November 15: "Catholicism," Exhausted, Perfection

I'm a cradle Catholic.  

I was baptized by a bishop, so my mother had high hopes of me entering the priesthood.  Obviously, I was a disappointment to her in that respect.  However, I have been playing the pipe organ every weekend since I was about 18 years old.  If you do the math, that's well over two thousand Masses, and that number doesn't even include special holidays and times I played two and three times on a weekend.  Throw in Methodist, Lutheran, Presbyterian, and Episcopalian churches, and the number of worship services I've played climbs well above five or six thousand.  

That's a lot of time on an organ bench, meditating on my life and its failings.

Billy Collins examines his conscience . . . 

Catholicism

by: Billy Collins

There’s a possum who appears here at odd times,
often walking up the path to the house
in the middle of the day like a little ghost
with a long tail and a blank expression on his face.

He likes to slip behind the woodpile,
but sometimes he gets so close to the window
where I am standing with a glass in my hand
that I start to review my sins, systematically

going from one commandment to the next.
What is it about him that causes me
to begin an examination of conscience,
calling to mind my failings in this time of reflection?

It could just be the twitching of the tail
and that white face, but his slow priestly pace
also makes a contribution, as do the tiny paws,
more like hands, really, with opposable thumbs

able to carry a nut or dig a hole in the earth
or lift a chalice above his head
or even deliver a document,
I am thinking as he nears the back door,

not merely a subpoena but an order
of excommunication with my name and a date
written in fine Italian ink
and signed with a flourish of the papal sash.

I'm pretty exhausted tonight.  I just got back home from practicing at a couple different churches for this weekend.  Most people would be surprised how similar Catholic and Lutheran worship services are.  Often, I play many of the same hymns for Mass on Saturday evenings and Lutheran worship on Sunday mornings.

What I have learned during my tenure as a church musician is that there's not much difference between various Christian denominations.  They all follow the same lectionary, sing the same songs, and read the same Bible (with a few extra books thrown in for Catholics).  

Some people have asked me which denomination I like the best.  That's a hard question for me to answer.  I like Catholics for their pageantry and rituals.  Methodists have the best music.  And Lutherans, for the most part, are the most open-minded and accepting.

This week, a good poet friend of mine (who was raised Jewish) said that I'm a mystery to her, because I'm a Catholic, but love being irreverent.  Admire saints, but would rather hang out with sinners.  They're more fun.  

We're all the same--broken and imperfect--trying to survive in a broken and imperfect world.

Bless Saint Marty, for he has and will continue to sin.  Over and over and over.  Perfection is kind of boring.

February 20: Cliques, Catholics, Cadillacs, and Expectations

"You ought to go to a boys' school sometime.  Try it sometime," I said.  "It's full of phonies, and all you do is study so that you can learn enough to be smart enough to be able to buy a goddam Cadillac some day, and you have to keep making believe you give a damn if the football team loses, and all you do is talk about girls and liquor and sex all day, and everybody sticks together in these dirty little goddam cliques.  The guys that are on the basketball team stick together, the Catholics stick together, the goddam intellectuals stick together, the guys that play bridge stick together.  Even the guys that belong to the goddam Book-of-the-Month Club stick together.  If you try to have a little intelligent--"

Holden doesn't fit in.   He's not an athlete.  He's not a future entrepreneur of America.  He's not an intellectual (although he is emotionally smart).  He's on the fencing team at Pencey, but he loses the team's foils on the way to a competition.  Although cliques aren't his thing, he seems to have a lot of friends, or people with whom he's friendly.  He's not economically challenged (poor).  He's been kicked out of all the best prep schools on the East Coast.  His brother's a semi-famous writer, and his dad is a lawyer.  Everyone expects Holden to be successful, and he's doing everything he can to not be successful.

I sometimes worry whether I've made wrong choices in my life.  When I started college, I majored in computer science, and I was good at it.  Granted, I wasn't a natural like some of the other people in my programming classes.  There was one guy I knew who wrote computer code for fun.  On a Saturday night, he didn't search for computer porn.  He worked on artificial intelligence.  I didn't fit in with this crowd.  I knew I didn't, but I hung on because my family expected me to be successful.  Graduate and get a mid-level IT job where I spent my time chasing down binary code bugs   I wasn't happy.

In my last semester as an undergraduate, I changed my career plans.  I applied to graduate school in English, and I switched my degree.  Instead of a Bachelor's in computer science, I graduated with a major in English and a minor in computer science and math.  I've never looked back.  Until now.

The last couple weeks of financial worries have made me a little reflective.  I've been playing a game of What-If.  As in, what if I had stuck with computers?  What if I'd moved to California and started programming?  What if I'd created an Internet search engine and called it by some kind of funky name, like "Google"?  What if, what if, what if...

The problem is that I wasn't a natural computer science geek.  I didn't eat, sleep, breathe, and have sex with silicon chips.  My classmates never let poor Rudolph play in any computer games, if you know what I mean.  The girls in my major were only interested in the guys with the biggest...pocket calculators.  I wasn't really interested in being a part of the Turbo Pascal clique.

Writing came naturally to me.  I was good at it.  Other people recognized I was good at it.  Girls read my stories and poems and wanted to talk to me.  English was where I belonged.  And that's where I've stayed.

I wish I could find a way to make more money with my English creds.  About 15 years ago, I had an idea about a series of books about a young orphan boy who attends a school for wizards and battles the most evil wizard who ever lived, but I didn't think anyone would be interested in it.  So here I am, working four jobs, teaching part-time, and cranking out blog posts.

Saint Marty has no regrets, except maybe the wizard book thing.

I don't fit in with any of these people...

February 9: Catholics, Sarah Vap, "Faulkner's Rosary," New Cartoon

I said I'd enjoyed talking to them a lot, too.  I meant it, too.  I'd have enjoyed it even more though, I think, if I hadn't been sort of afraid, the whole time I was talking to them, that they'd all of a sudden try to find out if I was a Catholic.  Catholics are always trying to find out if you're a Catholic.  It happens to me a lot, I know, partly because my last name is Irish, and most people of Irish descent are Catholics.  As a matter of fact, my father was a Catholic once.  He quit, though, when he married my mother.  But Catholics are always trying to find out if you're a Catholic even if they don't know your last name...

Of course, Holden has an opinion about Catholics.  Holden has opinions about everyone.  He reserves his most negative criticisms for people he considers to be "phony"--pretentious teens and adults who try to pass themselves off as smarter or more important than they actually are.  Holden prizes humility and truth.  That's why kids like his sister Phoebe and brother Allie are so central to him.  They are unspoiled by life.  In the passage above, Holden is talking to a pair of nuns he's met at a diner, and he likes them a great deal.  Holden claims to be an atheist, but he admires people with strong convictions and beliefs, because, at the moment, Holden is not sure what to believe or who to trust.

I've been lucky.  For the most part, I've had a strong spiritual life.  I was raised Catholic, and, aside from the usual teenage diversions, I've maintained my beliefs.  My faith informs most of what I do--working, teaching, husbanding, parenting, and writing.  I may get mad with God.  I may question God,  I may even wrestle with God from time-to-time.  That's normal.  Even healthy.  It's my faith, however, that is the thread that holds the elements of my life together.

Sarah Vap's collection of poems, Faulkner's Rosary, follows this thread, from pregnancy to birth to new motherhood.  Each poem is a bead, a cell, a prayer in the fabric of life.  Vap uses the concept of the Catholic rosary, with its concentration on meditation and mystery, happiness and sorrow, love and death, to create a circular poetic portrait of life.  Each line vibrates with a peculiar energy and light:

Fallopian

I don't know what it was like for you,
before me.          Wrapped-up, did your night

walk with you?  And practice speaking

like the black rock
slipped secretly, hand to hand, by a new love

to a new love?  Then, is forever looked-after?
Welcoming,

and not very happy, the black cat
turns into a white one

as it crosses the stone wall of the Street of the Holy Spirit.
Something untouchable, we know,

is still voluble.

I would be lying if I said I understood all of Vap's poems.  They resist understanding at times.  Like reading a Faulkner novel, Faulkner's Rosary is a journey through time, from the inner space of the womb to the outer space of the Street of the Holy Spirit.  Vap sees the miraculous even in the frayed string that holds her rosary together:

A cradle of warmed oats for the chickens on the Epiphany

Last week you formed the chambers of your own heart; this week
the lobes of your brain.  I wake up thinking overcelebrate.

I wake with the phrase as I am wont.

Chronology doesn't enter--my birth and yours,

my mother's pregnancy
and mine, they are the same:          blessed,

and tendered thanks for the infinite detail--windowsills,

before or after Advent, where the worm lived

by your vanished sister.  You must dream

of animals, afraid,
pitching themselves

into hollowed-out buildings, built

several stories down into the earth.

Sarah Vap's work frustrates me at times.  It leaves me puzzled, wondering.  Yet, I keep returning to it, the way my mother returns to her prayer books every morning or my father to his black-beaded rosary.  The poems in this book make me say a holy "yes" to life in all its vicissitudes, from the subatomic to the cosmic.

Saint Marty is in love with Faulkner's Rosary.

Confessions of Saint Marty