A Faith for Grown-Ups: A Midlife Conversation about What Really Matters

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[c o n t e n t s ] Introduction: A Story, Not an Argument vii 1 When All Was Right with the World 1 2 A Little Help from My Friends 27 3 In the Beginning 45 4 Travels with Luke 67 5 Here Comes the Sun 89 6 Flowers Never Bend with the Rainfall 105 7 Visiting O’Toole’s Bar 125 8 Holy Ed and Other Eccentrics 151 9 Like a Bridge over Troubled Water 173 10 Amazing Grace 193 11 A Song for the Asking 219 12 The Great Life 245 13 The Only Living Boy in New York 269 14 The Tavern at the End of the World 289 Acknowledgments 302


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When All Was Right with the World What is a mystery? A mystery is a truth which we cannot fully understand.

T

he kid heading toward me had that seedy look. A line flashed in my head, like something from an old Ray Chandler mys-

tery: “He could spit fear.” I don’t know what that meant exactly, but it fit the moment. I was out for an evening walk with the dog. I never thought the time would come when I would consider a stroll through the neighborhood exercise, but that’s what happens as the hair gets grayer and the waistline stretches. All the exercise and all the fad diets can’t combine to beat the years, though men in particular like to think so. A diet to start next Monday, a few weeks of sit-ups and


When All Was Right

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we’ll be thirty again. Of such things great lies are built over a rare steak and a cold beer. The kid wore a baseball cap brim backward and a floppy old jacket hanging low in the night drizzle. Baggy tan pants and black sneakers finished the sartorial splendor. When he finally walked past harmlessly, I let out a ­little breath and sucked the night air in deeply. What was that smell? When he went by, he left a brief but very distinct odor, like a cigar burning in a mattress. No, it wasn’t an illegal substance. It was something else. I racked my brain, the memory triggered like hearing an old song on the radio. Something from the past. As if to help the memory, my thighs began to itch in sympathy. And suddenly I was back. Twenty-four eleven-year-old boys sitting on one side of the aisle of Christ the King Church in Yonkers, New York. Thirty-two girls in blue jumpers and skirts are across from us. It’s a rainy March morning and we have trekked in from various parts of the neighborhood to begin a Lenten school day with prayer and devotions. Nobody got a ride to school in 1959. Buses were for the public-school kids. The Old Man had the car anyway, and nobody was rich enough for two cars. If it rained you were outfitted in hat and rubbers. Puddles formed under the pews, mixing in with about a thousand coats of pine wax to ­create its own unique aroma. But that wasn’t what I had just smelled. Wet corduroy pants! Take fifteen mangy mutts, soak, and they don’t smell nearly as bad as one pair of wet corduroy pants. Our blue corduroy pants were part of the school winter uniform, worn for extra warmth.


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The fall and spring pants were made of some thin faux substance that tore in the knees if they got a whiff of the asphalt of a Catholic school playground. But we took them any day over the corduroys that introduced us to a lifetime of jock itch. Years later and we’re still scratching. The blue pants went with the white shirts and blue ties with the “CK” logo stitched on them in white, though by March most of us would have colored that over in blue ink from our fountain pens in an act of desperate boredom during arithmetic. With the stench of corduroy overpowering the lingering smell of incense, hundreds of us jammed into the pews, class by class, for a Lenten prayer ser­vice during which we would be reminded that each of our sins pressed a thorn deeper into the forehead of Christ. That “told-a-lie-twice” that we rattled off in the confessional on Saturday afternoons was not some small affair. It was part of an eternal understanding. The knowledge that Christ died for our sins was explained very personally. This was not sin in the abstract. Christ did not suffer solely for what Hitler and Stalin had done; He suffered because you clobbered your ­little brother for touching your stuff and because you talked in line yesterday afternoon when heading back to class after recess. Bookshelves are filled with baby-boomer recollections of growing up in the postwar Catholic Church in the years prior to and just after the Second Vatican Council. Some are funny, ­others are desperate. Most are cynical. It is a curiosity that, as far as I know, there are no fictionalized memoirs of growing up in a public elementary school at the same period. Stuff like Blackboard Jungle ­doesn’t count because the theme was “juvenile delinquents” in high school, rather than the allegedly stultifying atmosphere of elementary school.


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That was an age where every kid feared the neighborhood “JDs” and we were warned that if we followed a certain disreputable path, we would end up with “JD cards.” I never saw a JD card, though there were more than enough juvenile delinquents where I hung around. The difference, of course, between the public-school environment and the parochial schools was that central linking of faith and education. Arithmetic was just arithmetic over at Public School 16 in my neighborhood. At Christ the King—and thousands of Catholic grammar schools across the country—arithmetic was only a part of the whole. There was a thread intertwining with spelling, geography, history, and reading that held it all together. It was our faith. Our Catholicism was never confined to the religion class that usually started the morning’s education. It was not solely the prayers that would mark the transition of one class to the next, the Angelus at Noon (when kids would freeze in place at the sound of the church bells: “The angel of the Lord declared unto Mary. And she conceived of the Holy Ghost. Hail Mary, full of grace‑.‑.‑. ”), the saints days celebrated, the steady pace of the liturgical year from September through June. The faith pervaded every moment of the day, making phonics not merely a drudge of endless sounding-out, but a part of the eternal cosmos: “When you see WH together,” Sister explained, “it produces a ‘whe’ sound, as in whip. Like the WHips that lashed Jesus on Good Friday.” Public school kids back then were being introduced to a vague and flattened civic religion that identified George Washington with a White Anglo-Saxon Protestant culture, as bland as an Episcopalian box social. Even the Jewish kids weren’t offended. It was a white-bread experience without texture or taste that no one b­others to recall. Love it or hate it,


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accept it or reject it, praise it or blame it, no one who experienced eight years of Catholic grammar school in the 1950s, 1960s, or early 1970s could find it forgettable. I mean, their school was named after a number. Our school was named Christ the King. And that can be the essential problem. The grammar-school experience of those three decades was so inextricably bound to the faith that one is simply identified with the other. When the nun told us that Jesus was disappointed that we spoke in class, she was playing an ace to maintain her sanity, not trying to present the Catholic faith. Too many of us have never much gone past it. Most of what a generation or two identified with Catholicism was a nun’s attempt to exercise crowd control over a bunch of kids more interested in being home watching Three Stooges reruns. It was a childish presentation of the faith for childish minds. No harm done, except if we never get past that. That said, there was something clearly overwhelming in the faith of our youth. And therein lies the contradiction. The faith some of us avoid now has ­little to do with the faith as it is to be lived and known as an adult. Yet, at the same time, that introduction to the faith in the church of our childhood was powerful. It lingers with us. Kenneth Woodward, religion editor at Newsweek for many years, described Catholicism—and particularly the Catholicism of a baby boomer’s youth—as a sensual religion. By that he ­didn’t mean sexy. God forbid. When I graduated in 1963 from grammar school, I ­couldn’t be screwed-up by sex. Sex hadn’t been invented yet. Woodward meant that it was an experience that appealed to each of the senses. As the smell of wet corduroy can put me back in a cramped pew in Yonkers, New York, four decades earlier, there


$17.95

“[Lockwood helps] us to recognize what a truly adult Catholic faith looks like as we move into middle age and beyond.” —Greg Erlandson, president, Our Sunday Visitor Publishing “A delightful revisiting for baby boomers, a ‘faith-story’ as witnessed, and now explained, by one of its own.” —Owen McGovern, executive director, Catholic Press Association of the United States and Canada

I

n this call to a generation, Robert Lockwood argues that many middle-aged Americans with a Catholic upbringing are spiritually trapped. They experience adult religious longings, yet they have a hard time taking the faith of their childhood seriously. Catholics of a certain age confuse the powerful imagery of a vanished Catholic world of the 1950s and 1960s—nuns in long black habits, the crisp questions and answers of the Baltimore Catechism, Saturday confession—with the Catholic faith itself. With wit and keen understanding, in a narrative rich with anecdotes, Lockwood invites disconnected and passive Catholics to encounter a faith for grown-ups: one that is richer, stronger, and more satisfying than the fleeting images of a bygone Catholic era. It is a faith rooted in the Jesus of the gospels, safeguarded by two thousand years of tradition and reflection—a faith with answers to the questions adults ask.

is director of communications for the Diocese of Pittsburgh. He was president and publisher of Our Sunday Visitor Publishing and writes the popular “Catholic Journal” column in Our Sunday Visitor.

l oc k wo od

robert p. lockwood

[a faith for grown-ups ]

religion/catholicism

a faith for

[

A Midlife Conversation about What Really Matters

]

grown-ups rob e r t p . l oc k wood


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