burlap banners with quotations from Crosby, Stills & Nash.

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A few more grades passed, and the school built an Awareness Room across the hall from the chapel. It had big pillows and Ziggy posters. I'm not sure what its purpose was, but architecturally it seemed to be an alternative to the chapel.

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Everything was under renovation, and a lot of it seemed silly to the students who were supposed to be its beneficiaries. My dispositions weren't great to begin with. I was still a handful. And some teens are prone to resist the best efforts of their betters.

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So I checked out, mentally, and I think most of my friends did as well. If this stuff was Catholicism, then Catholicism was as comically passe as the Sixties. 

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I stayed checked out through high school. I was glad to be rid of it when I went away to the big state university.

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But a funny thing happened there. So much of my education seemed to be about Catholicism. I took an art-history survey, and the large screen in the large auditorium showed a regular succession of icons, biblical scenes, and episodes from the lives of the saints. My prof dwelt long on the genre of the Pietà in its historical context. I never got the impression he was a believer, but in the conduct of his business he clearly had to acquire a deep knowledge of Christian doctrine.

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This happened in other courses, too. In American Lit one day we were discussing Willa Cather's Death Comes for the Archbishop, and the professor found something puzzling. She asked if any Catholic in the class could explain the matter for her. I knew the answer, so I spoke up, and I was able to address her follow-up questions as well. I even drew upon unforgotten answers from the Baltimore Catechism. 

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I began to recognize the Church's place in history, though I still felt no attachment. I just didn't think about it much.

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In my senior year I took a writing seminar taught by a poet I much admired, and he put us through the rigors. We had to translate a poem from another language, analyze its form in the original, and then explain our efforts to replicate the effects of the poem's formal elements. I’m not great with languages. I’d had one year of Latin and three of Spanish, but my Latin was better than my Spanish. So I went to the university's library, pulled down the Oxford Book of Medieval Latin Verse and decided to translate whatever poem I opened upon. It happened to be St. Thomas Aquinas’s Adoro Te Devote, on the Eucharist.

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By the end of the exercise I was pretty much home. I know no other way to talk about it.

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The assignment forced me to engage the poem in a serious way, and by the end of the exercise I was pretty much home. I know no other way to talk about it. There was nothing dramatic about the episode, nothing extraordinary. I suppose the assignment helped me to redirect my attention to what is essential and central, and there I remembered grace.

 

Adoro Te Devote by St. Thomas Aquinas

(Translated by Gerard Manley Hopkins)

 

Godhead here in hiding, whom I do adore,

Masked by these bare shadows, shape and nothing more,

See, Lord, at Thy service low lies here a heart

Lost, all lost in wonder at the God thou art.

 

Seeing, touching, tasting are in thee deceived:

How says trusty hearing? that shall be believed;

What God’s Son has told me, take for truth I do;

Truth Himself speaks truly or there’s nothing true.

 

On the cross Thy godhead made no sign to men,

Here Thy very manhood steals from human ken:

Both are my confession, both are my belief,

And I pray the prayer of the dying thief.

 

I am not like Thomas, wounds I cannot see,

But can plainly call thee Lord and God as he;

Let me to a deeper faith daily nearer move,

Daily make me harder hope and dearer love.

 

O thou our reminder of Christ crucified,

Living Bread, the life of us for whom he died,

Lend this life to me then: feed and feast my mind,

There be thou the sweetness man was meant to find.

 

Bring the tender tale true of the Pelican;

Bathe me, Jesu Lord, in what Thy bosom ran

Blood whereof a single drop has power to win

All the world forgiveness of its world of sin.

 

Jesu, whom I look at shrouded here below,

I beseech thee send me what I thirst for so,

Some day to gaze on thee face to face in light

And be blest for ever with Thy glory’s sight. Amen.