Thirty years of self-imposed exile from Catholicism and you’d think Easter ritual memories might fade. Nevertheless, every spring Lent stirs the pot. Memories of giving up TV and chocolate blend into a frond waving Palm Sunday. The priest’s thumb smearing cross on my Ash Wednesday forehead overlays Holy Thursday’s Last Supper, a Judas betrayal and the absolution of my mortal and venial sins. The inevitably stormy Good Friday Passion Service is the penultimate ‘all is lost’ moment. Jesus’ thirty-nine lashings from a cat of nine tails followed by an incense clouded, thorn-pierced and bloodied Way of the Cross was my sole annual foray away from Heidi, Disney and Nancy Drew. Saturday’s quiet eggstravaganza was colored with undertones of a solemn Evening Vigil and finally, oh finally, my Dad’s Easter Sunday exclamation mark - the jubilant belting out of “Halleluja.” Powerful stuff.
For me and my three sisters it meant white bobby sox, black patent shoes, white gloves, matching spring dresses and white doilies fastened into barbershop pixie cuts with scalp scraping bobby pins. This was ritual. While my siblings and I hunted for baskets Dad boiled no less than a dozen eggs, fried a half pound of bacon and toasted a loaf of bread for brunch while Irving Berlin’s “Easter Parade” streamed from the Hi-Fi stereo.
All those years of ‘good girl’ Catholicism didn’t stand the scrutiny of emerging adulthood. Dad died in the head-on collision that fractured my Mom’s cervical spine. I was fifteen. But I lost more than my Dad. My brother, as can happen in accepted patriarchal faiths, was elevated to mythic status. At sixteen years of age, with a freshly minted driver’s license, four younger sisters and a grieving, traumatically injured Mom, his sudden responsibilities were massive, overwhelming and arrived far too young. Still, the shadow he threw was long and one in which I lost myself.
If Dad taught us anything it was that we were ‘pretty lucky kids’. He said it over and over again. Life is life and my brother’s burden was no less than mine. He had, quite literally, giant shoes to fill and for the last thirty-seven years he did so, without reservation. Fair? That’s another thing Dad said. “Who ever told you life was fair?”
The timing of my loss was impeccable. First boyfriends, emerging womanhood, university life and late night, post party philosophical discussions beckoned. Not much of the Catholic faith I grew up in made sense anymore.
My resentment of the Church’s strong patriarchy barely scratched the surface of my turmoil. I questioned the banning of birth control, the idea that only Christians went to ‘heaven’, the subleties of fear-based adoration, the sex, marriage and family counseling by celibate priests, the liberties taken with factual history, the Vatican kept vaulted secrets of the missionary schools, the belief in inherent evil and original sin and indeed, the blind adherence to dogma.
I didn’t just throw it all to the wind. That’s not my style. I studied. I did a term paper in an Ethics based Theology course on birth control and I met with the University priest to seek truths. The walls came tumbling down. Fact and truth were debatable, apparently. My seeking served only to solidify a spirituality that was based solely on the one rule that seemed to hold up. The Golden rule. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
No one could really argue with that. That one rule encircled my motley crew of secular friends without the subtle but ever so present Catholic air that we are all equal - Catholics are just ‘more equal’.
My first sidekick was Gary Zukav’s 1976 Nobel Prize winning book, “The Dancing WuLi Masters.” Emerging from the 1970’s think tank, the Esalen Institute, it was the first lay study of physics, quantum mechanics and relativity and its close cousin, spirituality. These were my early tools and talismen. Followed up by Marilyn Ferguson’s “The Aquarian Conspiracy” and Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged” my early twenties reading ensured my rolling stone of clarity would gather no moss.
