Beauty surrounds a scaffolded church

National Catholic Reporter, Sept 22, 1995 by Jeff Behrens

I recently saw an old woman at lunch in Willie's Diner, sitting alone. She wore lovely clothes, a red scarf and fur hat. I was in the booth next to her.

She ate slowly and very neatly. She seemed eager to talk longer with the waitress, but the-waitress was rushed and politely cut the woman short and went on about her business. The old woman smiled an understanding smile and went back to ner lunch: tuna melt, soup, french fries and tea. She repeatedly rearranged the three or four plates. I noticed her fingers were disfigured and swollen, bent where they should have been straight.

She sat in stark contrast to all the people around her, in twos or threes or even fours in other booths, filling the diner with all sorts of words and levels of laughter. They just ate and talked, never arranging anything on their tables.

She rearranged the plates one more time, then pulled out a little makeup case from her purse. She put on new lipstick, lightly powdered her cheeks and pursed her lips. She tilted her head a bit and with her free hand, softly brought back to their proper place some wandering strands of white hair. She reached for her fur hat and adjusted it for the right feel. She put a dollar on the table for a tip.

A few minutes later, I saw her walking slowly down the street, her head bowed because there was a strong wind and it had just started to snow.

Near Willie's Diner was Sacred Heart Church, a very large Romanesque building. The steeple was in danger of collapsing, so for months it had been covered with dense scaffolding. It looked like a rocket ship right before the blast of the engines blows away all the scaffolding and the ship roars off into the heavens.

Sacred Heart embodies many memories, hopes, sufferings. These days the congregation has many old people. There are young people, too, but the church does not attract them or their hopes. It has not gathered their memories or their hearts.

Between the church and the diner is Broad Street. Normally, there are quite a few people. They stop and look into the many shop windows. But it was snowing that day and there were few people.

I watched some large birds, crows maybe, circling in wider and wider arcs, high near the top of the steeple. They looked beautiful in the swirling snow.

I remember feeling, that day, that the church represented a definite fullness yet to be revealed. It was a way to understand the incompleteness of the larger church as I then understood it. A kingdom in the making. I believed that the church possessed the secrets of the street, the people, the birds. I still find in myself some need or hope to interpret these things in the categories of faith, to take them to myself, my heart in all their mystery and real beauty, because being a Catholic invites me to. All, then, that is wandering and seemingly meaningless or circling in ever-wider arcs would be providenced by some grand design, a design revealed to and shared by the church.

The longing for that conviction is hard to shake. I still feel myself looking to the church to provide some sort of centering myth. Yet I know that the center has shifted. I feel it. The things I see and want to express reflect a shift that I am trying to live toward and write from.

Strangely sad, I now think to myself. All this natural beauty surrounding a church in danger of collapse. All these living, breathing, walking universes of meaning, hoping and longing, chatting away an hour in Willie's and then strolling up and down Broad Street, passing a church so badly in need of repair.

I do not think that the church as we presently know it will be fixed. It may collapse or it may stand empty or may for a while find passing through its doors individuals who yet find the present dispensation to be of some comfort. But as they walk through the doors, they will not be noticed by the passersby or the birds.

The old woman was a flesh and spirit, living edifice of meaning and eternal life, with a fur hat, moving along Broad Street, past a church that is too slow to recognize her as she moves along, pretty in her way with a red scarf and fresh makeup, a church too slow, too stubborn, to learn from the winds.

Perhaps, when the scaffolding is about to be taken down and the church repaired and repainted, it will feel an emptiness that cannot be fixed, reformed, mandated, updated, programmed or bought. It may look outside itself for the mystery it so needs for its very life and mission.

And may it see that mystery and comprehend her significance as she turns from Broad onto Liberty, preferably on a fine spring day, and she adjusts her hat ever so slightly to the felt nudge of a strange, warm wind that arrives seemingly from nowhere, a wind that warms her being but blows away the few remaining parts of the scaffold and hurls them into the winds.

Fr. Jeff Bellrens writes from the Trappist Monastery, Conyers, Ga.