Headed back to church for some needed guidance
- Mike Dewey: Life Lines
- November 7, 2020
- 985
I’m so happy I wasn’t there to see it happen.
Less than two weeks after I left home for the coast, they tore down my old church.
Friends told me about it, in guarded terms, knowing how much that place meant to me and understanding it was a loss I would carry for a long, long time.
It’s just the way I am.
I’m much better at preserving the old than embracing the new.
My wife doesn’t always understand this predilection toward hanging on to what’s long gone, but then again, neither do I fully grasp her willingness to trust what’s totally unproven.
Thus, I listen to the Rolling Stones on vinyl even as she walks around the house with earplugs in her head, mainlining NPR.
And that’s fine.
No married couple has a monopoly on synchronicity; in fact, it’s my belief the most successful ones rigorously allow for differences of opinion, of habit, of diet, of most anything if it results in what we’re all hoping to establish.
And that, to lift a phrase from America’s earliest gestation, is to form a more perfect union.
That old church played host as both my brother and sister consummated their wedding vows.
It also served as the site of my mother’s funeral Mass, a ceremony that to this day reminds me how raw and awful a wound can be.
I would witness friends’ weddings in that sacred place and, in years to come, bear witness to my father’s second set of marriage vows and, in sad, due course, to his requiem.
So you can understand how much that old church meant to me.
The last time I was back home, I tried to resurrect it, using all of my imaginative gifts, calling on every ounce of my marvelous memory, praying for a miracle, but it was all in vain.
Long-haul truckers engaged their jake brakes, shearing the air with their intolerable, whining squeals as they slowed their rigs for the descent down Jail Hill.
Amish buggies, drawn by aging mares, clip-clopped dutifully from the grain silos to their rural destinations, out there in God’s country.
And the cars passed by, their single-minded drivers none the more aware of what once stood in that empty space, the one they hardly noticed, let alone mourned.
I’m accustomed to missing people and places and things that no one else cares to remember, not because I want to, but because I have no choice.
We’re our own biographers, but no one will ever read our stories.
Ever since I turned 65, I’ve been thinking about how Mom never lived this long, how little I’ve done to merit this happenstance longevity and how paltry my contribution to the world has been.
I should have done better.
Then again, it could have been worse.
I remember my first exposure to old-school Roman Catholicism and how incredibly daunted I was to be told — absolutely and irrevocably — that before I could serve Mass as an altar boy, I’d have to memorize the entire liturgy.
In Latin.
I was all of 9 years old.
I won’t bore you with the details, but suffice it to say that by the time I made my debut in front of the pews, I knew how to muffle my voice against my robed sleeve when I came across one of the more challenging aspects of the Apostle’s Creed.
Hey, part of being a parochial schoolboy was learning how to cut corners in order to achieve maximum success; in fact, my brother will swear an oath to this day that I cheated in order to finish second in the school-wide spelling bee.
And I can’t call him a liar … well, no more than he’s always been.
That old church was the place I learned the value of confessing my sins and taking my penance like a man, even if 10 Hail Marys and five Our Fathers seemed too small a price for my transgressions.
I remember standing in line, waiting my turn in that darkened and curtained chamber, working up the courage to admit what a disappointment I’d been in the eyes of God, peeling back every layer of artifice and self-delusion, only to realize I was just like every other kid in my class: flawed and in need of forgiveness.
Not that every experience in that old relic of church was bad.
On the contrary, I was my brother’s best man, an honor I treasure.
And when it came time to bury my father, I did one of the readings, giving my attention to the phrasing, the timing and the meaning of that Old Testament passage, making eye contact with those I saw.
Nothing about being in that church was ever ordinary. After I had left my job at the newspaper with no landing place in sight, I renewed my connection with that place of my youth, hoping to find something approaching comfort as my future awaited, unwritten.
I would ride my bike from our house in the ghetto and speed down the back streets, arriving in time to lock it against a playground pole and hurry into the chapel, tucked away from the packed nave, so that I could ponder the impenetrable mystery that confronted me.
When you’re 45 years old and you’ve just walked away from a career that’s lasted more than two decades — not only burning, but detonating every bridge in your wake — you’re a little bit nervous.
But there was something about that church, some indefinable yet tangible assurance that led me to the belief that not only would I find something better, I’d find it in a better place at that.
Now would it be true to say all of it transpired in the way I’d hoped, that nothing untoward or ill-timed has knocked me off my pins since leaving all I knew behind 20 Novembers ago?
Puh-lease.
To quote Lowell George: “I’ve been kicked by the wind, robbed by the sleet, had my head stove in but I’m still on my feet … willin’.”
And when it gets bad, so dark — inside and out — that I can’t imagine a new day dawning, I think of that little church, the one that isn’t even there anymore, and I just remember feeling blessed.