Father B.

My first husband and I met in a hospital. He was a nursing student, I was an intern. After two years and random vicissitudes, we made the ill-considered decision to wed. We were, after a brief excursion to Chicago, back at the same little hospital. The excursion and return were both fraught and conflictual; the return was, at least on my part, a desperate default whose repercussions I feel every day of my professional life.



Father B. was the hospital chaplain. He was a youngish man, cheerful, blond, about a decade older than us. To me, of course, he radiated Catholic mystique. His presence at deathbeds and codes was as an emissary from a world from which I felt excluded and into which I longed to be admitted. Since my intended was Catholic, Father B. seemed a natural choice to marry us.



We had the requisite pre-nuptial sessions over dinner in the tiny flat in which we were, in retrospect, living "in sin." I recall sitting on the living room floor, drinking wine, and talking -- we probably gossiped about the hospital, I think he told some anecdotes from seminary, and I remember nothing about the heart of the matter -- presumably that marriage is a sacrament, and that we'd raise our babies in the (only true) Church.



Seven years later we divorced, at least in the eyes of the state, and didn't set foot inside any kind of church for the whole duration of our ill-conceived union.



A few years ago I Googled Father B. and found a name similar to his on a list of sexually abusive priests. After initial shock and dismay, I concluded that I did not have enough data to say it was our Father B.



This week, after the European recrudescence of the abuse scandal, I remembered Father B. and re-Googled; the available data was more robust, and, yes, the Father B. who had been chaplain in our little hospital in the late 1970s had committed abuse in the 1960's, which had come to light in the late 90's. A Holy Cross Alumni obituary reports his death in the spring of 2008, at the age of 71.



Seventy one. In my memory, that idyllic place, we still sit in the dank living room at Henry Street listening to Fr. B.; he is blond, enthusiastic, youthful. Catholic, a priest, intellectual, immaculate, a friend and colleague. Not dead in a Catholic nursing home at 71, sinful, criminal, disgraced.



A complex sadness sits like a stone in my chest -- disappointment, disillusion, grief, loss, guilt, sorrow, regret. It's hard to name. It may be nameless.



Lord have mercy. On all of us.

Wash

The riverwalk, today, was a riverslosh. As water leaked through my 35-year-old LL Bean boots, I couldn't help imagining my soggy walk as a prelude to tonight's footwashing liturgy. I'd spent the morning setting out bowls and towels, as well as removing the tarp from the organ and the towels from the sacristy sideboard that had been set out to catch invading rain.



The errant river, receding, has left a debris field of the usual styrofoam coffee cups and plastic drinks bottles, reminding us of the reciprocity it mandates, the mutual servanthood -- that we not sully it with our leavings, the effluvia of our unquenchable desires.



This is no paradise, no gilded age. My self-portrait is in a flatbed's hubcap; behind me, in verso, the dirty river thunders. I enter the Triduum unprepared, a slate scoured blank by Lent, Leonard Cohen's cold and broken Hallelujahs sounding in my mind's ear like rusty windchimes in a gale. I shall see what I shall see, hear what I shall hear. It's like going for a walk with my camera: I am all eye. And silence.



Liturgy is word and act; it is embodied and relational. You have to take off your old boots and get your feet wet. You have to touch each other.



From the outside it might look strange, disturbing, barely comprehensible, even risible, like a word stripped of its meaning, an absurd and contingent grunt. And, let's face it, from the inside it's also a little odd -- the bread, the wine, the stained glass, the ranks of organ pipes. The God-Man crucified; the God-Man resurrected.



But what about being-here-at-all isn't odd ? And that's the terrifying, sorrowful, agonizing crux and heart of the matter, isn't it.



What better place to begin than with a naked foot ?

A Neo-Luddite Snit, an Apology and a Manifesto

I sort of noticed a few weeks ago that good old Haloscan -- the free comment system I've used here for the duration -- looked a little different. Sure, sure, I thought, transiently annoyed when it failed to recognize me, but, you know, whatever, things change and all that.

When, today, I received 3 spam comments here from Twitter from 3 strangers -- one in japanese -- all shilling "js-kit" which, on closer look, seemed to have something to do with the entity into which haloscan has transmogrified, I decided I'd better look into what was going on.

So I ended up at a site of unsurpassed un-navigability and graphical chaos, only to learn that Haloscan has been snarfed up something called "js-kit/ECHO" and -- for a fee, now -- would somehow integrate blog comments with all sorts of other social media such as twitter, facebook, google, yahoo & blogger in a tangled web of cyber-interrelating that, frankly, has given me an attack of cyber-agoraphobia.

So I did what any short-fused cheapskate neo-luddite would do, a template code-ectomy, and turned on blogger's own comment system.

Sorry, friends.

That's seven years worth of wonderful and generous comments vaporized. Comments I have often been woefully remiss in acknowledging and reciprocating. Sorry, sorry and more sorry.

Am I too asocial for social media ? I thought the internets were a place where nerdy recluses like me were supposed to flourish ! Have the facebooking hordes invaded and installed 24/7 live-action simulacra of their gloriously gregarious and richly connected social lives, about which they blog and tweet and yelp and digg and ping and plurk and flickr and facebook (as loathsome a verb as "to scrapbook," I apologize for it) creating a huge confluence of "streams" of -- of what ? Soliloquoy ? Conversation ? Dialogue ? Networking ? Working the room ? Shilling, hawking, branding, buying, selling, promoting ? Beneath which sits the ECHO comment box in which we can merrily decline to cease to cherish opinions on every modality available simultaneously.

Yes. I am too asocial for this scene, as I am for most aspects of my life, both sacred and profane. It is the way I am, it is a part my neurobiology, my code, and I am tired of swimming upstream against it.

My manifesto ?

So be it. And move over, Dr Bouville & Morose Curate, I'm joining you at the charterhouse.

Asperges

It rained hard and long, so hard and long that even the waterfall was swamped. I swung by before work to see the river at full flood. Around me, the geese honked and strutted; I wondered whether it was the disconsolate honking of parents whose nests had been washed away. A gloomy thought, perhaps, but my lenten desert this year has been one of distraction and distraction breeds gloom, or, at the very least least, creates the conditions in which gloom can flourish.

Distraction. It's an interesting word, from the Latin dis trahere, or "draw apart." In human distraction, what gets drawn apart is attention. All week at work I'd felt my attention drawn and quartered -- patients in rooms, new patients queueing up, patients back from their xrays needing discharge, lab results, refills, phone calls, rising anxiety, anticipation, annoyance and exasperation, more patients queuing up, patients popping out of rooms to ask "have you forgotten me ?" -- a virtual desert sandstorm of distraction. A whirlwind whose calm center was eluding me.

I dragged out my career-long mantra, the mantra of a hypersensitive introvert who finds herself, daily, despite herself, in the crowded, bustling midst of things:

I should have been a librarian.

Or a Carthusian. Or a shepherd. The list of should-have-beens is long.



I was long overdue for a walk by the river. So Saturday afternoon, the first warm and bright afternoon of the year, I set out with my camera. The water had receded a little, the geese were quieter. Dozens of people were out, and strangers were smiling and greeting one another. The flora and fauna of spring were just beginning to emerge,



but, already, there was a snail resting in the crook of a wild indigo branch, under a cluster of beaded, brown half-moon seeds. I smiled at the snail, and greeted it, photographing the yellow and brown coil from several angles. No stranger -- more a mon semblable, ma soeur -- it was fresh from its long winter's nap, buried in a composting pile of twig and leafmulch, secure within the walls of its pretty shell. And now here it was, out in the sun and wind, unperturbed.



I shrugged against the weight and constriction of my own shell and walked on. I was in my element: light, form, color. I was experiencing attraction, not distraction. I was as open as an eye, then as focused as a lens. This is where I belong I thought, out here with the snails of spring and the decomposing branches of winter, branches white as fingerbones and stippled with elegant black mold.



Two characters have emerged out of my Lenten fever fog, Dr Bouville and the Morose Curate of St Julian the Wanderer's, both avatars of myself, both taking their shape in 140 character utterances on Twitter. They seem to inhabit a world compounded of the mise-en-scene of Sartre's Nausea and Bernano's Diary of a Country Priest.



As the already-gloomy Curate catechizes the existentialist Dr Bouville, his gloom deepens; he becomes increasingly bitter, disaffected, nihilistic. DrBouville's trajectory is opposite -- not even baptized yet, he is on the threshold of joining a Charterhouse, but only if the Curate joins up too. The two misfits are, of course, a little bit in love with one another, and God only knows how it will all turn out.



The Curate and his Catechumen have been my companions in the Lenten desert. I love them both and I want them to be happy. I want them to be working side by side in the kitchen garden of, if not a Carthusian, at least a Cistercian monastery. But who is St Julian the Wanderer ? How can a bona fide gyrovague have been beatified ? Wandering implies deviation, lapses from received truth, certainly anathema to the Magisterium that bestows the beatifications. But in Bouville, that squalid little town through which the Boulevard Noir cuts like a knife, the usual criteria do not apply.



The Curate is a figment of my long, illicit, schoolgirl crush on the Catholic Church. True love, as MacQuarrie says of God's love, is a "letting be," not simply in the sense of leaving alone, but creating the ongoing ground of flourishing and growth. And there is also an element of "hands off" in that sort of love: we are free to chose, and even to mis-chose, but, like the prodigal son's father's love, God's love is unfailing. My schoolgirl crush is of another substance. It's the kind of fussy, manipulative love that wants to put the beloved through a makeover.



Be less triumphalistic, less patriarchal, less hierarchical, less exclusivist, less legaistic, less authoritarian, less absolutist ! Conform your anthropology to contemporary understanding of gender and gender roles ! Be more ecumenical, less misogynist, less homophobic ! Stop making claims about the "validity" of Anglican/Episcopal sacraments and holy orders !



Of course, when reality testing replaces besotted unreason, it is clear: I have, indeed, found the corner of the one holy catholic and apostolic church where all those conditions already exist. So why the ongoing Rome crush ?



It's a mystery. Like something primitive that erupts in a dream. Like a character, a morose curate, that appears in one's Lenten desert, offering catechesis, even as he prepares to go down for the third time.



And then there's Dr Bouville. The stranger, alienated from everything, the loner, prodigy of acedia, abulia, anorexia, ataraxia and absurdity. Artisan of contingency and thrownness. Irresistably drawn to the image of a black cassock against white snow, to a vision of metaphysical solidarity and community, of high literary nostalgia for something that never truly existed.



So, on the threshold of Holy Week, I ask: were these my temptations in the lenten desert ? Dogmatism and nihilism ? The Catechism and Being and Nothingness ? Have I resisted them as well as I have resisted soymilk ice cream, peppermint Life-Savers and pretzels ?



There's a line from a Wallace Stevens poem about "finding what will suffice. It refers to the construction of poetry, but could just as well refer to the construction of or the reading of religion. This is why my Roman paramour, if I had the courage to approach and ply my petition, would reject me: that I think religions, all of them, are complex poems whose symbols and stories and rituals all attempt to "find what will suffice" to describe and understand and guide our mysterious and contingent being-in-the-world.



A rather thin gruel, I would assume, in the eyes of the Magisterium; a thin and pitiably heretical gruel.



But Dr Bouville and his morose Curate are men of an ascetical bent. For them, thin gruel -- black coffee and alphabet soup -- is sufficient. Eventually, they will meet each other half way just outside the narthex of St Julian the Wanderer's,



and strike out together, hand in hand, for the charterhouse beyond the farthest reaches of the Boule' Noir.



And who is the third that walks always beside them ?

Stability

Inclementine

One of my sillier unexamined religious assumptions seems to be that somehow the mere fact of Lent automatically transports one into an austere and transcendental Beyond, and transforms one into a character in a yet-undiscovered film by Andrei Tarkovsky.

Uh, wrong.

Aw, c'mon, Lent -- be that way !

That's as close as I get to intercessory prayer, unless you count the "Lord have mercy" that I have taken to muttering under my breath as I disinfect my hands preparing to see each next patient. I thought I might switch to "Create in me a clean heart, O Lord," but that lasted about half a morning. Clean hands would have to do.



I have been thinking, of late, about certain elegant inclemencies of Catholic phraseology. There are a lot of them that rankle, not the least of which is Leo XIII's "On Nullity Of Anglican Orders" from the Bull of the same name. Then there's that old fave "intrinsically disordered," cf. the Catechism 2357, referring to "homosexual acts," and "objectively disordered," cf. the Catechism 2358, referring to homosexual "inclination." These Curial utterances may not use the same crude, monosyllabic Anglo-Saxonisms as Rev. Fred Phelps' signage, but they imply the same thing about the Incomprehensible Ground Of Being: that It is weirdly concerned with the nit-picking particulars of human consensual erotic expression.



This being Lent, I must confess to a churchworthy intrinsic disorder: Roman Catholic Attraction. This has resulted in various objectively disordered acts: I have secretly attended masses, including Latin masses, I keep a Catechism under my bed and I bought myself a Liturgy Of The Hours for my birthday. This is an attraction to a Church that excludes from priesthood people of my gender, and that would exclude me from the Eucharist because of divorce. This is a Church that regards my own small-c catholic church as a sham with invalid holy orders and, by extension, an invalid Eucharist (vide supra, Leo's Bull.)



And despite the bewildering encrustations of strange anthropologies, patriarchal structures, authoritarian demands and triumphalist, exclusivist claims, I continue to drift and redrift Tiberward, my mooning gaze fixed on the Vatican's domes and spires. It gazes back, smug and pitying, condescending in a bad way, and hisses, "scandal." And yet.

And yet.



The natural outcome of this oft-reiterated process is to cry "Faugh !" and fling it all aside. And that's where I find myself at the beginning of this Lent: LOTH freshly unloaded on eBay, I stand chastened, babyless, nearly bathwaterless, stripped, shivering, exasperated, back at point zero, bewildered, a stranger in a strange land and a pilgrim without a clear itinerary. All time, even Lent, is ordinary time, time filled with laundry, work, cups of bad coffee, odd hankerings and daydreams, pretensions, abjections, sore elbows, acid reflux, cheap shoes and utter foolishness. The trick is to find the way out of the swirling, solipsistic decidua of which the "I" constructs itself and into -- into what ? That's the question, isn't it.



A few weeks ago, as the priest spoke the familiar words of the Eucharistic prayer -- On the night before he died for us, our Lord Jesus Christ took bread -- I thought that maybe the Eucharist was one way out of the swirling solipsism, this act that spans and transcends time, this act that unites us with one another and with Christ. What is more boundary-abolishing than eating, incorporating, in-carnating ? We each take in and together become the Body of Christ.



And then, absolved, fed, blessed and dismissed, we go forth into the ordinary world --



--which immediately gathers, swells, rises and crashes over my head like a rogue wave, half-drowning me and knocking me senseless. Lord, have mercy, I sputter. Lord, have mercy.