I feel like I have to know things as deeply as I can, from every possible angle, before investigating something else. And since there is always more to learn where I have started, the investigating-something-else bit never happens.
So I live in the house where I was born, and I go to the church where I was baptized. I have gone to other cities but I always come home; I have gone to Mass at other churches but I am never gone from my little church for long.
It is my growing up; my grade school was my parish grade school. Once a week in religion class we'd get a visit from the pastor, a tall, thin, cadaverous type who absolutely terrified us. He would ask us questions out of the Baltimore Catechism. Silence would descend on the class. He would sigh, shake his head, cluck sadly. Apparently the teachers either never let him know we didn't study the Baltimore Catechism or he always forgot.
"What is hope?" he asked once. Blank stares all round. There was one boy who usually knew the answers to things; he raised his hand and gave it a go. I did too. But neither of us could save the class' reputation in front of our pastor. To this day I freeze up if I try to define "hope" theologically.
In the church building back then, the altar had a canopy over it and different-colored curtains behind it that were changed for the occasion--green for Ordinary Time, red for a martyr's feast day, purple for Advent. There were candles arrayed on candelabras like men on stairs or like the upside-down Vs of flying geese. There was a marble-topped communion rail and statues entirely surrounded by flickering votives as though atop hills of fire. Mary was on one side, St. Joseph on the other, and they were flanked by St. Thomas and St. Theresa, the Infant of Prague, a Pieta.
I threw ten kinds of fits--the whole class did--when due to scaffolding in the church building we were forced to have our grade school graduation at the "rival" church down the road. The church was being renovated. The old pastor was gone and so was the communion rail, the canopy, curtains and candelabras.
Saturday I went to the funeral of the man who served as custodian at the church and the school when I was growing up. He lived right next to the church and would ring the Angelus bell at 6 in the morning, at noon, and six in the evening; the same bells I would try to race at lunchtime--could I make it home before they stopped clanging?
Sunday I was at the church for the Feast of the Immaculate Heart of Mary. The Vietnamese Catholic community in my city, who now share the church with the few English-speakers left in the parish, consider Mary their patroness under this title. We processed down the middle of the street: young girls in pastel silk dresses scattering rose petals, toddlers and older women carrying flowers, men in blue silk costumes with circular hats carrying a statue of Mary on a litter, the support beams of which were red dragons. We chanted the Rosary in Vietnamese. (Okay, everyone except me.) Every few hundred feet we'd stop and the loudspeaker being pushed on a cart would tinnily lead us in song. I was thinking of being in second grade, dressed again in First Communion dress and veil for Mary's May crowning, singing "Bring flowers of the fairest/bring flowers of the rarest" and forming a "living rosary" round the perimeter of the church pews. And then someone rang the church bells.