All those years ago I waited for priests to come and say Mass in a language I couldn’t discern as Latin, Italian or English at the Carmelite Monastery around the corner from my childhood home in Buffalo, and I usually arrived before the priest and when I went through the side door of the chapel, up the concrete stairs and through a thick wooden door, always I was greeted by nuns in full habit, soft spoken and kind and as mysterious to my twelve and fourteen year-old brain as God and the warmth of the sacristy made it easier to slip out of my coat and into the vestments of the day, usually black and white except for holy days and feast days, and on those days my fingers fumbled with innumerable buttons up the front of my cardinal red cassock and when the lace surplice was laid over my shoulders I sometimes saw the censer I would later open for the priest to spoon a heap or two of precious frankincense and myrrh onto the disk of charcoal I had earlier lit, which certainly pleased our Lord, and in those few minutes before Mass began I would sit in a small room at the side of the sacristy and begin or continue to read a brief life of a Saint as weak morning light only just illuminated the stained glass above me, and I, a young boy with no understanding of the world, as innocent as the far away lives I read about, still can remember the huge oak drawers that held priceless hand-stitched and already ancient feeling silk chasubles and stoles for every season and feast that belonged in a museum but served instead to adorn the bodies of those who through the Sacraments brought God into the very Bread we ate though they stumbled at times through words that didn’t fit their mother tongues, and the austere iron grille that extended high into the side apse and kept the entire order of nuns, but for the two or three who dealt with the likes of electricians and milkmen and altar boys and priests too old or addled to work in a parish, removed and separated from the rest of us who wandered the world and ate, played, fucked – though I didn’t know it at the time – worked, disobeyed, drank, argued, reconciled and confessed, and when they sang, their voices lifting higher than our sacrificial offerings, the few neighbors in the pews at seven-thirty, the only Mass to which the public was welcomed, looked to find the source of these voices, they saw only me and an old priest on the altar, the nuns themselves as incorporeal as incense drifting in the still space, able to make their presence felt in vibrations of their Heaven-bound prayers and as I knelt during the Consecration of the Holy Eucharist and rang the bells that signified the descent of the Holy Spirit into the bread that became the Body of Christ, I always tried to place the bells back onto the hard marble step without causing them to jangle and perturb the solemnity of the moment, and when I rose my fingers lightly clutched and lifted the bottom of the cassock, whether black or red, so I didn’t step on myself and fall backward, and how many times did I wash his hands with Holy water to cleanse him from his sins and watch as he poured all of the wine from the crystal cruet into the chalice, after which I would stand facing him, holding in my hands the large red Roman Missal as he flipped its pages to the part of the Mass we were in and everything had a name and meaning and a history and purpose and all of it was held together somehow by the Pope and in our front hallway vestibule we had a framed picture of a wedding blessing given to my parents and signed by Pope Pius XII and everything was in Latin except for their names and it hung in a place of honor at the entrance to our home and at our cottage my dad had the Prayer of St. Francis of Assisi on the wall next to their bed and I never thought of him as gentle or sensitive but he looked at that prayer every day and at home I didn’t go into my parents’ bedroom often but when he got home from work and went upstairs to change into his khakis and flannel shirt he would often kneel down and pray, his thumb and forefinger pulling Rosary beads along their well known path or else his eyes would be buried in his right hand, bowed down and God only knows what he was thinking feeling praying crying out to deepen his compassion or lessen his anger or fear or frustration or help him remember how to live kindly gently in this ruptured world and still when I kneel in a church and listen to the silence that sacred spaces create when they put walls and a roof around the idea of God, and I look at the altar or stained windows or icons or mosaics and see all these representations of God and wonder still at the inherited traditions and beliefs and do not know if it matters if I believe or not but when I find a space that is silent and empty and has an air of reverence it’s not hard for a string of words to run from my mouth my heart my racing brain and as much as I try to silence everything I hear and feel and think and know, it is in the tumult of these conflicting and contradictory and unsettled thoughts that eventually I find a rhythm to the beating of my heart and if I allow it to expand perhaps I return to the received notions I’ve been taught but there’s another possibility among all those out there that the worn course gives me access to push along this trough and use its trajectory the way a satellite uses the gravitational orbit of the sun moon or Earth to propel it deeper into space and untraveled emptiness and in the newness of that space the words I speak and write are not bound by the gravitational pull of my past and I can grow and expand and disappear into the immensity of the universe, an impossibly faint beating heart that resolves itself into the silence
before I find myself sitting at my desk or remembering my childhood and no time has passed except that of my life and still
I wonder if God exists
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