Rosary Bracelets and Checkbook Prayers: Family, Religion and What a Little Bit of It Means.

Cross-posted at BlogHer.

This weekend in New Orleans I popped into the St. Louis Cathedral on Jackson Square, a building I've walked by several times but never entered. The usual things brought me inside this time: curiosity, a compulsive search for cool pictures that increasingly defines my days, and a sudden desire to find a calm spot in a nonstop city I love that can nonetheless can be exhausting.

St. Louis is one of the oldest cathedrals in North America, established in 1720. Inside, it is the usual Catholic combination of simple wood pews and votive candles, a brightly muraled ceiling and an ornately carved altar with Jesus and Mary and a few of the finest gilt archangels keeping watch over the proceedings. It's also a tourist center steps away from Cafe du Monde (beignets!) and Central Grocery (muffalettas!), so there are people milling around, taking pictures, lighting candles, a number of them kneeling and praying.

I was raised Catholic. I'm a cradle Catholic, culturally Catholic, "I survived Catholic school" (14 years, counting graduate school) kind of girl. I know what I'm talking about relative to this church. I've heard it harshly criticized and been told it is the one true church, the way, the truth and the light. And although I don't practice this or any religion anymore, there is still something in the spaces that hold it, in the words and the rituals that give it its shape, that I find comforting.

At the heart of that in so many ways is my grandmother, born Marie Louise McGrath, herself raised in the church in early 20th century Washington, D.C., way pre-Vatican II, a time of May queens and no meat any Friday, ever, not just during Lent. She went to Holy Comforter School, a few years behind my grandfather, in classes with one of his ten sisters. She dragged me to 7:30 Mass more weekends than I can count, and before her mother, my Nanny, died, she'd go along, and I'd sit next to her and she'd keep her arm around me the whole time. Nanny never went to Communion. She'd said "bastard" too many times that week, she said, and not gone to confession, so she'd just sit there with me. This transgression of profanity lasted for nearly 10 years, and I didn't understand it until I experienced the horror of the sacrament of penance myself. Mass with Nanny is one of the most visceral memories of my life, such that it may be the last thing I see before my eyes when I die. 

When I hit my knees in New Orleans this weekend, these women, along with my mother, a convert and my grandmother's daughter-in-law, were the reason why.

I had no idea that's what would happen when I walked in the door. The plan was to take a few pictures, get out, go get a muffaletta. But the more I walked around the place, paid attention to the details - the stained glass Stations of the Cross, the French inscriptions, all the candles burning for someone or some personal intention - the more I just I wanted to sit. It turns out, I wanted to kneel.

My life has been loud lately. There's a lot of movement, a lot of change and stress. I'm really tired with no time for it. As full of great stuff as my brain and heart are on a daily basis, there is also worry, uncertainty and confusion. Some people I love are having a really rough time. There are some unsettled questions. I've been doing a lot of work, inside and out.

The very act of kneeling is surrender. Outside the constraints of who I pray to, it felt like turning it over, all the junk and the stress. Take it, whoever you are, please, plaster cherubim at the end of the aisle. I'm doing the work, I'm holding it down, trying to be smart and make good decisions, trying to step up or back when it's called for. But it's a LOT, dude. It often feels like a "FAIL" in a "FTW" world. So I just need a little help, a freaking blazing neon sign would be nice, kthxbai God.

My God has a sense of humor and speaks LOL, apparently.

I steepled my hands on the back of the pew in front of me the way I'd watched my grandparents do it when I was little so it's just a reflex. I looked around and felt a little guilty, yes, non-practicer that I am, (really) vocal critic of all things structural and political and systemically sick about the patriarchal organization that built the pew I was kneeling in. But my "Catholic guilt," as it's commonly called, is always transient. I just don't buy it, don't choose it, won't own it. I'm pretty lucky, I guess, in that I was raised in what I always call the "felt banners and butterflies" 1970s church, where I associate mostly good thanks to the fairly moderate way my family practiced and the extreme amount of love and acceptance I received from them. Also, nobody got smacked or anything worse than yelled at in my school. If I ate a hamburger on a Friday in Lent, no one told me I was going to hell. It was just "Try again. Keep trying."

I tell my mom when she bemoans my lost religion that I can't belong to an organization that wouldn't let me lead it, I just couldn't, my conscience won't let me. Then again I still cried several times in Vatican City under the weight of the beauty and history there, all that I know about the Crusades notwithstanding, mostly because of what it would have meant to my grandparents and my Nanny to see it. 

So it was good in this time of flux and confusion to close my eyes in this cathedral for a few minutes, to breathe, to let the piped-in Latin chanting fill my ears. And when I got up off my knees and sat in the pew, I needed paper, because I wanted to write some stuff down. As it happened, all I had was the back of my checkbook, where I scratched out some things I wanted to remember, for me, for New Orleans, and for my family.

I am not pious. I am not proud. I am a flawed child of spirit if not of God. Pray for this loud, proud, chaotic, soul- spirit- and pain-saturated city. Pray for me, that I choose the right next steps and the best words. Help me look past the insanity of the surface to whatever simple greatness I can find in everything around me.

I capped my pen and I got up. I lit a candle apiece for my mom and my grandmother, crossed myself with holy water, and bought a rosary bracelet for my grandma in the gift shop. And then I walked out towards the Mississippi River, into the pouring rain. 

 

Writings about family and religion and all the ways they collude and collide:

Ann Steliman at World Unturning wrote about sharing her concerns about her Jehovah's Witness beliefs with her family.

Brian at Daily Buddhism responded recently to a reader who was concerned about her family's reaction to her practice. 

I would suggest the best approach is to make sure your family sees you acting in the finest traditions of Buddhism (without necessarily advertising the fact). They’ll see and experience you as a good person, doing good in the world, alleviating suffering where and when you can. Be an exemplar of the best “Christian values,” and when your “shocking secret” eventually comes to light, perhaps, just perhaps, they’ll be willing to talk rather than judge you out of hand.

Carrie at My Funny, Funny Family shares what it's like to explain religion to your kids when it's not something you participate in "The Holy Trinity of Questions." 

It's unavoidable that some of the questions are going to be about religion. It's a sticky subject, because we are not religious. So we don't have a preapproved set of explanations for that stuff. And it's going to take a lifetime to explain why some kids believe in God, Jesus, Mohammed and the Almighty Dollar, but we don't.

Loni is an American Muslim who "reverted" (her word) to Islam and writes about what it's like to wear the hijab in front of her family for the first time. (Fascinating stuff -check out the post.) 

But it is one thing for me to be “outed” in a community full of strangers; it is another to show my close friends and family the person I now am.   

Shannon Clark at Searching For the Moon writes about "The Communities I Speak" including Catholicism and Judaism. (Again, really fascinating ideas here.)

I am not religious but I do consider myself Jewish at least as an ethnic and cultural identity. At the same time to some degree I don’t fully speak “Jewish”, I was raised more as a Roman Catholic, went to a Catholic elementary school and the world around me has generally engaged with me not as someone who is Jewish so I haven’t had the experiences positive or negative that might convey

Laurie White writes at LaurieWrites. Photos in this post and thousands more live on Flickr.

Comments

[Sue]

You nailed it again. The prayer is so elegant and humble....and me. Thank you for bringing to words what my crazy conflcited mind can never get wrapped around.

[The Exception]

beautifully written and expressed. Sometimes we each need to find that silence and that stillness in our busy daily lives.

[Lisa]

*love* this post! Thank you so much for sharing words of truth that so many of us feel when it comes to the spiritual/religious/upbringing/current day/heavy stuff of the world/help me! parts of ourselves.

Amazingly enough, I have a photo almost *exactly* like yours of the cherubim statue. Mine was taken in October 2006 right there at that very spot.