Gary DeCoker
Once a Catholic
My father is Catholic, but he doesn’t believe in God. Every couple months he goes to church with a handful of offering envelopes, the dates of his absent Sundays carefully printed, one per envelope, a dollar stuffed in each. He does this, he says, “just in case.” On his charitable day, he arrives at church after the entrance hymn and leaves when the priest concludes the consecration. I know from the nuns that if you are present through these two events, God will note your attendance, an important consideration in the pre-Vatican II days when missing church on Sunday was a mortal sin. The nuns told my father the same thing when he was a boy, so he figures that he might as well get credit for his attendance, “but why stay longer than you have to?”
My mother is Lutheran. She never went to church in Detroit when I was a child, but started going after we moved north into a house across the street from a Lutheran church. When she was engaged to my father in the 1940s, his Belgian mother insisted that she attend classes led by a Catholic priest, so they could be married in the Church. My mother would not convert and instead compromised by signing an oath pledging to raise her children as Catholics. Since then, she has kept a quiet dislike of Catholicism.
So it was that my sister and I were raised Catholic. She became a Lutheran when she got married, turned with her husband to fundamentalism, then got divorced, and now doesn’t attend church. My father isn’t steady on his feet these days, so he sends his envelopes in bundles every so often with a neighbor. My mother crosses the street to the Lutheran church when she feels like it, about once a month. And I have worked my way from the Trappists, to Buddhism, Shinto, Theosophy, yoga, and anything else that seemed to make sense along the way. Three and a half decades of eclectic wandering, one of them in Japan, have left me an agnostic leaning these days toward atheism. Yet still searching.
The nuns twisted Aristotle’s famous saying into something like this: “Give me a child until he’s age seven and I’ll deliver him for life.” They had me until twelve, but I’ve wiggled away from their grasp, in part because of my mother’s unwillingness to play along and my father’s attempts to extinguish any hint of piety burning in his son. If the nuns from my childhood were to look at my bookshelves, however, they might think that they had their way with me. Religious books take up a good bit of shelf space, and, while the nuns would probably overlook the Japanese, Chinese, and Indian traditions, they could shift their eyes to the end of the shelf, to names such as Saint Augustine, Saint Thomas Aquinas, and Thomas Merton, and nod with approval. We have him, they might think, for life.
I’m not sure whether I’m still Catholic. When asked, I sometimes say I’m a lapsed Catholic, a term I remember from my childhood. I thought then that it meant “no longer Catholic,” but now the term makes me think of an interval, a respite that will eventually expire and leave me back in the fold. My searches through other religions may then become the interim when I replaced “capital c” Catholic with a lower-case, eclectic approach. I’ve been surprised recently by my attraction to the writer Andre Dubus who returned to Catholicism at the end of his life. I bought a copy of Meditations from a Moveable Chair, his last book of essays, and was drawn to his references to faith, made stronger, it seems, by the accident that left him in a wheelchair. Will there be an event in the future that will awaken something from my past and send me back to the Church like a salmon returning upstream at life’s end? Does my belief in the sacredness of life come from a mark that the nuns carved in my soul? Perhaps I am a “loose” Catholic, continuing rather than rejecting my religious background, as when I traveled through East Asia in search of something beyond what my eyes could see.
* * *
The nuns divided the world into three distinct categories: Catholics, non-Catholic Christians, and the rest of humanity. Catholics occupied the higher reaches of heaven with the other Christians beneath them. Some version of hell was the final resting place for everyone else and for those among the potentially saved who died tainted by mortal sin. Looking back on this arrangement, I’m struck that my Guardian Angels School classmates and I never stood up for those to whom heaven’s doors would remain closed. Since most of us didn’t know anyone who wasn’t Catholic or Protestant--or more likely we just assumed everyone we met was—I guess we didn’t feel the need to rally to anyone’s defense. When the nuns told us that Jews were doomed to wander the world without a country as a punishment for killing Christ, we believed them without understanding the newly formed state of Israel nor Christ’s status as a Jew. But the distinctions that the nuns drew between and among the Catholics and other Christians held our attention.
I remember long question-and-answer sessions where we would press the nun for clarification of specific points, often of an eschatological nature. Saint Christopher medals were popular among my classmates because the nuns told us that, were we to die with the medal on our person, we would immediately be taken to heaven regardless of the balance sheet of our sins. The Saint Christopher medal seemed like a good bet, given the eternity that lay ahead following our brief stay on earth, and I began wearing one on a chain around my neck when the nun sold them in fifth grade. The chain, although uncomfortable, offered opportunities for dramatic moments. Running to first base, the medal would pop out of my T-shirt, bounce off my chest, and flutter in front of my face. When I got to first, I would take the medal in my hand and fling it over my shoulder in the way I’d seen girls flip back their long hair.
A theological question arose during recess one day when a chain on one of the boys got caught in the catcher’s mitt as he slid home. It broke and the medal bounced on the ground, disappearing in the dust. As soon as we returned to class, we asked what would happen if a person was in an accident where his chain was torn off the instant before death. Would he go to heaven even if he had committed a mortal sin a few minutes before? Or what about when you took the medal off to shower or sleep or to polish it? The nun’s answers were always the same--you had to have it on or intend to put it on again as soon as you were able; God would know your intentions. Similar questions arose when we learned you could say “forgive me, Lord” at the point of death and be granted a place in heaven (as a result, Saint Christopher medals lost some of their popularity). The phrase only worked for Catholics who were baptized into the Church, however, and those without this baptism were doomed at death unless a concerned Catholic came along and baptized the person. Any water was fine for an emergency baptism and, if only a mud puddle was available for the task, that was okay, or, lacking water, milk or lemonade would suffice, anything as long as it contained some amount of water. None of us had the courage to raise the pressing question of urine.
My mother was skeptical of the supernatural side of the church. She let me wear the medal, but didn’t offer much encouragement, leaving me with the feeling that she didn’t care about my life beyond this world. I don’t remember worrying about her either, despite her ambiguous position in the afterlife hierarchy. It should have bothered me that she would join the Lutherans in the lower regions of heaven, but I never gave it much thought. I wasn’t allowed to because my mother made it clear that her religious background and practice were off limits. She’d consented to send us to Catholic school and that was enough.
My father never questioned the choice of schools either--he couldn’t defy his mother--but he did attempt to counteract Catholicism’s influence. On most Sundays, until fifth grade when I became an Altar Boy, I took my little sister to church. My father seldom joined, but when I was about seven, he started taking me to the gas station after I returned home on Sunday mornings. About a year later he added a second stop to our ritual--Hazel’s Bar. It opened at noon, so we’d leave the house at 11:40, get gas, and pull into the gravel parking lot a few seconds before the bar’s opening. Sometimes, when we’d get the timing just right, we’d hear the lock clicking as Hazel turned the latch from the other side of the thick wooden door. “Well, hello boys,” she’d say with a smile.
Every Sunday, I would put my foot on the metal ring at the base of the barstool next to my father and climb into my seat, grabbing the banister that ran around the bar to pull myself up. We sat facing a long line of bottles that reminded me of the stories told by the nuns about the way alcohol can ruin a person’s life. Even though my father drank two or three cases of beer a week, I didn’t associate his habit with the nun’s crusade against alcohol, and I gained strength from the knowledge that I would never drink or smoke, a pledge made easily in elementary school when both habits caused nausea every time my father offered a drink or a puff. Lust wasn’t so easily forborne. Hanging above the bottles at Hazel’s was a four-by-eight-foot painting of a reclining nude, her midsection shrouded in purple velvet, set off in a gold-leaf frame. I couldn’t keep my eyes off her.
My father seemed to combine most of the elements of the depraved, as described by the nuns in their daily homily when we returned from morning mass, and he seemed to make a virtue out of sin. “Ah, wonderful beverage,” he’d say when he opened a bottle of beer, or I’d overhear him bragging about a “company job,” which meant he was building something at work for himself or a friend--sometimes for profit, most often in the form of a case or two of Stroh’s. Alcohol, tobacco, theft, and lust--my father exemplified them all and seemed to take pleasure in confronting me, trying in his own way to pull me into his masculine world and away from the weakening influences of my grandmother and the nuns.
In reaction, I grabbed onto every lifesaver that the nuns tossed to us, going from Saint Christopher medals, to repetitions of “forgive me, Lord,” to weekly confession. I also learned other avenues for gaining God’s approval such as nodding in prayer when passing in front of a church. On a vacation to Northern Michigan, I talked my parents into stopping at the Cross in the Woods to see the 55-foot crucifix. The base of the cross is on a hill at the top of a series of a few hundred steps. Visitors demonstrate their devotion by climbing the stairs on their knees, an act of contrition that I achieved while my mother browsed the gift shop with my sister and my father waited by the car, smoking a cigarette.
When I was twelve, we moved to Lexington, a small town on Lake Huron. In Detroit around fifth grade, I had begun telling people that I was going to become a priest. Neither of my parents reacted to this news and I seldom talked of it at home, but the nuns seemed to appreciate it, giving me “A’s whenever I was able to weave my intentions into an assignment. Since most of the students from our Detroit school graduated to a nearby Catholic high school, my enrollment in seminary would have come when I started college. In Croswell, where Catholic school ended at eighth grade, the nuns showed more interest in my comments about the priesthood and they soon had me meeting with a priest to make plans for high school at a residential seminary. One Saturday in early spring, my parents, sister, and I drove 80 miles to Saginaw to meet with priests at the seminary and firm up my enrollment. The nuns were especially pleased, they repeated to me and my classmates, because they had sent a boy to the seminary each year for the past six years. The attention I gained from my peers, especially the girls, kept me devoted to the idea in the abstract, but led me to question the celibate life I was to lead. I still wasn’t sure exactly what I was required to forgo, but my throbbing puberty told me that there was going to be a conflict. I explained my motivation for entering the priesthood to my parents on the drive to Saginaw; in short, I wanted to make sure I’d get to heaven. I don’t remember how my father responded, perhaps he didn’t say much because he was nervous about the day’s events, but my mother went into a long and obscure discussion about girls and love, marriage and fatherhood, priests and celibacy. When I sat down to meet the priest in charge of admission, I had already decided to attend the public high school at home.
* * *
My grandfather had married at 30, just before leaving Belgium, and I set that age for my own eventual marriage, leaving the intervening years for travel and perhaps, following my grandfather’s example, emigration to a country that better matched my evolving sense of self. This vague life course ended up being fairly accurate. I lived in Kuwait for two years after college, then in Japan for six more. Marriage came at 35. While first in Japan, I became involved with a Shinto religious organization that taught the Japanese arts of tea ceremony, martial arts, and calligraphy--arts laced with Eastern religion and philosophy. (They also were full of esoteric details that challenged me, and, I now realize, paralleled the Catholic minutiae I heard from the nuns.). What attracted me most was the same thing I had found in yoga and Transcendental Meditation (two paths I pursued briefly as a college student); namely, the elevation of the present moment to a level of importance greater than what had preceded and what would follow. It was in this timeless present that I could finally quell the Catholic voice that told me I was no good, a voice rooted so deep that its dismissal required me to reject my entire religious upbringing. I longed most strongly for a single mystical moment that would tell me I had it right. Zen literature repeats stories of enlightenment that come through a physical whack or a perplexing statement from a spiritual guide. Although I had never studied Buddhism with anyone, I convinced myself that I already grasped its truths, and while reading works by Buddhist patriarchs I nodded my approval, telling myself that I may have even written those words in a previous life. I overcame the Catholic voice reminding me of my worthlessness by making myself into a Bodhisattva, on earth to share wisdom and help others achieve satori.
The teachers and students at the Shinto shrine used various maxims as a shorthand in their conversations and during tea ceremony practice, where a simple phrase was displayed on a scroll in the alcove along with the day’s flower arrangement. The most representative saying, ichigo ichie (one time, one meeting), a phrase said to hold the wisdom of the arts, reminded participants to give their practice complete attention. Here was another version of the Indian and Zen practices involving the acquisition of immediacy that I had read about. But in the tea room it finally made sense--the present was important, not because of what you were doing or what you could gain from it, but because only by concentrating on the immediate moment could you live your life at the highest level.
The martial arts teacher spoke of the same concept in a different way. The goal, he told us, was to develop concentration that would allow all of your physical and spiritual energies to flow through the tip of the sword. “In life,” he said, “we are sometimes put into situations where we need to command our entire pool of energy and focus it to a single moment. Practice prepares us for these instances.” Shinto philosophy also found its way into our study. To me the appeal lay in its lack of complex doctrine, layered scripture, and centuries of exegesis, such as found in Christianity and Buddhism. In its place, as explained to me then, was the belief in the goodness and unity of all God’s creations. The role of humans--all creatures, for that matter--simply was to live in the authentic purity of nature.
It took three religions to satisfy me and I finally felt I had found my spiritual home. When I accepted a job at the shrine, I noticed that my contract did not stipulate an ending date and asked about it. “You can stay as long as you like,” was the reply, and I was certain I would never leave. But as I entered my second year, I felt my teachers pull back--or perhaps it was me; in any case, I began talking about graduate school, and they, about the importance of my taking what I had learned and translating it to my own culture. What pushed me further was a conversation with Zwi Werblowsky, a professor of religion from Hebrew University who was visiting the shrine. He summed up my spiritual longing this way: “If you cannot find spiritual fulfillment in your own religious tradition, you won’t find it anywhere.”
As my departure approached, I worked to solidify my knowledge, but the arts still seemed cumbersome and complicated when I did them, and beautiful and efficient when done by the teachers. I knew that I was learning the movements, but sensed that there was something more. In martial arts this additional something became clear to me on one of my last days, when I repeated a movement that the teacher had just demonstrated. It was a downstroke, one of the eight basic moves, where the wooden sword is raised straight above the head and then brought down and forward. “You must ride the sword with your inner energy.” The ability to harness this energy (Japanese ki, Chinese chi, Sanskrit prana) toward the desired end is the essence of the arts and religions of the East, but the harder I worked to control it, the more my teacher shook his head. Finally, I raised the sword, paused in discouragement, and let my arms drop in front of me, carried only by the weight of the wood. “That’s it,” my teacher said. I was stunned. I repeated the movement, trying to capture the same spirit that had advanced the sword a few minutes earlier, but I never regained the teacher’s approval. Nevertheless, I had understood his lesson. I was trying too hard, thinking that I could grasp everything and take it home with me, failing to realize that the importance of practice was not in arriving at an endpoint of development but in the continuity of disciplined study.
* * *
I had just turned 30 when I left Japan. In the five years I spent as a graduate student and the decades as professor, I lost myself in academic research, teaching, and administration. These activities fulfilled me in different ways--the acceptance of my publications, the satisfaction from helping students, the involvement in the academy--but lately I’m beginning to feel unsettled again, wondering whether there should be more. I miss the spark that arises when I’m making progress under the guidance of a master, learning within a well-defined tradition. I miss the insight from reading, not for information or potential reference in an academic paper, but for personal meaning. Another Japanese aphorism says, “Never forget the beginner’s mind.” When I first heard this, I took it as a caution against the arrogance that can develop when a person masters something and then becomes a teacher who prospers on pompous declarations and students’ fawning, rather than on his own hard-earned progress. My initial interpretation may be accurate, but the phrase also can be a reminder never to forget the quest for meaning, a quest that leads us to ask ourselves whether we are making the most of this one opportunity, this one meeting we have with life on earth. It tells us to stop and read the barometer of the present, not for its pleasure but for its depth.
Thinking about Professor Werblowsky’s advice, I have recently begun reading again Saint Augustine’s Confessions and am drawn to the intensity of his examination of his life. I’m not sure what I’m confessing through this essay, but I am coming to understand that I need to return to my beginner’s mind and listen again to the voice calling from within, a voice that I hear differently as an adult. It no longer repeats that I am inadequate or immoral, but instead reminds me that I am yet unformed, that there is something more to life than I can see. I cringe at the Catholic guilt that Augustine expresses as he catalogs his transgressions, but I think my reaction comes from my childhood memories rather than my adult interpretation. When the nuns told us of our sinfulness, I interpreted their words personally and linked to them every aspect of my life that seemed abnormal or abhorrent. I’m a sinner, I thought, and my examination of my life revealed ample evidence. It took me years to overcome this childhood tendency toward self-loathing, and now I can see that Augustine was moved to write perhaps less from guilt than from humility and awe. Of course, the nuns mixed a lot of their own personal angst into their teaching, but reading my Catholic childhood from the distance of four decades, I can see that their use of guilt could be interpreted as a means of pushing me to achieve the most from the present.
I can still hear the nuns say, “Your body is a temple; use it to praise God.” Or perhaps it is this phrase nudging me along: “An idle mind is the devil’s workshop.” Whatever the phrase and whatever their motivation, I still resist the message that the Church offers the only valid path to redemption or to a life well lived. The followers of the Shinto religion where I studied often used the phrase bankyô dôkon (myriad religions, one root). Although this universality still attracts me, I have come to question the root itself and prefer to believe that any life, pursued with devotion, can bring fulfillment even without religion. And this leaves me writing on a Sunday morning rather than sitting in the local Catholic church. A life of devotion, the phrase fits my Catholic childhood and the Asian traditions that I explored as a young adult, but like my father I’m left with a hint of uncertainty that tempts me to return to the fold, an offering envelope in my outstretched hand. But this choice seems too simple, too talismanic.
On the day of my grandmother’s funeral, the ushers at Our Lady of Sorrows passed out cards with her photograph, a brief biography, and the words, “God mixes the happiness of this world with bitterness to make us seek after another life.” Decades later, I’m still trying to understand my own seeking. Twisting Professor Werblowsky’s advice, I want to believe that if you cannot find spiritual fulfillment within yourself, you cannot find it in religion, no matter where you travel. Yet, when I sit alone, as I am now, I hear the voices of the nuns, softened to a whisper, calling me home.
