The Living Water

Maybe I’m not praying enough.

I decide to aim for the highest award a Catholic Girl Scout can achieve: The Marian Award. It entails a yearlong study of the Blessed Virgin, acquiring knowledge of Church liturgy, vestments, and objects, completing a public service project, and writing an essay. For good spiritual and physical discipline, I also try losing weight at the same time with Metrecal and Ayds.

I flop at weight loss, but continue my study of the Ideal Mother: God’s Own. When I earn my Marian Medal, everyone’s proud of me, me included. Even Mom.

The Church was living water flowing through our landscape, with weekly waterings at Mass, rosaries recited in the car or doing dishes, bent-knee Lenten mornings, waterfalling into the great cyclical feasts marked in our home by the lotiony scent of lilies or the prickle of the Advent Wreath. High ecclesiastical tide culminated in our personal rites of Catholic passage: First Communion and Confirmation, conferring the sense of blessed, sanctioned growth.

In our early years, security bloomed because of The Living Water: the weekly rhythm of Mass; the strange comfort of Latin, like a grunting affectionate animal; the soaring healing music—not just organs full of Bach and Mozart, but many lesser melodic mortals—laying down hymns like blocks of stone, simplicity and certainty in every note. Chest-resonant, this joy of choir harmony both heard and sung—voices enter the body like scent.

The Church fostered appreciation of the arts beyond sweet Breck-hair Jesus pointing at his glowing heart or Mary weeping at his twisted torso on the crucifix. We gaze at sculpted Stations of the Cross, brilliances of stained glass, intricacy and beauty of embroidered vestments. We hear poetry of Psalms and parables, the drama of the Gospels. Enjoy the theatricality of a good sermon, which we review as pointedly as Times critics. The mysterious beauty of words on the parish-issued calendar: Liturgical Year. Ember Days. Ordinary Time.

Welcome, too, the constantly refreshing idea that you could be forgiven on the spot if you were sorry enough and did your penance. The sense of belonging to a larger entity nourishes the spirit. The belief in the non-physical aspects of ourselves. The gravitas of tradition.

To say nothing of seeing your own Dad at Midnight Mass on Christmas Eve looking like an ambassador in a throne room when he wears the full magnificent Knights of Columbus regalia: sweeping red-lined black cape, sash and sword, black velvet chapeau brimming with a snowy ostrich plume.

The Church. On the one hand, great comfort. But in the palm of the other hand, the oozing wound: “You’re born bad, you can’t be trusted, and you must do what we say.”

Flowing through the desert of self-doubt, The Living Water gets saltier and saltier over the years, evaporating, condensing to a lump of salt. Immobile. Causing, no longer quenching, thirst.

Like Bedouins, we’re forced to lick the dew which collects on stones at sunrise.