On Sacraments, Lemonade, and the Ascension of the Lord

Nothing went the way that it should, and that was a mercy.

It all began with the catalytic converter– or, rather, the lack of a catalytic converter. Jimmy was curious as to why my car still ran so loudly and smelled so terrible after the engine replacement last year. He examined the underside of the car, which is when he found out that I did not have a catalytic converter, just a pipe. Ohio doesn’t have emissions inspections, so no one had noticed.  The dealer had swindled me in yet another way. We ordered the correct catalytic converter, and Jimmy took Saturday evening and most of Sunday morning to put it on the car for me. The car was finally finished at eleven-forty-five, when I’d planned to go to the eleven-thirty Mass. I realized it would be ridiculously too late, so I changed course for downtown to a church that had a Mass at noon. As I drove, I noticed the car’s air conditioner wasn’t working even though I’d recharged it just last week. I made a mental note to have Jimmy look at it as I drove.

The church downtown was the old grand Baroque-style church where Michael and I were married, just over a decade and a half ago when the whole world seemed totally different.

That’s the church with the fancy marble Communion rail, where they say the Mass in Latin. And this was the hour for the Tridentine Low Mass, which meant seventy minutes of dead silence while the priest muttered prayers with his back turned to the congregation. On another occasion, I might have found that pleasant, but just then the thought turned my stomach.

I hadn’t been inside the church since 2021. 

I am in the stage of healing where panic and flashbacks surge at random times, instead of every time I approach a potential trigger. I had no idea how going inside that church for the first time in five years would affect me. I didn’t know if a Mass with no music at all and plenty of time to think, would be better for my nerves than a Mass with a loud blaring organ. I knew that Jesus wouldn’t mind in the least if I thought my trauma wouldn’t permit me to go to the only church I could get to after the mess in the morning. Sickness is a perfectly valid excuse to miss Sunday Mass, and PTSD is a sickness. But I didn’t like the idea of skipping on Ascension Sunday. I tiptoed inside, feeling as if I was trespassing, somehow.

I sat in the foyer, which isn’t an unpleasant place. It smelled like incense, which I like. There’s a baptistry with a great big plaster crucifix to look at so it feels like a miniature church. There were several tired-looking mothers in long modest dresses and veils sitting there, soothing equally well-dressed noisy babies. The mothers smiled politely at me even though I felt like a fish out of water with my dress pants and bare head. Of course, for the Tridentine Mass, it wasn’t Ascension Day. That was Thursday in their calendar. The Gospel was a different one, the one where Jesus warns us that soon everyone who tries to kill us will feel as if they’re serving God. For some reason, that was the domino that started the panic chain. I hurried outside to take deep breaths on the front steps, and that’s where I stayed. I did my best. I will go to Mass again next week.

The next day, Monday, was boiling hot. When Jimmy came to inspect the car’s air conditioner, he found that the pump wasn’t working, and I’d have to get an entire new one for a hundred and fifty dollars instead of a twelve dollar can of recharge. That meant no driving out to the lake beach, which had just opened for the year for swimming, after I got Adrienne from school. The car was an oven. I could barely stand to drive to the grocery store with all the windows rolled down.  I sat grumpily inside by the rattly window air conditioner, wishing it would rain.

Eventually there was a knock at the door.

I came out to find that my front yard had become the site of Jimmy’s boy’s latest business venture. He and the Princess were attempting to sell popsicles and cups of room-temperature lemonade pilfered from Jimmy’s boy’s kitchen, at a little card table on the edge of the grass. “Can you help us?”

I ran inside and got a big sheet of poster board and wrote “LEMONADE AND POPSICLES $1” in block letters for Jimmy’s Boy to color in, and drew a large picture of a lemon for the Princess to color. The children worked on their sign while squabbling, because Jimmy’s boy was still being bossy with the Princess. I ran inside to get more art supplies. I came out to a tragedy: Jimmy’s boy had moved his lemonade stand to the front of the apartment building on the corner, to sell treats with two children his age. They were waving the sign that the Princess had helped color. The Princess herself was in tears, because she was left out. She was too young to cross the street.

“I’m so sorry,” I said. “I’ll have fun with you here. Do you want to color some more?”

“Make a sign,” said the Princess, “That says ‘No Boys Allowed! Yes Girls Allowed!'”

I obediently made another poster board sign for her to color. She waved the sign up and down at Jimmy’s boy, who didn’t notice, because his stand was having a sudden surge of customers. People kept pulling over and handing him dollar bills. Eventually, he ran out of cups, and the parents of the other two children brought him paper cups and water bottles to fill. The grandmother of the Baker Street Irregulars brought him a pitcher of homemade sweet tea and a case of juice boxes, so he sprinted over to me and asked for more poster board.

I went in one more time to get the art supplies. I came out with poster board, and also a bowl of ice cream and a little Mylar balloon left over from a bouquet of flowers. “All right, I’ll write ‘ICED TEA AND JUICE, ONE DOLLAR,’ and then you have to go back across because we’re having a girl party today. No boys allowed! Yes girls allowed!”

The Princess squealed with laughter. Jimmy’s boy tried to kick the sign out of her hand like a football, but he was smiling as well. He accepted his temporary exile.

A new girl from the apartment on the corner happened by, carrying a doll. She asked if she could join the party, and I got her a bowl of ice cream. The girls took turns dressing the doll and rocking her to sleep. They colored and chatted and took turns dressing the doll while I watched.  The whole neighborhood was full of laughter and mess, chaos and noise, popsicle wrappers, paper cups, sticky children and amused adults. Whatever the exact opposite of a Tridentine Low Mass was, I suppose that’s what happened in LaBelle this afternoon.

Now, here’s your catechism lesson.

God became man, so that Man might become God. Christ became a baby and then a child and a man, accepted a terrible death and rose from the dead, in order to draw all people to Himself. Christ was dragged out of the holy city of Jerusalem to die in humiliation and exile, because that’s where human beings like you and me live and die. He descended into hell and rose from the dead, taking our mortality with Him. He appeared to Mary Magdalene and the Myrrh-bearing women and eventually to His apostles in the upper room. And then He led them outside the holy city and ascended into Heaven, so that all might be drawn up to Heaven with the Father. All human experience is drawn up to Heaven with the Father: all.

Part of your life as a Christian is ritual. The sacraments are important. One of the things you ought to do is go to Mass if you aren’t prevented. The other part of a Christian life, the harder part that takes much more of your time, is to live your life. Even after everything I’ve been through, I still believe in the importance of the sacraments. But in this long, strange, terrible journey, I have learned the importance of living a life. Christ lived a human life to sanctify human life. Human life is a participation in Divine life. The story of your life is your hagiography. The things you have to do every day: the changed plans and disappointments, the neighbors who need you, the messes and noise. These are your path to Heaven. Christ is already there, not because He left us, but because Christ is the beginning and the end of the journey.

Nothing went the way that it should, and that was a mercy.

The name of that mercy is: life.

Life is terrible, but it’s also good.