Goin’ To The Chapel

The rest of us were required to be still under severe penalties; she was allowed to do liturgical dances for the entire twenty minutes. She would flit about the room like a ballerina. She would lie on the floor with her tongue out in a grotesque imitation of a slain martyr. She would flap her arms like an angel.

Once, she made a series of gestures, pointing at others and herself and shaking and nodding her head. My mother was so curious that she stopped in the middle of the Rosary.

“What’s that about?” she asked.

“I’m a beggar saying ‘the bread is not for you, it’s for me,'” said my sister.

Our Lady got an unusually high number of dead roses that night, but I imagine she couldn’t stop laughing either.

Some nights, my father would read Vespers or part of the Office of Readings– he was allowed to do this himself, because my mother never got the hang of praying the Liturgy of the Hours. This went relatively well, except that he always used the moment of silent meditation to try to preach a short sermon on the text. My father was not a gifted preacher, and he knew it. But my mother wanted him to preach. She kept on saying that he was “the spiritual leader of the family.” He was to lead the prayers my mother orchestrated and preach on the text, because he was the spiritual leader of the family.

One night, after we’d sung Praise and Worship songs, my mother said “And now, kids, since your father is the spiritual leader of the family, he will lead us in a prayer.”

This was news to my father. He began, “Hail Mary–”

“No!” my mother insisted. “I want you to make up a prayer.”

My father blinked at her. “I thought I was the spiritual leader of the family.”

A quarrel ensued.

Finally, my father said that if my mother had something special in mind, she could pray it herself.

My mother said that she would only do so if my father made it clear that as the spiritual leader of the family, he was delegating.

“Kids?” said my father, “I’m delegating.”

For a few nights afterwards, he began our evening devotions with “Kids? I’m delegating,” and my mother would take the wheel entirely. She never stopped referring to him as the spiritual leader of the family, though.

“Dad is the spiritual leader of the family,” I said one night. “Mom is the physical leader of the family. I am the mental leader of the family.”

My mother looked offended. “God forbid.”

I guess it was a strange way to grow up, but it was the only way I knew.

One night, apropos of nothing, I got the feeling that I should pray. It wasn’t time for evening devotions; it was earlier.

I went into the chapel by myself and got on my knees. I didn’t know how to pray– no one had ever taught me to pray. They’d taught me Praise and Worship songs and how to obsess over the Rosary, but not how to pray from the heart and never how to listen. Perhaps nobody else knew– or, perhaps, it’s the sort of thing that can be learned but not taught by mortal tongue. I’m no good at it myself. Nobody is.

In any case, I tried to pray, there on the wood floor of the ridiculous chapel. There, in the middle of the odious temple to scruples and bad marriages, I prayed. I didn’t exactly have a numinous experience, not then. Most people I know who pray have them from time to time– those moments in prayer when your eyes are opened, and you glimpse the Reality that was always there to begin with; the unbroken Light beyond the silly electric candles, the riotous Joy behind the silly hymns and dances, the eternally youthful Father we portray with a long white beard and a sad face. The Rose which returned from death and can never die again, even when mortal minds wander, for He does not depend upon our devotion. It is we who would fade into nothing if He stopped thinking of us. Nothing like that happened, at that moment. At that moment I felt nothing except that I should be praying, and I was, and that was good.

And it was good.

All prayer, however silly and seemingly shallow, is good. And whatever is not good, we entrust to Him to make well.

Let us go unto the House of the Lord.

(image via Pixabay)