“Where I Come From”

A while ago I took a writing class at the 92nd Street Y – it was GREAT. We had random cool assignments – and I really stretched myself.

We had one assignment – we could write whatever we want – but whatever we wrote had to have two things:

1. It had to take place in the 1960s
2. It had to start with the words “Where I come from”

When we all read our pieces outloud – it was just AMAZING to read the differences, to see people’s creativity – and where it led them. Some people honed in, of course, of the more stereotypical image of the 60s – drugs and the sexual revolution and hippies – Others didn’t go that route at all. They just wrote a story that happened to take place in the 1960s. It was just so so cool.

I interviewed my great-aunt Joan for what I wrote – she was hugely helpful (she’s a nun) and also put out a call on the blog for people to share any personal stories they might have had about MY topic. I’ve put it all together here – using some of those stories, making up others, and trying to give a sense of that time and how momentous it was for Catholics.

Anyway – I just dug up my piece today and thought I’d share it. I already want to edit the SHIT out of it – but whatever, that always happens. I’ll post it as I wrote it.

WHERE I COME FROM

Where I come from, Latin wasn’t a dead language. Mass began with: “In nomine Patris, et Filii et Spiritus Sancti. Introibo ad altare Dei.” Where I come from, south Boston, everyone is Catholic.

I was born on a holy day, I can’t remember which one, but I know it was a Wednesday. July 15, 1945. Four days later, my mother left me in the care of one of my older sisters and went to confession. Father O’Brien sat behind the grate, and my mother, mantilla pinned hastily to her head, blurted out her horrible sin: she had missed mass on a holy day. There was a brief pause, and then came Father O’Brien’s voice, the brogue of western Ireland still strong on his tongue: “Molly, am I mistaken , or did you not just give birth?” “Yes, Father. I gave birth on the holy day.” There was another pause and then: “Molly. For God’s sake, the Lord forgives you. Go home. Rest.” My mother loved to tell that story. She regaled her sisters with it, on long summer evenings in our cramped back yard, as they sat around, all 6 of them, drinking vodka tonics in the cool of twilight, letting their kids run wild through the streets until it was time for bed. My mother and her sisters did competing imitations of Father O’Brien, a priest who had baptized them, confirmed them, married them, and then baptized their children.

Where I come from, you don’t miss mass lightly, even if you just gave birth, and your breasts are leaking milk, and you can barely walk. You get your ass in the pew.

My grandmother gave me her rosary beads as a gift for my confirmation, and I loved them. I loved the sparkle, and I loved them because grown-ups had them, and I was fifteen, on the cusp. I still have them, even though I haven’t done the rosary in ages. I find it very meditative actually, a wonderful practice, but for some reason now, I resist. There’s something there that cuts too deep. It’s mysterious. And yet I look at my rosary beads – the multi-faceted rainbow-sparkles, the old silver crucifix dangling on the end, the solidity of the object and yet also its grace – and all I can see is my grandmother, brogue still strong in her voice, even after forty years in this country, her pale-as-paper wrinkled hands, the raw bony fingers moving from stone to stone to stone, hop-skipping from one to the next as though she were in a creek and she needed to get to the other side. The imprint of my grandmother is there in the beads, an afterimage. I can’t say the Hail Mary anymore without feeling my throat clog up, burning tears at the back of my eyes. Why? The emotion feels like loss, but that baffles me.

I found church very boring as a kid, especially the Latin part, although I grew to have an appreciation for it once everything changed. But still. To a child, that mass was the height of psychological boredom, meant to break you. It almost drove me to hysteria.

Kyrie eleison
Kyrie eleison
Kyrie eleison
Kyrie eleison
Kyrie eleison
Kyrie eleison
Kyrie eleison

Good grief. But I loved the mysticism hovering on the edges of all the rigidity, the glimpses of a mystery at the heart of the mass. Sometimes, usually during the Lenten masses, when everything got horribly solemn, it would be as though a sheer curtain fluttered back, giving me a seconds-only view of a glorious awful world of pain and beauty and redemption. But those were just moments. For the most part, it was insufferable. The quiet chill face of Mary stared down from her niche up on the altar. She didn’t really care. She was above it all. But when I said the rosary, to myself at night, in the way my grandmother taught me, I felt like I got closer. Closer to Mary, certainly, but it was more about getting close to the wordlessness at the heart of the entire ritual.

When “For the kingdom, and the power and the glory are yours, now and forever” was tacked on to the Lord’s Prayer after Vatican II, my father (never a zealot really, his Catholicism was more of a cultural thing, an Irish thing) was outraged. Not for any theological reason, he couldn’t back up his opinion with verse and chapter from the Bible. No. He was outraged because that was how the Protestants had always said the prayer, and to my father “Protestant” was a dirty word. And when, after Vatican II, they introduced the “sign of peace” into the mass, where the congregation turns to each other and shakes hands, saying, “Peace be with you”, my father stopped going to church altogether, which nearly broke my mother’s heart. But he wouldn’t bend. He stood over the smoking grill in the backyard, turning hamburgers over, railing on and on about it. “Goddammit, Molly, I don’t go to church to make friends.”

Pope John XXIII, during the Second Ecumenical Council, said that the church needed to “open a window”, and open it they did. My grandmother died in 1962, so she missed the opening of the window, although she did live long enough to see “one of ours” elected President of the United States. Oh, I remember her laughing, on election day, that open-throated guffaw we all loved. She sat in her kitchen, listening to the election returns coming in on the radio, a gleam of tears in her eyes. She kept saying, over and over, “I never thought I’d see the day. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, I never thought I’d see the day.” And then that laugh – free and loud. Not only was he “one of ours” because he was Catholic, but he was from Boston, and he was Irish. It was a great great day for all of us.

When Kennedy was assassinated a year later, my grandmother was already dead and buried. As awful as it all was for our country, in and of itself, there were a couple of moments, during that breathless excruciating time, when I would think, thankfully, “I’m so glad she didn’t live to see this. It would have killed her.”

Two years after the assassination came the tumult of Vatican II. Every morning, I woke up in my dorm room at the small women’s Catholic college I went to in Connecticut, and rushed downstairs in my robe and curlers, to pick up the New York Times from Sister Agnes, and bring it back up to my room. My roommate Moira would make instant coffee, and I would read aloud the latest dispatches from Rome. No more “In nomine Patri et Filii et Spiritus Sancti. Introibo ad altare Dei.” Now it was “In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. I will go to the altar of God.” It was still an incantation, a call to worship, only it was now in English. Traditions upended, altered, shifted, thrown out, preserved but only in different forms.

I wondered what my grandmother would have had to say about all of it. The Latin mass was her tradition, and also her connection to her girlhood home in Ireland. What would it have done to her to give it up? Many adapted to the changes in the Mass, and many were unable to adapt, and instead drove three hours on Sunday mornings to the one church in the one county in the next state that still had a Latin mass on Sunday.

Although the Catholic Church remained, almost none of the old rituals survived the opening of the window. And now my rosary beads might as well be a relic from an ancient archaeological dig, for people in the present-day to puzzle over, and speculate about what they were once used for.