And then, right there on the board, I met a girl. She was a swing-dancer from the Twin Cities who chose for her avatar an art-deco painting of a woman in a cloche walking an Afghan hound. True, she wrote largely without paragraph breaks, but who was I to be picky? And she was Catholic.
She began leading me deeper into Catholic culture by the senses—or at any rate, by two of them. The board had a subforum dedicated to religious art. When we found it, the place could have passed for Graceland, so numerous were the photo-realistic images of Jesus holding court among giggling children or hugging His Aging Blessed Mother. We proceeded to redecorate—Ghirlandaio's Birth of John the Baptist here, Caravaggio's Judith Beheading Holofernes there. By the time we finished, we had a perfect little thread away from home.
One night over the phone, she taught me the Hail, Holy Queen. Between the life, sweetness, and hope and the mourning and weeping, I hadn't heard such pathos packed into so small a space outside of those teen car-crash fatality songs they play on the oldies stations. I cried, and she waited patiently until I finished.
About that time, real life went back into the rinse cycle. First, I left my job after driving a belt loader into the fuselage of an Airbus 319 for the second time. (Union rules would have kept me around, but my Samoan co-workers—deserters from the Pequod, to look at them—would not have.) Then my head gaskets melted. On a late-evening walk, I was rolled by tweakers who left me stripped of my wallet and my cell phone.
Call it Grace or the logic of abjection. Either way, my thoughts, if I may call them that, went something like this:
"I've lost everything but the board and the girl. What does the girl have? The board, me, and the Church. Well, then, jolly good—I'll just join the Church and even it out!" The next Sunday I showed up for the 8:45 Mass.
That combination—girl, board, Church—helped me to rally. The gang's rapturous "Welcome home!" kept me going through the holidays, after which I found, in what felt like a miracle, a respectable job with a major bank.
The gang stuck by me throughout my catechesis. The Monday after my baptism, I received a call from one of its ladies' auxiliary's queen bees, a Jersey girl who kept a relic of St. John Neumann. "Did you check your mail today?" she asked.
"Sure," I lied. I pay all my bills online. Anything in hard copy is either junk or a dunning notice.
"Are you sure?" "Well, no." "So check your freaking mail already!"
I checked—and found one of those keys that the Postal Service leaves when you've got a package waiting in one of the bins. Opening the bin, I found a large envelope and a cardboard tube. Inside the tube was an apostolic blessing from Pope Benedict. Inside the envelope I found two rosaries (one conventional, one finger); two scapulars (one brown, one white); three dozen pamphlets of prayers, novenas, and offices; and at least four medals. The real prize was a prayer for vocations authored by none other than Marcial Maciel—bet that'll be worth something someday.
And, of course, there was a card, with all their names.
To tie up loose ends, the Swing Dancer and I didn't last. She ended up marrying the Gnostic, and for all I know, is starting a brood of dualist, hepcat kids. When the economy went, so did the job. In a sense, the board went, too: everyone disappeared onto Facebook, whose garden-party ambience discourages any exchange of substance. But the Church—that has stayed. After three years and some nasty buffeting from a number of sides, I'm still hanging in.
Life on the board both primed me for life in the Church and spoiled me for it. Whenever a parish busybody inquires about my life in a way that feels invasive, I wish I could ignore him as easily as I can an uninvited PM. Once on retreat, when I saw two women nearly come to blows over pride of place in the kitchen, I felt like saying, "Cool off. Take a vacation. Go post in another thread for a while."
I'll go a step further. Since building online friendships demands equal parts reason, faith, and imagination, the experience has sharpened my view of the Church Triumphant. Thoroughly practiced in inducing a person's character from the picture in his avatar and his mood from his comma splices, I can look at a Cimabue painting, read Canticle of the Sun, and form a pretty good idea of how a conversation with St. Francis might have gone.
If I haven't yet trained myself to 100 percent accuracy—well, we are a Church of mysteries.
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