Rain and Religion, Silence and Faces

My name is John, and I’m a Catholic.  I’m not a Catholoholic, mind you; there’s no picture of the pope on my wall, no Infant of Prague in his seasonal clothes promising to keep us in the money as long as we display him to all who enter our house.  

Why am I Catholic?  The response that comes to mind is that if I go out in the rain I get wet.  I don’t take credit for getting wet, it just happened.  But I did decide to stick with it, Sunday Mass and such, when I went 300 miles away from home to college.  I thought I’d take the safe route, keeping up the Sunday Mass thing just in case it was true, you know, God and everything.  And I met Bernie Owens, a Jesuit who had a neat way of defining “religion”: - re-liggio, like a ligament, connecting us, holding us together, to our true selves, and perhaps to each other.  And I think that I have found that true, that there are ways that the rain that I have walked out in has kept me from drying up.

Smells and Bells, it is called these days, the idea of incense and ringing hand bells and ornate vestments, distinguishing Catholic worship  from the simplicity of others, the here-and-nowness of them.  For me, the rituals and accoutrements of Catholic worship have been bridges to otherness, doorways to mystery.  Incense rides on smoke, smoke that rises, raises eyes and faces, raises them upward.  Look in any direction but up, and you’ll see something.  Look up and you see nothing, nothingness, the sky, the forever of it.  I grew up with Latin prayers and songs.  Watch a movie with the sound turned off.  You will be drawn to find meaning in faces, in body language.  We are left to wonder, in the silence, what is happening. 

Congregation, from the Latin, con-gregare – to gather as into a flock – made perfect sense as Kathy and I married and made our home in Detroit.  Gesu Church gave us the gift of a gathering of like-minded people finding safety in staying close to each other.  Together, we kept our ideals in a world different from us.  We lived black and white; we shared burdens and gifts, problems and solutions.  We worked together to make sense of a world, and to work and learn in it.  Even now after 40 years, Gesu Church is a feast of faces.

Like the earth has its seasons that show themselves in the sky and the soil, the Scriptural stories in the Catholic Church follow an annual cycle, following the life of the real historical man named Jesus who some called the Christ, the one anointed with Chrism, the anointed one, chosen by God.  And this time of year, after Easter, these stories turn mysterious, like the smoke and the silence.  He rises from the dead and shows up, physically I mean; he cooks for his friends, and joins them in eating.  But he shows up less and less, and then leaves behind a Spirit.  

For some, Easter is a holiday, and when it’s over, it’s over.  For me, this passing into spirit is an annual question that turns down the sound, leads me to look at faces, to find, in the silence, meaning and hope.

 FreeLemonadeStand by John J. Daniels is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.