Side effects

Spiritual Life, Fall 2003 by Sauro, Joan

PEOPLE ASK ME WHY I GO TO the particular church I go to when I could do so much better elsewhere. After all, just a few blocks from my home there is a papally designated basilica I might attend. Travel another mile and the celebrant is charismatic, the choir orchestral, the pews packed with the blind, the lame, and the disturbed-all of God's people served with joy and passion. The church I attend boasts none of the above. I go there for the religious experience, the side effects.

Religious Experiences

My first religious experience did not occur at the likely time of my First Communion. That seems to have escaped memory, although in our family album there is a beautiful picture of me all in white, standing next to a bed of tulips at my grandfather's house. Sunlight pours through the sheer veil on my head making it look like a bird with lowered wings and me, like a luminous angel. I remember none of it.

My first religious experience happened a year later in a second-grade classroom, where each morning I looked for stars after my name on the chart taped to the wall. There were blue stars and red stars, but what I desired were gold stars. Everybody knew that stars in the sky were gold.

We received gold stars for going to Mass every day in Lent, so I was out early in the dark and cold, walking in the middle of the road until I met my girlfriends, also on their way to church. Later in school, another gold star appeared after my name. There was a narrow, well-defined strip of white after our names, so that no one's stars got mixed up in anyone else's heaven. The strip after my name was filled with stars, so many that they touched points, spilled out and fell off the edge of the chart. I had hit the gong, gone over the top, with gold stars to spare.

This was my earliest religious experience. It was filled with excitement, adventure, camaraderie, and rewards, with absolutely nothing to do with God in my seven-year-old mind.

The next religious event of major importance was my Confirmation. For weeks we had been steeled not to flinch when the bishop slapped our cheek. After all, we were soldiers of Christ. Sad to say, I received this sacrament waiting, not for the Spirit of God but for the slap of the bishop. It turned out to be a disappointing tap. That evening I received a beautiful silver watch with a bracelet band from my Aunt Ann, my Confirmation sponsor. I still have that watch and a small desire to receive the sacrament over again, being convinced the first one did not take.

A few days after my Confirmation, the arm of St. Francis Xavier arrived in our church. Wearing my new silver watch, I waited in a long line that began on the sidewalks outside our small church. High excitement and low-pitched talk ran through the crowd. As soon as I entered the church, my eyes riveted to the altar rail where people knelt slowly and reverently to kiss the arm of the saint, encased in a glass box. When my turn came, I squeezed into a packed row strung out at the altar railing and watched the holy relic advance my way. When the glass box was placed before me, I took a good look at what was in it-a dark skeletal bone, the saint's radial, extending from elbow to wrist. I looked up at the priest. He nodded. My lips grazed the glass over the decomposing bone.

Years later, I read that the hand attached to that bone used to cut the names of friends off their letters. Poor Francis, flung onto a foreign shore where he worked out his Confirmation, missed his friends so much that he cut out their names and pinned them to his underclothes, over his heart. I thought this was a far more precious relic to keep than a disintegrating arm bone.

As it stands, I received two Sacraments four sheets to the wind, as my mother likes to say. Religious events in my life tend to occur to the side of main events.

A Current Experience

Last Sunday is a typical example. I was in church for the main event, seated, as it happened, with my mother on one side and my youngest brother on the other. As we waited for the liturgy to start, the church turned noticeably brighter. I looked over to the side and there was the sun, passing through a stained glass window like a spotlight, like a yellow marker highlighting first a saint's foot, then a shamrock of the Triune God, then the opened book of the Scriptures. This is where to look, the sun said. This is what to consider.

The liturgy started. A dull sermon, delivered in monotone, was soothing background for the imagination to soar-like a mother's reassuring voice whose rhythms are more comforting than words, like a verbal curtain over ordinary time, like music that takes your mind off things so you can think of essentials. As the sermon droned on, everyone in the pews was mentally gone, out in a field swinging butterfly nets. One was pulling in the roast cooking in the oven back home and the family, such as it was, gathering around the table. Others would gather at a nearby diner. Looking at the fine vestments she had made the celebrant, it slowly dawned on one in the pews that it was time to close her dress shop, to thank God for all that had been, and to spend more time with her friends playing pinochle. All of these inspirations came from the Almighty and the low-keyed homilist speaking over to the side.