I said I would, so I am. Driving somewhere out near Kickapoo to talk to a Father. The reasons were clear just two weeks ago. But losing focus might mean greater depth of field, later. I'll let you know how it goes. Right now I'm nervous and overwhelmed by details landing on my desk that must be seen to before real work can be done. You're not interested in this, I'm not either, so together we'll wait and see what arises from the slop.
***
I did mean priest. But the secularity of the word "father" is always good for a cheap thrill, so I went in fear and made father jokes for solace on the way and sang with Axl Rose on the radio at the top of my lungs Sweet Child O' Mine and was given, again, this time by Father Joseph Mary Prior of the Congregation of St. John near Kickapoo Illinois (who is really quite wonderful, and the place too: wonderful) the parable of the father who lets loose his wastrel son into the wide and difficult world and who looks to the horizon for his son's return each day with both emptiness and hope tightening his chest. Especially emptiness. Of course I almost joke about the daughter. Where is she?
***
Catholic until seven, then nothing. Then a series of Pentecostal churches my mother joined. I tell him the story of kneeling in front of the entire congregation while the church elders layed fervent hands on me and prayed in tongues that I too might get the gift. Tongues from the Holy Spirit. I was ten and suspicious. Humiliated and full of loathing for all the loathing my questions met with. For my self-imposed imposterhood. I knew I was evil, if they didn't. I was up there for nearly an hour and wanted so badly to stop I nearly made something up so they would let me go. --Nothing happened, he said. He does not nod or smile. It is a paraphrase meant to help me move elsewhere. I hear you, it means.
***
--Right. Nothing happened. I get stuck there.
***
I don't mean my irreverence. What's happening now is I can't get near a Catholic mass without feeling vulnerable and exhausted and the uncontrollable need to cry. I'm serious. The kind of crying you do as a kid that hurts more than you thought imaginable and that leaves you shaken and hiccupping and convinced that after all you are utterly alone and without a purpose in this world. Which is how a kid probably feels after a belting. Like it hurts too much to believe in much of anything besides pain since pain at least proves to be the real thing, is self-evident. This is not exactly right. I'm trying to sort it out. I sat in the chapel for a few minutes before my meeting and wrestled with my feelings and told myself if you're sniveling when the Father comes for you you've wasted this meeting on tears. Is that what you want? Is it? Okay then. Shut up before I really give you something to cry about.
***
What opens the mass waterworks is a shift, a deep shift in the middle of my head and chest and groin from something upright autonomous wry and irreverent to a reverence that looks and feels like crumpled Kleenex.
***
It is pathetic. It tells you how fearfully indecisive I am. I could procrastinate my life away before believing one way or the other--however much I might want to believe, well, something, finally. It's not that I need a faith system, no. The madness is there's no way out of one. You're deluded into a faith system no matter what you do. The fantasy of there-is-a-God and the fantasy of atheism are the same. Both make very desirable Truth claims. Both are religions.
***
In Tarot the final card in the major deck, the Universe, the wayfarer before the throne of God, incredibly beautiful. The wayfarer before the throne of God, face to face. I always imagined them looking at each other, laughing. Possibly telling father jokes.
***
Homework: did you know the Catechism of the Catholic Church is eight hundred and three pages long? And Pope Benedict XVI's encyclical letter Deus Caritas Est a mere twenty-six pages after printing? Father Joseph asks me just as I'm leaving: you do want to go to heaven? He is not threatening, but asking, genuinely, as if to suggest there are options I haven't considered. It's true. This hasn't occurred to me before, not as something else that exists in the divide between this man and me. Not as another part of the story I dismiss as not useful. I say, well it would be nice to get it right here, before. He says, yes of course here first. He laughs. We have been joking, I see.
***
