Faith
I waited a long time for a sister. Or at least it felt like a long time, which makes sense since I was a child and everything feels like it takes forever when you’re seven or eight. What’s the old motto? For the young the days go fast and the years go slow; for the old the days go slow and the years go fast. The years during which I had a brother, then another, then another, seemed to go very slowly. Then one morning in April my father came home from the hospital and announced that I had a sister. And for some utterly bizarre reason my parents had decided that I could name her.
My sister’s name is Theresa Bernadette.
Many people reading that name would consider it either slightly strange or rather old-fashioned. But for Catholic girls of a certain era, it makes perfect sense. My sister is named for what any of us would consider the Big Two: Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, the French saint known as the Little Flower, a high-strung child who spent most of her youth trying to persuade clerical officials to let her follow her sister into a Carmelite monastery, and Saint Bernadette of Lourdes, the peasant girl who had visions of a beautiful lady in a rock declension who the church eventually concluded was the Virgin Mary, turning Bernadette’s hometown into a mecca for pilgrims seeking cures. There was even a Hollywood movie of her life, which for Catholic saints is comparatively rare. The beautiful Jennifer Jones played Bernadette.
For me, being Catholic is like being Irish or Italian or Caucasian, not a faith but an immutable identifying characteristic with which I was born and with which I will die. Many of the faithful would not consider this so; they would point to the fact that I no longer attend Mass every Sunday and never followed church directives on contraception. (If I had, I would be writing now about the challenges of raising twelve children.) But the Church is in the schools I attended, the women who taught me, the way I dressed and ate and spent my days as a child, the way I raised my own children and buried the older members of my extended family. It is woven into the fabric of my self, in both the warp and woof, so that it seems if you pulled its threads, all the rest would unravel. If a stranger were to stop me on the street and say, “The Lord be with you,” I would reply automatically, just as I did for many years during Mass, “And also with you.” Or perhaps “And with your spirit,” which is what the response once was and then became again, or even “Et cum spiritu tuo,” the Latin of the Church of my childhood.
I am a long way from those traditionalists who chart the decline of modern Catholicism from the moment when its rituals were couched in a language its people could actually understand, but I sometimes think the modern translators lacked a sense of the poetry of prose. I still prefer to recall that Mary gave birth to Jesus and placed him in a manger because there was no room at the inn; the first time I heard the revamped version of the Gospel that instead spoke of “the place where travelers lodged,” I cringed. It sounded as though the Holy Family got shut out of a cut-rate motel. No room at the inn. That’s what happened.
The bedrock of my life as a reader and as a writer is in these stories from the New Testament, of an angel appearing to Mary and saying, “Fear not,” of Jesus changing water into wine at a wedding. (“We’ll save the best wine for last, like Cana,” my husband said one night when friends came for dinner, and once again I was grateful that I married what seemed like the only Catholic boy at Columbia.) More important, the bedrock of my life as a citizen and a human being is contained in my faith as well. As I’ve said often, much to the consternation of friends of other faiths who have come to see Catholicism as narrow, conservative, and antediluvian, I am a liberal because I was raised Catholic. In a typically thoughtful and searching speech he gave at Notre Dame, former New York governor Mario Cuomo, the most intellectual of nonclerical Catholics, referred to practicing the work of Christ in our life, “practicing it especially where that love is most needed, among the poor and the weak and the dispossessed.” That’s the lesson I took away from the New Testament, the requirement that if you had two cloaks you should give one to the person who had none, that you should love your neighbor as yourself. It’s a lesson that has never left me.
But what has disappeared, the older I’ve gotten, is the kind of belief that I once thought I would have forever. I began, as a child, by accepting that certain things were true, things that I would learn, as I grew older, were considered odd and even bizarre by others. The idea that the bread and wine at Communion had become the body and blood of Christ, the idea that Christ was the Son of God, the notion that Mary gave birth although she was a virgin. Of course, when we first learned this it was a more innocent time, when none of us knew what a virgin really was.
Naturally, when I was a teenager I was disdainful, of the Church, of its traditions, even of its underlying messages. During four years of college I attended Mass only when I was at home and my parents insisted. Yet when I was living in lower Manhattan, alone, with no one to roust me on Sunday mornings (often with a hangover), I found myself occasionally at the church of St. Anthony of Padua on nearby Sullivan Street, just north of the salumeria that made fresh mozzarella, surrounded by women who could have been cousins of the Guarinis and Pantanos, who were my maternal relations.
It’s commonplace for parents to begin religious observance again once they have children, and we were no different, although the ways in which we did this were considerably different from the ways in which we ourselves had been raised. Our sons were baptized in our living room by the priest who married us, with a blessing at the end sung by a female rabbi for whom I had been a dorm counselor in college. (Immediately after the Hebrew words died down, my father launched into a full-throated rendition of “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling,” which he has always contended was in no way a protest against the rabbi.) We were so appalled by the limited theological knowledge of the parishioner who tutored us before our daughter’s more traditional church christening that my husband, a former altar boy, provided the classes that led to Communion for each child: the prospective communicant would share the two-hour car ride from country to city on Sunday evenings, there on Route 80 to learn the seven sacraments, the names of the evangelists, and other factoids that would have enabled any of our three to score in the high 700s on a Catholicism SAT. We left it up to them whether to continue on to Confirmation, a consecration to the Church that we both felt was too important to be decided by us alone. None of the three has been confirmed.
“I told them I was a self-educated Catholic,” Quin told us after an admissions interview at a Catholic boys’ school, and the two of us, whipped into shape, and doctrine, by a procession of women in wimples and men in Roman collars, looked at each other sidelong: bet that went over like Bermuda shorts at Sunday Mass.
Today, of course, we see Bermuda shorts at Sunday Mass all the time. Which is an outrage, although not a religious one. It’s hard to believe God has any interest in how we dress, and the only religious outrages are those of bigotry and hatred, like the right-wing evangelicals who protest military funerals with signs that say GOD HATES FAGS or the Muslim extremists who took down the World Trade Center and a corner of the Pentagon. Bermuda shorts in church are merely a sartorial sin.
Church garb was a major part of childhood observance for me, the modest dress, the hat, eventually the mantilla of Kennedy’s Camelot and Vatican II. And perhaps, in retrospect, that signaled one of the inherent problems with the Catholic Church in which I grew to maturity. There was so much emphasis on form over faith, so much about head coverings and fish on Fridays and rote memorization. The lips moved but the mind was not engaged. Occasionally someone would make the argument that this was the foundation that would enable us to learn more, to think harder, to begin to appreciate the spiritual sense that was the point of the exercise. And yet, as far as I can see, that rarely happened. A small cadre of intellectual Catholics delved into the nature of God, of Christ, of the Gospels, of the soul and life after death. Sadly, many of those found themselves in trouble. Delving leads to questioning, and questioning leads t
o dissent, and dissent leads to disenfranchisement. “Every day a little closer to excommunication,” my husband once said of my columns about the Church.
This is not just the lot of Catholics. Few religions foster a searching approach to spirituality. Piety has always found its most comfortable home in America amid newer immigrants, who welcome the shape devotion gives to an uncertain existence and the solace the spiritual provides in times of dislocation and want. But the more people are educated, the more they are skeptical; the more they are prosperous, the less likely they are to slavishly adhere to the faith of their fathers. In this way our family is a reflection of many others. Our grandparents were devout, our parents observant. And we are haphazard.
It’s not that I’ve renounced the Church, although during the course of my lifetime it has provided so many reasons to do so. As other faiths have concluded that the Christ of the New Testament was a friend to women despite the strictures of his time and would have wanted them to lead and serve, the Catholic Church has been determined to marginalize its female members by denying them, with the flimsiest of arguments, the right to serve as priests. It has persisted in practicing a kind of theological gynecology by obsessing about contraception and abortion during a time of worldwide poverty and growing women’s rights. It has cast in shadow the enormous contributions of righteous religious workers throughout the world by minimizing the scandal of pedophilia and other sexual predation that turns out to have been widespread in the Church.
That last was why I finally stopped putting on a skirt and heels each Sunday and going with my husband to Mass. I felt that my very presence in the pew suggested that I was willing to overlook the priests who had been shuffled from parish to parish, fondling children and teenagers as they went. But I’m not sure that was the only reason I stopped attending church. It’s simply that, as I’ve grown older, I’ve had more time to think about the layers and layers of truth and understanding that make up the strata of our own personal earth. When they say there are no atheists in foxholes, the presumption is that the closer we come to mortality, the closer we will be to God. For me it has been the opposite. I was raised on stories and traditions. I know the lives of many saints, not just Thérèse and Bernadette, and the Sign of the Cross is so deeply ingrained in me that I have found it difficult not to use it in synagogues. Perhaps because of this, stories and symbols have become the basis of my professional life and the traditions of my family life. All five of us have assigned seats at the dinner table; woe betide the visitor who plops down in Chris’s chair.
Our Christmases are vast inviolate repositories of custom: the Santa dolls on the mantel, the evergreen garland around the stair rail, the areas of the living room designated for the presents of each child although the children are now adults. Every year we go to the circus together, have done for decades. Each year we take up our bowls and spatulas and bake: oatmeal cookies for Quin, Toll House cookies for Maria, fudge for Chris, sugar cookies that the three of them will decorate with royal icing. The year that I believed Quin would be spending Christmas at his apartment in China almost did me in. He was a vegetarian at the time, and I wept in front of the veggie burger display at the supermarket as Muzak carols played on the PA system. When a group of Maria’s friends showed up one evening on the sidewalk to sing carols and the Santa at the back took off his white beard to reveal himself as our eldest child, it was the closest I’ve ever come to fainting. My husband still considers flying Quin home from Beijing for Christmas among his cleverest pieces of subterfuge, and I consider it the nicest.
Every year, as a family, we read aloud Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. Neither my husband nor I can recall precisely how the tradition began, although we know we started it before we had children and then watched as, one by one, each learned to read well enough to manage an entire chapter, managed the pronunciation of words like “excrescence” and “apoplectic opulence.” Learning to walk, learning to read, going to school, graduating from college—one of the notable markers of maturity in our family is having your own stave, or chapter, to read in the book. And because sometimes heaven is merciful, there are five staves, and five of us.
This should not be the centerpiece of the holiday. The birth of Christ should be the centerpiece. Actually, any good Catholic of a certain age can tell you that Easter ought to be so rather than Christmas, because this is when the promise of the Resurrection was fulfilled with a rolled-back stone and an empty tomb and the guarantee of life everlasting. But over the years Christmas has assumed a position of primal importance in our household, and the words of Charles Dickens in his slender novella have taken on the force of doctrine. I have quoted from that book in my own work more often than any other. “Are there no prisons?” Scrooge asks disdainfully of provisions for the poor. “Are there no workhouses?” And when the scales are lifted from his eyes by ghostly apparitions of the past, present, and future, those words are thrown back at him, and he, too, is made to understand that if you have two cloaks, you should give one to he who is shivering and in need. Dickens’s tale makes me understand what it means to be a good person, just as the New Testament has.
I’ve thought of my faith so often as I’ve grown older, and I admit that I’m not certain what I really believe about any of it anymore. And, frankly, I’m not sure it matters. If the message of Christ led me to try to be a more generous human being, does it matter whether he was the Messiah or a prophet? If people are empathetic and charitable, does it matter whether they believe in a God who somehow began, or engineered, or oversees us all? If we have traded the evangelists for Dickens, is that a tragedy or a draw? Those questions take me far, far away from the positions of the Church in which I was baptized and the beliefs I had many years ago, and into the realm of humanism, secularism, even heresy.
I don’t say that with the gleeful “gotcha” of the dedicated atheist or the cynical dismissal of the enthusiastically lapsed Catholic—recovering Catholics, some of them call themselves. Atheism is a game for younger people, who are so sure of what they’re sure of. Contempt for religion and for Catholicism (as opposed to contempt for the men who poorly lead the Church) makes me breathless and ill at ease; a smug certitude about the foolishness of a point of view that has been held for millennia by such bright lights as Saint Augustine, Thomas More, C. S. Lewis, and Graham Greene just seems silly. But the writings and beliefs of those great men intrigue yet do not entirely persuade. I am less sure of what I know than of those things of which I’m doubtful.
When I coach students through essay writing, I invariably give the most able the same direction: go deeper, go deeper. In each iteration, reveal more, of who you truly are, of what you really think. That’s the hallmark of aging, too, that we learn to go deeper, in our friendships, in our family life, in our reflections on how we live and how we face the future. The reason we develop an equanimity about our lives and ourselves is that we have gone deep into what has real meaning.
And the mark, I suppose, of an indelible connection to religious faith is that ability to go deeper, to burrow into the self, to expand spiritual connections and limitations. I’m stuck too close to the surface. Perhaps that is because of my own shortcomings. Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that I was raised in a Church that does not invite its people to go deeper, or to move very far beyond its outward forms. Catholicism is an autocracy. It not only dismisses questioning, it demonizes it. The tiny subclass of Catholics who bring deep intellectual rigor to issues of tradition, doctrine, infallibility, identity, and sanctity are almost always honored in the breach if they are honored at all. The price for that is that many of the faithful, especially highly educated ones, either skate on the surface or fall away.
At some level I may have lost my religion, despite the deep talons of its traditions and forms within me. But I’ve never lost, and will never lose, my faith. “Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen,” it says in the book of Hebrews. I believe in hope and mystery. Th
at belief is just different than it once was. I remember being mesmerized as a child by the fact that one indication that Bernadette was truly blessed by God was that her body had not decomposed, that you could travel to Lourdes and see her, in her nun’s habit, a rosary entwined in her waxy hands, lying in an elaborate glass coffin. Having now seen Mao Tse-tung and Lenin in a similar state, that seems like a cheap parlor trick to me, beneath the dignity of an uneducated woman who either saw visions or was brave enough to insist she had. I look at the list of miracles that earned Thérèse a place at the table of sainthood, and they’re poor narrow things, all about illness and ailments, tuberculosis and arthritis and cancer allegedly cured.
By those standards radiation is miraculous, and antibiotics. Actually, by any standards those are miracles. And there are all those little everyday miracles, too, the fact that a daffodil bulb sprouts a flower year after year, that kittens know to use a litter box without being taught, that the music of Samuel Barber and Stephen Sondheim and the last sentences of A Christmas Carol make your soul rise and shine. “God bless us, every one,” the book ends. I trust He does.
Step Aside
When I was a young reporter I went to Key West one Easter weekend to interview Tennessee Williams, who was chipper, voluble, and fascinating in the mornings and then became progressively less so as the day waned and he had more and more to drink. There was no mystery about the source of the profound sadness that came over him as night fell. It was the genius version of sundown syndrome; he suspected, feared, in fact knew that he would never again write anything like The Glass Menagerie or A Streetcar Named Desire, both produced when he was in his thirties. It was a kind of journalistic malpractice to expect a twenty-five-year-old reporter to understand this; there surely must have been something in this courtly man that recoiled from my youthful get-up-and-go. I cringe now at the memory of the great men who opened their doors to what they can only have concluded was the most callow and clueless of interviewers: John Ashbery explaining his epic poem Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, Richard Yates talking about his great novel Revolutionary Road. But they were all so lovely to me, Williams especially; he let me wear a sun hat he said had belonged to his beloved sister, Rose, the model for Laura in Menagerie.