Authors: David Beers
My badly suppressed grin as she tells me this does not seem
to threaten my mother’s belief in the slightest. She is hardly an irrational person. A trained scientist who returned to work in a medical laboratory after her last child reached high school, she reads the newspaper closely and sends me insightful clippings about the latest political and economic shifts in California, America, the world. At the same time, she is unshakably sure that Mary has “a plan for world peace,” a plan the Blessed Mother is in the process of revealing through mystical appearances.
This feminine face of heaven, this Mary who shimmers into view now and then to reassure the world of her concern, is central to the Catholicism my mother wanted to give her children. Our Lady of Fatima, Our Lady of Guadalupe, Our Lady of Lourdes, Our Lady of the Potato Famine and the Bosnia End to a New World Order, all of them Ladies quiet voiced and lovely, without wrath or vengeance. When the mysterious Lady appears, it is to tell us she has a plan for the world that is beyond our ken, a plan that will gradually, miraculously make itself apparent if enough of us pray hard enough.
This is the Catholicism, of course, that was most vulnerable to my ironic obliteration, the notion of a supernatural otherworld populated with saints, angels, three Gods in One, and a Virgin Mother mysteriously worrying the world toward a better future. This is a Catholicism that Father Jim likes to downplay in his message to Queen of Apostles today.
“The mystery experience,” Father Jim told me, “is not all it’s cracked up to be. Most people can’t handle the mystery experience and they tend to go off the deep end, become very fanatical in their religion. Mystery,” he said, bringing things back to the personal and pragmatic as he likes to do, “doesn’t mean something that’s unknown. Mystery is a deep appreciation of the goodness of the other person, whether it be God or someone else. I think that is what should be stressed, rather than the fact of the unknown. Because unknown things tend to frighten us.”
Still, as much as my mother enjoys the down-to-earth preaching of Father Jim, she also elects sometimes to leave this world, to inhabit, through prayer and belief, the shadowy, mystical
world that the Catholicism of her girlhood made available to her, a world she tried to give me and I laughed away.
Hail Mary, Mother of God.
My mother prays to the Queen of Peace who appears, now and again, to six children in the mountain village of Medjugorje. “I have come to tell the world that God exists,” Mary is said to declare (in the pamphlet my mother shows me.) “He is the fullness of life, and to enjoy this fullness and obtain peace, you must return to God.”
Tony, Tony, listen, listen.
Hurry, hurry, something’s missin’.
My mother prays, still, to a St. Anthony who has been granted the miraculous power to turn up lost items.
I
n the hope of feeling cleaner in her presence, I make an appointment to tell my mother I am a pagan. I ask her to lunch, driving her to a pleasant bistro of her choosing, disclosing, before the dessert arrives, the uninvited. I tell her I respect her faith in God, but that I have none. She is quieted, peers back at me with calm concern. Then, in her measured, elliptical way, my mother tells me, in so many words, that she prefers to have faith that I will have faith.
I ask her, “Do you feel embarrassed when you pray for me, asking God to favor someone who has betrayed your religion?”
“No!” she says, suddenly brightening, smiling. “God loves you. God loves all of you.” She is grouping me with my brother and two sisters and father, all of us who have said, in varying degrees, no to my mother’s Catholicism. “He sees the good in you.”
Her belief in a God who is willing to wait me out reminds me of the many times I’ve told her over the phone, “Don’t waste your prayers on me, Mom, I’m doing fine.” In our sun-kissed
way, we children have always kidded her whenever she has voiced her worries, demanding that she be her usual good fun. “It’s not that I don’t believe in you,” my mother would usually clarify. “It’s just that so many things can happen to anyone at any time.” This, I now see, is an apt summation of an awareness in my mother, a tragic awareness that, like her belief in miracles, she has retained despite the smooth brightness of the suburbs.
I begin to realize, as the dessert comes and we eat it shyly, that my mother has somehow resisted becoming a creature of California’s famed optimism—the optimism that now is curdling into a bitter tantrum of thwarted expectations, the angry people of the suburbs who say their future was ruined by welfare mothers and immigrants and liberal politicians. I begin to see that my mother’s attraction to a cheerful and casual Catholicism did not cause her to forget the catechism of the Depression she learned as a girl in Rock Island’s dark old churches. My mother has always understood that fate is lean and mean, that anyone’s future could be drastically downsized at any time. Yes, hers was a God who unreservedly endorsed progress, personal and national, and the good suburban life that went with it. But never would He
guarantee
such progress, and only a people of hubris would think they could guarantee such progress for themselves, by themselves. All of my mother’s religious folkways in the midst of aerospace suburbia—her statuettes of Mother Mary on windowsills, her cataloged powers of the patron saints, the Styrofoam Advent wreaths she helped us make every Christmas—were like candles lit against a darkness that, should it come, would not surprise her, would not extinguish her faith.
And so, quite the opposite of a shallow optimist, my mother has been, all along and still, a person of Christian hope. Such hope begins by acknowledging the forever frail helplessness of every soul and, in that acceptance, finds all the reason to believe in a merciful, all-powerful God. A hope like that humbles a person, makes a person generous in the face of human stupidity, fashions faith from anything, nothing. Such hope is at the heart of Christianity’s great paradox, the most difficult of ironies, the
acknowledgment that we are saved by knowing we are lost. Having shrugged off my Catholicism, having flipped off Jesus Christ, I am unable to fathom my mother’s hope. I will have to content myself with godless ironies, easier ironies, and that, I suspect, is my great price to pay for having said no to my mother’s Catholicism.
“As long as we’re near downtown,” my mother says, “let’s drop into Sacred Heart.” She means the place where she has volunteered for the past few years, Sacred Heart Community Center, a whitewashed storefront on a particularly desolate corner of old San Jose, fifteen minutes on the freeway and a world away from Queen of Apostles. When we arrive there a tanned, vivacious young woman named Elisa gives my mother a big hello and whirls me on a tour of racks of secondhand clothes, stacks of donated food, the closet-sized free health clinic, the computer training room, the daycare. “Our clients are immigrants, the working poor and urban migrants who saw one too many sitcoms about California and came out here with no support system,” she explains. “We fed sixty-six thousand individuals in the course of last year.”
Elisa was born a little over a decade after me and grew up in a house like mine not far from mine. After college, her boyfriend took a job opening up a new Gap store in Moscow while she headed for L.A. and landed work in rock ’n’ roll public relations promoting Depeche Mode and U2.
“But I felt a tug,” she says. “After a year I came back and wanted to do work in service.” Elisa tells me about the founder of Sacred Heart Community Center, a woman named Louise Benson who, at age sixty-one, began gathering and giving away clothes out of her tract home garage until complaining neighbors made her move the operation. “Louise couldn’t sleep at night knowing people were going hungry. And nobody worked harder. She always said, ‘Minister with dignity, compassion and respect.’ ” When Louise Benson died at age eighty-one, eight years ago, she left, says Elisa, “so many real stories of grace about her.”
“Grace” is a thing Elisa knows and wants. It is why she
comes here to work. “It’s nice,” she says, “to see the action and the grace around you.” “Grace” is one of those words Elisa and my mother say often and with ease, a word I would feel comfortable saying only after placing around it air quotes. Later in the afternoon, my mother invites me to drop in on the first day of the Survival English class she helps teach at Sacred Heart. I listen to the new students introduce themselves for the first time in a new language.
My name is Ramon Luis! My name is Irena!
Head teacher Sister Elizabeth Avalos, in a flowered blouse and purple skirt, is making everyone shout the words out with silly gusto, as only children usually are made to do.
My name is Fidelia! My name is Hector!
I count more than a hundred people jammed into the little room, and I get a sense of why my mother makes her pilgrimages here. She has come to be with people who find hope in being in California, who might even believe what we believed when we first came to the new subdivisions of Queen of Apostles parish: that in California the future could be annexed and developed and built out to make room for everyone.
My name is Virgilio! My name is Juanita!
I sit on a box in the corner, the interloper, vaguely ashamed that I should find their expressions so foreign. I would not want people to see me with that face, so open, naked. I think to myself, here is a place, an experience, immune to easy irony. And I realize that this has been my mother’s secret resource, the reason she has always been able to laugh patiently at my blasphemies and to be a modest mystic amidst a sterile subdivision. She understands how to seek out and fit within moments immune to sarcasm. She is at home within these moments, and maybe that is to know grace.
Tony, Tony. Listen, listen.
No prayer of faith, in my mother’s mouth, could sound corny.
Hurry, hurry. Something’s missin’.
In mine they all do, and I expect they always will.
O
n the last night of my visit home I look up an old college buddy who has become a successful corporate designer for Silicon Valley. Like some of my other Ironic Fundamentalist friends, he has decorated his house with ornate Catholic icons, saints, and crucifixes and shrines handpainted by peasants. The son of an Italian and a Colombian, he grew up living all over the world, Brazil, Mexico, Cairo, Rome. Having been smothered in a baroque religion, he now finds its images beautiful in a playfully agnostic sense, and as usual, he was ahead of the style curve, anticipating by many years the brass and crystal crosses that Donna Karan now sells as $395 jewelry accessories.
I arrive at the door expecting a lot of vodka and laughs, but the news is terrible. My friend’s mother is dying quickly of just discovered cancer. He sits on his porch, eyes away, weeping in the dark. I don’t think he wants my arms around him, but what can be said?
I say, “Does she believe in God, in heaven?” He turns toward me, his face a wet crumple, and we two friends who are faithless look at each other and are grateful for his answer. “Yes.”
N
early a year further on in the Age of Irony, I pull from my mailbox one of my mother’s packets of clippings. This long after my confession of faithlessness, her letters have continued to arrive as newsy and funny as ever, nothing, seemingly, having changed between us. These many months later, I have done not a thing to reward her faith that I will have faith. I have not sought out a Catholic Mass here in Vancouver. I have not wanted Father Jim’s macho common sense, his Mass as motivational seminar.
Nor have I wanted the old-fashioned Catholic Mass I’m told is still celebrated in these parts, the mystical supplications, the whispers inviting of the feminine grace of a Virgin Mary. I am wanting to stay out of churches altogether for the reason that I find it a trespass to pray with strangers, to pass myself off as their community, all the while silently editing our prayers in my head until all is metaphor bracketed by air quotes.
Nor have I, when alone, attempted to send a single prayer to heaven, even though I know my mother would want me to try. The part of me hovering above, detached, would be winking at my own halfhearted attempt and I couldn’t bear that. The conclusion I have come to is this: Once the ironic instinct has scoured away the sweet earnestness of religious faith, the only recourse is to acknowledge the loss with a more rueful sense of irony.
For my mother I feel the same envy I felt that day in church as I sat and watched her step forward and receive Communion, her weekly miracle. She has kept what she brought with her to the suburbs before she ever set foot in Queen of Apostles church. She has kept her mystical imagination, her own way of defeating the banal, of living at once inside the moment and outside of it.
Her mystical imagination allows her to believe, when the latest news of a dream unraveling comes from Sarajevo or Silicon Valley, that this means the Virgin Mother is all the more likely to reveal her restorative plan soon. I refuse to scoff at that belief for the simple fact that I love my mother too much to demean the faith that is at the center of her being. And if I would not demean my mother’s belief, who am I to scoff at the belief of anyone else who might also happen to know grace? So, after all her many prayers for me, you could say that my mother has given me, if not the Catholicism she wanted me to have, at least this. She has made me want an ironic sensibility that is more generous and patient, more content to trade hope for optimism, more like her.
I open the packet my mother has sent me, finding a short article from the
San Jose Mercury News
written by a staff writer named Tracie Cone. The writer is waxing amused at Our Lady of
Peace, the 32-foot, 7,200-pound stainless steel statue of the Blessed Mother that stands overlooking a busy stretch of freeway in Silicon Valley.
The writer finds very funny the thought of a Mary “blessing perpetual gridlock and the souls of hot-footed drivers.”
The writer has found a believer, a woman who answers phones at Our Lady of Peace Church, to say of the sculpted Virgin, “In a lot of ways she represents Silicon Valley. Stainless steel is so modern and this valley is so state-of-the-art.”