Rosie was absolutely right: there was a long, rectangular mirror near the clothes rack, with the letter “R” written on it in marker. As I looked closer, I saw more letters, too smudged to be fully legible. I could see that the mirror had a verse from the book of Romans drawn on it in pink and blue ink: “for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and all are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus.”
What a horrible thing to write on a mirror.
I saw myself in the mirror, as well. I had that weary, just-went-to-Job-and-Family-Services look in my eyes. I was wearing my frowziest stand-in-line-at-Job-and-Family-Services outfit, parts of which I’d purchased in that very thrift store. My ponytail was loose and tangled. I looked shabby and poor, which I am.
Was that why the sister assumed I wasn’t Catholic?
This town’s religious demographics are a bit unusual– the university draws materially comfortable and well-educated Catholics here; some of them form their own cliques and avoid anyone who doesn’t fit in. The poorer people who have always lived here are not often Catholic, and are suspicious of Catholicism because of the way Catholics tend to patronize or avoid them. It’s not only that the Catholics in the acceptable clique look down on people who are shabbily dressed– it’s that there are two typically distinct social castes, and the poor caste is rarely Catholic here. I myself have sometimes assumed a stranger here was Catholic if they drove an expensive car, and that they weren’t if they were walking in the wrong part of downtown. This could easily lead to a circumstance where a frowsily-dressed woman dips her fingers in a font under a statue of that bedraggled Poor Man of Assisi, and causes a Franciscan sister cognitive dissonance. Catholics don’t dress like beggars– at least not around here.
The sister found me in the toy section. “Wait, I think I remember you!” she said. “Didn’t you used to come to Franciscan University? I saw you all the time at Mass, with your daughter in the stroller.”
I did used to go to daily Mass at Franciscan– I had to give up walks that far when I realized the exertion was badly contributing to my autoimmune condition. I used to sit in the foyer for Mass, while Rose amused herself pushing the stroller back and forth from the statue of Saint Francis to the rack of vocation pamphlets. I had my nice long cries there, wondering how we’d get through one more month without homelessness or worse. Once, when I was there, I fished quarters out of a birdbath statue of Saint Francis in order to buy milk.
I didn’t know how to tell the Franciscan sister that her celebrated father and founder had once treated me to a gallon of whole milk two days before payday. Maybe that was only something that happened to the poor people who came to use the thrift shop, and never to Franciscans themselves. For all I know, things like that only happen to me.
“Yes, that was me,” I said. “I went to Mass there.”
“Your daughter’s really growing up,” said the sister, with admiration now.
I had shocked her when I dared to dip my fingers in the font, but she had known me as her sister when she remembered the breaking of the Bread.
Awkward as it was, there’s something sacred about that.
(image via Pixabay)
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