On Saturday, I rose and looked out the window at a wonderful world of white swirling snow. Maybe I should have called to confirm our date, but I got dressed and borrowed my father’s car and drove to St. John’s. I had to park a block away. The rotten weather could not spoil the first snow of the winter for me.
Outside the church, a gusty squall was churning up snow in the slushy street. The wind nudged me in through the huge brass plated doors, past Holy Water bowls the size of bird baths, and down the long nave into the old church. Walking among the pews, I felt the immensity of the structure as small sounds echoed about me to accent the silence.
Looking around the huge and ornate house of worship, it was apparent that in the 19th century God and Mammon had run neck and neck in a race that God must have lost. Gold filigree wound around carved columns that arched up and over a 25 foot high altar. The white marble floors shined as bright and clean as my soul on the day of my christening, when Uncle Harry carried me up the steps to the gold baptismal font. One more Catholic soldier reporting for duty in a line that extended back to my ancestor Patrick’s baptism here in 1830. Afterward, my mother must have carried me back down the marble steps and past Stations of The Cross, each carved into the grey stone walls. If the morning had been sunlit, the high stained glass windows would have provided wonderfully colored splashes of reds and greens and gold to wash down the steps and out onto the expanse of white floor.
I looked up to the yellowing chandeliers and imagined the great empty space that rose above me to the vaulted ceiling held the souls of countless men and women who had vowed their obligations to God and their love to each other. Many were my family, husbands and wives, sons and daughters, mothers and fathers, grandparents and great grandparents. One life after another consecrated to something that could only be felt in such surroundings. Hands holding each other tightly at the altar in marriage. Hands holding the oil and water of baptism. And then letting go as the hand of the one left behind touched the casket for the last time in that awful and lonely moment of goodbye.
On this day, as the snow outside sifted up against the stained glass and I waited for Immy, the church was cold and dark and empty. I sat and thought of the young woman who had meant everything to me just a few years before. And I thought about our futures. I did not know which missionary field I would serve in the future, but I prayed for those placed over me in the Order to have an anointing on them when they made decisions for me. And I said a prayer for Immy’s future, whether she married a boy provided by her Italian mother’s army of aunts and cousins or if she chose a dumb Irishman like myself from her father’s Hibernian lodge. If she showed up today, I would frankly be surprised. Something in her voice on the telephone told me that before today she would decide to not come. I think Immy knew we weren't right for each other, but did not have the words to tell me. Her sense of the world was much more practical than mine and I suppose she didn’t want to spend her life pulling my head down from the clouds. Romance and hormones can often rush toward a union that proves disastrous for two young people. The lucky couples survive it. And I was lucky to avoid it, but I felt anything but blessed. I had understood little when I felt my world end at her goodbye four years before. And now a young man of 22 years, the sting of it was still with me as I sat in the cold church that Saturday morning.
As midday approached, the pews began to fill with people. I had forgotten there was a Mass at noon. Soon, a crowd of worshippers began to assemble behind me as they prepared themselves for the Advent service. Since I had sat down at the very front, I had no idea who was behind me. I wanted to turn around and scan the congregation, but I didn’t.
Immy never came to the church. But that was OK, because I had the answer Bert had asked me to seek. I still loved Immy. I could feel the loss of her affection nagging me. But I could survive. I didn’t know how long I would carry the loss with me, but I somehow knew I would go on with life and find my way.
I happened to look to my right at one of the smaller altars along the side wall of the church and I noticed a new statue. I stood and shuffled sideways on the kneeler past the Asian man and woman who had sat down next to me. Exiting the pew, I walked across the church to the statue. A small sign on its base said the image was of Blessed Kateri Tekakwitha, the Lily of the Mohawks. I remembered reading about her life among the Mohawk Indians in Central New York State. She had been disfigured by small pox and while growing up was the butt of jeering and ridicule by the adults and children of her tribe. But when she grew to be a young woman she became known as a wonderful storyteller who loved children. The little ones followed her around asking for stories and she kept them entertained, but her adult peers still persisted in their mocking. She became a Christian and legend has it that when she died at a young age in April of 1680, moments after her death her face was wonderfully transfigured into that of a lovely young woman. I knelt down and said a prayer to her, or to the spirit she represented, the spirit that fills the universe, the spirit that we can only perceive as one person at a time, be it God, Mary, St. Francis or (for some) Elvis. Without further defining a theology and wrapping it around her, I asked her to be my friend. To look out for me and to help my guardian angel, who is also of the same spirit (but is better looking than Elvis.) I have felt a special kinship with Kateri ever since. But it would be years before I realized we had both survived an airplane accident.
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