I grew up Catholic. My family wasn’t particularly strict in their attention to doctrine, but we attended mass on Sundays and for all the major feasts. My mother read scripture for mass every once in a while and was well acquainted with the priests. Even when I was eight or so, she told me honestly what she thought of them, that Fr. Aaron was a bit cold, that she liked Fr. Lou but couldn’t stand the smell of those cheap cigars he smoked, that sort of thing. She taught me how to pray, made sure I knew all the right words in the right order, but she never taught me how to feel during prayer.
My father did not care about the Church, and I could see the boredom in his eyes during mass. He set them in a cold stare throughout the service, sometimes going through the motions of prayer, mouthing the words indifferently, sometimes simply sitting, standing, and kneeling. That was the bare minimum of participation necessary to keep the parishioners from whispering conspicuously to one another after mass. I knew my father was indifferent to the pageantry and incense of life as a member of the Church, and that knowledge was probably the seed of my own divorce from the institution my mother holds closest to her heart.
My earliest memories of mass are from about age three or so. The church we attended then was the church of my baptism, in a Polish neighborhood in Utica. My father grew up there; it’s where he attended mass as a child. Then, of course, the only way one could hear mass and understand it was by speaking Polish or Latin, and perhaps this was the root of my father’s disinterest in the Church. St. Mark’s is a cathedral in those early memories of mine, with high, vaulted ceilings and gilded pulpits, marble altars and ancient, time-softened pews. The light was always golden. The few memories I have of that place lead me to believe that it was there that I felt the holiest, there that the Holy Ghost lit on my head, and there that I last held any unmarred faith in the power of the Church to unfailingly produce purity and light.
In later years, I was sent to classes meant to teach me the faith. We learned all the requisite prayers: the Act of Contrition, the Our Father, the Hail Mary, the Apostolic Creed. They came to us through textbooks designed to look like the sort of thing we encountered in school, with chapters relating a biblical story and questions at the end meant to review and apply the reading to some hypothetical situation we might encounter. It was a brilliant method of teaching religious doctrine, especially for a by-the-book faith like the Catholic Church. Make the sacred look like a fact, just like math class. It infuriated me, not for the reasons it does now, but because I was always bored witless. The prayers I knew by heart from years of attendance at mass, and by the third grade I had read nearly all of the New Testament during mass out of the same boredom that plagued me in those classes. So began my fall from grace.
When I was twelve and confirmation was fast approaching, tension began to mount. I had come to despise the early Sunday mornings spent shivering in that cold church, and I held the classes in equal contempt. I began to protest fiercely against my confirmation. I told my mother I wanted nothing to do with it; she told me I had no choice. I asked questions in class that weren’t supposed to be asked, and I’m sure word got around the parish rather quickly that Mary Jo’s son was a troublemaker. Finally, I simply refused to be confirmed. If my mother wanted to see me made an adult in the eyes of the Church, she could go on wanting that forver; I made it known that I would be nothing more than a confirmed unbeliever.
My father played the peacemaker throughout the ordeal, and it was he who forged the fragile peace between my mother and me. It was agreed, days before the start of confirmation classes, that I would not be confirmed, but that I must attend every class, every function, and every trial run in preparation for confirmation. I had won, and I hated myself for it. I learned then a little of the joyless victory of war.
The aftermath is strange. In my fight to remain forever a child in the eyes of the Church, I spat on every holy thing I could. The excesses and absurdities of the Church were my stones; my free will, acknowledged even by the Church itself, was my sling. I picked the ground clean looking for missiles to continue the fight. I had wounded myself, too, though.
My sense of the sacred was founded in the Church, and in divorcing myself I burned the icons and left myself singed, lacking any spiritual identity. My poetry and artwork came to reflect the loss, and I came to regret a little of what I had refused. I could not extinguish my fascination with the sublime alchemy of passion and joy. A depiction of the Virgin could bring me almost to tears, and the Stations of the Cross held mysteries in which I knew I could never revel. Whenever I felt a pang of regret, I chided myself for my weakness and sentimentality.
I encountered Joseph Campbell a few years later, and the pieces of my broken faith began to coalesce into something new. I came to believe that my attachment to the iconography of the Church was not an attachment to the Church itself, but to the archetypal matrix the Church provided. Thus it was that I came to make my peace with the Church, and set out anew, cutting my own path through what Robert Pirsig called the “high country of the mind”. I began to assemble a new spirituality, one that is not now and will never be complete, but whose image is sharper and more rich with each passing day. A mosaic. Birdsong is part of it, and so is the pattern formed by the cracks in the asphalt of the road that runs past my house. The Church is part of it as well, but no greater a part than the elegance and the beauty of the Portuguese man o’war. Each day,I look for a new piece. Some days I find one, and I pick it up, put it in my pocket, and keep it there until I know where it goes. Some days I don't. But every day, I look.