After the Death of Pope Francis I

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

What’s left

Here we are with crusted mounds of traffic-weathered snow on the edges of roads, dragged grey through the long weeks of February, an oscillating weather pendulum punctuated by sheets of cold rain and dumps of snow and now at the end we’re wondering what’s next. In the kitchen, though, it’s mostly been sour rye, risen and proofed and baked hot, a thick chewy crust and memory after memory of my Buffalo childhood and the smell of Kaufman’s rye bread drifting over the neighborhood, and when I slice this bread and toast it lightly and skim a thin sheen of butter the rich earthy caraway seeds and the springy dense texture of this bread satisfies some primordial memory, maybe that of ancestors in the wilds of cold northern Europe equally satisfied with a tear of this bread, frothy and alive and bubbling as it’s built, a mostly forgotten grain these days and as we head into Lent I went to an ecumenical Christian service and liked that they used the traditional, remember you are dust and to dust you shall return, the rough texture of ashes beneath his thumb and onto my forehead and those words are liberating because you who read this and I will both in three hundred years be dust again and with that certainty we can and should do what we will and in this season of want I remember so many past years when I believed in the trajectory of the church and thought it an institution that weathered the ages because of some grace and after these recent years of unending revelation of decades-long indifference to the abuse, molestation and rape of children by innumerable priests I continue to feel an anger and rage toward those men who used the power and moral authority of the church to intimidate and silence the very people they vowed to lead and protect, and the administrative, institutional authority of God’s church on earth crushed so many girls and boys that it’s hard for me to go into a church because when I do I want to interrupt the priest saying Mass and challenge his holy vows because I think of all the times I served as an altar boy for years and years and it’s only luck that a pedophile rapist priest was never assigned to my parish because then it would have been me and my friends whose lives would have been torn apart and filled with fear and doubt and mistrust but instead it was a parish over there, and over there, and over there and I feel an anger that can’t be forgiven but even with those feelings when I walk into a church there is a texture to the silence and I feel the pull of the sacrament of the holy Eucharist and even when I feel such anger toward the priests and the institution of the church the ritual ceremony sacrament they perform or conduct connects me back again to an even older, deeper mystery of life and death and the life of a soul or spirit and our unending desire to know and feel what lies beyond the edge of death and if the church sells its gold and vestments and art and churches and properties and jeweled chalices and priests are the people who hear within them a silence that calls to be voiced then perhaps the church has a chance and will not succumb to the fate it currently faces, a slow fall into indifference and irrelevance, and now, as these forty days unfold I wonder what’s left of the church I knew and gospels are filled with references to bread and after a long generation of bad bread in this country, the past decade or two have given us remembories of what bread is, fermented with wild yeasts and shared among neighbors and friends, constantly used and saved and used again, grown and depleted time after time, a continuous nurturing of life even when it slows down and rests in the fridge in an old pickle jar, a chunk of starter just waiting for warmth and wild spores floating through the air.