From the memoir, Going Out

Franciscan Church, Bratislava

Faith of Our Fathers


The only part of the Latin Mass that I understood was the English part when the congregation said three times, very quickly “Lord-I-am-not-worthy-that-you-should-come-under-my-roof.-Speak-but-the-word-and-my-soul-shall-be-healed.”

Lord-I-am-not-worthy-that-you-should-come-under-my-roof.-Speak-but-the-word-and-my-soul-shall-be-healed.

My father said it, though I couldn’t hear his individual voice. I probably said it, too. I don’t remember. But then my father would go up to receive the parchment-papery circle of wafer that was the body of Christ. I didn’t go up. I wasn’t really a Catholic. I just went to Mass with my father for fun. That’s the kind of kid I was.

I liked the holy water in the little holders by the door. It always seemed more slippery than real water as if its power to bless and to heal was somehow related to its special viscosity.

I liked the genuflecting and the kneeling. I liked the marble columns that had pink veins running through them. For some reason they reminded me of Beechnut Fruit Stripes chewing gum that had been sculpted into these lovely columnar shapes. I always wanted to take a bite out of one.

Votives at St. John Cantius Church

I loved the incense. The mysterious sanctus bells. Mostly, I guess, I loved the little memorial candles that flickered willy-nilly in their blue or red glass votives. From time to time my father would let me light a memorial candle for Aunt Alice or Grandpa or for his own father, Pop, who had died before I was born.

My father would give me coins to drop into the metal box that sat next to a pile of thin, wax-coated wicks. I would pick up one of those long wicks, light it from another candle and then choose the votive I wanted. When my candle’s flame began to flicker along with its companion candles, I would drop the wick into a metal tray and its flame would gradually die out.

After my father died I used to light memorial candles for him whenever I was in a Catholic church. I imagined him watching me as I set a little tongue of flame into a blue or a red votive cup. I imagined that he knew I was lighting it for him and that somehow, in a way I didn’t pretend to understand and could scarcely allow myself to trust, it made me feel closer to him.

I liked the memorial candles best. But I also liked the hollow sound of the priest’s voice echoing throughout the walls of the church. I liked the way the ushers swished the offering baskets—on their broomstick handles—quickly up and down the pews, twice each service.

That’s how you could tell it was a Catholic church. They took the collection twice.

In our church—my mother and sisters’ church, my church—they took it only once and it was gathered slowly, the shining brass basin passed from hand-to-hand by every person.

Our Saviour’s Lutheran Church was very different from St. Augustine’s Roman Catholic church where my father went and where nearly all of my classmates—Catholics, like my father--went.

Our Saviour’s Lutheran Church was a better church, of course, a more godly church. Somehow I had been brought up to believe that. I’m not sure why we thought we were better. Maybe it was because in my mother’s church I was so much more terrified of God than I was in my father’s church.

For one thing, in my mother’s church there was so little to distract you from the fact of God’s awful presence. The pastor was a boring preacher who spoke unconvincingly of a loving God. In our hymns we sang of a God who existed, it seemed, only in order to menace us so that we should know ourselves as sinners, first and last: “Chief of sinners though I be, Jesus shed his blood for me;” and “Come to Calvary’s holy mountain, sinners ruined by the fall;” and “Go to dark Gethsemane, All who feel the Temptor’s power.”

They didn’t sing in the Catholic church. They just murmured responses and kneeled a lot. Maybe the Catholics couldn’t carry a tune. I’d never heard my father sing, but my best friend, Denise, was a Catholic and she was most definitely tone-deaf.

The Catholic kids got to take Communion by fourth grade. I wasn’t allowed to take Communion in my father’s church because I was a Lutheran. 

I wasn’t allowed to take Communion in my mother’s church either. I wouldn’t be able to do that until I was fourteen. That was not only because I wasn’t good enough, but because I wasn’t old enough to know just how not good enough I was. I would know a lot more about that by the time I was fourteen.