OUR LADY OF IRONY
Queen of Apostles has a new Jacuzzi. You can’t miss it there just to the left of the altar—waist-high concrete tub full of chlorinated, heated holy water; small fountains burbling at four corners; bottom inlaid with tile crosses; stainless steel filtration vents. State-of-the-art baptismal fonts like this don’t come cheap—high five figures—but most of the flock cheerfully paid. The look of their church was tired—early Perry Mason set, cinderblock and river rock and knotty pine. It needed … pizzazz; time to redecorate! Besides, as He Himself put it: Water is Life. Except when it’s not. Like when some little kid falls unnoticed into one of the neighborhood’s swimming pools. Which explains why, between baptism dunkings, a perfectly clear Plexiglas lid, resistant to all potential lawsuits, seals off the surface of this most sacred of spas.…
There. See what I’ve done? I return to the church where my mother still worships, where she still asks her saints to be good to a son in his thirties, and these are the whispers that swarm my head, scribble themselves in my notebook. If you find them funny or blasphemous or both, imagine them a different way. Read them as a prayer, a furtive little prayer by one who long ago abandoned his Catholicism to become an Ironic Fundamentalist.
We make, I suspect, an all too common set, my mother and me at Mass this Sunday in the middle of Silicon Valley in the middle of the 1990s. She is the mother who thanks God for her good life in the suburbs, and I am the son whose good life in the suburbs convinced me I did not need a God. She is the mother who offered her children Catholicism as a connection to heaven, and I am the son who placed his faith, instead, in ironic detachment.
I could offer the usual explanations. I could blame the ironic reflex in me, so quick and caustic, on the false promise of blue sky suburbia, the picture of progress offered me as a child that is today so laughably “retro.” I could say that, in these media-manipulated times, irony proves me smarter than television, more wily than advertising, a thinking individual rather than a mass consumer. I could admit (most truthfully, probably) that I am insecure; I dread the embarrassment of misplaced sincerity, of playing the dupe. For whatever reason, there are enough people like me that we are now said to be living in the Age of Irony, a time when it is hip to place “air quotes” around sweetly earnest ideas like faith and community and the soul and the sacred.
Just when I began placing air quotes around God and the Virgin Mary and the religion my mother wanted me to have, I am not sure. I recall no agonizing crisis of faith. I did not so much lose my Catholicism as casually shrug it off, leaving it there in the pews like a forgotten sweater on a warm California Sunday. This may have begun as early as age ten or eleven, when my mother would fret over whether to let me eat a hamburger on a Friday (then still forbidden) and I’d crack, “Oh, Mom! Nobody’s going to hell on the meat rap!” When I put it that way, she could not help but laugh along with me. I know that, barely a teenager, I listened to the catchy new folk hymns meant to evoke sweet earnestness in me, and I was glad for so soft a target for my sarcasm. Kumbaya my Lord, kumbaya … Yeah, right.
I know that by the time I was attending Catholic high school, mine were the surlier expiations of an Ironic Fundamentalist. One dull afternoon I wandered into the chapel with a few friends (one of whom intended to become a priest) and, with no one else around, I suddenly waggled my middle finger in a fuck you salute to the Christ on the wall. My startled friends searched my face. Was I angry at God or just sure He was dead? Would I pretend such a vulgar atheism just for a laugh? Or was my point that my God, a profoundly un-Catholic God, was so impossible to offend that He laughs back?
I left it to them to decide. I didn’t bother to explain it even to myself for I had accomplished my only aim, which was to puncture the dullness of that afternoon with my new plaything, my ever-sharpening sense of irony. If I was reckless with my recent discovery, it was only because I was so very pleased with it. For how could you be caught inside a banal moment if you also stood outside of it, always poised to destabilize it? How, for that matter, could you be trapped in a banal self if you hovered above your own life, suspended upon layers and layers of ironic detachment? That, to me, was the saving power of irony. Staring back at my friends in the quiet of the chapel, still flipping off Jesus, I waited for a wave of remorse to well up in the former altar boy. But waves of feeling, when filtered through layers of irony, have a way of flattening into a confusion of small, ignorable ripples.
These many years later I must confess that I lack, still, a sinner’s guilt for having shrugged off Catholicism. And yet here I am, sitting next to my mother at Mass, here to sample the Catholicism of Queen of Apostles today, a Catholicism that is attracting the return of many a fallen-away son and daughter of the blue sky suburbs. This Mass, I have been told by my mother, is the most popular one for miles around. The pastor who packs them in is Father James Mifsud—Father Jim as he likes to be called—a bald, compact man who grew up in a big working-class family on the rough side of San Francisco, a priest who lifts weights every morning and who proudly proclaims that his Jesus “is not some wimpy guy with no muscles,” a priest who has made himself welcome in the dugout of the Giants baseball team and the locker room of the football 49ers. Father Jim’s famous sermons have, in fact, the flavor of a rousing locker-room harangue, peppered as they are with swear words and shouts of encouragement and even the occasional ironic joke.
“My mother taught me: Every time you lie, blue lines come into your forehead.” Over a flutter of chuckles, Father Jim’s voice swells.
“I said to her, ‘Blue lines? What blue lines?’
She said, ‘Only your mother can see the blue lines.’ So. I grew up learning not to lie … because my mother lied about those blue lines!”
Grateful laughter pours forth from his audience, including me, as I absorb the latest modernization of a church interior that once seemed so modern. How much brighter and more streamlined Father Jim has made Queen of Apostles by installing racks of track lighting and by painting white over all the knotty pine and cinderblock. The altar has been lowered and moved forward so as to make the Mass (as Father Jim explained when he did it) more democratic, more a celebration of community. The enormous, agonized Christ who once hung on His Cross on the back wall has been spirited away. The bared space is used for projecting words to hymns so that all can sing along accompanied by whatever image of God each prefers to keep in one’s head.
“Everybody,” thunders Father Jim, “is welcome here.”
Everybody is welcome in the community of fragmented opinion that American Catholicism has become. An “attitude problem” as Newsweek put it, grips a Church “honeycombed with groups who want more: the democratic election of bishops, optional celibacy for priests, a declaration of rights for dissenting theologians and blessings on monogamous gay marriages.” Two thirds of American Catholics say the Church is wrong to oppose birth control, the same percentage thinks women should be priests, and even more are for ordaining married men.
One in ten Catholics told a New York Times survey they rarely if ever pray privately. One in eight said that to be a good Catholic one needn’t even believe that Jesus was the Son of God. Almost two thirds of American Catholics, and half of regular churchgoers, dare to see the central sacred ritual of Catholicism, the Eucharist, as a symbolic flourish. Apparently, in the communion line of Queen of Apostles Mass, there are many who answer Amen to the declaration Body of Christ, all the while placing air quotes around their assent.
Father Jim sidesteps all these fault lines by fashioning a community around what his flock shares: a sense of the grip slipping. Father Jim speaks not to the old future I grew up with, but to the latest one, the future that won’t let you take a thing like progress for granted, the future that makes you wonder all the time whether you are good enough to hack it. “You are better,” goes one of Father Jim’s favorite pronouncements, “than you think you are!”
“Never Give Up!” goes another. Outside, draped above the church entrance, a vinyl red on white banner proclaims Never Give Up! This has become the public theme of Queen of Apostles parish, visible to anyone driving by. It is printed on signs handed out for free. Never Give Up! It is emblazoned on the parish bulletins in every pew. Never Give Up! It is urged by Father Jim in his pulpit on the day I am there to hear. Never Give Up!
I look around at the sea of people who have come to hear this exhortation at a time when the blue sky dream is being downsized. A surprising number seem to be like me, soft and white and in their thirties, dressed in their casual Sunday best. I hear Father Jim demand that all of us pray together, for each other, loudly and with feeling, the way a community would. Someone stands and says, “For a special friend with a drinking problem.” Lord, hear our prayer, we all answer. Someone says, “For my sister who’s having legal problems.” Lord, hear our prayer. “For Dad’s speedy recovery from a stroke.” Lord, hear our prayer. “That those who are unemployed may seek work with faith, hope, and patience.” Lord, hear our prayer.
Later, as I listen to my mother sing her hymns so happily and charmingly off key, as the Mass nears an end, I realize that a moment I have been vaguely dreading is at hand. It comes when my mother stands to join the line receiving Holy Communion and I remain seated in the pew, drawing my legs in to let her pass by.
Regardless of what New York Times surveys say, the Church teaches that through the priest God literally transforms bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ, so that to take Communion is to participate in a fresh, recurring miracle. My mother is one of those Catholics who still believe in this miracle. I, of course, cannot. And so, Christmases, Easters, every Holy Communion brings the same dilemma. If I were to follow my mother into line, say Amen to the priest’s Body of Christ, swallow the wafer, and squeeze my eyes shut, would I be telling my mother what she hopes is true, that I am, at least, wishing to believe? Or would I simply be dishonoring her own authentic belief? Each time, I wonder this. Always I have chosen to remain behind and sit and leaf through a hymnal with my head down, like a criminal suspect not wanting to be noticed.
This Sunday morning at Queen of Apostles is no different. Except this time, as my mother makes her way up the aisle toward the body and blood of Christ, I do not find the usual solace in detached irony. I begin to imagine my ironic sensibility as a gremlin who sits on my shoulder and whispers dirty things into my ear. I see my mother take Communion, have her miracle, and I think: What if the essence of an ironic life, the striving to live both inside the moment and outside of it, is merely to live twice removed? What if, instead, I had managed to hold fast to the Catholicism that everyone around me in church seems to have kept, somehow, on their own terms? How must it be, to stare at that sparkling new baptismal font and not see a Jacuzzi?
“I don’t think Queen of Apostles parish has changed much in thirty years,” Father Jim told me a few days later. We chatted in the study of the ranch-style rectory that sits across the street from church and school. “I think this is still a white middle-class neighborhood.”
Father Jim was well-acquainted with the history of Queen of Apostles; he celebrated Masses here in 1965 as a newly ordained priest. Even during the thirteen years he spent as a missionary in Seoul, South Korea, Father Jim maintained his ties to Queen of Apostles, returning every summer with slide shows and requests for donations. When he became pastor in 1989, he was the old friend returned home. But when Father Jim said that Queen of Apostles has remained white and middle class and therefore not much changed, he was of course wrong, because to be white and middle class in this neighborhood today means something very different than when I was growing up.
Once, this was a frontier parish on the edge of an expansive idea called California. That was when the four-bedroom houses cost twenty-five thousand dollars, no money down, and Lockheed was hiring for life. But these days those same homes sell for half a million dollars, and realtors say the neighborhood is “highly desirable” for its peaceful remove, and the good public high school that, as everyone has been told, can make or break a child’s future in the new economy. These days Lockheed is laying off and no Silicon Valley firm pretends to hire for life; just until the next “right sizing.” These days, around the perimeter of the parish, at the freeway on-ramps, homeless people hold signs saying “Will Work for Food.” The white middle-class people of Queen of Apostles are the Californians who frown as they watch the rest of California on the six o’clock news, the California of too many Crips and Bloods, too many drop-outs, too many have nots, too many “aliens.” A once expansive idea is now imagined to be collapsing from the edges in, and Queen of Apostles has changed from a frontier parish to an enclave of worried, tenuous affluence—without room, even, for the children who grew up here. “I see a lot of kids getting married and wanting to move out of California,” Father Jim told me when I asked him what troubles he saw in his parish. “It’s almost impossible to finance a home.
“The other big negative, I find out from my parishioners, is the difficulty of maintaining a position in highly competitive companies and society. Extremely difficult. A lot of cutthroat.” Father Jim shook his head. “That does something to you. It drives them to an awareness of their faith. Their religion and their beliefs are quickly tested by the realities of life and if they don’t have that kind of a background, they despair quite easily. To be constantly competitive in order to stay financially well-off can cause one to feel very lonely and despairing.
“I think the challenge for me,” said the pastor, “is to get people to believe in themselves. They are not sinners, they are God’s children. They want to hear something positive. They want to hear something human. Stand up for yourself. The jackass boss, the troubled marriage, the autistic child, the friend dying—they need strength for those things. That’s what they’re looking for, I think. They want to know God loves them. That they’re okay. That they’re better than some people say they are. And once they begin to believe in themselves, they will open themselves to others. So I work on telling people they are good, they can be better, and there are other people who need them.”
His delivery grew more staccato as he warmed to his theme. “I tell ’em: ‘Instead of sitting on your rear ends and watching the problems of society unravel on the six o’clock news, what are you doing to become involved in some way? And the parish must be the hope that provides people with opportunities. That’s why we have the employment program here.’ ”
In a refurbished church storage room a retired realtor and other parish volunteers clip classifieds, make phone searches, and otherwise help jobless people hook up with employers. When Father Jim started the Ascent program, he intended it mostly for ex-cons he’d meet in his jail visits, though lately a lot of out-of-work aerospace engineers had been showing up at the door. As for the homeless people at the freeway on-ramps, Father Jim had a word for them. “Crooks, most of them.”
“Crooks?” I said, startled by the word, so damning in the mouth of a priest.
“God, yeah. Crooks. Every one within the radius of this parish I’ve bumped into, I’ve given them a card. I say, ‘You’re fifteen minutes away from getting a job. You don’t have to do this anymore. Come. I’ll take you there right now.’ They say, ‘Well, I’ll see you later, Father.’ No one has ever come. Why should they? If they can make a hundred bucks a day from some suckers who give money to them, why should they? They’re not gonna make a hundred bucks a day in any kind of a job.” For this form of Silicon Valley entrepreneurship, Father Jim has no sympathy at all. “And then they give you the Vietnam crap! And they have babies sitting next to them! Most people that way are dishonest. They’ve got arms and legs. They can walk. When people call here for help, I make sure they get help. God helps us to help ourselves. Well, that’s what I want to do. Help people to help themselves.
“I’ll say to someone, ‘You’ve been coming in here the last three months for food. Have you got a job?’ ”
Father Jim mimicked the mumble of the beggar. ” ‘Well, uh, no.’
“Then get a job! And don’t come back here until you’ve got a job!”
“There are jobs to get?” I asked.
“Sure! We put fifty to sixty people to work a week.”
Tough love for the panhandlers, pep talks for the beleaguered executives, and a job program that maps and fills the cracks of the new economy, promising a place for everyone. That is Father Jim’s pastoral recipe. The anxious middle class of Queen of Apostles finds strength in the assurances of their blue-collar priest, his message that when things go wrong, nobody’s perfect so just keep trying. The flock is appreciative of a priest who wants them to believe, above all, in themselves.
I told Father Jim that despair, the deadliest of sins, is the one I found impossible to comprehend as a child in sunny, booming California, no matter how many times the nuns tried to explain the concept to me. Do people who live here now so need to hear, over and over, his Never Give Up! refrain?
“The people who commit suicide,” he reminds me, “are not those less well off.”
After my conversation with Father Jim, I strolled over to the little cinderblock complex where I spent grades two through eight. In the 1960s, Queen of Apostles school had the air of a mission outpost, so sparse were the facilities, so poorly paid were the lay teachers (many of them unaccredited). We endured such shortcomings because, within those cinderblock walls, Catholic doctrine was so concentrated as to be sure to permeate our souls. Why else would we not attend one of the shiny, sprawling, new public elementary schools?
Marianna Willis, who taught fourth grade when I was in eighth, had stayed all these years at Queen of Apostles and become principal. I found her in her office, her face as kindly as I remembered, her Kentucky accent still softening the edges of her words. She said, “When you were here, remember how the racks were full of bicycles every morning? Now there are maybe three. This used to be a neighborhood school. Now it really isn’t.”
The students live as much as an hour away in towns like Gilroy and Morgan Hill, where tract homes are still being built on garlic fields. The parents commute into Silicon Valley and drop their kids off before work. That is why Queen of Apostles now operates a day care from 6:30 in the morning to 6:00 in the evening. I smiled to remember my mother riding her bicycle over to school with a basket full of hot dogs for her children’s lunches, my mother with another mother placing a pink frosted cupcake on every desk for a Valentine’s Day party, my mother and all the other mothers taking their turns as volunteer supervisors of dodge ball and jump rope games at the lunch recess. Marianna Willis recalled the same era, when Queen of Apostles children came to school on Mondays with stories of picnics and excursions taken with Mom and Dad. A few Mondays back, she asked a girl why she was excited and this is what the principal heard: “Oh, my mom got to sit down and eat dinner with us.”
Monthly tuition, once $15 for me, is now $256. There is financial aid for only ten families and “a lot of our people have lost jobs, or are single mothers,” said Marianna Willis. At that, applicants are turned away. Enrollment is highest ever and full at 301, a number that includes “a handful of blacks, some Hispanics, quite a few Asians.”
Marianna Willis told me what Queen of Apostles parents today were wanting for their money. “Academics is a big thing,” the principal explained. “Quite often a C in public school translates to a D or F from us.” Low-performing applicants were therefore screened out by an entrance exam. Another selling point was peace of mind. “When you hear about the guns and knives in the public school, you can’t help but think, ‘I don’t want my child there.’ ” The worst such scare Marianna Willis had faced was the confiscation of a rubber band gun. And unlike public schools, Queen of Apostles need not keep children with disabilities or behavior problems. “We don’t have counselors. Would it be fair to take one child who’s going to take half the teacher’s time? We have to be able to serve the community we have.”
That community of carefully culled children is not necessarily a Catholic one. Some students at Queen of Apostles are, for example, Buddhist. Still, another reason parents of various faiths send their children here is the Catholic ethos, not just the prayers and Masses, but the good deeds demanded of every pupil. Marianna Willis described for me the regimen of beneficence: the kindergartners baking cookies for the convalescent home, the first graders writing notes to the sick, the fifth graders visiting disabled children, the other grades preparing and delivering food for the hungry. None of this went on when I attended. Our outings were to see a soft drink bottling plant or the mummies under glass in the local Egyptian museum. Once, I think, my class adopted a poor child in some lost land like Bangladesh.
“We teach the children to live a Christian life, to make religion a part of their daily experience. We teach care and concern for others. We try to teach our children they are part of a community,” said Marianna Willis. What the gremlin of irony whispered to me is that Queen of Apostles school was from the beginning a rather ruthless protectorate, a nun-run Utopia dependent upon a military contracting economy that allowed mothers to stay at home and fathers to keep jobs and children to grow up cocooned from the implications of our great luck. Today, with no nuns but tough screening tests and pricey tuition, Queen of Apostles school is at least more frank in its ruthlessness, its children, the fortunate 301, reminded of their brightly diverging prospects whenever they deliver lunch to the ever-full Emergency Family Shelter downtown.
Later that morning I sat in the back of the seventh-grade class sampling, along with the budding teenagers, another example of what Queen of Apostles had to sell that public schools did not. Father Jim was roaming the front of the room, splintering chalk against the blackboard whenever he turned to write a word like “RESPECT.”
“Here’s what I want, you little farts. (Nervous laughter.) I want some respect. If you brought a friend from a public school and you were walking around here and you threw a piece of paper on the ground, I wouldn’t call you a jackass in front of your friend. Because it would embarrass you. I’d call you over and say, ‘Hey, don’t you have respect for this property? Good, then go pick up that paper.’ You’d give that guy a bad impression and you’d give me a bad impression, but I would never do that in front of him, make you look bad. Because he’s your friend. That’s called respect. That’s called respect. I’m talkin’ about all different kinds of respect. I’m talkin’ about respect for authority. People who love you, who are older than you and work for you. I’m talkin’ about your parents. I’m also talkin’ about respecting yourself. Get this in your heads when you’re young. So you flunk a test! No test is worth cheating for. Big deal. You’re not going to the electric chair. No test is worth cheating for. Look at the people I visit in San Quentin. Here’s a guy who gets mad one time because he’s drunk, comes back and shoots a kid in a gas station and kills him. He goes to jail for the rest of his life for one stupid ass thing. But that didn’t happen because of just one time, it happened because he stole things when he was little, he lied when he got older, he cheated, then he got into the drug business. That’s what I’m trying to get into your thick skulls now. Hey! When I’m talking, I want your eyes on me! No place else. Joshua! Are you deaf or are you just thick? I’m not here talking for my health. I’m interested in you because I love you and because these are the things that will keep you a decent human being and you’ll learn them now! Otherwise why the hell are you paying 2,500 bucks to go to school here when you can go to any other school that has good teachers and a good curriculum and much better facilities than we do?”
At this point Joshua, and the rest of us, were surely giving our full attention to Father Jim, who had known convicts in hell, who could summon a vision of a descent from the middle class into hell, a vision of damnation more tangible than any the church of my youth could have made me believe.
“Did you know that Mary appeared in Medjugorje just before the war in Bosnia?” my mother asks me. She reminds me that Medjugorje is a village sixty miles from Sarajevo, the city where evil currently resides most vividly on the television news. “She tends to appear to people who are really discouraged. And she always appears to poor people. She appeared in Ireland before the potato famine. Did you know that Immaculate Mary is the patron saint of the United States?”
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.
In 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.
In mine they all do, and I expect they always will.
On 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.”
Nearly 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.”
The writer has discovered something delicious. “At Our Lady of Peace, souls seeking solace may have their prayer wishes recorded on microfilm and perpetually stored inside Mary’s giant heart, much the way tax records are stored at some county office buildings.… So far, more than 100,000 prayer requests have been loaded, with room for millions more.”
The writer has made a bit of room for the perspective of Sister Mary Jean, who is secretary of the shrine. “This is a time of great tribulation. People release sorrow just by putting it on paper. They know God’s mother understands.”
The writer has summed up in the voice I instinctively recognize and warm to, the voice of the gremlin who whispers in my ear and will not be brushed away. “The church folks say Mary will receive your message,” ends the column, “even if heaven is a place without microfiche machines.”
Attached to the article is a note in that familiar, small script of my mother’s. “I thought of you,” she has written.
